Witness (6 page)

Whatever she wanted to say died the next second, butchered prematurely by the sharp ring of his cell. Dash sprung from her as though she’d electrocuted him, and from the wild, erratic look in her eyes, she was just as shaken.

Once the shock of the interruption waned, Dash pulled the phone from his pocket. He didn’t need to look at the screen to know who it was. More than enough time had passed.

It was with more poise than he felt that he brought the phone to his ear.

The realization should have hit him sooner. The second he’d seen her, perhaps. Or even the instant he’d been given her name. The instant Gunner had identified her as a problem to be dealt with. Sometime before now, definitely, Dash should have acknowledged that things were going to change. That everything in his life—this life, the one he’d built for himself, the one he owed to the man who had saved him—would become a casualty of something greater than he was.

Because it had never been a question for him. Could he kill Rennie Jones? No. Even if Rennie’s story wasn’t true. Even if it was. Nothing would change the fact that she was the only other person in this world he’d ever loved—really loved. Killing her wasn’t possible. Maybe that had been the test. Maybe he’d been wrong, and Gunner had known their connection all along.

Fuck.

If he couldn’t kill Rennie, that meant he didn’t put the club first. That meant his oath was shit.

Still, knowing this, he somehow managed to keep a level voice. Looking into the eyes of the woman who was supposed to be dead, and answering the man who had ordered it.

“Gunner.”

Chapter Four

The clubhouse. That was where he’d taken her. Until Dash had dragged her from the garage, she’d had the luxury of ignorance. She’d been able to pretend that she was somewhere else—anywhere else. Not at the scene of the crime.

After his phone call, Dash had effectively shut down. He’d grabbed her and steered her into the main part of the house, into the awful, familiar maze of halls that had chased her in her nightmares. A part of her had wondered, then, if anything after Tanner’s death had been real. Or if she’d actually died that night, and this was the purgatory to which she’d been sentenced. Perhaps there was a god after all, and this was her punishment for having abandoned the faith.

Yet Serenity had known on some level where she was. The bikes in the garage, the Lucifer’s Legion insignia—yes, it had been obvious. But fuck, she wished it wasn’t.

She wished so many things.

Dash had dragged her down a corridor she hadn’t explored and all but shoved her into a dark room. He’d slammed the door shut before she’d been able to protest—him on the other side, and the definitive click of a lock betrayed that escape wasn’t on the menu.

After fumbling for a light switch, Serenity had discovered she was in a bathroom. A cold, sterile bathroom with slate gray walls and little beyond the essentials. Why was a different matter, though she suspected it had something to do with the phone call.

She also suspected she didn’t really want to know.

At this point, she wasn’t even sure she was still conscious. Everything from the moment Dash had muttered her nickname and replaced her unknown horror with something infinitely more heartbreaking seemed muddled. As though torn from her brain, a concoction of forgotten nightmares pieced together in some mockery of a long coveted reunion. How often she’d dreamed of seeing him again—how much she’d feared it.

The reality of their situation was much crueler than anything her own imagination could conjure. The world she’d found was darker than the shadows in her mind. Orson had never told her the particulars of Dalton Denyar’s death, but he had alluded to Dash being responsible. Then, Serenity hadn’t been able to believe it. The Dash she’d known had seen what drugs—heroin in particular—did to a person. He’d witnessed his mother’s destruction. That he would have ever considered turning to any drug, let alone heroin, was something she doubted she would ever understand.

What had pushed him to that precarious edge? Did she even want to know?

Coward that she was, she feared the answer to that was no. Serenity would much rather preserve her teenage fantasy of Dash, the one she’d never really allowed herself to give up on. The reason she hadn’t gotten involved with many men in college, save one or two boyfriends who had done little more for her than warm her bed and teach her about the joys of sex. A part of her, a very real part, had always clung to the notion that she would find her way back to Dash. Even after the rest of her psyche had gone through the motions of moving on, he’d remained—a constant presence, even if she refused to acknowledge him.

How different things would have been had Orson not learned how deeply infatuated she was with Dash, had she held her tongue when her father had interrogated her. Had she found the strength to look him in the eye and lie. Compulsive truth-telling hadn’t been a problem since then, not where Orson was concerned. As far as he knew, his only daughter remained virginal if not virtuous. Devout, if not consistently pious. Her father saw what he wanted to see, because that was what made life easier.

She hadn’t learned the game soon enough. All Orson had seen when he’d looked at Dash all those years ago was trouble waiting to happen, and the possibility of his daughter getting pregnant. She’d refused to sever ties, so he’d been forced to sever them for her.

Then it hit her. She knew.

Dash hadn’t just been trouble, he’d been
troubled.
It was the reason they’d met, after all. The reason the school had paired them. He’d been danger tied to a time bomb, and she’d been the minister’s daughter. And yes, during those first meetings, he’d been withdrawn and antisocial, but slowly she’d coaxed him out. Gotten him to smile, to laugh then to talk.

Dash had transformed in front of her, and it had never occurred to her the change had been
because
of her.

Then she’d been sent away, and…

God, she didn’t want to think about it. Any of it. She didn’t want to think of Dash turning to drugs out of loneliness and depression, or the guilt he so clearly harbored for Dalton’s death. Or the twisted logic that had made him believe a man not beating him to a pulp was the same thing as saving his life.

She didn’t want to think about Tanner or Gunner Pierce, or the goddamned Lucifer’s Legion. The missing years between then and now, or how irrevocably fucked something that had once been so precious to her had turned out to be.

Serenity washed her hands, cleaned dried blood off her sore wrists, and splashed her face with water.

Dash had been told to kill her. He hadn’t. Were there others who hadn’t been so fortunate? Try as she might, she couldn’t picture her friend as a murderer. The leather-wearing, motorcycle-riding bad boy image fit him nicely, but nothing else that had to do with Gunner.

Serenity had pulled him from darkness once. Was it possible to do it again?

The girl in the mirror stared back with haunted eyes. She barely recognized herself, and maybe it was the exhaustion talking, but she wasn’t sure that was a bad thing.

Before Serenity could pick that thought apart, a crash pounded through the otherwise still air, wrangling a small cry from her lips as she jumped. She twisted awkwardly toward the door just as it smashed against the bathroom wall. Dash stood on the other side, his eyes dark, his posture rigid, his hands balled into tight fists.

“Dash?”

Then he was moving, hard, furious steps crushing the distance between them. He didn’t give her time to think—instead, he seized her by the shoulders and hauled her against him, his mouth crashing down on hers. And for a blessed second, time stood still.

But only a second.

Serenity wasn’t sure if she meant to shove him away or drag him closer, her jumbled mind a mess of warring sensation. Either way, Dash denied her the option. He worked his tongue past her lips, delving into her mouth as he pushed her back, back, back, until her spine connected with the bathroom wall. Warm, callused fingers danced up her throat, then her face was between his hands. His cock was hard at her belly, and he wasn’t shy. He let her feel him, rubbed himself against her, and rumbled small murmurs of encouragement into her mouth.

Then, finally, he tore away from her lips and nudged her brow with his.

“Rennie,” he whispered, and the sound was so sweet she nearly burst into tears.

A decision snapped in her brain, one she instantly identified as wrong and hasty, but couldn’t deny if she tried. Anger and confusion pulsed through her body in tandem with feelings much older and primal—feelings she’d first entertained as a sex-starved teenager and had clung to as she’d matured into a woman. This was the Dash she knew—the Dash she’d once loved. Pressed so close to her, and hard in all the right places. This was the Dash she’d wanted, and the one she’d never had a chance to touch.

This was the Dash that mattered.

And she wanted to tell him this—all of it—but he beat her to the punch.

“You have any idea,” he murmured, his whiskers tickling her skin as he whispered kisses down her throat, “how much I loved you?”

Something between elation and sorrow twisted in her chest. “No.”

“I did, Rennie. I was a fool for you. Fuck me, I still am.” He dipped his fingers to the hem of her skirt and began inching the fabric upward. “Just once—can we have it just once?”

An unwelcome wave of tears stung her eyes. Serenity nodded and wrapped her arms around his neck. If she’d had any fight left, the soft plea in his voice did her in. “Fuck me, Dash.”

It was crazy and stupid, but it was what she wanted, and she wouldn’t stop herself.

A growl rumbled through his throat, and he responded almost immediately. Without ceremony, Dash shoved the material of her skirt all the way up. He had it bunched around her hips in a flash, and held it there with his body as he maneuvered himself between her legs. His mouth, hot and hungry, returned to hers with a consuming desperation that shook her foundation. He’d held back before, she quickly realized—he wasn’t holding back now. He didn’t just demand, he took. His tongue stroked, delved, his teeth nipped and tugged. He slipped one hand between their bodies and cupped her through the thin, damp fabric that guarded her pussy. It wasn’t until he began working her clit that she realized how wet she was. Sparks from the pressure alone tore through her body, and she felt herself tremulously near climax just at the touch.

“Were you wet for me back then?” Dash demanded after their lips had broken apart. He slipped a finger under the elastic at her crotch and drew a line between her slick folds. “Goddamn, Rennie…”

Serenity swallowed hard. “Yes. I was.”

“You wanted me?”

She nodded and hiked her left leg around his waist, spreading herself open wider to encourage his exploration. The pad of his finger came perilously close to nudging her swollen clit, but not close enough. As though he knew how near climax she was already.

“Fuck,” Dash murmured. “Think of the fun we coulda had.”

“Dash—”

“I wanna eat you. Lick you until you can’t stand. I want your lips around my cock. Do you have any idea how often I’ve dreamt about this mouth?”

A sound that might have been a mewl in a former life scraped through her throat. She wanted that too. All of it. No matter how improbable. No matter that there was nowhere to go from where they were.

He knew that, of course, which was undoubtedly why he pulled away the next second and began fumbling with the belt to his jeans. The sound of his zipper lowering tore through the thick air with a hint of finality. There would be no going back from this—no matter what came afterward, and Serenity wasn’t dumb enough to think it meant anything other than a culmination of everything that they hadn’t had a chance to have together. The world existed outside the bathroom, and it was a scary one. But for now, they could be Dash and Rennie, those crazy kids from Joplin High who had once been inseparable until forces outside their control had shoved them apart.

The crinkling of a foil wrapper was next. He’d pulled the condom from his pocket, and Serenity allowed herself a moment of misplaced jealousy. Or was it wonder? He’d disappeared for a few minutes after shoving her into the bathroom. Had he known this was where they were headed, or was he always prepared to get laid?

She didn’t want to know. Then it didn’t matter, because he was between her legs, the blunt head of his cock nudging her slick entrance. Serenity threw her head against the wall, murmuring in the back of her throat when he encouraged her other knee to wrap around his waist. His hands at her hips, he held her in suspended animation for what felt like an eternity.

“Look at me, Rennie.”

She exhaled raggedly and obeyed.

The second their eyes connected, Dash slammed his cock home, and the world tipped off its axis. A cacophony of sensation exploded inside her, her nerve-endings tingling, her cunt tightening around him, pulling him deeper into her body. She crossed her ankles behind him, her fingers digging into his forearms for support. His invasion hurt in a sweet way, like she’d been split down the middle, but the pain was what made it worthwhile. And goddamn, he felt huge. She hadn’t had a chance to sneak a peek at his cock before he’d buried himself inside her, which might have been a good thing—if he looked anywhere near as large as he felt, she might have hesitated.

“Shit,” Dash breathed, his face dropping to her neck. He brushed a soft kiss, one that belied the force of his initial thrust, across her skin, sending a ripple of shivers in his wake. “You feel amazing.”

Then he was pulling away, the slick drag of his cock along her pussy walls coaxing a murmur of complaint from her lips before he plunged inside again. The force sent her back rocking against the wall, and would have hurt—maybe—if it had occurred to her to mind. All she cared about was that he was inside her again, and again, and again, pumping hot and hard into her pussy. The rhythm he established was fast and brutal, a culmination of so many things.