By
USA Today Bestselling Author
Claire C. Riley
Odium The Dead Saga Series
Copyright ©2020 Claire C. Riley
Cover Design: Wilde Designs Elizabeth Constantopoulos
Editor: Amy Jackson
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, without express permission from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Odium VII
the dead saga
About the book:
Book 7 in the bestselling post-apocalyptic romance series.
How can we love in a world full of death?
A year has gone by and Nina is filled with rage and grief for her many losses. Only one thing remains the same: her hate for the Savages and the desire for their death.
More bitter and broken than she’s ever been before, she wonders if she can ever find her way back to the light again. But Shooter hasn’t given up on her yet, and neither have the rest of the Devil’s Highwaymen.
Mikey, living at Haven, is not the man he once was.
He hunts. He kills. He protects…but inside he has fallen apart.
He may have survived his time as the Savages’ prisoner and come away with all his body parts intact, but they managed to carve away a more vital part of him and he doesn’t know how to get it back.
Revenge is on both of their minds, their mutual hatred for the Savages continually driving them on toward an uncertain future. Together or apart, their enemy is the same, and they both cling to the hope of taking the head of the one who stole everything from them.
Only one thing is certain now: if they are to survive this enemy, they must seek out a truth that has evaded them thus far.
But will this truth destroy them?
Only time will tell.
Dedication.
To Stacy,
Love is infinite.
It transcends the stars in the sky, the deepest depths of any ocean & the life we live in between.
You will meet again.
My heartfelt thanks for your trust.
Claire xox
By
USA Today Bestselling Author
Claire C. Riley
1.
Nina
His lips on mine are all that I feel.
All that I see.
All that I need to know.
His lips on mine are what wash away the pain, the grief, the loss.
His lips on mine wash away everything.
“Nina…”
When you think you’ve lost everything, when you’re running your bare palm across rock bottom and getting dirt under your nails and scuffs across your palm, when you’re at that place…that dark, dark place, remember to look up.
“Nina?”
His hand on my bare arm made me open my eyes and I stared up into his blue, blue eyes. Eyes that reminded me of living and dying, of breathing and suffocating. Eyes that saw me so well, despite how much I tried to hide myself from him. Despite how much I wanted to hide everything I am from him. He saw it all.
“What?” I mumbled, my voice still thick with sleep.
“You were talkin’ in your sleep again.” Shooter said it as a statement, but we both knew it was an accusation. The truth slipping out between rough sheets. Between the layers of wake and sleep.
I rolled over to my side, feeling fully alert then. Anxious about what I might have been saying. Sleep was supposed to be private. Your dreams yours and yours alone. Speaking out loud was like whispering your secrets, your fears, to anyone within earshot. It made me severely uncomfortable. I had many secrets and oh so many fears.
“Fuck,” I grumbled, rubbing my eyes as I tried to hide the panic in them.
“You wanna talk about it?” he asked, his gravelly voice betraying nothing.
Snorting out a laugh, I pushed my choppy bangs out of my eyes and threw him a hard scowl. “Do you?”
“Fuck no,” he growled.
I slid myself to the edge of the bed and got out, leaving the warmth of our bed and his body behind. “Then why ask?” I retorted as I stomped my way to the bathroom and slammed the door behind me.
I shouldn’t have been so hard on him; he was only trying to help—trying to be the perfect boyfriend, or whatever he was to me. I wasn’t even sure anymore what we were. Comfortable? Definitely. Lost? Without a doubt. Clinging on to one another so neither of us drowned? Absolutely.
Inside the bathroom I sat on the edge of the bathtub and stared down at the cracked tiled floor with a sigh. My arm was hurting, the dull ache and throb at the point where it had been hacked and chopped so many times to try and stop an infection. Scar had taken my hand, but germs and my own body fighting the germs had taken the forearm. It was worse than an itch that you can’t scratch, because there was nothing there to scratch anymore. I broke my arm when I was a kid—funnily enough, it was the arm that’s no longer there—I mean, my arm’s there, but my hand isn’t anymore. Sheesh, this arm’s unlucky, but I digress. I broke my arm when I was a kid. Snapped the bone clean through when I came off my bike while riding it down a huge hill like I was invincible. It hadn’t even hurt for the first minute or two. Though my Mom had said later that I was in shock and just didn’t remember screaming so loud that I could be heard three blocks away.
I remember wearing a cast on my arm for eight weeks. My skin had stunk to high heaven when I’d gotten that stupid cast got cut off, and my arm was as skinny as a matchstick, but oh had I enjoyed scratching and rubbing that skin until my flesh was red raw.
This was nothing like that though.
I stared down at my arm—my non-existent arm—my gaze going to the bandaged stub at the end of it. The place where my wrist should have been joined to my hand. Only there was no wrist and there was no hand. It just ended below the elbow in white sterile cotton. A stub for where everything else should be.
My stomach churned, getting worse the longer I stared at the white bandage.
I felt sick, dizzy with rage and sadness and total misery. In the grand scheme of things, it was just a hand. I mean, it could have been worse; it could have been my whole arm. Or my head! Can you imagine if he would have gone for my damn head! A headless Nina…I could have been dead. I sometimes thought that dead would be better than this. I sometimes wished I was.
“You okay in there?” Shooter said from the other side of the door. His voice came from just on the other side of the wood, and I imagined him standing there, bare chested, his hands holding on to the top of the doorframe as he stared at the closed door, patiently waiting for me to answer. “Nina?” His voice was gravelly and thick. He wasn’t saying it, because he never said it, but he was worried about me.
He was always worried about me.
So was everyone else, but no one dared say it to my face.
My tongue was a serpent’s and my throat was filled with fire.
“Just peachy,” I grumbled.
I thought he sighed and then moved away from the door. He wanted to ask me more, but he didn’t want to know the answers—not really. He had a thousand questions, but he knew he wouldn’t like the answers so he didn’t ask the things that burned the tip of his tongue, that begged to be spoken. I didn’t blame him though. If things were reversed, I wouldn’t have wan
ted to ask him either.
I could hear him moving about the room—getting dressed, no doubt, and heading out for coffee and a nightshift report. The Rejects were still with us, most of the NEOs too, though they had to switch out every couple of days to make sure that Haven stayed protected. The Rejects, though, they didn’t really have a home anymore. They had a temporary base, from what I’ve heard, but it wasn’t a home.
So there we all were. Like one big happy freaking family. The Highwaymen men and women, the Rejects and the NEOs, all working together to hunt down and kill the Savages. To make them pay for everything they’d done to all of us. Everything they’d taken. We were enemies and friends combined into one army. We were an army of frenemies, if you will. I wondered for the millionth time what was going to happen to all of these people when we finally found and killed the Savages. Because we would, eventually. I wouldn’t rest until we did.
A shudder ran down my spine and my stomach roiled when I thought about the Savages’ caves and the things we’d found inside them. They were empty of the Savages, but they’d left most of their…stock behind, both alive and dead. It turned out the Savages weren’t just cannibals—they also liked to torture and play with their food too. The minimal survivors we had found had been put out of their misery quickly. It was the only humane thing left to do for them. Because if I thought my life sucked with my hand missing, it was nothing compared to what those people were missing.
I realized that I was digging the nails of my right hand into the top of my thigh and I stopped myself short of drawing blood, staring down at the half moon shapes I’d created.
Shooter and Gauge had set up small explosions in those caves and closed them off for good. There was no way we wanted anyone to ever have to go back in there again.
Pulling on the previous night’s jeans and T-shirt, I buttoned them up with surprising ease. Highlander had said it would get easier and he was right. It had, yet it still hurt.
Phantom pains, he called them. But they felt so goddamn real I didn’t understand how they could be a phantom.
I left the bathroom, finding that Shooter had already left to go to the clubhouse for his meeting. I should have been there too but today I just didn’t feel like it. Today I felt especially melancholy. I needed to harness the rage I knew was embedded somewhere within the core of me, and then I needed to drag it kicking and screaming toward the surface, because rage was better than this miserable existence. Rage was better than grief.
I’d lost everything, and yet I knew that I still had so much.
A sharp knock at the door drew my attention away from my moody inner monologue, and I went and answered it, finding Stormy waiting wide-eyed and beautiful as always.
“Hey, how are you doing today?” she asked, though there was no way she couldn’t tell how I was doing, by my glum expression.
“Great actually,” I lied. “I was thinking of signing up for the Devil’s Highwaymen 10k charity race. You know, I may only have one hand but at least I still have two feet. Gotta see the glass half full, right?” I snarked.
Her mouth opened and closed as she tried to come up with a reply to my bitchiness. While she tried to decide how to handle my bitter sarcasm. I hated that I’d become that woman again. The one with the too-sharp tongue and the bitter chip on her shoulder. The one that didn’t think before she spoke and turned away help because she was too angry at the world to believe that there was anyone or anything good out there anymore. It was like I’d gone back to the Nina from behind the walls. The one that was mean to teenage girls and let her friends get killed because she was too scared to do anything about it.
Only I wasn’t scared anymore, I was just fucking furious.
I swallowed and looked away, shame clawing its way up my too-dry throat. “I’m sorry,” I said with a heavy sigh, but we both knew I wasn’t really sorry at all.
I just wanted to be left alone.
I wanted to be left with my misery.
And the really messed-up part was that I really did keep wishing that it would have been my head Scar took and not my arm. I would have welcomed death with open arms. In death I would still have everything…my hand, my wrist, my Mikey.
“It’s okay.” She accepted my pathetic excuse for an apology easily, like she always did. Like everyone always did.
I wished I could be nicer to her. Hell, I wished I could be nicer to everyone—anyone! But I couldn’t be. I was just angry and sad and all chewed up inside. I had nothing left. No arm, no heart, no nothing. I was just a shell filled with turmoil and anger.
“I need to check the dressings actually, so grab your stuff and let’s get over to the clinic.”
I nodded and reached over to grab my boots, realizing, as I did every morning, that I couldn’t pick up the heavy boots with one hand. My anger flared again, but I bit my tongue that time to stop myself from losing my shit. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I grabbed my boots with my one hand and dragged them closer, sliding my feet into them. And then it was there again… the anger, the rage, the misery because I couldn’t even tie my own goddamned laces.
“Want me to do it?” Stormy asked, and my gaze flipped to her. She must have seen my rage simmering beneath the surface, because she flinched.
I pushed the laces into the sides of the boots around my feet and stood up. “No, I’ve got it covered.” And then I barged past her and out the door.
Every footstep was another step closer to losing my shit. But I wasn’t going to cry. I was going to lash out. I wanted to hurt someone—people, monsters, I didn’t really care what or who. I just needed someone to hurt like me, just for a moment. I wanted to smash and break and rage against the unfairness of everything.
Pushing open the clubhouse door, I stormed outside, the too bright sky encouraging me like it was my own personal cheerleader. If I’d had a rocket I could fire into it, blackening it forever, I’d have fired that thing without a second thought.
I could hear Stormy jogging to keep up with me, but I didn’t wait for her. I kept my pace up…in fact, I picked up the pace just to be mean, my feet moving quicker by the second, like I was trying to outrun myself and my demons.
“I’ll meet you there,” I called back to her as I passed her doctor’s clinic. Because I knew I couldn’t go inside right then.
I felt trapped and pent up. I needed to run and know that I was alive, because I felt fucking dead inside. I felt death crawling across my chilled skin like a ghost’s touch, and I welcomed it. I welcomed it so much. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t understand why they’d saved me. Why couldn’t they have just let me bleed out?
My feet pounded the dry earth over and over, until my muscles were aching and my lungs were burning, and my poor broken heart was struggling to keep up with me and all I could think was good. Die. Please, God, let me die. Let my heart quit on me right here and end this misery. Please!
I ran until my skin was slick with sweat, my hair plastered to my head, and I felt like I might be sick. I must have done twenty rounds of the complex, avoiding every single person who tried to talk to me or called my name. I avoided it all because it was all just so pointless.
But mostly I knew that I was avoiding life because all I wanted was death.
2.
Nina
The clouds moved above me, a slow avalanche of misery trying to block out the sun. Lying there and looking up at the sky like that reminded me of another time. Only then I had no idea what lay ahead of me. All of the death and misery, the loss, the love and the loss again. It was too much for one person to take in a single lifetime. Hot tears slid down my cheeks, mingling with the sweat from my mad dash from life.
“Och, you’ve got that look in your eye again, girly,” Highlander’s thunderous voice broke the silence of my misery and I turned to look at him.
“What look?” I grumbled. I was sitting behind one of the old supply sheds, my back against the dusty wooden walls.
He came over, uncaring that I didn’t ask
him to share my space, and sat down next to me. He looked up and pointed to a cloud. “That one looks like—”
“Don’t,” I snapped, cutting him off. Memories of cloud-watching with another man a lifetime ago stung my heart but I pushed them away. I stood up and started to walk away.
“Och, wait up,” he grumbled, and followed me.
“Ever heard of personal space, Highlander?”
“Ever heard of blowjobs, sweet cheeks?”
I turned on him with a scowl that could cut marble and his face split into a huge grin as he started to laugh. That man never took anything seriously.
“Go eat horse shit,” I gritted.
“Fecking hell, woman, you’ve got a tongue worse than a viper on its period on ya! Don’t worry, I wouldn’t put ma’ dick near that gob o’ yours for all the gold in the world.” He laughed even harder when he saw my anger growing. Which of course made me angrier. It was a vicious circle of anger and laughter and anger and laughter. And around and around we go. “All right, all right, calm ya tits will ya, Queen B. I’ve got somethin’ for ya.”
“Queen B?” I asked with an arch of my eyebrow.
“Figured you’re a massive bitch that deserves a crown to go with it!” he barked out with a loud laugh, like he’d said the funniest thing ever. I was still confused, and my face must have shown it because he rubbed a hand down his beard and at least had the decency to look a little embarrassed. “Queen Bitch, Nina. The queen of all the bitches.”
I scowled. “Firstly, don’t call me a bitch; you haven’t earned that right yet. And secondly, hard pass on the dick sandwich, Highlander, and don’t let Shooter hear you talking like that or he’ll cut yours off and feed it to you.” I turned and started to walk away from him, but he jogged up and gripped the bicep of my good arm, swinging me back around to face him.
The Dead Saga | Book 7 | Odium 7 Page 1