Witness (3 page)

Rennie stilled, and inexplicably, scarlet tinged her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to. Being kidnapped doesn’t sit well with my stomach.”

Dash dragged the towel down her neck, then tossed the terrycloth over the pile of sick beside her. He reached for a bottle of water, unscrewed the lid. “All right,” he murmured, placing the bottle against her lips. “Now open up.”

She blanched. “What?”

“It’s water. Figure the inside of your mouth has to taste like a jock strap.”

“Water, huh? Why should I believe you?”

“You shouldn’t,” he conceded. “But I could always make you open that pretty mouth of yours, couldn’t I? At least this way it’ll be your choice.”

A beat passed between them, then Rennie’s lips parted. Dash held the bottle in place as she gulped down several hearty swallows of water. When he began to pull away, she made a sound of protest, and he didn’t have the heart to deny her more. He hadn’t considered how thirsty she must be.

“Thank you,” she said when the bottle was empty. Before he could summon a response, she continued, “You’re with Gunner, aren’t you? That’s why I’m here.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“He killed two people. I saw it happen.”

Dash bit back the instinctive response, knowing that engaging in any conversation would only lead them in circles. Yes, Gunner had killed two people. That was what happened when a man walked in on another man screwing his woman…even if that woman was Luanne Stevens and not worth the effort, the fucking principle counted for something.

Needless to say, things had gone south. The fact that the asshole with his dick in the cookie jar just so happened to be a deputy sheriff complicated things, but the deputy was none too clean where the law was concerned. The sort of stuff reporters didn’t print boggled his mind. Sure, Gunner had been a bit trigger happy, but what man could blame him after what he’d seen?

Following Gunner there didn’t take much, and if Dash stopped thinking, he could pretend everything about this situation was normal.

It wasn’t enough, though. Gunner couldn’t go to prison. The one person standing between him and the death penalty was Rennie. No one had expected her to show up to take the stand today—already, from what he’d seen, reporters were commenting on how Gunner’s elite network had managed to silence her. The elite network that happened to be in the audience—all save Dash.

Most people likely assumed her dead—most including the man who
wanted
her dead.

Dead she
would
be had the task of taking her out fallen on Pete or Jax’s shoulders. Either dumb fucking luck or the goddamned universe had intervened. Gunner knew precious little of Dash’s past before Lucifer’s Legion. He’d known enough to keep Dash from killing himself, to give him a reason to not follow his brother.

Gunner had saved his life. Now he was asking for one.

And were that life anyone but Rennie’s…

“He killed two people,” Rennie repeated, her tone notching up an octave.

“A dirty cop and a cheating bitch.” The words came out with more venom than Dash had intended, feeling almost rehearsed. Like he didn’t really mean them. Still, facts were facts. “Not the kinda people I’d cry too hard over.”

Rennie recoiled, swallowing visibly. “So the sentence for infidelity is death?”

“In this world, sugar, it’s the sentence for crossing Gunner.”

“That’s barbaric.”

He shrugged, then when he realized she couldn’t see him, said, “Tough shit.”

“And Tanner was an asshole.” Her assessment caught him off guard, but she continued before he could dwell, “He was even a criminal asshole—”

“Who you were on a date with.”

Rennie made a face. Either surprise or disgust—he wasn’t sure. Maybe a combination. “Yeah. I was.”

“Straight-shot, you are,” Dash said, settling in beside her. He’d never spent so much time in the garage without his hands on tools. This particular corner wasn’t what he’d have called remarkable. Now he’d never look at it the same way.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How’s a straight-shot like you get tangled with a dirty cop like Wilcox?”

“I didn’t know he was a dirty cop,” Rennie spat, pressing against the cuffs again and agitating her bleeding wrists.

He cursed and began dabbing the injuries with a clean towel. The cuts were superficial—the sort that looked worse than they were and would sting like a bitch for a few days. But he hated that they were there at all. That she’d hurt herself because of a situation he’d put her in.

She continued talking as he tended to her wounds. “People typically don’t air their dirty laundry on a first date.”

“Yet you went anyway.”

“Went where?” she barked.

Here. To the clubhouse. Rennie had walked these halls. Having her here now was surprise enough. Now he couldn’t help but imagine her everywhere.

Flushed on his Victory Cruiser, her chest heaving, her legs spread, her pussy wet and ready for him.

Dash shoved the thought back, though not before it earned his cock’s attention. Shit, he’d imagined fucking Rennie Jones for over a decade, had an endless series of both prepubescent and adult fantasies waiting to be exorcised. Feeding Rennie his dick while she clung to his ride was one of the more classic, cliché and all. While he doubted she’d thought much of him since the days at Joplin High, she’d haunted him like a persistent ghost. The one shade of the man he’d been before.

Before heroin had claimed Dalton’s life. Before Dash had tried to take his own. Before Gunner. Before Lucifer’s Legion.

“Are you still there?” Rennie prodded, drawing him back to the present. “I already admitted I went on a date with the man. How was I supposed to know—?”

“You went with him,” Dash said. “You can’t tell me you thought a cop taking a nice girl to a motorcycle gang clubhouse was normal.”

“He thought it’d impress me, the big dumbass.” She shuddered and turned her face from him. He took the opportunity to open one of the other bottles of water and douse the towel. When he applied the damp cloth to her bleeding wrists, he expected a struggle—a jolt. Something.

She didn’t react. She just stared. Which was damned annoying, considering she had that blindfold on. What the hell was she staring at?

Dash’s brow furrowed. “Why’d he think it’d impress you?”

Something that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob choked through her lips. It made his heart wrench.

“He’d asked me about church. Why I never went. I told him I don’t believe in God. He thought that meant… Fuck, I don’t know what he thought that meant. That I wouldn’t care, maybe. That he could come clean about being in Gunner Pierce’s pocket. That it meant we were the same, or something.”

He couldn’t help it. He stared. “You’re Orson Jones’ daughter.”

Rennie stiffened. “And?”

“And you don’t believe in God?”

She snickered, relaxing a fraction. “That’s what Tanner said.”

“And what’d you say?”

“Does it matter? He’s dead.”

Dash studied her a moment longer then forced himself to break away. He drew in a breath then exhaled it on a humorless laugh. “Little Rennie Jones doesn’t believe in God,” he muttered. “Don’t that beat all? I never thought I’d see the day.”

It took a blink—half a second—for him to realize his error. For the words to cycle through his filter. For his guard to snap back into place. A stab of alarm pierced his gut. Then he couldn’t look at her. No matter that she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t look at her. As long as he didn’t look at her, there was a chance—

But he did look at her, and one look was all it took.

She’d caught his slip.

She knew.

“Dash?”

Chapter Two

The air seemed to pulse between them in the all-consuming silence that settled after her revelation. Waiting for him to confirm or deny his identity was moot—the wait itself had answered her. That, combined with the fact that no one else on the planet had ever called her Rennie.

No one but Dash Denyar.

Dash.
How had she not seen this coming? How could she have
possibly
seen this coming? Five minutes ago, Serenity would have sworn under oath that she remembered everything about him. His crooked devil-may-care smile. His mess of inky black hair. His scarred eyebrow, purportedly the result of his first run in with the law when he’d been the tender age of eleven.

And his voice.

His deep, rumbly voice with just a hint of smartass. She’d had pictures—yearbooks—of him to carry with her after her father had shipped her off to boarding school, but she’d had to rely on memory for his voice. One of the conditions Dear Old Dad had outlined all those years ago was monitored phone calls. He’d wanted to cut every possible tie to Dash. No phone calls. No emails. No nothing.

And no word. No word for so long.

Serenity had promised herself in the early days, the first couple of years, that the second she graduated, she’d be back to stand up to her father, like all teenage girls with overly involved parents dreamed of doing. But real life had intervened, in the shape of new friends, evolving ambitions and college scholarships. The closer she’d gotten to being a liberated adult, the less she’d wanted to go home—distance from Orson Jones had proven very good for her.

Even still, she never forgot about Dash. She couldn’t. Once upon a time, he’d been her best friend. Her
only
friend. Hell, if he knew how much that time of her life had meant to her, she’d never hear the end of it.

Or she would, rather quickly, because Dash was no longer a teenager, nor was he her friend.

He was a dangerous man involved in a dangerous group. He was tangled with Gunner Pierce.

Shit.

Serenity swallowed hard, considering her options. His lack of a response burned the air between them. She could practically hear the wheels turning in his head, feel the hard waves of tension rolling off his body. He didn’t have his pick of options—he could either ignore or acknowledge himself…or kill her, as he’d likely been told to do.

That thought made her breath catch and suddenly, Serenity understood why she was alive. Why she’d woken up at all.

“You couldn’t do it, could you?”

Another shuffle of movement answered her. She pictured him, the adult Dash, crouched beside her, his head bowed, his gaze fixed on the floor. His breathing had changed, from calm and measured to harsh and ragged, though Dash wasn’t the sort to recognize such a shift in himself.

“Gunner asked you to kill me and you couldn’t.”

“Shut up.”

The words weren’t said so much as growled, bitten, the nerve she’d hit raw. Serenity’s heart skipped a beat and she almost had to smother a grin. That tone was familiar—he’d used it every time she’d insulted her math skills. Math had been his forte, where English and History had been hers. A trained chimp would have a better shot at acing a geometry quiz but Dash never had been able to stand hearing her put herself down.

But that Dash wasn’t the one in front of her. That Dash would never have aligned himself with the likes of Lucifer’s Legion. He certainly wouldn’t be party to whatever it was Gunner wanted him to do.

That Dash, the one in her memories, hadn’t yet experienced real loss. Serenity’s stomach dropped, her mind filling other blanks—the ones she’d almost let fade. And suddenly, a decade’s worth of declarations pressed against her lips. Condolences she’d never had the chance to give him, even after she’d begged Orson for the privilege of a phone call. Things she’d learned through the grapevine. Obituaries—one in particular—she’d found when searching for news of home.

“Oh, Dash,” she murmured. “This is about ten years too late, but I’m so sorry about Dalton.”

Everything around her went even stiller, frighteningly so. And the silence was too much to bear. She began babbling. “I tried, you know. To call. I even tried to get my brother to send you a note. Or something. But you know Orson. Nothing got to the family without going through him. Any time I mentioned you—”

“Stop it.”

The words weren’t barked this time. Rather, they were pained. Serenity bit the inside of her cheek to keep from reacting. Yet she couldn’t stop from talking. “I should have been here. I wanted to. I begged Orson to let me come to the funeral, at least. Or send flowers. Or—”

A harsh laugh cut through her confession, one that had her shivering. “You never could let something go, could you?”

The next thing she knew, the pressure at her eyes was gone. It took a few seconds for the sensation to register, for her to realize he’d removed the blindfold. Another moment lapsed as she blinked her shocked eyes, willing the shapeless colors around her to turn into something recognizable. Slowly, the scene around her began to harden.

Tools. Three or four motorcycles, and a lot of empty space. A banner with Lucifer’s Legion emblazoned in dripping red, undoubtedly in an effort to imitate blood. Their insignia—the demonic skull inside a pentagram—bookended the words. There was a door to her right, sandwiched between work-shelves…and there was Dash.

Serenity allowed herself a moment to drink him in, so much of him familiar to her, the rest foreign from age and distance. His face was the same, though the lines were firmer, his jaw covered with a smattering of whiskers. His nose looked a bit crooked too, possibly the result of a healed break. His hair was as dark as she remembered, and as unmanageable, by the looks of it. The rest of him was almost startling in how little she recognized—he’d never been scrawny, but she hadn’t been prepared for the tight, hard muscles that comprised his arms, or the ink that doctored his skin. The Dash she’d known had had a horrible fear of needles. Judging by the extensive artwork, he’d outgrown it.

The tattoos were breathtaking, mostly swirling lines and characters she couldn’t identify. There were a few she knew—the symbol for Lucifer’s Legion and the nods to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin most prominently. The cover of Dash’s all-time favorite album,
The Dark Side of the Moon,
had been given a place of honor.

Right over the tattoo of a headstone, one marked
D.F.D, 1986—2004.