Eternal Temptations (The Tempted Series Book 6) (51 page)

“Go on, I’ll give it to you,” I dare him.

His finger closes around it as my bullet whizzes through the air and blows his finger off. The shots begin to die down, the gun powder is thick in the air and the bitch is still burning on the ground. Smoke throws his gun over his shoulder and walks over to the unfortunate club whore and whips out his cock and takes a piss on her.

Charlie squeals like a pig, drawing my attention away from Smoke and his attempt to put out the fire. With my gun still poised I make my way toward him and stand over him as he slithers across the floor like a snake.

I arch my shoulders and pull the trigger again. His body stills and I bend over to stare into his eyes and watch as the life spills out them. He hangs on by a thread, suffering through his death. I sling the gun over my shoulder and turn around. My eyes struggle to search through the smoke for my brother that deserves to take this man’s life and fade him to black.

“Pipe,” I shout, pulling the utility knife from my belt. I hear his boots creep up behind me and I straighten my back and hand him the knife as he stares at Charlie.

“He’s going to die, make it be from your hand,” I tell him. Pipe diverts his eyes to the knife I’m offering and then he looks back at me as his hand takes the weapon.

After Christine died I struggled for years, let my temptations become my demons all because I was desperate for retribution. I got mine and now it’s time for Pipe to get his.

I watch as he kneels beside Charlie and presses the blade against his cheek, the sharpened point touches the outline of one of the teardrops inked beneath his eye.

“Your tears belong to me now,” he seethes, as he traces the drops of ink, carving the tattoo from his cheek. Charlie’s body jerks but he can’t fight. He can’t scream. He can only lay there and be at the mercy of the knife.

Like Oksana.

Pipe flicks the pieces of bloody skin off his fingers before he drags the knife across Charlie’s neck and slices it wide open.

Retribution.

It has a color.

Its color is
black
.

Three days feigning off the sadistic voice inside my head that tells me the long languid kiss Blackie gave me before he slipped out of our bed, was the very last one he’d ever give me, has left my heart in a million tiny shattered pieces. I did everything I was supposed to do. I woke up and routinely took my dose of lithium, replayed his promise over and over in my mind but nothing worked.

I’m coming back for you, girl.

In a last ditch effort to pull my sanity from the ruins Blackie’s departure left me in I went to my father’s house. My father knew I was being worked over by my treacherous mind the moment he opened the door. Either he spotted the familiar signs reflected in my eyes that he sees every time he glances in the mirror or I am more transparent than I thought. Whichever the case may be he was trying his hardest to pull me from the depression dragging me down.

He didn’t need my stress added to the mountain sitting on his shoulders but he took it, anyway. He acted as if it wasn’t severing his soul that he wasn’t with his club or that they were on the road facing peril without him. And after he cooked me and Reina dinner he and I went upstairs and painted the nursery.

“He will come back, right?” I ask, rolling the green paint on the wall. I couldn’t avoid the question anymore. I know I’m not supposed to ask, that a better, wiser old lady would just sit idly and wait for her man to come home, but I couldn’t help myself.

He doesn’t answer me straight away and for a moment I wonder if he heard me, forgetting his ears were still on the mend. But my father heard my words, maybe not as loudly as I spoke them but he heard my question. He thought before he actually answered, not something Jack Parrish usually did. The man doesn’t have a filter.

He places the roller into the tray and turns to me taking a deep breath as I continue rolling the paint on the wall.

“Careful how you answer, Bulldog, wouldn’t want to make a liar out of you.”

The roller falls from my hand as that deep voice vibrates through me, awakening all the dormant parts of my body and finally ending the torment.

My dad’s face comes into view first, the cocky smile, wide and proud on his face. My eyes follow the direction of his and I see Blackie casually leaning against the frame of the door. His smile matches my fathers, arrogant and victorious. But everything else about him screams exhaustion, everything except his eyes. Those bad boys are feral, primal, outright hungry.

“Whatcha waiting for, girl?”

Pushing off the frame, he crooks his finger and beckons me.

“Jack, with all due respect, you might want to get your ass out of this room. Pipe’s downstairs waiting for you anyway,” he says, his long legs swallowing up the space between us.

“Wish I lost my fucking vision not my hearing,” my father grunts as he pats Blackie on the back and disappears out the door.

“Get over here,” Blackie whispers.

He doesn’t have to say it twice. Like so many times before, I jump straight into his waiting arms and throw mine around his neck. The familiar smell of gasoline assaults my senses and I bury my nose in his neck, breathing in his scent. My fingers slide over the leather covering his shoulders as his slide into the back pockets of my jeans and squeezes my ass.

Blackie’s back.

I lift my head from the crook of his neck and stare into his eyes.

“You kept your promise,” I whisper.

“I did,” he agrees, leaning his forehead against mine. “Now it’s time to keep all the others,” he says huskily as his gaze lowers to my mouth. “How quickly can you finish your degree?”

I open my mouth to question what he means, but he doesn’t give me a chance.

“Take another class, do whatever it takes, girl,” he murmurs against my mouth, softly sucking on my lower lip. “As soon as you get that degree I’m putting a ring on that finger and then you’re gonna get that tattoo you want so bad,” he rasps before covering my mouth with his.

I thread my fingers through his hair, pull on the ends and wait for him to say the words I’ve been waiting to hear.

“I’m back, girl.”

Yeah, Blackie’s back.

And he’ll keep coming back time and time again.

And these arms of mine will always be waiting.

Pipe’s standing in the kitchen, his hands braced against my counter, his eyes trained on the knife laying on top of it.

“Brother,” I say, jolting his gaze from the pocket knife. Beady, drained eyes stare back at me and the cockiness I felt upstairs when I saw Blackie alive and well disappears.

“Mission accomplished,” he says solemnly. Two words. Two words that declared victory for our club but they were lack luster coming from Pipe. “The insurance adjusters will assess the compound this week, if there isn’t enough to cover the rebuild you have plenty of equity in my garage—pull it out and rise up.”

“You talkin’ like you’re going somewhere,” I accuse, crossing my arms against my chest as I continue to stare at him, dreading the words he’s about to say.

“I’m done,” he declares, shrugging off his cut. “Riggs would be good in my position; the kid is a whiz.”

“Pipe, brother, I know—” he cuts my words with a glare.

“You don’t know,” he spits. “Like I don’t know what it’s like to watch my kid die you don’t know what it’s like to find your wife with her neck slit.”

I snap my mouth shut and grind my teeth. Another man would’ve been dead for bringing up my boy but I know Pipe’s just hurting. He was there for me when I buried Jack, stood by my side and reeled me in every time I tried to join my boy in eternity. He gets a pass.

He turns his cut over and picks up the knife, inching the blade under his patch and cuts stitch after stitch.

“You're right, I don’t know what you’re feeling but I know whatever it is it’s made you raw and you need to heal.”

My words are ignored, and he continues to pull the stitches out until his patch is free. I watch on as he shrugs his cut back onto his shoulders, pockets the knife and hands me the patch.

“That patch is who you are,” I argue.

“That’s not who I want to be anymore,” he sneers. “Take the fucking patch, Parrish,” he seethes, extending his arm. “TAKE IT!”

I snatch the worn patch from his hand and grab his cut with the other, stepping to him as I set my eyes on his.

“I’m taking the fucking patch, Pipe, but you’re coming back for it. Clear your head, get your shit figured out but you get back on that bike and you come home. Your patch and your chair will be waiting for you. I will be waiting for you.”

Without another word he pulls out of my grasp and glares at me before charging out of the kitchen like hell was on his tail—maybe it was.

Reina steps into the kitchen as I throw Pipe’s patch on the counter and fight the urge to throw something.

“Jack,” she shouts, demanding my attention. Turning my narrowed eyes on her I see the phone she’s holding against her chest. “It’s Bianci.”

Of course it is.

“Victor passed away,” she says solemnly.

I heard the three words.

Read them off her lips too.

And wished I did neither

.

The call came from the warden. Thinking back now I don’t remember what he said but I know there was no remorse in the deliverance of his words. And why would there be? To him he was just a number, just a problematic inmate, a criminal who turned his prison upside down. He was happy to be rid of him.

I had been preparing myself for the inevitable and I think that’s why I didn’t react at first. I held my composure and called my son-in-law, Anthony. Bless his big heart, the man brought my daughters, and together we told them that their father had passed.

I was sure watching my children mourn their father would be my undoing but still I didn’t shed a tear and was able to be the rock they both needed. The girls stayed with me that night and just like when they were small, and Victor would work through the night; they crawled into the king-sized bed I shared with their father and snuggled close.

Victor’s body was released and flown back to New York, Anthony and I went to identify his body. I wish I never stepped foot into that morgue because the man beneath the sheet was not the man I married; he was not the handsome, dapper man I met at Studio 54. He was skin and bones and all the suffering he did in the last few weeks of his life stared back at me and it became evident that my husband died a miserable death. A man who was loved beyond measure died alone and imprisoned with a failing body and broken heart.

I left Anthony in the morgue and ran out of there as quickly as my weak legs would allow and desperately tried to erase the image from my mind. I closed my eyes and begged Victor’s soul to paint me one last picture and envision the young man with the charcoal gray suit and the black turtleneck. The man who promised to marry me and make a life with me. I closed my eyes and remembered our last visit and the way we promised one another we would remember the other.

Still, I didn’t cry, not a tear.

At the funeral parlor I picked out the most lavish casket, the final throne for the king. Anthony gave the funeral director Victor’s favorite suit, and he assured us he would pin it to look like it was tailored to fit. We matched the handkerchief to the tie just as he always did and included a pair of his Italian loafers. Some might say I was being foolish since I had kept the casket closed but I wanted my husband to be impeccably dressed for his final sleep just as he was in life. He would want that too.