‘I figured you’d be celebrating with Mariana,’ John said, and didn’t the shit hit the fucking fan right then.
‘Did you have anything to do with the shit she pulled this morning?’ Dornan asked.
Get straight to the point, why don’t you?
John clenched his teeth, suddenly itching for a cigarette. ‘No.’
Dornan held his eyes for a few moments before he seemed satisfied.
‘What the fuck is going on, Dee? Kids? A baby?’
Dornan took a swig of whiskey and slammed the glass down on a table beside him. ‘It wasn’t fucking me, okay? You think I’d do something like that?’
John apparently took too long to answer, because Dornan’s entire demeanour changed. ‘Fuck,’ Dornan muttered, looking to the ceiling. He was like a tightly wound coil, about to snap. About to explode.
‘You need to do something about your father,’ John said in a measured, controlled voice that belied his utter rage. ‘Now.’
Dornan gave John a withering stare. ‘You might be the prez, big boy, but don’t ever think you get to tell me what to do.’
‘I’m not telling you as the prez, you fuck, I’m telling you as your friend. Your father murdered a KID.’
Dornan pounded the table with his fist. ‘Don’t you ever fucking say that. Not here, not anywhere. You hear me? Don’t talk about my family.’
‘For fuck’s sake, how many of these things does Mariana have to deal with before you do something about him?’
Dornan went very still, his eyes far away for a brief second. And for a moment, the aura of anger that surrounded him was gone, replaced by an unsteady silence. ‘I’m going to make things right with Ana,’ he murmured, spinning his empty glass with two fingers. ‘We’ll have another baby. I’ll marry her. Things will be made right again.’
John felt like he’d been punched in the fucking heart. He would kill Dornan before that happened. Even if it meant he died with him. If anyone was marrying Mariana, it was John.
You have a daughter, John. Calm your shit. Get it together.
It wasn’t easy to be calm around a storm like Dornan Ross. He made you see the worst in yourself, like a mirror, held up to expose your dirtiest truths. He was like poison.
‘You really think that’s gonna fix what’s done? You think that’ll make up for the shit you’ve done to her? You think she’ll ever forget that the only reason she isn’t fat and pregnant right now is because you beat that baby out of her?’
John couldn’t take any more. The club suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in, squeezing the air out of him. He stood, and that would have been fine, except that Dornan stood too, his face in John’s.
‘This conversation isn’t fucking finished,’ Dornan seethed. ‘Sit your ass down.’
John held his ground. He even laughed, because it was really this absurd right now. ‘You know who you’re acting like right now, don’t you? I mean, I don’t even need to say it.’
They were starting to attract attention from other Gypsy Brothers. Viper, sitting a few feet away with a topless brunette, watched the scene unfold as he pushed the woman away. There was a thick tension in the air. John didn’t need a sixth sense to tell him that something bad was about to happen.
‘You should say it,’ Dornan said, throwing his empty tumbler at the floor so that it exploded in a mess of glass shards.
‘You’re acting like your father, Dee. You’re acting like you’ve lost your fucking mind.’
John had been anticipating the swing, yet it still came as a surprise. In twenty-odd years they’d never come to blows. Not once. But as Dornan’s fist came at him, John knew with a certainty that lived in his bones that one day very soon, one of them was going to kill the other. It was the only way.
John jerked his head back in time to lessen the blow, but not avoid it completely. Dornan’s fist connected with his jaw, and he felt his teeth move in his mouth. It was like poking a sleeping snake. John attacked, a hand on each of Dornan’s shoulders as he smashed the hard part of his forehead into his nose. It hurt, but it’d hurt Dornan more. Sure enough, Dee stepped back, blood exploding from his nose as he held a hand to his broken face.
And then Dornan pulled a fucking gun on him.
‘Put that away, shithead,’ John said, suddenly aware that Dornan was unhinged enough to actually shoot him right now. Goddamn it, why’d he have to open his mouth?
Dornan grinned, blood seeping from his nose and down his chin, staining his teeth a ghoulish red. It gave him the appearance of a vampire, one who’d just been feeding on some poor victim.
Dornan didn’t put it away. He stepped into John’s space, so their noses were almost touching, and he rammed the barrel of the gun underneath John’s chin. It was hard to breathe with a metal gun barrel pressing against your windpipe, but it wouldn’t exactly be the first time John had been at gunpoint. It was, however, the first time he’d experienced it at the hands of one of his own men.
John was aware of the crowd gathering around them. Nobody spoke. Over Dornan’s shoulder, John saw Viper, an original Gypsy Brother, circling behind as if to offer assistance. John gave him a sharp look that stopped him in his tracks. He didn’t need assistance. He would beat down this motherfucker for his transgression all by himself.
‘You’ve lost your fucking mind,’ John said to his oldest friend, his voice barely above a whisper. Dornan stared at him, his pupils and irises the same black in the low light of the club. He looked possessed. Demonic. John suspected both were true.
‘You gonna shoot me?’ John asked, bringing his hand up and tightening it around Dornan’s wrist. ‘Your oldest friend. The one who would do anything for you. If you shoot me, who would ever have your back?’
‘I don’t need anyone to have my back,’ Dornan seethed. ‘I got my back.’
John smacked the gun away, taking Dornan by surprise as he grabbed his throat. He had always been an excellent hand at poker. Maybe he should have played more, gotten a nice stash of cash happening so he could get out of this fucking place.
Hindsight’s a cruel bitch.
John tightened his grip around Dornan’s neck and drove him into the wall, hard. He heard his skull hit the brick wall with a loud thwack, and took the opportunity to bend Dornan’s arm until it was almost at breaking point. The gun dropped out of his grip, and John kicked it away, using both hands to grab hold of Dornan’s shirt.
‘Don’t you EVER pull a fucking gun on me!’ he roared. Dornan shoved him away, throwing him off balance. He was heavier than John, higher than John, crazier than John. Insanity seemed to breed a strength that normal men could not possess. Dornan kept coming at John, who’d now lost the element of surprise. He charged John, tackling him around his waist as they both slammed to the floor. Dornan straddled John, bloodthirst in his eyes, as he rained blows down on his face.
Nobody was stepping in to stop this, and John understood why. For a club that had always prided itself on being a singular organism, two factions had slowly started to emerge. Without voicing it, people were starting to bleed towards one side or the other. Towards John, or Dornan.
Their club was falling apart at the seams.
Dornan was still hitting John, but the blows were less forceful now that he had him pinned. Almost like Dornan thought John had given up.
‘Apologise,’ Dornan ground out, his bloody face hovering above John’s. ‘Now.’
Something old and forgotten was unleashed in John. The part of him he tried to hide. The part that enjoyed blood and violence as much as Dornan did. John lived by a different set of morals than Dornan Ross, but that didn’t mean he didn’t take great delight in beating down somebody who had it coming. And Dornan had it coming.
This was overdue.
John’s adrenaline spiked, and he flipped Dornan easily. The tables were suddenly turned, but John wasn’t going to settle for a few punches. No, he wrapped both hands around his best friend’s throat and squeezed hard enough th
at Dornan was actually scared. He heard Dornan’s breath get stuck in his throat as he struggled beneath him. Whatever Dornan had been snorting off that stripper’s skin might’ve made him feel invincible for a short sprint, but John was filled with enough rage and contempt for a fucking marathon.
‘I will never apologise for telling you the truth,’ John said, his teeth about to shatter they were clenched so tight. ‘You killed Stephanie. The woman you’ve been looking for for fifteen fuckin’ years! Because you were still in love with her! And you killed her, Dee. Why?
‘You tie your own kid up and drug him and dump him in your trunk and leave him there so he pisses himself. He didn’t do anything to you. He didn’t even know you.’
‘Shut up!’ Dornan managed, his words barely audible. He started to prise John’s fingers from his throat, but John wasn’t finished yet. He picked up Dornan’s head with very little effort, slamming it back into the ground. Once. Twice. Three times. Dornan stopped fighting.
‘You beat the woman you say you love until your baby was dead. You say Juliette’s the daughter you never had, but that’s not true, is it? You had a daughter. She was alive. And you beat her mother until you killed the baby inside her.’
Dornan snapped. Perhaps he had seen himself in the mirror John was holding up and decided he didn’t like what he saw. Whatever it was, he managed to break free of John’s grip and then they were on their feet somehow, throwing punch after punch.
John still hadn’t gone for his own gun, but it was only a matter of time. Something had to put an end to this shit. As Dornan punched John in the jaw, he staggered back, the fight clearly wearing on him.
‘Don’t ever fucking talk about Stephanie again,’ Dornan said. ‘About any of it. Do you understand?’
John used the segue to get down low, to kick his leg out and sweep Dornan’s feet from underneath him. He went down hard, making a sound as the air knocked out of him again.
The time for games was over.
John pulled his gun, cocking it as he stepped over Dornan. He planted one foot on either side of Dornan’s torso, aiming the gun right between his fucking eyes, and everything in him screamed at him to pull the fucking trigger and end this. Kill the motherfucker, save the girl, and everyone could live happily ever after. Only, it was never going to be that easy. John knew only too well how surrounded he was by people who were firmly in Dornan’s allegiance, people who were probably aiming their guns at him right now. Instead of unloading a round of bullets in Dornan like he wanted to, John changed his grip on the gun and brought the butt down straight into his forehead. Dornan’s eyes rolled back in his head momentarily, before they refocused on John, the fight completely gone.
‘I buried Stephanie!’ John roared, spittle landing on Dornan’s cheek. ‘I will talk about whoever, whenever, because I dug her grave with my bare hands and I fucking buried that poor bitch myself!’
The place was as quiet as the dirt grave John had lowered Stephanie into, back in Colorado. Nobody moved a muscle. Jaws were on the floor and somebody had turned the music off completely. Even the girls who were supposed to be dancing onstage were motionless, their eyes bugging out as they took in the scene unfolding.
Anarchy like this had never existed within the Gypsy Brothers before. The brotherhood was bleeding away in front of everyone, replaced by mistrust and greed. And in Dornan’s case, by a darkness so black he couldn’t even see his way back to the light.
Selfishly, John wanted to reach through and pull him back. To go back to a time when things were simpler. To know who was a friend and who was an enemy.
But it was too late. He’d seen too much. The blood. The death. It was all just too fucking much.
‘Let me tell you what happens if you stay on this road, brother.’ John’s eyes burned, his throat thick. Dornan had been his only true friend. What had gone so colossally wrong? When? Where? Before Mariana, before any of it, where had their paths diverged so violently?
And then, John understood. An epiphany that lay beneath him, beaten and still. Dornan had been born on this road. Naked, bloody, screaming, a pawn in a game much bigger than him. A chess piece that belonged to Emilio Ross, in blood and in name.
John could run.
Mariana could run.
But Dornan would never be able to run from the thing he came from. The thing that created him. The darkness didn’t just exist within him.
He was the fucking darkness.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DORNAN
It was quiet as John left. He didn’t go without leaving his mark – in this case, spitting his own blood on the floor of the strip club before he smashed the doors open and disappeared.
Dornan stared at the ceiling for a minute. A fleeting moment of peace after he’d just had the shit beaten out of him. He didn’t know whether to feel embarrassed that John had at times overpowered him, or victorious that he was still here while John had walked away. As he was lying there, catching his breath, a female face appeared in his vision. The stripper who’d been grinding on him just a few minutes ago was now ashen, her eyes big and alarmed, her tits still shiny from where he’d sucked on them.
How quickly things could go from good to terrible.
‘Are you okay, baby?’ the stripper asked, reaching a hand down to him as if she were going to pull him up. A waifish thing, all skin and bone and tits, and she was offering to help him up. Dornan would have laughed had the situation not been so dire. As it was, he got to his feet and smacked her hand away. ‘Scram,’ he said, and she did.
A lot of the club members were in this place. A lot of customers, too, and they’d seen the entire thing. Dornan looked around at the tight faces, the stares, and he laughed.
‘Hasn’t anyone ever seen a scuffle before? Get back to your fucking drinks!’
And just like that, the place thawed. The music was turned back up, the girls onstage grabbed at the nearest pole and started grinding, and most of the onlookers dispersed to other tables. A few customers left, casting worried glances behind them. They were probably tourists. Regulars didn’t usually get their panties in a knot when things got ugly.
Viper approached Dornan carefully, a look of unease on his face. He was a tall skinny thing, with a deadly bite if you messed with him – hence, the name Viper. He was also called Viper because he liked to bite the women he fucked, all over their bodies, but that was an aside.
‘What was that?’ Viper asked, cool concern masking the worry Dornan could see in his eyes, clear as day. Dornan wiped blood from his nose, leaving a sticky trail of the red stuff up his arm.
‘That was John signing his ticket out,’ Dornan said, placing his fingers between his lips and whistling, short and shrill. The rest of the Gypsy Brothers who’d witnessed the fight drifted over to him, drinks and women forgotten. There were over a dozen core club members present, and they formed a loose circle around Dornan and Viper.
Dornan looked at each of them, right in the eyes, before he delivered his proclamation.
‘He’s done.’
The music was loud in the club, the flashing lights bright, but their focus on Dornan was so absolute, he could have whispered and everyone would have understood.
‘We have to make it official,’ Viper said beside him. ‘A vote.’
Dornan nodded. ‘We do.’
He let the silence stretch on until it became uncomfortable. He grinned, his teeth still bloody, and for that he was glad. It made him look more commanding to be covered in battle blood.
‘I look forward to your votes,’ Dornan said finally, again making eye contact with each of the Gypsy Brothers in front of him.
He left before anyone started asking questions. Took himself off to his motorcycle and tried to call Mariana. He was going to need stitches in some of these cuts on his face, a hot shower, and then he was going to need to have his dick sucked.
He called her three times. She didn’t answer. Santa Monica was only ten minutes by car at this time of night, faster
on a motorcycle, but if she wasn’t there Dornan would be pissed.
He tried her one more time. It rang out. Dornan smiled as he thought about who else lived nearby. Somebody who could tend his wounds. Somebody who John loved above all else.
He shoved his cellphone into his jeans pocket and pulled on his helmet, gunning the engine before he roared down Venice Boulevard.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JOHN
He drove around in circles after smashing his fists into Dornan’s face; windows down, radio blasting. Anything to drown out the blood that roared and pulsed at his temples, in the tips of his fingers, that steady smash of blood around his heart as rage pumped through him, alive and bright red. Red stoplights and red road signs and red gas station signs, Dornan’s red blood splashed across John’s torn knuckles, the world a haze of John’s anger and Dornan’s violence. The old Dornan never would have killed Stephanie. The old Dornan would have thrown himself off a roof sooner than laid a hand on a woman, his pregnant mistress at that.
He had changed. Embraced his darkness, gone full circle. He’d pulled away from his father in the early days, resisted his vacuous demands for bloodshed and absolute loyalty – loyalty he had given, bloodshed he had kept to a minimum – but now it seemed Dornan Ross relished the hunt of bloodletting as much as his soulless father.
After driving aimlessly for what seemed like an hour, John pulled in to Redondo Beach and parked on the shoulder of the road. Hands shaking, he took out his cellphone and called home.
He called twice, each time getting the red ‘busy’ symbol flashing up on the screen. More red.
His daughter was probably still on the phone to that fucking kid, the one she and Mariana seemed obsessed with. Dornan, too, for that matter. Everyone was so concerned for this kid who’d found his poor mother dead in a bathtub full of blood, but nobody seemed to care that John had had to dig her goddamn grave in the dirt behind her house. Nobody seemed to care that he’d had to spend hours wiping down every surface for prints and possible DNA, especially when he was a mechanic and most definitely not a crime scene cleaner.
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