Rogue (Dead Man's Ink #2) (13 page)

I’m not like her, though. I don’t wear every single thought I have on my face, or in my body language. I keep things close to my chest. It’s the only way I’ve survived this world for so long.

Other members of the club have survived by alternative means. Cade’s stone cold like me, but his temper is legendary. People don’t fuck with him, because they know the consequences will be dire to say the fucking least. Shay uses her body to protect herself. She’ll make you think you’re about to get the ride of our life, when in actual fact you’re about to get a stiletto blade slipped through your eardrum and into your gray matter without a by your leave. She really is a true widow maker. The guy I’m digging this grave with, Brassic, is our resident bomb maker. He won’t hurt you with his fists. He’ll hurt you with a pound of C4 and a remote detonator while he’s a mile away slamming back a shot of whiskey.

He doesn’t talk while we dig. Neither of us do. He’s angry that I wouldn’t let him go after the guy who killed his best friend’s girl last night when his rage was peaking, but he won’t show it openly. Good thing for him, too. I’m not in the mood to be questioned. My side is killing me, and all I can think about as our shovels make dry,
shink, shink, shink
sounds in the dirt is that I somehow have to fix this fucking Ramirez mess under the noses of the DEA. Highly fucking inconvenient.

“We’re digging this hole for the wrong person, you realize,” Brassic says. It’s the first thing he’s said since we started working, and it’s so true it makes my head pound.

“I do know.”

Brassic grunts. He’s slick with sweat like I am, except the vast expanse of his back bears the Widow Makers’ club badge instead of the Virgin Mary that I have inked into my skin. She was my first tattoo, my holy lady. The space had already been taken by the time I started the Widow Makers, and besides, it’s better for me not to have any club markings. There are times when I need to go places, see and do things that I wouldn’t be able to if people suspected I had affiliations to a biker gang. In those instances, if they knew I was the
president
of a biker gang, I’d be murdered on the spot.

“So when, then?” Brassic asks. He sounds tired; I know for a fact he was up all night with Keeler, drinking and smashing the shit out of the workshop in one of the outhouses, so his head must be killing him.

“Soon. Really soon, man,” I tell him.

“And you’ll give me free rein?”

I mop my brow, eyes still stinging, my head swimming, and I say, “Buddy, when this thing goes down, you don’t need to worry. You can turn the bastard into red mist and I will thank you for it.”

In the distance, thick plumes of dust billow up into pale, washed out blue of the sky overhead. Cars. Three of them. I can’t see what kind they are or who is driving them, but they’re traveling fast.

We walked out here to clear our heads. We fucking walked. Brassic turns giving me a concerned look. “We need to get back?” he asks.
 

I have a sick, anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach as I watch those cars speeding toward the distant compound. “Yeah. Yeah, man. We need to get back.
Now
.”

******

SOPHIA

I’ve never noticed that Cade has a slight limp before. I notice it well enough when he’s charging across the compound toward me like a crazy person, though. He favors his left side, skipping his right foot behind him ever so slightly as he charges in my direction with a stony expression on his face. I can feel the worry pouring off him when he pitches up in front of me.

“You should get back up to the cabin, Soph.”

“Why?” No way am I going back to the cabin. I have no specific reason for being in the courtyard outside the clubhouse but I’ll be damned if I’m being sent away again already. I am sick of being cooped up. Sick of feeling a prisoner. Cade must see me bristle; he blows out an exasperated breath, holding his hands up in the air.

“We got visitors, okay. And not the nice kind. Better you aren’t here for it,” he says.

I feel like being stubborn some more, but the look on his face tells me that might not be wise. “Who is it?” I ask.

“Don’t know. Not DEA, but still… no one good. C’mon. Get back up the hill.
Please
. Jamie will kill me if I let anything happen to you.”

He looks genuinely concerned. Out of the corner of my eye, the woman with pink hair from last night, Shay, emerges from the clubhouse, pulling on a dirty white t-shirt over her florescent pink bra. Classy. She shoots me the foulest look ever, and then frowns as she squints into the distance beyond the compound gates. When I follow her gaze, I see what she sees: tall columns of dust, red and brown, growing closer and closer. Too close, it would seem. The hood of a black car is visible, only meters away from the gates, but there are more behind, following.

“Shit,” Cade hisses. The first black car screeches to a halt, kicking up more dust and debris as it almost crashes into the gates. The sound of hot metal ticking reaches us, and then the loud
crack!
of a gun being fired. Sounds like it came from inside the car. I can just make out the shape of a figure slumping forward in the driver’s seat, and then the car’s horn starts screaming, blaring out obnoxious sound into the quiet.

“Ah, sweet Jesus.” Cade steps to the right, blocking me from view of the car. He sends Shay a sharp look that she returns, arms folded across her chest. “Make sure this one doesn’t come to any harm,” he tells her.

She scowls and then spits on the ground at her feet. “Rebel said not to threaten her. Didn’t say nothing about
protecting
her.”

Cade pivots on the balls of his feet and begins marching toward her. He looks like he’s about to tear her head from her shoulders. She holds up her hands, taking a step back, eyes wide. “All right, all right! Fuck, man, it was a joke.”

Cade’s not in the mood for jokes, though. “Just do as you’re fucking told, Shay.”

A high pitched screaming joins in the sound of the car horn, and suddenly there are people climbing out of the first car while a second and a third pull up alongside the first, blocking the gate to the compound entirely. I couldn’t see it before, but all three vehicles are completely riddled with bullet holes.

 
A tall, leggy blonde in a tight black dress and red stilettos emerges from the first car. She looks like a wild animal, dark eyes round and filled with madness. As soon as she’s on her feet, she turns and unceremoniously drags the lifeless body of a huge man out of the car behind her. He looks like he’s half dead; given the amount of blood spattering the woman’s arms and legs, he could actually be all-the-way dead.

Shay’s mouth hangs open, surprise taking over her features. “Is that…?”

“Maria Rosa?” Cade finishes. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

It takes me a second to remember who this woman is. I’ve met so many new people and been introduced to so many new threats recently that this recalling where Maria Rosa fits in takes a beat. I get there fairly quickly, though. Maria Rosa. What was it Carnie called her the day the police came to search the compound? That’s right…the Bitch of Columbia. The head of the Desolladors Cartel—the woman who tried to frame Rebel by sending men in Widow Makers cuts into a grocery store in Hollywood and mowing down women and children.

“What the fuck is she doing here
?” I whisper this under my breath, unable to give force to my words. I’m too disbelieving, too stunned, too completely horrified to grasp what I’m seeing in front of me.

“I don’t know,” Cade replies. “But it looks as though, as per usual, the psycho bitch has brought trouble with her.”

“Help me!
SOMEBODY HELP ME!
” Maria Rosa topples to the ground, tripping on her own heels as she tries to drag the extremely heavy looking body toward the gates. She spins around, fury and panic lighting up her face. She sees the man standing next to me and the panic vanishes, completely replaced by anger. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Get over here, Cade. Get over here and fucking help me.”

More people pour out of the cars—all men in black suits and white shirts with guns in their hands—but Cade remains utterly still. His eyes look cold. Dead, almost. “You really are insane if you think for one second you’re getting through those gates, darlin’.”

Maria Rosa lets go of the man’s arm and stalks up to the metal railings of the gate, a wicked snarl twisting her features. I can tell that she’s a beautiful woman usually, but at the moment she looks like medusa—her hair is everywhere, her eyeliner smudged down her face, bright red lipstick smeared. She’s hysterical, and from what I can tell about to get much, much worse.

“You let me through these gates, Cade,” she snaps. “Let me through, or I’ll make sure this one finds his way inside all by himself. He’s been telling me all about how he’d like to fuck the pretty little thing you have hiding in your shadow.”

I only put two and two together and realize she’s talking about me when she jerks her head at one of her men and Raphael Dela Vega appears. He strains against the taller, broader man holding onto him, desperately trying to get free. I spot the crude spider tattoo on his face and it all comes rushing back to me—him telling me how he was going to rape and kill my mother and sister right in front of me. I feel dizzy, like I’m about to pass out. He’s haunted my dreams, but this is the first time I’ve laid eyes on him since the night Rebel bought me. I’ve tried to pretend he doesn’t exist, tried to pretend he’s dead somehow, that Hector tired of him and got rid of him, but no. Here he is in all his savage glory, only twenty feet away from where I’m standing now. And Maria Rosa’s threatening to set him free on our doorstep. Irrational as it may be, I’m terrified. Since the gunshots, car horn and Maria Rosa’s screaming took place, twenty Widow Makers have materialized out of the compound buildings, all holding guns, all ready to put a bullet in this woman’s head for fucking with their club name. I
know
they aren’t going to let Raphael anywhere near me, but still… I can feel his eyes crawling all over my skin, can sense the dark things he wants to do to me, and it makes my heart squeeze in my chest.

“Shoot them all,” Shay says. “We don’t need any of them alive. Just fucking kill them all.”

For the first time since I’ve met the woman, I finally find myself agreeing with something that’s come out of her mouth. Less than a second after I think this, the weight of that hits me in the gut like a battering ram. Kill them all. I want them all dead. There are perhaps eleven people on the other side of the gate including Maria Rosa and Raphael, and I just agreed that I wanted them all dead.

Who am I becoming?

They’re drug dealers, murders, human traffickers and rapists. If my father were here, he would forgive them of their sins and invite them inside so he could help their wounded. I want to double chain the gate, douse the bastards in petrol and strike a match.

I would watch them burn.

Maria Rosa snatches a gun from the guy standing closest to her and holds it up, aiming though the bars of the gate at Cade. “If you kill us,” she hisses, “I won’t be able to tell you what Ramirez has planned for you, will I?”

I’m still all for killing her, but Cade falters. Shay cocks a mean looking gun, holding it up with both hands as she moves closer to Cade. “She’s bluffing. She doesn’t know anything about Ramirez. Let me put a fucking bullet between her eyes, man.”

“You think Rebel would do that?” he asks.

Shay’s determination flickers, only for a second. Only for the briefest of pauses. It’s enough for Cade, though. “Exactly. He’d want to know what she knows first. And
then
he’d kill her.”

I don’t like his tone of voice at all. It sounds for all the world like he’s about to do as she asks. “You are
not
going to let her in here, right?” It seems like sheer madness that he would even consider such a thing, and yet he gives me a tight-lipped smile and starts walking toward the gate.

“You, Rico,
him
,”—he points at the guy holding onto Raphael—“and Hector’s guy. That’s it. Everyone else needs to get gone. Then you can come in.”

“You’re crazy!” Maria Rosa laughs scornfully. “I’m not walking into the lion’s den with only one able-bodied guard. You must think I’m stupid.”

“No, I think you’re desperate otherwise you wouldn’t have come here. The choice is yours, Mother.”

Mother? My head is spinning. Why the hell would he call her that? It makes no sense. No one else seems to find it strange, though. The Widow Makers surrounding me are all wearing severe expressions, hands resting on their guns, some blatantly holding them out like Shay. I’m the only one who looks lost, I’m sure. Cade shrugs, smiling in a dramatic, all of a sudden way that is totally out of place.

“When you make up your mind, you let me know, okay? Meantime, I’ll be in the clubhouse drinking a cold one.” He begins to turn around, turning his back on the crazed woman on the other side of the gate, but she starts screaming again.

“¡Te odio! usted es un enfermo, el mal hijo de puta!”

Cade faces her again, grinning. “Oh, don’t worry, Mother. I hate you, too.”

There’s pure murder in her eyes when she lowers her gun. “Fine. Just the four of us. But trust me…if you value your life and the lives of your precious Widow Makers, you won’t lay a finger on me or mine.”

Cade draws an ex over his chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“I’ve hoped you would die many times over already,
cabron
.”

“Likewise.” Cade stares at her until she loses patience and starts barking at her men in Spanish, presumably telling them to leave. They look unsure at first, and then afraid as she gets angrier and angrier. Eventually seven other men climb into two of the cars, start the engines and leave.

“There. Are you happy now? Rico is
dying
, motherfucker. Let us inside.”

I have no idea who this Rico guy is, but he sure as hell seems important to Maria Rosa. Cade grunts, still grinning, though the humor has vanished from his face. He looks like he’s grimacing as he slowly strolls to the compound gate and punches a code into the keypad to the left. The metal screeches as the gates swing open and then Maria Rosa is charging into the compound, holding up her gun. She marches straight up to Cade and presses the gleaming metal directly against his heart.