Brawn: Lethal Darkness MC Read online

She looked at me as she said, “I want to see it.”

  Tristan nodded. “Very well. You’re a grown girl. I’ll respect your decision.” He adjusted his grip on the handle of the gun. “This is for my wife,” he said.

  I kept my eyes riveted open. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing any fear in me. I had none to show. I was an outlaw about to die an outlaw’s death. I knew that it might come to this, that walking into the lion’s den meant there was a good chance I’d never come out, but I’d come anyway. For her. For Paris. I didn’t regret it.

  “Pull the trigger, Tristan,” I said.

  He grimaced. Three shots were fired.

  Chapter 25

  Paris

  I heard a howling shriek and saw blood erupt from my father’s leg. To either side of me, his two henchmen collapsed. They were dead before they hit the ground.

  I screamed as I fell, cowering into the dirt, shielding my head and eyes and praying that I didn’t get shot.

  I peeked out between my hands. From across the yard came two massive, shaven-headed men wearing tactical gear with big sniper rifles strapped across their shoulders.

  They pushed Tristan onto his back, then one of them reached a hand down to help Micah up. He took it and struggled to my feet.

  “Are you okay, friend?” said a voice behind me.

  I turned and saw a man walking towards where I stood. He was wearing a track suit and looking as casual as could be. But I saw the glimmer in his eyes and knew that he was brewing with anger.

  “I’m okay,” Micah said.

  I didn’t know what was going on, but somehow, I’d made it through unhurt.

  The man nodded sagely. “It seems our timing was appropriate. I am glad,” he said with a Russian accent.

  “You don’t even know the half of it, Sergei, my brother.” Micah and the man clasped hands, then turned as one to look at Tristan where he was lying in the dirt.

  “So this is the motherfucker, eh?” he asked.

  “This is him,” Micah replied.

  Daddy sat up on his elbows, breathing in heavily through his mouth. His eyes were wild with animal fear.

  “That is a nasty wound,” Sergei said, pointing at my father’s leg. “You ought to go to a hospital. You are very likely to bleed out if you do not.”

  Tristan kept breathing, not saying a word. Off to my right, I saw the crumpled bodies of his henchmen. Each of them bore a clean bullet hole right through the forehead.

  “Tell me, Tristan,” he continued, “why did you hurt my friend, Anton? And your wife? That is a very disgraceful thing to do, friend.”

  “I didn’t do shit,” he spat.

  Sergei clucked and shook his head. “I know very well what you did. Do you think you are the only one who is friends with the police?” He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, crouched, and waggled it in front of Tristan’s face. “There was video, wasn’t there? You knew this. They had you on camera! Very sloppy, very sloppy indeed. You are not so good at this job. Perhaps it is best that you do not do it anymore.”

  Daddy paled. I felt my stomach drop.

  “Let us watch together, shall we?” Sergei announced. He hit play and held the phone so Daddy could see. As each second ticked by, the pallor in my dad’s face whitened further. By the end of it, he looked like a corpse.

  The desert was silent when the video ended. Sergei stood up. “Tell your daughter what you did,” he said. His voice was icy cold, barely human. When Daddy stayed silent, he nudged a toe against his ruined leg, eliciting a bone-chilling scream. The howl echoed in the night. “Tell her,” he repeated. “Now.”

  Daddy closed his eyes and started to speak, but Sergei interrupted again. “No, you must look at her. Like a man. Explain what you did and why.”

  My father looked at me and the whole world shrank down to just his voice. I couldn’t see anything else, hear anything else, couldn’t even breathe as he spoke. His eyes were quivering. “It was me,” he said in a near-whisper. “I did it.”

  I shook my head vigorously. “No, you didn’t, Daddy. You couldn’t have.”

  “He did it, Paris,” Micah said softly.

  Tears pearled at the corners of my eyes. I heard a hollow, rushing noise, like the blood in my head had begun to stream faster and faster through my veins. My heart in my chest was fluttering at top speed.

  “Daddy, why? Why would you kill Mom?”

  His face twisted into a violent snarl as he erupted suddenly. “Because she was a fucking whore!” he thundered. “A nasty, cheating slut!”

  I shrank in fear at the sudden outburst. Who was this man lying across from me, telling me he’d murdered my mother, calling her a whore, a slut? It was night and day. Just moments ago, I’d felt like I was reunited with him, like I had my father back and everything was falling back into place. But there was one more sudden jerk of the world left in store, it seemed, one more dizzying wrench before I could get a bearing on my life. Just moments ago, he’d seemed so innocent. This didn’t seem possible.

  But then I remembered the day with the broken vase, when I’d seen the beast in my father come roaring out as he bellowed at my mother. Tell me who it was! He’d been a monster then. Maybe he’d always been a monster.

  “She was sleeping with that fucking filth I found her with. She didn’t have to tell me; I knew it. They were together, just like I knew they’d be. I found them and I did what had to be done. I don’t regret it. She died like she should have—like a whore.”

  The Russian man, Sergei, tilted his head to the side. “She was not cheating on you, Tristan. Anton was her friend. They had known each other for a long time. He told me often that a friend of his was in trouble, that she was trying to run away from an abusive husband. But he did not say it was you. Perhaps she made him swear to keep her secret safe; I do not know for certain. But I do know that you killed an innocent man. One who deserved better than to die at the hands of a pig like you.”

  I couldn’t keep everything straight. Revelations were being tossed around casually, but each one was exploding in my head like a hand grenade. My mother was a cheater—no, she was just scared. Micah had killed her—no, my own father had. I didn’t know what to think, how to feel. It was all too much. I felt dizzy and nauseating. And all this blood around me wasn’t helping.

  “What are you going to do to me?” Daddy asked. “Take me to the police?”

  Micah shook his head grimly. “Whatever Sergei has in store for you will be far, far worse than jail, Tristan. I’d say, may God have mercy on your soul, but I don’t believe in the big man upstairs, and even if I did, I don’t think he gives a damn about you.”

  Sergei’s men bent down and each took one of my father’s arms in their grasp. They began dragging him off to the side of the house, where a truck sat idling. Sergei looked at Micah once, nodded brusquely, then turned and followed his men to the car. They tossed my father into the backseat and climbed in after him. Then they shut the door. The car turned and disappeared around the bend in the road.

  Micah turned to face me. I was still lying in the dirt. He walked over and reached down to help me up, brushing off dirt from my clothing as I stood. I felt weak and numb everywhere, like I could barely support my own weight.

  He looked down at me, his eyes steely and soft at the same time, boiling with some inscrutable mix of love and distance, of fire, of glaciers. All of the things that made him who he was, they were visible in one way or another, or maybe I was just going delusional from all of the emotional stress.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Is it true?”

  He took a moment before nodding. “I’m sorry, Paris. It’s a horrible thing to hear.”

  I bit my lip, then fell into his chest. He wrapped his arms around me and for the first time in a long time, I felt safe, protected. Like the wildly pinwheeling world had finally come into balance and I could start trusting the things around me again. There would be a l
ot of time needed to recover. It wasn’t going to be easy to come to terms with the fact that my father had killed my mother, that he’d lied to me, that he’d used me as bait to lure his enemy here and try to kill him. I was an eighteen-year-old girl, not a war-hardened biker like Micah.

  But somehow, being close to him made me feel like I’d find a way to make sense of everything. To find my feet again. I felt strong. Do you trust me? he’d asked when I stood on top of the rock and looked down at the branches hiding him from sight below me. I’d said yes, and I jumped. Wasn’t this just more of the same?

  In the midst of the dizziness swirling through my head, I began to feel centered and calm. His arms around me were so solid; there was no way in hell I could doubt them. His breath was so steady, so easy to rely on. It was mind-boggling how quickly he had become my everything. In a world that refused to sit still for me, he never budged. Micah was a rock. My rock.

  I leaned back and looked up at him and said the only thing I knew I could say in the moment. “I love you, Micah.”

  He brushed his lips against mine. “I love you, too, Paris.”

  And, at long last, the world stopped spinning. My world stopped spinning, at least. I had everything I needed. Right here. Right now.

  Epilogue

  Micah

  Four Months Later

  Paris was squeezing the living daylights out of my hand. “Jesus, you’re stronger than I would’ve guessed,” I said.

  She glared at me. Her hair was slicked over her forehead with sweat, and both cheeks were flushed bright red.

  “Not the time,” snapped a nurse to my right. “Move.”

  I shuffled out of the way as the woman went over to check the IV bag on a stand next to the hospital bed. It was chaos in the room. Doctors and nurses were swirling around, Paris was moaning in pain with each contraction, and the air was filled with beeps and clicks of a thousand different machines. But goddamn, the girl could really grip. I’d lost all feeling in my fingertips.

  “Push,” ordered the doctor, crouching between her legs.

  “Come on, baby,” I said encouragingly. “You got this. I’m right here with you.”

  A piercing wail broke the air and my heart stopped in place. Paris’s face scrunched up, then she slumped back in exhaustion. The doctor at the foot of the bed rose with a grime-covered infant in his hands. I looked at it in amazement. It was my son.

  “Paris, baby, look,” I said, stroking her forearm gently. “Look at him. We made him. That’s ours.”

  Her eyes fluttered open. The doctor brought me over to snip the umbilical cord before gently sponging away the slickness covering his skin. When he’d been dried off, he brought the baby over to Paris and laid him in her arms. I crouched over the head of the bed, my fingers resting on her shoulder, as I stared at my son. Words failed me. That was happening too often lately, but then again, this was never a direction I’d expected my life to go in. I was in a hospital room with my wife and son. Now there was a sentence I never thought I’d say.

  “He’s beautiful,” she whispered.

  I kissed her on the forehead. “You are, too.”

  She looked up at me and smiled. She looked dead tired, like she’d just fought a war, but there was so much beauty and power in those gray eyes of hers. Those otherworldly gray eyes, the ones that had caught my attention so long ago, sticking out of a crowd and demanding that I walk over and into her world. It meant so little at first. Now, it meant everything.

  “I love you, Paris.”

  “I love you, Micah.”

  # # #

  I pushed the wheelchair carefully through the double doors into the waiting room on the other side. Paris was seated in it, with our swaddled son nestled in the crook of her elbow. I kept glancing down at him. That skin was so perfect. He’d fallen asleep and I marveled at how calm and still he was, how flawless. I didn’t know what to call the emotions I was feeling.

  As soon as we walked in, we were swarmed. Zeke, Bolt, Carter, and Bear were there, lingering on the back edge of the crowd, looking ridiculously out of place with their tattoos and leathers in the middle of this pristine white hospital. In front of them, Paris’s friend Katy had swooped to her knees in front of my wife and was clutching her arm and cooing at the baby.

  I leaned down and planted a soft kiss on top of Paris’s head before walking over to my men. Zeke shook my hand. “Congratulations, prez,” he said with a grin. “Now you’re really in for it.”

  “Don’t remind me,” I said.

  “You ready to be a poppa?” Carter asked.

  “I don’t think anyone’s ever ready, but being around you idiots has definitely given me experience in the dealing with children department.”

  We all chuckled. Then I felt a soft touch on my shoulder. I turned around to see Valeriya. She was smiling, but her eyes were wet with emotion. “I just want to say thank you, Micah,” she said.

  “I’ve told you a million times, Valeriya, you don’t need to thank me.”

  “Without you, I would have no closure. I needed that.” She paused before correcting herself. “We needed that.” I looked down and saw her son, standing wobbly on two feet with her hand clasping his.

  “He looks so big,” I said.

  “He is going to be very strong and handsome. Just like his father.”

  I laid my hand on her shoulder. “Without a doubt.”

  She smiled again. “Congratulations on your son, Micah. I’ll let you get back to your wife.” Leaning down, she scooped up her son in her arms and kissed him on the cheek before strolling away.

  I walked back over to Paris and crouched at her side. “You look exhausted, Par,” I said.

  She groaned. “My whole body hurts. I want to sleep forever.”

  “Ready to go?”

  Her smile made my chest do that funny twinge, the one it had done the first time I’d seen Paris, and every time since. It didn’t show any signs of stopping. “Take me home, Micah.”

  “As you wish, princess. Let’s go home.”

  I stood up and pushed through the crowd, out the doors, and away into a future that looked as bright and pure as my son’s skin. I was a bastard and an outlaw, always had been. But maybe a little grit was what made my wife and child seem so shining and perfect in my eyes. There was redemption for everyone, I supposed. Even for a man like me.

  THE END

  Continue reading for your FREE BONUS BOOK, Bones!

  Revenge came at a price. So did she.

  They say if you love something, let it go.

  I’ve never believed in that B.S.

  When I see something I want, I make it mine.

  That’s exactly what happened when Isabel showed up on that auction block.

  She looked innocent. Terrified. And oh so f**kable.

  I had a mission to complete, but I put it on hold and did what I wanted:

  I bought her.

  It could cost me my life.

  After years of waiting to strike back, I’m going behind enemy lines.

  If I let Isabel become a distraction, I could get a knife in my back.

  But I’ll take that risk. It’s time to have my revenge.

  It turns out that my enemies might be one step ahead.

  Before I can stop it, betrayal comes fast and blood comes faster.

  They’re coming after everyone I love.

  They’d better be careful, though. I always protect what’s mine.

  Chapter 1

  Dominic

  The first thing I remembered was white. White everything. Blinding, imposing white, closing in on me from every side like a huge, pale hand pressed over my eyes.

  The second thing I remembered was a noise. It was a steady beep. It chirped every few seconds, as steady and reliable as a heartbeat. That was because it was a heartbeat. My own, to be exact. The monitor to my right showed a skittering blip that tracked the ups and downs of the organ pumping in my chest.

  A nurse came by, although I didn’t k
now at the time that that was what she was. I thought she was just a warm voice and a soft hand mopping the blood from my forehead and picking out the bits of glass that stuck out from my skin.

  It was a miracle the crash didn’t kill me. At least, that’s what they used to say, back when I was in the group home. My parents’ bodies had been all mangled to shit, hardly recognizable as the people who had once walked and talked and more than likely did things that were at least a little bit valuable for polite society as a whole—like jobs or volunteering or whatever. But little baby Dominic had made it out with just a few nicks and scratches. Hell, I hadn’t even cried. That’s how the story went.