Devil's Heart, page 8
part #1 of Executioners MC Series
“Maybe.” He sighs. “But I’m not giving you to them. No damn way.”
“What if they agree to give you your friend back as well? Ask your boss. I bet he’ll agree to it. They’re all crazy sick perverts, Mason. They’ll agree just to rub it in your face.”
“Do you have any idea what the fuck you’re saying?” he snarls, kicking the already-broken bed. He turns away from me, his shoulders shaking. But only slightly. He gets himself under control a moment later. He turns back to me slowly, his face set. His grin is a long-lost memory. “I’m never doing that, so you might as well get used to it. I’m protecting you.”
“I can’t let it happen again!” I hiss. Now I turn away and stride to the window again. The sun rises bright yellow, bathing everything in too much light. The day is far too beautiful.
“What do you mean, again?”
I don’t answer.
He walks up behind me. But he doesn’t touch me. “Jasmin?” he growls when I don’t reply. “Just talk to me, all right?”
“Why?” I hiss, still not turning. I just stare out at the sun-tinged parking lot until my eyes hurt from the brightness. “What good will it do, dredging it all up now?”
“I don’t even know what we’re talking about,” he snarls. “What is it? Can you just talk to me? Goddamn!”
I hug my arms around myself the same way I did when the police came and told me what had happened. “Oh, it isn’t a big deal.” I laugh. Even to myself the laugh sounds deranged, like a woman in a mental institution trying to convince everybody she is sane. “It’s just … I guess you could say I was a wild teenager. Well, not wild exactly, but …”
“But a teenager?” He walks around the side of me, puts his hand on my shoulder. I don’t turn at his gaze because I think it would be too painful. “You were a normal teenager. Sometimes you did wild things, maybe? Is that it or am I just pissing in the dark here?”
“No, you’re right. That’s it. My mom and my dad and my little brother, Freddie, we had this function we had to go to. It was for my dad’s work and it sounded like the most boring thing in the world. Me and Tiffany wanted to go and get drunk instead. We were sixteen but getting drunk was, like, our favorite thing to do.”
I paw at my face, checking for tears. It’s dry, I’m glad to find. “Me and my dad got into this big fight, screaming at each other. He told me I was an ungrateful little bitch and I told him I wished he was dead. Mom slapped me, and Freddie was crying. It was the worse fight we’ve ever had. I slammed the door and left the house.”
I shudder in a long, deep breath, then keep going.
“Dad crashed into a tree halfway to the party. He was always a good driver. Never got a ticket in his life. Always paid attention, eyes on the road, hands at ten and two, blah blah blah. But he crashed that day. Why do you think, Mason?”
“No,” Mason snarls. He grabs both of my shoulders and forcibly turns me to him. “That ain’t your fault. So you got into an argument. That don’t mean a man has a right to forget how to drive. I mean, fuck, Jasmin. You think every man who gets into an argument crashes his car? This ain’t your fault.”
“That’s easy for you to say!” I snap, stepping away from him. “But he never crashed. Not once in his entire life. He was forty years old and he’d never even gotten a speeding ticket. And then we get into this big fight and he … come on, you can’t think that’s a coincidence!”
“Even if he ran off the road because he was thinking on the argument instead of paying attention, that’s not on you. That’s his fault.”
“Wow.” I fold my arms, staring ice daggers at him. “Are you seriously saying that my dead father is to blame?”
He nods, not fazed one bit by my reaction. “Yes,” he says. “That is what I’m saying. What about it? It’s the fuckin’ truth. Ask any man here who’s to blame in that situation and they’d tell you it was him.”
I flee to the other side of the room again. It seems my entire existence in this room is going from one wall to the other. Mason follows me but stops just short. I turn to him. He has his hands half-raised, as though he can’t quite decide whether to hold me or throttle me. Maybe he wants to do both.
“You can say anything you want,” I whisper. “You can tell me it wasn’t my fault and fine, maybe there’s some truth to that. But it doesn’t change the way I feel, does it? It doesn’t change the fact that if Tiffany dies too, I’ll—” I shake my head fiercely. I have no idea what I’ll do. “She was the only one there for me in the years after. She never abandoned me. And now she’s …”
“We’re heading out to try and save her,” Mason says. “We’ll do everythin’ we can. None of us want a civilian woman to die. We don’t work like that. Maybe these Pagan Sons fucks do, but we don’t. We’ll get her back.”
“Can you promise me that?” I close the distance between us, pushing myself against him. Oh, I want to fall into him so bad, to lose myself in him. For the hundredth time, I curse them for choosing that particular moment to attack. Just a few more hours of his touch, his lips … just a few more hours of sinking deep into his warm glow before it was all snatched away. “Can you?”
He clenches his jaw. “No,” he says, releasing it. “I can’t, and I ain’t gonna lie to you about it. I promise I’ll die gettin’ her and Danny back if I have to, though.”
I put my hand on his chest. His heart beats heavily, far heavier than I ever would’ve guessed. He touches my arm, moving his hand up to my shoulder and then to my chest. But not my breast. We feel each other’s heartbeat. If either of us thinks it’s strange, we don’t comment. It feels natural.
“I trust you,” I tell him, wondering if it’s a terrible mistake. “Please don’t make me regret it.”
“Shit, Jasmin. Just come here.”
He drags me close to him and envelops me in his stony arms. I fall into him and close my eyes.
“It’s not your fault,” he whispers, his breath tickling my ear.
“I wish I could believe you,” I counter.
He leaves soon after and I return to my main job: pacing, pacing, and more pacing.
I need to do something. This pacing is driving me crazy. Yet I can’t stop.
If I stop, I have to think.
And that’s the worst idea I’ve had yet.
13
Mason
“What’d you reckon?” Yates says when I come walking out.
“About what?” I ask.
He pushes his wire-framed glasses up his nose with a skinny finger. Maybe that’d make other men look weak, but everybody in the club knows what the boss is capable of. All around the bar, the boys are getting ready, loading their rifles, checking their weapons. It’s time to head out and show them what we’re about now. Nobody is laughing. Everybody is focused.
“The funerals,” Yates says. “After the war, eh?”
I nod. “Probably be for the best.”
“Fuckin’ Rex, fuckin’ Bones,” Yates growls. “We’ll gut those Pagans for this, gut them like the dogs they are.”
“Damn right we will!” I snarl. I head over to the bar and stand with Mickey, a forty-something New Yorker who joined the club three years ago. His hair is slicked back, looking almost soaking wet stuck to his head. His face is hard and sometimes the fellas call him Liotta on account of how he sounds and looks like the actor.
“You ready for some serious killin’?” he growls in his heavy New York accent.
“Yeah, you?”
He nods slowly. I wouldn’t wanna be the man on the other side of that gun he hefts over his shoulder. It’s a heavy machine gun, the sort they carry in the army. He closes the barrel with a heavy click and winks at me. The only person in the world who can make a wink terrifying. “If they hurt that civilian girl, I’m going to burn them all alive. There ain’t shit worse than that, hurting women, kids. Hurting kids is worse. But hurting women is almost as bad.”
“Damn right,” I say solemnly.
Mickey claps me heavily on the shoulder. “You steady, Wolf?” he asks. “We need sharp eyes on this one.”
I shrug his hand off and give him a quick nod. “I’m ready.” I assemble my rifle, checking each part one by one. “Let’s hope they’re not, the fuckin’ bastards.”
“We’ve gotta be smart. The boss has laid out a plan.”
“Yeah, I know. But they took Danny.”
“Your brother,” Mickey notes.
“All of ours,” I correct.
He smiles tightly. “Yeah, that’s true,” he allows. “But you two are goddamn shadows. When’s the last time you headed out on a job without Danny? Apart from some collection bullshit, I mean?”
I think on it. “This might be the first time,” I answer.
“I wouldn’t wanna be the man who took him when you get your hands on him.”
I grin at him, my first genuine smile all last night and this morning. “No, Mickey, I wouldn’t either.”
He laughs and claps me on the shoulder again. Hearing Mickey’s throaty New York laugh gets some of the other brothers making jokes as well.
“What’s the difference between a Pagan’s Son and a little girl with shit in her pants?” Rickshaw roars, already laughing at his own joke. “Nothing!”
“Shut the fuck up!” somebody tells him.
Everybody laughs, but there’s a bite underneath it. We all know that the laughing will end soon.
“Fellas.” Yates doesn’t raise his voice as he climbs onto the bar. He’s an old man now and climbing on the bar probably isn’t the best idea. But I know why he does it. The newer guys need to see that this wire-framed-glasses man is still capable. And he is. Everybody falls dead quiet at the sound of his voice.
He looks over the whole room, nodding slowly as though satisfied with what he sees. A room full of eager killers. “We’re riding out to the warehouse ten miles northeast. Some of you may know it as Charlie’s old place, but Charlie’s dead. We found him in the dried-out creek down by the interstate. The Pagan’s Sons’ve taken it over and our scouts are telling me that is where they are. We’re done messing around, boys. We’re done fucking with these bastards. They rode into our town, and now they’ve killed one of our brothers. Shit, more than one. They’re making us look like assholes.”
He clears his throat. “But I want clean work here.” He clenches and unclenches his fists. “I’m just as pissed as you, but gettin’ emotional ain’t gonna help a damn thing. You listen to your officers, and officers, you listen to me. We’ll root these motherfuckers down and kill this bastard who calls himself Deadman. We’ll kill him like the rat he is and get Danny back. And that civilian girl.” He looks at me for a moment. I wonder if it’s that obvious how much I care.
“Are we ready?”
Everybody roars, putting their guns in the air. I stamp my feet with the others and then head outside to my bike, rifle slung over my shoulder. I glance back to find Jasmin at the window, watching me through her fingers. She has her hand splayed on the glass, as though she wants me to go over there and hold hands with her through it.
I shake my head at her. I can’t, not now. A man can’t be weak before a fight.
She nods, understanding. Then she blows me a kiss. I smile. I can’t help it. Then I wink at her and climb on my bike. Hopefully, that’s enough to let her know I care.
And hopefully, this isn’t the last time I see her.
As we ride down, I try not to think about all the things that could go wrong. But it’s strange looking across and seeing Rickshaw or one of the other brothers instead of Danny. Mickey was right when he said me and Danny don’t go on jobs without each other. It’s been years since I headed out on my own, if I ever did. It’s impossible to feel alone with my brothers’ wheels screeching against the road all around me.
But it still feels damn strange to be riding out without my right hand.
We stop a few miles out from the warehouse, next to an old gas station that looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. Yates steps from his bike and strolls over to me. He nods at the station. “Take a couple of men and check that out.”
“Boss.”
I climb off my bike.
I walk over to the gas station with my hand on my gun. It always pays to keep my hand close to it even if I don’t think any shit’s gonna go down. “That’s your lover right there,” Yates told me a long time ago. I was still a kid back then and Yates and all the other fellas seemed like giants to me. He pointed at the pistol and then pointed at his chest. “It’s the only thing that’ll keep this beating.”
I go inside the gas station, kicking the dusty door open. It’s been abandoned for a long time. There’s crap everywhere, old tins and plastic containers and a bunch of other junk. I check each room, one by one. I don’t know what I expect to find, but there’s nothing back here. Just a bunch of forgotten shit. I’m heading back outside when I realize our mistake.
The gas station sits right opposite a small hill, about a quarter-mile across the desert. Not a big hill, but big enough for a few men to hide behind if they lie flat and if they’re patient.
“Boss!” I roar, but it’s too late. A Pagan’s Son pokes his gun over the top of the hill and fires.
Thud, the bullet smacks into Mickey. “Mother-fuckin’-shit!” he roars, dropping down behind his bike and clutching onto his belly.
“Fire back!” Yates roars straight away. “Find cover, you bastards!”
I run outside, ducking my head as the glass of the gas station explodes in a shower behind me. Bullets tear up the ground. More and more guns appear over the hill, the Pagan’s Sons coming out in full force now. I grab onto Mickey and drag him to a better position, an L-shape where two bikes meet. More men are running back toward the station, the only decent cover apart from the bikes. And the bikes are just an explosion waiting to happen. Hell, the station might be a ticking time bomb, too.
“Nice to meet you, Wolf!” somebody roars through a loudspeaker. The voice echoes around our little section of hell like Satan’s. “They call me the Deadman!”
I glance up. It’s that bald bastard with all the tattoos on his head.
He must be using binoculars because somehow, he sees my face drop. “Yeah, I know!” he roars. “Bet you wish you’d had some balls back at that restaurant, eh?”
I stare down at Mickey, ducking my head lower. My hand is soaked through with his blood. The bullet caught him deep in the belly. He’s bleeding out like a stuck pig.
I rip of a strip of fabric off my shirt and press it into the wound. “Stop wheezing like a pussy,” I growl.
He grins up at me. He has that sleepy look men get when they’re almost out. Rickshaw frowns at me from some bikes across the other side. The fellas are mostly in the gas station now. The gunfire has ceased, but it won’t be long before it picks up again. Crack-crack; one of ours throwing lead their way. Crack-crack; they return it just as quick.
“You know I’m done,” Mickey whispers quietly. “Motherfucker got me good, eh? That’s the luck of the Irish right there. All you ugly bastards standing around and he chooses to take a chunk out of me. Unbelievable!”
His eyes fall closed. I give him a shake. Then I slap him across the face.
He stares up at me, a smile of disbelief on his face. I don’t reckon it’ll ever stop shocking me how casually men die.
“Oh boo-hoo,” Deadman laughs. He must really be Deadman, the famous prick we’re all supposed to be scared of. No leader would let his man take the megaphone. Especially the leader of a club this fucking cocky.
“Wolf …” Yates say from behind me.
I ignore him, stand up, and sprint straight at the hill. I sprint past the bikes and through the desert, head ducked down low. I don’t think. I just see Mickey smiling at me, handing me a chocolate bar after we went on a forty-hour ride with nothing to eat. I laughed and asked him why he didn’t get me something with some meat in it and he grabbed the chocolate bar and threw it in the trash. We both laughed like hyenas and then went and got some steaks. Forty hours without sleep’ll make a friendship, that’s for damn sure.
I only realize what a stupid mistake I’ve made when it’s too late. I stop at the bottom of the hill, raise my gun …
The bald bastard and three other men are already on me. He bows as his men leap at me. One cracks me across the jaw and then hauls me up, spinning me so that nobody from the gas station can fire without maybe hitting me.
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “That was a really stupid thing to do.”
Yates and the fellas shout a bunch of things from behind me, how they’ll pay for me, and what’ll happen if they take Wolf. But the bald man just walks backward, always keeping me between him and the station.
“We’re gonna have some fun,” he tells me as he drags me over the hill. He tosses the megaphone from hand to hand and hops from foot to foot. At the bottom of the hill, they’ve stowed their bikes sideways. There are already men hauling them back up, as well as guards posted to watch for any of my brothers coming over the hill.
“You’re riding bitch.” Deadman hefts a pistol, pointing it at me.
“I’m not ridin’ bitch, you motherfucking—”
He sighs, flips the gun, and lashes out at me with the grip. It happens fast. A flash, a blur of movement—blinding white light and pain explodes between my eyes, somewhere near the top of my nose.
Suddenly, I am floating through the darkness, wondering why the world won’t stop bumping around so much.
Somebody somewhere coughs out a laugh. “Time for some fun.”
My eyes fall closed.
14
Jasmin
I wake to the sound of men roaring. I didn’t even know I was asleep until I jolt up, drool sliding down my chin. I rub at my face and work the kinks out of my body. I must’ve been having a nightmare. I can always tell, even if I don’t remember it. My jaw pounds from biting down and there’s a tight band of tension around my head. I stumble into the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. Then I stuff my mouth in the sink and lap from the faucet like a cat.
