Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3) (2 page)

I failed and now I was never going to feel like I could breathe free.

My hands moved up to cover my face, trying like hell to fight back the tears. I didn't cry. I couldn't. I wouldn't let myself. If I started, I knew I was never going to stop. So for eight years, I choked them back.

And that was exactly what I was trying to do when I heard the rumble of a truck move past me then idle a few yards ahead of where I was still knees down in the dirt.

"Just keep going. Just keep going," I mumbled to myself, hoping they decided they weren't
that
good of people and went about their business.

I heard the door slam and the footsteps as they approached.

Damn it.

I gulped in a breath that burned like acid fog in my lungs, trying to pull it together and face whoever the hell it was who decided to stop and help the random chick on the side of the road.

"Woman," a deep, rough voice called, making my head snap up.

Oh for Christ's sake.

And there he was... all five-million feet of him. Not really, but the guy was tall, six-six if he was an inch. He also had the width to go along with the height- solid shoulders, broad chest, strong down the center, legs like freaking tree trunks. He had on black jeans that were neither tight nor loose and fit like jeans were supposed to fit which was refreshing amongst the sea of hipsters and wannabe gangsters. His black tee was slim cut and did nothing to hide the brute strength underneath the material. His leather cut was worn and soft-looking, having gotten that way from the daily wear of it since the day he turned eighteen. I didn't have to see the back to know what emblem I would find there.

The Henchmen MC.

I also didn't have to ask to know that he wasn't just any member; he was the road captain. He was the third in command behind Reign, the leader, and Cash, Reign's brother.

I knew all of this because about a year before, Hailstorm had worked a job with the three of them (plus some young kid named Repo who wasn't patched-in yet). Reign got himself wrapped up with a woman who belonged to V, the area's biggest skin trader. And when V came and took the girl, Summer, back, Reign came to Hailstorm asking for help. Lo, the hopeless romantic she is, had agreed and we had gone in all guns ablazing, action movie style.

As such, I found an unlikely accomplice to this night's activities.

Summer had followed my instructions to a T.

The mammoth in front of me was coming back from her house where I had asked her to have him, Cash, Lo, and Summer's father, Richard Lyon, to a dinner party.

In about two minutes, the giant would be getting a phone call telling him that his compound was bombed as well. I knew this because I bombed that too.

It's a long story.

"Leave me alone, Wolf," I demanded, keeping my eyes off his face. I didn't have to look to know that his freaky honey-colored eyes were fixed on me, that beneath his dark beard, his mouth was in a firm line. He was actually a really good-looking guy if you were into the mountain-man biker sort. Luckily for me, I wasn't into anyone of any sort. But that didn't mean I could meet his gaze. There was something about it that made me feel exposed, vulnerable... like he
knew.
Though he couldn't know, not really. No one did except Lo. And even Lo didn't know the whole story.

"No," he said after a long minute, making my head shoot up and, just as I had expected, I felt naked underneath his gaze.

"Oh, don't be trying to pull that macho bullshit with me, Wolf. I said leave me alone."

"I said no."

Christ. He was a stubborn fuck too. Wonderful. That was just what I needed.

"I don't need your..."

"I'll call Lo."

I shot to my feet on a hysterical, "No!" that made his brows draw together.

"No Lo," he said in a way that was half a declaration and half a question.

"No Lo," I confirmed, trying to slow my frantic heartbeat. If there was one person I couldn't face right then... or ever again, it was Lo.

I was so caught up in my own worries about Lo that I didn't see his eyes move from my face and settle on my arm until I felt his vice-like grip close around my wrist and pull it upward. My eyes moved up to his face, looking for some kind of reaction, but he gave me nothing.

If there was one thing that Wolf was, aside from wholly incapable of stringing together a complete sentence, it was unflappable. He was calm, steady, stalwart. He never gave anything away.

His eyes slowly moved to my face and he let out a heavy breath, his head shaking slightly and I knew he knew. He knew I set the bombs.

"Fuck, woman..."

Yeah... that about covered it.

TWO

Wolf

Dinner party was weird as shit.

Wouldn't have gone at all if, when I tried to refuse Summer, her eyes didn't fill up.

Couldn't fucking make her cry over something as stupid as my presence at a dinner party.

So I went.

I ate.

I got the fuck out of there.

Why she wanted to have us all over at once: gun runners, drug dealers, and the leader of a lawless army was beyond me.

Women...

The bombs started when I was halfway home, making the ground shake, forcing me to pull over and see what the fuck was going on. Down the hill, Lex Keith's McMansion was ablaze. I'm not gonna lie- seeing that almost gave me a Cheshire cat grin. I stood there for a long minute, hands tucked in my pockets, watching the evil bastard's little minions run around like idiots without their ever-present leadership to tell them what to do.

Fucking hilarious.

If anyone deserved to have their place blown off the surface of the Earth, it was Lex Keith. I said a silent prayer that he was suffering somewhere inside that place, skin blistering and peeling off. I might have been a lot of things, but I ain't never been merciful. Besides, that mother fucker didn't deserve anyone's mercy after the shit he had done to people, most especially women. He was an evil, sadistic rapist who deserved the most painful death imaginable.

Good riddance to bad rubbish and all that.

I was another ten minutes down the street when I caught sight of something on the side of the road. Scratch that. Some
one
on the side of the road, down on their knees in the dirt. At first I thought it might be one of Lex's minions, but my lights caught the long dark hair and the small, almost childlike body, and I knew it wasn't one of his men. It was a woman. It could very likely be one of the women Lex kept around his estate. Prostitutes or sex slaves. Who the fuck knew.

On a sigh, I pulled the truck off to the side of the road and got out.

Then fuck if the slip of a woman was none other than Lo's little hellion protege, Janie. I met Janie helping Reign save Summer from a skin trader about a year before. She had been a distant, calculating, hot-headed piece of work who had the respect from all the other men and women over at Hailstorm. And, given the sheer amount of criminal and ex-military talent that place sported, it went without saying that she must have been something special. I'd seen the way she'd wielded a gun, sure of herself. Maybe not the best shot I'd ever seen, but a cold, calculated killer when she needed to be.

She was young. I'd put her at twenty-four or five though she looked younger being short and so skinny that she barely had any curve to her at all. Even in her usual tight black tank tops, her breasts were barely more than a suggestion and her hips non-existant. That wasn't to say she wasn't hot. She was just her own kind of pretty with her long dark hair, big blue eyes, and colorful tattoos. Janie's biggest appeal was the confidence she wore, like she didn't give a fuck whether you thought she was hot or not. Which, well, made her all the hotter.

She didn't look so hot knees down in the dirt, her face twisted in a way that suggested she was fighting a losing battle with tears. But she came up spitting when she realized it was me. That was until I mentioned Lo's name and she jerked back like I'd struck her. She didn't want Lo. And that was some weird shit because from what I understood, those two were practically attached at the hip.

Then my eyes did a quick scan, taking in the tear in the knee of her right pant leg, the dark spot around the thigh of her left leg which I couldn't know for sure, but would bet good money on it being blood. Then, finally, the pale skin of her right arm that was usually just a nice piece of brightly colored artwork, but instead was violently red and peeling viciously. My hand curled around her wrist, pulling it up slightly.

It didn't take a genius to figure out how she got it. She was on a road that led away from Lex's estate. She set the bombs there. Why... I had no idea. And obviously it wasn't with Hailstorm and Lo's blessing that she did it, otherwise she would have been calling Lo herself instead of insisting I didn't. So I didn't know what was going on. What I did know, though, was that she needed to get the fuck off the road, not kneeling down beside it. She needed to get out of sight before the cops, crooked and inept as they might have been, started sniffing around. And she sure as fuck needed to get her arm taken care of.

After all of that, then I would get some answers.

"Fuck woman..." I said, releasing her wrist. It fell to her side without her so much as flinching. She should have been in massive amounts of pain. I'd been burned a fair amount of times in my life and the pain was a fierce and unyielding thing until you got the right creams on it. Maybe she was in shock. That would explain her unusual tight-lipped mood. "Come on," I said, waving a hand out to my truck.

"I'm not going anywhere with you, Wolf," she said, her chin jerking up defiantly. On a good day, everything about Janie screamed:
I don't need help from you or anybody else for that matter.
This was not a good day and the usual fierceness seemed dimmed under something else I couldn't explain: regret or fear or grief. I couldn't place it. But it was something strong that made her lip tremble slightly and her shoulders slump forward. It was a startling change that I didn't like. Women like her, strong women, don't take no shit from no one women, should never look so lost and unsure of themselves.

"Woman..."

"No," she said again, brows raising like she couldn't believe I wasn't taking no for an answer. "I'm fine. I'm great. I don't need your help."

"Cops are coming," I tried, jerking my head down the hill where the sounds of sirens were both stationary and moving... our way.

Janie looked over her shoulder for a long minute, her breath hissing out. "A ride," she said, turning back to me. "That's it. No questions. No explanations. Just a ride. Got it?"

I felt my lips twitch at her tone but nodded my head. She brushed past me, throwing her small frame into the passenger side of my truck and slamming the door.

I would give her the silence she wanted.

I would give her a ride too.

I just didn't tell her that where she was getting a ride to wasn't wherever she wanted me to take her. No, she was getting a ride to my place.

Like it or not.

THREE

Janie

"I said pull the fucking truck over right now, Wolf," I shouted, the sound reverberating back at me in the enclosed cab of his truck.

"No."

We'd been having the same conversation for five minutes, me yelling, screaming, cursing, slamming my hand on the dash. Him giving me the same one syllable answer, calm as a cucumber which was only making me all the more angry. He'd child-locked the friggen door so I couldn't open it. Then he just... kept on driving.

Only a handful of people knew where Wolf lived. He was private to the point of reclusive. The only reason I had any idea of his cabin in the woods (horror movie worthy, truly secluded) was because when I couldn't sleep, I screwed around online, digging stuff up about the people of Navesink Bank. I never slept. So I had come across the information about Wolf's land a good ten months before. So knowing this, I knew that was the exact direction Wolf was driving us in.

It was also in the exact
opposite
direction to where I asked him to take me, to where I had a car parked, full of everything I had taken from Hailstorm and all the supplies I'd packed for my new life.

"Are you seriously fucking kidnapping me right now?" I asked, eyes lowered as I sat in my seat, half facing him, arms crossed over my chest.

"Yep."

This couldn't be my life.

First, I royally fucked up my plan. I had no idea if Lex Keith was dead or alive. Second, I didn't get the hell out of dodge. Third, I was being
kidnapped
by someone I once fought alongside.

"I swear to Christ, I am going to kill you when you stop this car," I said, mostly meaning it. I wasn't stupid enough to risk my own life by beating the hell out of him while he was behind the wheel. But all bets were off when I wasn't risking violent, metal-pierced vehicular death. To this threat, I got no reply. Likely because he thought it was bluster. I imagined being a living, breathing hot-guy equivalent to the giant at the top of Jack's beanstalk made the threat of bloody death from a girl who could barely tip the scale into the triple digits on a good day dismissible if not outright laughable.