Burning Ember (26 page)

The guys taunted her, but she didn’t bat an eyelash, not even when their quips turned sexual. She stayed levelheaded, which also shocked the shit out of me. For some reason, I was the only one she lost her temper with.

My body, which stopped listening to my brain since the moment I met her, wanted her. Wanted inside her. Dirty fucking images of me bending her over the table ran rampant through my mind.

The lines I’ve drawn for myself when it comes to her are disappearing. I nearly kissed her last night. If Jade hadn’t interrupted us, I would have. And I wouldn’t have stopped there. She would’ve been wrapped up in my arms.

It didn’t escape my notice that our bodies fit perfectly together like a lock and key.

On the tail of that thought is the memory of her reaction to seeing Jade tied to my bed. She’d been terrified, in full-blown panic mode, clawing at me to get out of my room. You’d think I was trying to push her off a cliff, not making her face a bed with a naked woman tied to it. Then as if by magic, she calmed to my touch, softened in my arms and I’ll be fuckin’ damned if my voice didn’t have the power to tame the fire and fear in her eyes. I asked for her trust and she handed it over. Handed it right the fuck over. Even after all the shit that I’d dealt her way over the last few days. The result—a surge of protectiveness and lust barreled through me. My body and my brain aligned to want only one thing . . .
her
.

Just her.

Under me.

On top of me.

Any way I could get her.

But Jade’s shrieking put an end to whatever had been about to happen.

And I spent the rest of the night trying to get my body and mind to understand that Doll wasn’t for me, and wondering what in the hell she had been through that would make her react the way she did to seeing Jade. She claimed she was claustrophobic. And yeah, maybe, that explained Dozer’s door being left open, and her feeling cagey, but something told me this was different.

Scars.

She had more than the ones on her wrists. Scars that run deeper, like mine. Scars underneath her gorgeous skin and sea blue eyes. And little by little, they’re swimming to the surface for me to see.

Like the other day when Bodie had hold of her. Whatever had taken place, it wasn’t a game to her. The anxiety radiating through her eyes told me as much.

Fuck! Mav . . . you’re doing it again. . . .

You can’t keep letting her infiltrate and hijack your mind.

I force myself to shut down the part of me that gives a fuck about her. The part that wants to know every goddamn thing about her.

But it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, because deep down some baser part of me craves her. Craves her like I’ve never craved anyone, not even Dana.

The simple truth. And the only thing that has the power to help me get her off my mind. Is the fact that she’s not for me.

She’s for Edge. And I’ve already fucked my best friend over once. I’ll be damned if I’m doing it a second time.

Upending the bottle, I pour the last of the JD into my glass. I’m feeling good and trashed, but that little bit of liquid euphoria is calling my name.

Name . . . Name . . . Name . . .

I don’t even know her name.

It could be anything. Samantha. Alison. Tammy. I shake my head. Nah, she doesn’t look like a Tammy. Maybe a Tracy.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow I’ll make her tell me her name. Right after I find out why the fuck she’s scared of me.

“Mav?” Someone waves a hand in front of my face. “Mav?”

“What?” My gaze slowly travels up. I take in the woman’s nice tits, cleavage, and mocha skin. I flinch when my eyes land on her brown irises. I hate fuckin’ brown eyes. Dana had brown eyes. It takes me a second to recognize the girl in front of me.

“I don’t know if I should say anything.” The words spill from her mouth. “It’s about . . . Pumpkin. Maybe I shouldn’t.”

“S-say what? What about her?”

Her eyes widen. “Uh . . . nothin’. Maybe when you’re not so . . .”

She tries to leave and I grab her shoulder. “Lita . . . Lo, whatever-in-the-fuck your name is, you got somethin’ to say, speak your peace.”

“You’re really off your face, Mav, and I don’t want to stir shit up.” I glare and her resistance falls to the wayside. She eyes me hesitantly, takes a deep breath, and starts talking. “Earlier, I was in the bathroom. In the stall next to me, someone was snortin’. Snortin’ coke.”

Ice skates through my veins. I jump from my chair. “The fuck? Pumpkin?”

Lita grabs my arm. I rip it from her grip. She hurries to say, “I tried sticking around to see who it was for sure, but I didn’t want one of the guys ripping my head off for being gone too long. So I kept my eye on the door.”

“And you saw her come out? Just her?” She nods. “You’re fuckin’ sure?” I snarl.

“She’s the only one I saw come out.”

Piece by piece I puzzle together Doll’s behavior tonight. I don’t want to believe it. But she was jittery as fuck. Sweating. Wouldn’t look at me. Nervous as hell. Scared. Because she fuckin’ knew the rules and broke them!

She waited until we all fuckin’ trusted her.

She lied! Right. To. My. Fuckin’. Face.

I grab the empty bottle in front of me and hurl it through the air, shattering the mirror behind Lita. Shards of glass tumble to the floor. I spin around. The remaining people left in the room are eyeing me like I’ve lost my damn mind.

My past circulates. Five fuckin’ years ago, they looked at me the same way. Not only on the day Dana left me, but the day I found her too.

A muffled ringing wakes me. Groaning, I check my alarm and see it’s almost three
A.M.
I’m still drunk from the liquor I drowned myself in a few hours ago. Pulling my cell from beneath my pillow, I see an incoming call from a restricted number. My skin prickles. Hope rockets like a shooting star through my torso. I answer, praying like hell it’s Dana. Maybe she’s calling from a payphone or a friend’s cell. Please God, let it fuckin’ be her.

“Yeah.”

“You the guy lookin’ for the redhead?”

Instantly, I’m sober and wide awake. I sit straight up in the bed and wipe the sleep from my eyes. “Who’s this?”

Silence greets me and a shot of panic flares inside my chest. “Hello? You there?”

“You still offerin’ a reward? If so, I got an address for ya. But we meet first. I want the money up front.”

Every limb in my body strings tight. I pull in a shaking breath. I grip the sheet and throw it off me, swing my legs over the side of the bed. “No problem. Tell me where she is and you’ll get your money.”

“No. We meet. I get paid. Then I give you the address.”

I start yanking on my jeans. “Fine! WHERE?” I bark.

Turns out the guy’s a lowlife drug dealer from Albuquerque. Some guy I showed Dana’s picture to about two weeks ago. When we meet up, Edge threatens the guy and I end up giving him half of the promised reward now, and he’ll wait for the rest, but only if and when I find her. If she is, in fact, where he says she is.

The address he gives me is on the Westside, a shithole apartment complex. It’s December, and for New Mexico, it’s bitter and chilly as fuck out.

J-twenty-two is the apartment number. As I near it, I hear “Last Resort” by Papa Roach coming from behind the door. Dana always plays that song when she’s feeling particularly low. If those two things aren’t the mother of all bad omens then I don’t know what is. The lyrics slice like razor blades crisscrossing over my heart, cutting deeper as each word penetrates.

For thirty-seven days, I’ve been a dead man walking. My sanity hanging by a thread. A thread that’s been thinned with each passing day. I can’t eat. Can’t sleep. Can’t think of anything but finding her. I’ve gone from bar to bar. Searched every goddamn dive and drug house. Trolled central. Cap even promised a marker to the 13 Ds if they helped us find her. We bled every one of our contacts dry and they in turn bled theirs.

Daily, I concocted scenarios in my head. Where she was. What was happening to her. Maybe she hadn’t left me. Maybe she’d been taken. Maybe she was being held somewhere by someone who had a beef with the club. Maybe she’d checked herself into rehab. But fuck. I’d checked all of those too.

Hearing the song, and seeing the apartment number that eerily reminds me of my tattoo, is all it takes for me to know . . . know that today is the last day I search for her. I glance back to Cap. We lock eyes. I see he knows it too. My life will forever be changed after this day.

It takes two kicks to bust the door in. What I see when the door opens has my entire body shaking with rage. Naked bodies. Drugs. A fuckin’ brick of coke
,
only half of it left
, and
lines cut on a glass table waiting to be snorted. The place fuckin’ reeks of reefer, sex, old food, and sweat. The boys flood in behind me. They easily subdue the two men and a whore who starts screaming at us to get the fuck out.

With ice in my veins, I turn over passed out junkies and inspect each one. The skin and hair color aren’t familiar, but I still examined every female. She could have tanned, or died her red hair back to its natural color or something else.

The junkies grumble and moan as I move them. I slap a few awake and yell questions at them, like where’s Dana? Is she here? Have you seen her? A redhead? A goddamn white skinned redhead . . . have you seen her?

But they’re useless. Zoned out. Lifeless zombies. The lot of ’em.

My heart soars when I realize I’ve searched everyone and she’s not here.

Cap snatches up the brick and orders D to flush the shit. Cap’s not a fan of drugs either. He lost his only blood brother to heroine. It’s the why behind him stepping down as VP of the Greenbacks, and him and Griz starting the HOCs. He was done smuggling that shit into our borders for the cartel. He’d
already lost more brothers as a Greenback dealing drugs, than he ever lost in Nam, and w
hen he couldn’t convince Pappy to steer the club to a new course, he left. And Griz left with him.

“Mav.” Goose calls my name from down the hallway and the sick feeling permanently residing in my gut crashes up like a tidal wave against the walls of my stomach. I enter the hallway. Goose stops me by putting his hand on my shoulder. His eyes close and he slowly shakes his head. “I’m sorry, brother.” He squeezes my shoulder hard.

My body is a bomb . . . ticking . . . fucking . . . ticking.

My skin itches like it wants to detach and float away.

A barbwire coils around my heart, becomes hot, like it’s been lying in the pits of hell and it shreds my heart in as many seconds as it takes for me to understand what his apology means. His pain is my pain. Mine . . . his. Every muscle in my face constricts and my teeth crack from the force I’m using to hold it together. I will not let the moisture rising behind my eyes push forward. . . .

She’s in the third room on the right. And she’s not alone. Some dark-skinned fat fuck is lying naked beside her. She’s on the bed, passed out, wearing only a dirty midriff. Everything else is visible. Her red hair has blonde roots, and the ends are almost crimson with sweat and grease. She’s thin. Too thin. Her stomach is too flat. Where there should be a baby bump, there’s not one. And I know. Know what she’s done whether intentional or not.

It’s gone. She’s gone. She never even gave her a chance.

Everything I wanted. Everything I’d planned for us burns to ashes before my eyes.

I pull out my piece from its holster. Arms—it feels like a million of them—grab at me and there’s a shit ton of shouting. My brothers drag me from the room as I do my best to fight while at the same time I try to get a clear shot at her. I never do.

Someone needs to pay though.

Cap must recognize my need for vengeance because he throws a man to his knees before me and mouths two words. “The dealer.” The arms around me disappear as I leap forward gun in hand.

Shooting him would be too quick. Too painless. Too easy. So I use the butt of the gun to beat his face into a puddle of flesh, blood, and broken bones.