Witness (4 page)

Serenity blinked, horrified to find her eyes had watered. She stared at that sad patch of skin a moment longer then dared herself to meet his intense brown eyes.

The man looking back at her was not warm or friendly. He didn’t look moved, either. Hell, he didn’t even look annoyed. Just…blank and impassive. Like he didn’t recognize her.

“Dash…”

He blinked at her. “You’ve cut yourself,” he said, his eyes flickering to her wrists. “Rennie, this is important. I’m gonna uncuff you. And you’re not gonna do anything to make me regret it. Are you?”

She wet her lips and shook her head. Truthfully, her fear had almost abandoned her entirely. Her very logical brain kept trying to reassert its claim over her sensibilities, but seeing Dash again had a funny effect on her. She knew she couldn’t trust him—a long time had passed since they’d been friends—but trusting him had been instinct a lot longer than not. A part of her would always trust him, regardless of who he was now.

Seemingly satisfied with her compliance, Dash produced a small key and reached to uncuff her. It took a moment to convince her sore muscles to cooperate once she was free, and movement made her shoulder burn. Serenity did her best to cover it, but she had no hope of hiding her grimace.

“I’m sorry,” he said. The words were flat, but when she looked at him, something had changed in his eyes. “I think it’s dislocated.”

“Yeah. Some asshole decided to T-bone my car.”

Dash’s mouth twitched. “I can pop it back in. It’ll hurt like a bitch, but—”

“Do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“It’ll feel better after. I can do short-term pain for long-term gain.”

He didn’t look convinced but he also didn’t argue. Instead, he shifted to his knees and edged around her. Serenity would have sworn she felt her cells react to him, if she believed in such a thing. His body seemed to call to hers, warm and magnetic, familiar yet so not. And watching him move, even if it was on his knees, was enough to make her very aware of herself in ways she would never have anticipated when she’d awoken.

Dash was not a boy anymore. His jeans, which had absolutely seen better days, hugged his hips like a second skin. His arms were bare for her perusal thanks to the black wife-beater that seemed painted on his torso. He looked…

God, he looked good. She hated how good he looked.

She hated that she liked looking.

When he placed his hand on her shoulder, she inhaled and braced herself. Correcting dislocated shoulders was one of those things she’d seen characters in movies and television do, and it always looked painful. He whispered a warning to her, but he needn’t have bothered. She was ready.

And she did herself proud by not making a sound beyond a hard grunt. The blinding white rush of pain threatened to consume her, but settled almost as quickly, leaving her shoulder feeling sore but… Well, she could live with sore.

“Oh, thank you,” she murmured.

“Don’t mention it,” Dash replied. Then he was in front of her again, kneeling. “I knocked it out in the first place, remember?”

Serenity nodded, her chest falling. “He wants me dead.”

“Yeah.”

That was progress, at least. If they could talk about it, maybe they could resolve it.

Maybe she could find out what had happened to her best friend.

“He killed two people right in front of me,” she said, her voice low. “Was I supposed to pretend that didn’t happen?”

Dash looked away. “What if you were?”

“You know me. I couldn’t do that.”

“No. You never could. No matter what it cost you.”

A strained, unpleasant smile flirted with his otherwise sexy mouth. God, she so didn’t need to be thinking of Dash as sexy. The logical side of her brain declared war on the rest of it. After all, the man had injured her, kidnapped her, and before they were through, he might do worse. She couldn’t assume she knew him because she had once upon a time. Because they’d been…whatever they’d been.

“How did this happen?” Serenity whispered.

Dash cocked an eyebrow. “What?”

“You. You’re with Gunner. In Lucifer’s Legion.” She almost spat the words. Since that awful night, she’d grown to hate them. “You know what this is, don’t you? What they do?”

“Of course I do.” Dash glared at her. “Gunner’s my brother.”

That made no sense. “Your—”

“In all the ways that matter, Rennie. He’s my brother. He gave me this. A chance. Something to make of myself. To…” He broke off and shook his head, his nostrils flaring. “He gave me a reason.”

“To what?”

“To not follow Dalton. I owe him. Fuck.” Dash was on his feet the next minute, tearing up the floor in front of her in a fast pace. “I owe him.”

Serenity frowned. “What do you mean, ‘not follow Dalton’?”

He stopped and glared at her. “Just the way it sounds.”

“You wanted to kill yourself?”

“I didn’t want to, Rennie. I
did.
Tried, at least. Damn near succeeded.”

Everything inside her went cold, her fingers numb. “Dash, why would you ever—?”

A hard, callous laugh sliced through her words. “Don’t you know?”

There was only one answer she could conjure, only one that made sense. “Because your brother died?”

“No. Because I killed him.”

Chapter Three

There was some amount of perverse pleasure in watching the horror that flooded her face. As though her disgust were justification. Dash had wanted to shock her, scare her, make her realize what sort of shit she was in. Since she’d first whispered his name, he’d felt his grip on control sliding through his fingers. Away. Snagged by the blast from the past that was Rennie.

Her response to him had him unnerved, the way she looked at him with those big green eyes had his gut stirring in all kinds of ways it shouldn’t. Not to mention his cock, which needed no additional incentive where she was concerned. Never had.

But she was looking at him the way she used to—she was looking at him like he was someone else. Whoever she thought she saw didn’t exist anymore.

“What do you mean, you killed him?” she asked finally. “I heard it was heroin.”

Dash arched an eyebrow. “Where do you think he got it?”

“You don’t do drugs.”

The words were automatic, almost programmed. They made his gut hurt.

“No,” Dash replied. “I
didn’t
do drugs. Before. Things changed after you left.”

Because you left.

But he wouldn’t say that. She didn’t need it—with everything else, adding the weight of his brother’s overdose to her already burdened shoulders wouldn’t just be unnecessary, it’d be cruel. Dash had eventually reconciled that Rennie hadn’t had any control over the fact that her father was a controlling dickwad who’d decided to ship his daughter away rather than be a goddamned parent. Hell, a part of him—most of him—had known her disappearance from his life hadn’t been her fault, but it hadn’t hurt any less.

The ticking time bomb he’d been before he’d met Rennie had made his peers and teachers nervous, especially in a post-Columbine world. The counselor who had initially paired him with Rennie had thought she would be a good influence on him, because she was one of the only teenage girls in town who didn’t give a rat fuck about his reputation or how damn scary he looked. Granted,
scary
wasn’t something that took much to achieve in rural, alarmist Missouri. A guy with a healthy build who let his hair go unkempt and owned a wardrobe comprised mainly of black leather was enough to do the job.

But Rennie hadn’t been scared. She’d smiled at him, cracked jokes, made him laugh.

Made him hard.

Still doing that last thing.

Most of all, she’d been his friend in a very lonely world, and he’d been hopeless to do anything but love her stupid.

And for a while, he’d been able to pretend she loved him back. Hell, maybe even she had. He’d never know.

“You gave him the heroin?” Rennie asked, drawing him back to the present.

Dash shook his head, a familiar ball of self-loathing forming in his stomach. His gaze landed on his Victory Cruiser—his solace. His escape. Lucifer’s Legion had given him that. Gunner had given him that. A way to leave behind the mess that was his life and build something else out of it. It might not be pretty, but it was his, and until Gunner had asked him to take out the only good thing that had been in his life before, Dash would have sworn he was happy.

The road didn’t judge. Neither did Lucifer’s Legion. His history was fucking child’s play compared to the others.

“No,” he said at last. “It was in my room. He found it. He knew what it was, and he wanted to…I dunno. But it killed him.
I
killed him.”

The silence that spread between them would have suffocated a lesser man. In Dash’s world, though, he’d learned there were far worse things than silence. Things much harder to live with. Being so close to Rennie might confuse his thoughts, but he could never fool himself into the sort of thinking that convinced a man he could go back. Hell, were that even an option, he wasn’t sure he’d want to.

Life hadn’t necessarily been good, but it had been fun in many ways. Liberating. Even with all the shit Gunner pulled. Lucifer’s Legion had grown in size and influence in the years since Dash had been recruited, and while he didn’t necessarily agree with each step Gunner took, he’d definitely hold to his end that he owed the man more than he could say.

“How did Gunner save your life?” Rennie asked at last.

Dash swallowed. “I wanted to go the way Dalton did, but I was too chicken shit. Fuck, Rennie. I hadn’t even touched what was in my room, but after the funeral, I didn’t care. Gunner refused to sell me—”

“Gunner’s who sold you the heroin in the first place?”

He didn’t want to answer that. Gunner had his hand in a lot of things looked down on by the law—he was the son of the club founder, and had been born into this way of life. Paying off cops, making deals, sorting out exchanges—this was the way of the Pierce dynasty. So when Dash had been desperate for anything to ease the pain of Rennie’s sudden but inevitable disappearance from his life, he’d known where to look. Dash had been raised on the side of the tracks that took the law as guidelines more than restrictions, which was one of the endless reasons Orson had forbidden him from interacting with his virtuous daughter.

“Yeah,” Dash answered at last. “Gunner sold me the heroin.”

“What a fucking prince. And you blame yourself for Dalton’s death?” She snorted and rolled her eyes, dismissing him as only she could. It wasn’t surprising, but it was disappointing. A part of him had very much hoped she would understand. “So, what, he decided to not sell you more heroin after?”

“No. I went to him looking for a fight. I was stupid and pissed off and drunk off my useless ass. I knew if I threw a swing at him, he’d kill me.” Dash shrugged a shoulder. “I wanted him to.”

Rennie looked at him with her large green eyes, and apparently saw nothing. She blinked. “So…his way of saving your life was not killing you.”

“He knew what I was there for. He decided to—”

“Dash, that is the most fucked-up logic I’ve ever heard, and I was raised Church of Christ.”

A rush of anger shot down his spine. “What the hell would you know about it?”

“I know that not killing someone doesn’t mean you saved their life.”

He gestured. “The way I didn’t kill you, you mean?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Yes, exactly the way you didn’t kill me. What do you want, a thank you? You could have called me.”

He snorted. “Yeah. Tell me how that woulda gone, would you?”

She didn’t answer. “You could have just—”

“Could have what?” Dash snapped. “You were gonna testify and put a man on death row.”

“I was going to tell the truth. He murdered two people.”

“One was a crooked cop and the other was a cheating bitch!”

“And again, both shitty things, neither worthy of the death penalty.” Rennie glared at him for a long, cold moment before breaking away with a harsh laugh. “Dammit, Dash, I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t even want to go on that stupid date.”

He couldn’t help himself. Images of Tanner Wilcox pawing at Rennie had plagued his imagination in tandem with the dread of what he’d been asked to do to rid the prosecution team of its star witness. Dash had spoken with Tanner a handful of times, had occasionally been the one to make the cash drop offs that had bought the late deputy’s silence. The man had had asshole written all over him.

“Seems to me you ain’t a kid anymore,” he drawled. “You don’t gotta date who you don’t wanna date.”

“Orson had nothing to do with it.”

“Didn’t he?”

She ignored him and pressed on. “Tanner pulled me over for speeding. He hit on me. I was skeeved, but I didn’t exactly want my return to town heralded with gossip about run-ins with the law.” Rennie wrinkled her nose and looked away, flushed. “He hinted strongly that if I went out with him, he’d forget about writing my ticket. It seemed harmless.”

Dash felt the rein he had on his control slip a notch. “Well, ain’t he a fucking prince?”

“No,” Rennie shot back. “He was a tool. I didn’t want to be alone with him, but I played nice. And…like I said, once I told him I don’t believe in God, he seemed to think it was okay to tell me all this illegal shit he was involved with. Like my moral compass was switched off and I’d get it. All I can tell you is he loved being on Lucifer’s Legion’s payroll. Thought that made him a bad-ass or something.”

“I still can’t believe Orson Jones’ daughter doesn’t believe in God.”

“Get over it.”

Dash shook his head. When it came to Rennie, there wasn’t much in the way of getting over anything. Still, he found himself wanting to hear more—despite his need, urgent and very real, to kill a dead man. Tanner was the sort of piece of shit who would manipulate a girl like Rennie. Motherfucker thought he’d been untouchable because of the badge and the cut of whatever Gunner was dealing at the moment.

“So he took you to the clubhouse,” Dash pressed. “After your romantic dinner was over. What, to show you around?”