Ransom (Dead Man's Ink Series Book 3) (6 page)

“You’d better watch your mouth, man,” he says quietly. “It would be a pretty shitty start to my day if I had to kick your ass for being rude to Soph.”

“See! This is what I mean,” Carnie says, throwing his hands in the air. “She gets preferential treatment because she’s blowing the boss.”

“No one said this was an equal opportunities organization. If you don’t like it then you can always leave, Carnie. Just remember to leave your ink at the door.”

Leaving the Widow Makers is just like leaving any organized crime outfit. It’s never as easy as it might seem. Even if Carnie hadn’t had access to highly sensitive, high dangerous information that could really hurt the majority of the club’s members, which he
has
, then he’d still have to get the huge tattoo marked into his back removed. And that is a particularly unpleasant and painful procedure that involves whiskey, knives, blood, fire, burning and bleeding. Carnie begins to turn a sickly shade of green.

“I was just pointing out that—”

“People that point tend to lose their fingers,” Cade growls.
 

“Yeah. Well…”

“And I’m not sleeping with fucking Shay, you idiot. I don’t shit where I eat.”

Carnie looks at Shay, confusion all over his face. He looks so turned around that I almost feel sorry for him. I’ve got no idea what the hell lead to Shay telling this lie, but there’s no way I would have believed it for a second. I’m surprised that Carnie did either. Shay looks unapologetic as she swipes her plate up from the table and scrapes the remaining food from its surface into the trashcan at the end of the bar.

“Why did you tell me you’d fucked him?” Carnie demands.

“I have. Just not recently,” she says.
 

“Not in the last
five
years
,” Cade corrects. Shay turns purple, but she nods her head.
 

“You wanted to know. You
asked
. You were being a little pissy bitch about guys I’d slept with before that you might know. When I told you about Cade, you didn’t stick around long enough to hear that it wasn’t a current thing. You made assumptions, because you’re a hard-headed jerk, and now here we are, with you sticking your dick into a walking Hepatitis factory.”

The blonde, who’s stood quiet for the most part up until now, sets down the food Carnie passed her. “I think I’ll just get going,” she fake whispers. She looks like her temper is rising but thankfully she’s managing to keep a hold of her tongue; Shay will rip it out her overly-botoxed mouth if she doesn’t.

“I didn’t fuck her properly, baby,” Carnie says. “I swear I didn’t. I put my cock in her ass last night, but it didn’t feel right. I stopped. Tell her, Denise. Tell her I didn’t—” But Denise is walking out of the clubhouse, swaying a little on top of her six inch hooker heels, and she doesn’t look like she’s going to be stopping and turning around any time soon. God knows how she thinks she’s going to get back into town from here. Late last year, not too long after I arrived here with Jamie, we found one of the club member’s girlfriends strung up from a tree on the road leading from town to the compound. Her hands and one of her feet had been cut off. Along with her head. Ever since then, we don’t allow people to walk alone out there, especially women. Carnie was the one who found Bron, so it’s surprising he’s letting her wander off now.
 

His eyebrows are drawn together, pulled upward in a look of puppy dog hurt. The lenses of his thick-rimmed black glasses are huffed a little at the bottom, suggesting his temperature is up. It’s hotter than hell in the New Mexico desert in summer as it is; arguments and bickering only makes the weather more unbearable.
 

“You should have explained,” he says to Shay.
 

“And you should have dropped the machismo bullshit for just a goddamn second and let me actually finish my sentence.” She has a good point. She doesn’t seem too fazed by the fact that Carnie’s been out fooling around with another woman. In fact, she seems frighteningly calm. If Rebel had done that to me, there would be hell to pay. I’d have his testicles in a heartbeat. The relationship I share with the head of the Widowers is different to most relationships inside the club, though. Monogamy isn’t high on most people’s list of desirable moral traits in a partner. That goes for the male members and the female members alike. No one seems to want to be pinned down—not when you could be having fun with a whole bunch of different people at the same time. Sloane would have something choice to say about the arrangements that take place here under this roof once night falls. Probably something about the risk factors of highly communicable venereal diseases, and how syphilis is a really bad look on people these days.
 

Carnie grabs his cut from the counter and shrugs it on. “We’re not done talking about this,” he says.

“Whatever you say, baby. You’re the boss.” Shay smiles at Carnie, but it’s not a real smile. It’s a grimace, teeth bared, and the message is clear for Carnie to read. He’s
not
the boss, and if he even
tries
bringing this shit up again, Shay’s going to castrate him with a rusty butter knife.
 

Carnie shakes his head. “Fuck,” he mutters under his breath. Leaving his breakfast behind, he exits the clubhouse, presumably to go and grab the blonde he allowed to leave a moment ago and take her home, wherever that might be.
 

Shay sits herself back down, not saying a word. Everyone feels the burn of Cade’s gaze directed at her head, though. He looks pissed. Eventually Shay acknowledges him, rolling her eyes. “What?”

“Don’t ever drag me into your shit again, woman. It won’t end well. You feel me?” His dark eyes look almost black as he stares at her. Shay grumbles something under her breath. Cade rarely gets mad, but right now he doesn’t appear to be all that happy. “I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear that,” he growls.
 

“I only told him the truth,” she snaps. “I didn’t lie. We did sleep together Cade, no matter how badly you might want to forget about it.”

“You’re right. It would be lovely if I could forget about it, but you seem to keep bringing it up for some fucking reason, and I can’t seem to put my finger on the why of that. If we have problems, Shay, just let me know and I’ll happily resolve them with you.”

I’m waiting for Shay’s caustic response to that, but the door to the clubhouse swings open and Rebel walks in, scanning the room from side to side as he makes his way toward the bar. From the tense look on his face, he’s heard raised voices and he’s seriously not in the mood to be dealing with them. “What’s the problem?” He slams his gun down on the woodwork, blowing a long breath out down his nose.
 

“Nothing. Shay was just about to head into town to check on the shop. Right, Shay?” Cade doesn’t really seem to be giving her a choice. Shay is suddenly expressionless, her face utterly blank. She gets up and gathers her things, slinging her patch covered cut over her shoulder.
 

“Yes, sir,” she says, her voice clipped, devoid of any inflection or emotion. The change in her is miraculous, and yet I’ve seen it a thousand times before. She blows hot and cold, fire and ice, her tongue sharp enough to flay the skin from a man’s back most of the time, but the moment she’s faced with the man I love, she’s suddenly docile and compliant.

“Come back here after lunch. I’ll send someone else out to relieve you,” Rebel says.
 

Shay gives him a quick nod and then she silently leaves the clubhouse, leaving a handful of bemused Widow Makers behind her. Ever since Hector Ramirez showed up in Freemantle and decided to terrorize the Widow Makers any way they could, it’s been necessary to have someone armed and ready to respond at the club’s tattoo shop. I’d kind of thought Ramirez might have grown bored and left New Mexico by now, gone back home to his cartel in Mexico to oversee his drug operations, but it seems as though he has far more patience than anyone gave him credit for.
 

He was furious after his right hand man, Raphael Dela Vega, went missing. He vowed not to leave until Raphael was found, and so I guess that means he’ll never leave because Raphael is gone for good. I should know—I killed him and buried him out in the desert. Rebel shoots me a brief smile as he sits down with Cade. I try not to listen to their conversation as I clean up after breakfast, but it’s hard not to. I’ve felt an uneasiness in the compound over the last few days. An uneasiness I can’t put my finger on, but that I know is there all the same.
 

I hear two words that send shivers all over my body:
Los Oscuros
. And then I hear another two words that cause a bolt of panic to rise up my throat and relay around the inside of my head, so powerful and strong that I can feel my pulse beating in every part of my body.
 

Alan Romera.
 

That name should never be slipping out of Rebel’s mouth. It should never be a name spoken inside the walls of the Widow Makers’ clubhouse. It shouldn’t be uttered in any motorcycle clubhouse period. When I was initially captured by Raphael, he found my fake ID in my purse and assumed that Sophia Letitia Marne was my real name. I wasn’t exactly in a rush to correct him, given that he kept on threatening to rape and murder my family as soon as he could find them. I’m not sure why I haven’t told Rebel the truth, that Sophia isn’t my true identity, but… I suppose it felt safer. Better if I kept my family and my old life as far away from this new one as humanly possible.
 

So now that Rebel is whispering
that
name, the name of my
father
, out loud, it feels as though my lies are catching up with me.
 

He says the name again as he talks in low, hushed tones with his second in command. Suddenly I don’t feel all that well. My stomach is churning and my head feels light, like there’s nothing inside it. My hands are prickly, numb, rubbery all at once.
 

I look down at the wet, soapy plate I’m holding slips from my hands, and I watch as it seems to fall to the floor in slow motion. I know it will smash. I know it will explode into thousands of pieces when it hits the floor, and I can do nothing but observe as it does exactly that. The clubhouse falls silent. Eight people all turn and look at me, frowning, surprised, irritated. My eyes lock with Rebels and an entire conversation takes place in the brief heartbeats that follow. He knows. He knows
exactly
who I am.
 

And something is very,
very
wrong.
 

CHAPTER FOUR

REBEL

I didn’t push. I never did. It seemed like a bad idea back when Soph first came to the compound. She was livid, seven which ways from crazy, and calling her out on her secret seemed like the dumbest fucking move I could make. I always knew though, knew who she
really
was. I’ve been waiting for the past six months to see if she would ever come clean, to trust me, but the day never arrived, and now it seems as though I don’t have the luxury of giving her space anymore. I don’t have the luxury of giving her time. We’ve run out of both, because something terrible has happened, and I have no idea how we’re going to find our way out of this one. I’ve held my tongue and waited the past three days, hoping that I’m wrong, hoping the information Cade dug up is wrong, but it appears all the hoping was for nothing. Hector Ramirez, the motherfucker that had my uncle murdered in cold blood, has kidnapped Sophia’s father and brought him here to New Mexico.
 

It makes no sense. When we were back in Ebony Briar for my father’s charity ball, I heard Soph’s father say his own name when he answered her phone call. She hadn’t said a word, had hung up almost immediately, but I’d heard him say his name. I never told anyone else. When we got back to the compound, my curiosity was undeniable; I wanted to know everything there was to know about this strange, fiery woman I’d fallen in love with, so I did my due diligence. I did my digging. I looked up Alan, and then I moved on to his wife and his two daughters, Sloane and Alexis. I found pictures online. I read Alexis’s school reports. I looked up her Facebook profile and then wanted to kill some fucking moronic guy called Matt that kept posting on her wall, calling her every name under the sun because she’d left him and wouldn’t respond to his texts.
 

I got to know the other side of Sophia that she kept hidden, and I felt fucking weird about it. I knew I should wait until she offered up the information voluntarily, but shit. I’m a curious fucking guy, okay? I’m not perfect. I have my faults just like everyone else, and I needed to know if there was anything important about her that might cause problems for the club further on down the line. Some dark secret that might show up and bite us on the ass.

I found nothing, but during my momentary foray into P.I. work I did see many, many photographs of her father. That’s why I recognized him when Cade brought me observation shots of a dark-haired male in his late fifties being dragged up the porch stairs of the farmhouse Hector bought, hands zip tied behind his back, a rag stuffed into his mouth. I thought for a moment that maybe I was being paranoid, but no.

“Are you sure? Any chance he was lying?” I ask.

Cade fidgets in his seat. He hates this almost as much as I do. Over the past six months he’s grown close with Soph. He watches over her like a big brother, always keeping one eye on her whenever we’re here in the compound, and both eyes on her when we’re not. He nods, sighing. “No. No. He had no reason to. The guy spat out the name along with three of his teeth after I gave him a couple of right hooks. They definitely have Alan.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“Did Hector’s guy say what they’re planning on doing with him?”

Cade looks troubled. “After he spilled the name, he said Hector wants the girl. That he’s planning on offering her a trade, that she hands herself over to him in return for the old man’s freedom, otherwise he’s gonna dig him a shallow grave out in the desert and put a bullet in his head. Not before he’s cut off a few fingers and toes here and there, I’m guessing.”