Hawke (9 page)

“No? No it’s not going to happen?”

“No.”

Suddenly digging a hand into the waistband of his jeans, he produced a gun and aimed it in my direction. My heart lurched in my chest and I jerked away, about to jump off the stool when his other hand grabbed at my hair. I sucked in a breath as he smashed my head against the bar, my vision going blurry. My entire body seized at the lightning bolt of pain shooting through my nose and skull. Tears sprang to my eyes and I let out a small cry, my face pinned to the bar so hard I couldn’t move it.

“Is it going to happen now?!” Yuri shrieked, the tip of his gun tapping at my head. “You
listening
to me now, Hawke?”

“Oh, you fuck,” Hawke whispered, “you really shouldn’t have done that.”

“Or what –”

I didn’t see it happening. All I felt was the harsh tug on my hair as Yuri was tackled off his stool, a bullet ringing out of his gun and narrowly missing me. He took me down with him, and I fell in a heap to the floor, air knocked out of my lungs. I heard a struggle and turned my head to the commotion. They weren’t more than a foot from me, on the ground. Hawke was on top of Yuri, straddling him. With one arm across the asshole’s throat, Hawke effortlessly ripped the gun out of his hand and threw it haphazardly away from them.

Then he turned his dark gaze back to Yuri and smashed his fist into the man’s face. Yuri’s head snapped back against the floor, a sickening crack sounding out.

“It could have been easy,” Hawke calmly murmured as he dug his free hand into his pocket, pulling out a switchblade. “You could have been on your way and none of this would be happening.”

My heart thundered inside of me, desperate for oxygen, but I couldn’t suck in a breath. Everything went still around me. To my horror, my body refused to move. My gaze locked on them. This was my curse: my inability to look away.

With wide eyes, I watched the gruesome scene. Watched as Hawke murmured more words and dug the tip of the blade into Yuri’s eyes. He carved them out of his face one by one, quickly and steadily. Yuri screeched at the top of his lungs, his entire body exploding in tremors beneath Hawke’s mountainous frame.

“I’m not unreasonable,” Hawke continued, breathing quietly as he worked the blade into the man’s throat. Blood splattered everywhere. Over his jacket. On my face. All over the space between us. “I’m just surrounded by unreasonable fucks that take advantage of my hospitality.”

Then he stood up, drenched in Yuri’s blood and stared down as the man gurgled and fought for life.

With a shake of his head, Hawke spat out with disgust, “Now look at the mess you made.”

Tyler

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

I was…immobilized. Just a part of the scenery as I stared on with wild eyes.

Yuri had stopped gurgling and convulsing for a full minute when Hawke turned to Hector and Jesse across the room. His face cracked with anger. I could feel it radiating out of him, and I didn’t know how detached he was, or whether he was going to mutilate somebody else.

“Isn’t it just great how we allow people who aren’t part of the club to just come blowin’ through the door armed with guns?” he growled.

Hector stared at the bloody scene and frowned. “I wasn’t here.”

“The sign of a good president is taking responsibility over the actions of your members,” Hawke retorted. “No matter what!”

Hector looked away from his brother’s stare and stiffened a nod. Hawke turned to Yuri’s men, drunk and crimson red with horror, and spread his arms out, asking them, “Does anyone else have any fuckin’ problems?”

Four of them shook their heads.

“Are you sure? We can keep discussing this girl if you want.”

They shook their heads again.

“Fine. You pussies can go back to Abram and tell him I’m fine with the arrangement. But first, you can get off your drunken asses and clean this mess up. I want the floors sparkling like a sea of fucking diamonds before the sun comes up. We’re not responsible for the body either, so you take that maggot on your way out.”

All four heads nodded.

He then proceeded to turn in my direction. He casually stepped over the unmoving body and bent down to my level. He didn’t pay attention to my startled face and terrified eyes. He just slid his arms around me and picked me up.

“Come on, darlin’,” he murmured gently, moving us in the direction of the staircase in the back of the bar. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

*

Hawke carried me upstairs to our room. Upon entering, he vaguely looked around it, at all my stuff covering every surface of what was technically his before he opened the bathroom and gingerly set me down on the counter. Then he took his jacket off and threw it on the bed. Turning back to me, he bent down and opened the cabinet under me, moving aside my dangling legs for a moment with his bloodied hands to grab a pink hand towel. Standing back up, he turned on the faucet behind me and soaked it with warm water.

“You got a nasty cut,” he remarked, pressing the dripping cloth against the top of my forehead.

I jumped, surprised by the pain I felt. I didn’t realize there was a cut. I’d been too concerned with Hawke removing Yuri’s eyeballs to notice.

Hawke just killed a man and didn’t blink once.

I knew he was scary. Hell, I saw him smash a helmet against the head of that cockroach. He needed to be scary because being scary meant being powerful too, and god, he was such a figure of power around these parts.

But witnessing the violence out of his own two hands was something I couldn’t prepare myself for. It really hit me – and it felt like ice cubes crawling down my spine – that I had been infatuated with a killer since I was thirteen years old. He fucking beat cockroach and proceeded to have him executed, but my eyes had been shut. I’d been in denial and was comforted by that denial.

This, though? This was madly confronting because I’d seen…
everything
.

And now he was cleaning me up with the gentlest eyes narrowed on my wound as though it was a gunshot to the heart instead.

There was suddenly nothing exciting about this at all.

“It hurts, huh?” he asked softly.

I just blinked. I could hardly form words in my head let alone out of my mouth.

“That fuckin’ punk,” he murmured with a frown. “I can’t stand people like that, darlin’. They are the scum of the earth, you know that? They don’t deserve to breathe.”

I blinked again. Dear God, he just killed someone,
right in front of me.

The men here were fucking crazy, but not like this. Not like
him
.

“I had to,” he finally whispered gravely, catching my haunted expression. “You listen to me carefully, Tyler, and you remember what I say. You
never
let men like Yuri go. You make that mistake once and they’ll keep comin’ back with this entitled attitude and overinflated ego. They’ll
never
go away, darlin’. They’re there to stay until they fuck shit up so bad you can’t fix it. And, besides” – he let out a long breath as he stared at my cut some more – “he hurt you.”

As he pressed the towel against my forehead, his other hand rested on my bare thigh. His fingers soothingly rubbed at the skin. I was still a little too numb to feel it, though I hated to admit I wanted to.

“And what I did say about anybody disrespecting you?” he added, thoughtfully. “Your face is a temple, and he marred it. My fault for not reacting sooner. I give people too many chances. I let them talk. I should have known better. Should have seen the way he was shaking, obviously the maggot was in withdrawal.”

He moved a little closer to me, until I could feel the warmth of his body.

“Now he’s gone,” he told me sternly, and I was drowning in his dark eyes. “And you understand he needed to be gone, right?”

I stiffened a nod, too out of it still to speak. Hawke dabbed at my forehead and then rinsed the towel with more warm water. He seemed concentrated on his task, like it was surgery work that needed his absolute attention. He’d never tended to me like this. I felt like a china doll handled with care. It was strange being on the receiving end like this.

“You gonna be giving me those doe eyes all night, or you gonna talk?” he then asked, running his teeth over his plump bottom lip as he studied me.

How could I talk?

I was speechless.

Petrified.

And, worse yet, I was intensely attracted to this man regardless of all the fuckery.

What did that say about me?

I stared at him, drawn in by his rugged face and the tattoos visible above the collar of his shirt. God, he
screamed
trouble. And I foolishly listened.

He rested his hand on my thigh again – a little higher than before – and rubbed more circles over it, until slowly my body began to thaw and relax beneath his touch. My heart rate slowed down and goose bumps broke along the flesh he was touching, sending light little tingles through me.

“Why did he do it?” I finally asked, my voice quiet but surprisingly steady.

“Why did he do what, Ty?”

“Why
me
? It doesn’t make sense to single me out like that.”

Hawke’s eyes roamed my face. Again a look I couldn’t understand. He moved even closer to me, until his chest practically touched mine. Then he leaned down, and I felt his breaths on my cheek before his mouth touched my ear. My eyes fluttered shut as his scent enveloped me. I felt warmth travel all the way to the spot between my legs.

The tip of his nose ran along the curve of my ear, and then he parted his mouth and answered, “Maybe he singled you out after he saw the outline of your tits in your transparent top. And maybe, as he got closer, he saw that your painted on shorts accentuated the folds of your pussy. And then maybe, for a sick little fuck like him, he couldn’t resist the teasing show you put on any longer. What do you think of that theory, Ty?”

Blood drained from my face. Hawke pulled back, his eyes inches away from mine. I saw the amusement in them, and my warmth was replaced with sudden anger.

“So it’s my fault then?” I hissed. “Girls walk around with their tits hanging out but it’s
my
fault I got singled out like that because I decided to wear more than they did?”

“You’re an idiot, Tyler.”

“Why am I an idiot?”

He abruptly grabbed me by the chin and forced my face in the direction of the mirror behind me. My body broke out in tremors as I saw the drops of blood still coating my face. Yuri’s blood.

“Look at you, darlin’,” Hawke then said, his voice laced with fury as he looked at me in the mirror. “Look at how fucking beautiful you are. None of those girls with their tits hanging out have anything on you. You are simply fucking breathtaking.”

Turning my body away from the mirror, I shook my head and pushed his hand away. “That’s not why he singled me out and you know it.”

“You know what I know?” he snapped, the warmth from before evaporating. “I know that I told you a thousand times to stay away from this club. I know that if you just listened, none of this would have happened. If we’re lucky, Abram will let this go, but Abram won’t because to him it’s probably a sign of weakness that he sent his moronic cousin in here to renegotiate a deal and wound up dead.”

“You didn’t have to kill him!”

“He made you bleed.” He stopped there. Like that was all the excuse he needed to cut a man’s eyes out and gut him like a pig.

“You’re crazy,” I let out in a rush, my head swimming in shock. “You’re fucking crazy.”

He threw the towel down and looked away, a conflicted look crossing his face. “I know that already,” he whispered harshly.

He turned around, hiding his face as he opened the shower stall door and turned the water on. The room filled up with steam very quickly. He kept his face averted, determined not to let me see it, but his body was half turned in my direction when he ordered me to, “Get in, Ty. You need to wash yourself.”

“I’ll do that when you’re gone,” I replied evenly. I wasn’t going to strip in front of him and breeze past him.

He suddenly looked at me. “You can’t. You’re shaking and need my help.”

“I’m not shaking.”

“Then get off.”

“I’m not shaking,” I repeated confidently.

Trying to prove myself, I slid easily off the sink. The second my feet touched the tile floor, my legs suddenly buckled and I nearly collapsed to the ground, hands struggling to grasp the edge of the counter. Every part of me quaked, and I couldn’t understand it. I felt fine two seconds ago.

Hawke was instantly at my side and wrapping an arm around me. “I got you, Ty.”

“Let go of me,” I demanded.

“So you can fall back down?”

I glared at him, embarrassment flooding me. “I don’t want you to touch me.”

“You do want me to touch you,” he replied in a hard voice, searching my eyes. “Isn’t that what you begged for in that motel room?”

“I was a
kid
.”

He let out a chuckle and it didn’t reach his eyes. He leaned back into me, his nose barely touching mine. “So why are you still looking at me like that?”

My chest tightened and I shook my head. “I’m not looking at you like anything, Hawke.”

“No, but you are.”

“I’m not. You’re crazy. You just killed a man.”

“He had a gun to your head.”

“You killed him.”

“And it’s not changing the way you look at me.” The corner of his mouth went up in a soft smile. “Not one bit. You always manage to surprise me, Tyler.”

I didn’t respond. I hated that he was right. I couldn’t stop looking at him with that stupid fucking revering look. For as long as I could remember, the sight of Hawke did something to me. He made my insides go soft. He made my heart pump harder. He…seemed to
touch
some part of me that nobody else ever could.

Like a coward, I turned my face away from him. I didn’t want him to see that look from me. Not now.

He didn’t press the matter. No, that wasn’t something Hawke did. He didn’t like to talk. He liked to just
stare
nowadays.

“Lift your arms,” he then said, grabbing at the hem of my shirt.

“Hawke –”

“I don’t want to keep staring at you covered in a dead man’s blood, Ty.”

I shuddered, appalled and freaked out. I lifted my arms immediately, feeling sick to my stomach. Blood and gurgling sounds invaded me. Yuri’s face burned in my brain. I had half the urge to smash my head against the wall in an attempt to rid it from my mind.

“Put your arms down, Ty.”

I didn’t realize he’d already taken my top off. I dropped them immediately and covered my breasts with my arm. My head felt light and I sucked in air. I was ruined, wasn’t I? I’d asked for this, didn’t I? I was a spoiled little club bitch that felt like I belonged here, and one death later and I was already disintegrating into a giant baby. This is what they did, and I knew that already, but I dug a hole and put my head in it, loving the ignorance like the fucking idiot that I was.

You’re freaking out. Just calm down.

“What the fuck’s on your back?” he suddenly asked me.

I didn’t respond. I was still thinking of Yuri’s eye-less face. I’d never seen a face without eyes. I always thought it would just be two black holes, not…fleshy, or pink, or bloodied. How did Hawke manage to remove those eyes in less than five seconds? That took serious skill, didn’t it? And experience.