20. Jackal
TWENTY
JACKAL
“Are you fucking kidding me, man?” I shoved Coyote against the wall, his shoulders taking most of the impact as he snarled in my face, and I bared my teeth in response. “What the fuck possessed you to make a deal with a demon like that?”
His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing, all his words from earlier suddenly missing in action. The fucker had the audacity to vow our lives in service to that bitch, the same bitch who’d drugged us, gassed us, tortured us, and then threatened to take our lives.
Oh, no, sorry, promised. This was just an extension on our lives until we outlived our usefulness. Nothing more. Or until one of us found a way to kill her. Not that it’d take much.
But that would mean going against our word, and as much as I wanted to eliminate this thorn in our sides, I was curious why our usually quiet back man suddenly decided to be a free-thinker and make decisions for his packmates.
“The fuck was going through your mind when you decided to speak for all three of us, hmm?”
Dingo leaned against the nearby wall, picking his fingernails with disinterest. “Probably thinking with his dick, honestly, mate. Poor sap’s likely not got his noodle wet in at least a year. Cut him some slack.” He lifted his gaze to the ceiling and whistled low. “She is a hell of a looker, though. Won’t be too hard to see her strutting around our apartments every day.”
“She is not moving in with us,” I snarled, shoving my fist into the wall beside Coyote’s head. “I draw the line there. Let St. Clair find her a spare room to shack up in. I will not have that feral bitch living in arm’s reach of the rest of us.”
“Wow, Jackal, tell me how you really feel.”
Her voice drifted over my shoulder from the other side of the narrow storage closet she’d stuffed us in to have a chat about our decision. She’d been kind enough to unchain me and release the rest of the guys from their various torture positions, but had locked us in a room while she gathered all the stabby things in the room and hid them from us, most likely. Which gave us time to discuss this very out-of-character predicament Coyote threw us into headfirst.
Now, we had an audience, and I didn’t want to let her see me crack under pressure.
“I said what I said, bitch,” I opted for instead, hoping she wouldn’t see straight through my mocking tone to the excitement that raced through my veins at the possibility of her coming back for seconds of this great dick. “You get bored of waiting and decide to intrude? Thought you were giving us a minute alone.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, boys,” she mocked, her smile too wide to be serious, like the fucking Cheshire cat or something. “Please, if you want to suck each other’s dicks, don’t let me stop you. I like a good show.”
As if to drive her point home, she crossed her arms and propped herself against the wall, waiting for us to continue. And there was no way in hell I was about to let her see me ream out Coyote. That was our business, not hers.
New member or fucking not.
“We were just finishing up, actually,” Dingo offered slowly, apparently hoping to defuse the situation. “I think we got off on the wrong foot, sweetheart?—”
“You don’t get to call me pet names. To you, I’m either master or ma’am.”
This was beginning to sound like some straight-up dominatrix shit. And as much as I wanted another go at that rocking ass body, just to show her how hot she really was for her father’s murderers, I wasn’t about to roll over and show her my belly. That was a bitch move, and I was no bitch.
“I have no master. Certainly not you. ”
“You’ll come around soon enough, I think,” she chuckled, grinning like the cat that ate the canary.
Coyote looked like someone had just given him a year’s supply of the world’s best booze or some shit. Motherfucker looked eager to do what she wanted.
Something about that really didn’t sit well with me.
I didn’t want to analyze that strange possessiveness running through my veins.
“So, what are the details of this deal?” I said plainly, mimicking her stance in a power-play move. “What exactly do we have to do for you?”
“Everything and anything I want,” she supplied unhelpfully, as if that clarified the whole matter. “And in return, you can keep your lives for now.”
“That means you still plan to kill us eventually,” Dingo pointed out, his dry tone almost funny in its seriousness. “So, where’s the side of the deal that benefits us?”
“You would have died eventually, even without my intervention. And if you don’t take my deal—” She sighed, pulling a pistol from the back of her skirt, which had me wondering how long that fucking thing had been there. “Well, I’ll just put you down now, and we’ll all go our separate ways. Me, to my life as the killer of the Dogs, and you, to hell, where you belong.”
“Your daddy would be so proud,” I mocked, lips curled back in a sneer. “His daughter, following in his footsteps of debauchery and death.”
The rage that morphed her features nearly made me piss myself. Me, a grown-ass man who’d killed whole-ass men for a living for years now. It felt like watching a demon evolve before my eyes, like watching a human reveal its truth as Satan incarnate. The pistol came down on my temple faster than I could react, and I dropped to my knees, swearing like a sailor as my hand moved to cover the open gash she’d gifted me .
There was blood. Bitch broke the skin.
Of my face.
My fucking face.
“I warned you already not to talk about him like that. Or any way, for that matter. He was a good man, unlike you dogs.”
I would have moved to retaliate if not for the look Coyote turned on me. Something there made me pause because he clearly had ulterior motives. I just couldn’t figure out what they were, and he wasn’t talking with her in the room.
“I’ll need accommodations inside the Guild, of course, as an honorary new member of the Neon Dogs. And I assume I’ll need a name, because it’ll be suspicious if the daughter of a former contract hit shows up in the Guild with the men who killed her father, don’t you think?”
“Ought to just call you psycho. It fits.”
She tossed her head back and howled with laughter, the broken sound grating on the edges of my sanity. It didn’t sound human. It almost sounded animalistic, like something very clearly not-human pretending to be one of us.
“We’ll figure out your name later, kitten,” I drawled, eyeing her up. “You’ll need a mask, bike, and believable weaponry. We don’t use guns.”
“I think you’ll find I have everything but the bike ready to go.” Her eyes narrowed, and I held my breath as I waited to see what else she had planned. “As for a bike, well, I could just use yours. You can ride bitch with Dingo.”
Oh, hell no. Nobody touched my bike. Nobody. “You’re not taking my bike. I draw the line there.”
“Interesting place to draw it, but okay,” she conceded, shrugging with a disinterested huff. “I’ll ride behind you for now. You can buy me a bike later.”
“I ain’t buying you shit.” My teeth ground against each other as she tried to walk all over us. All because she held a fucking gun in her palm. First chance I got, I’d take the damn thing out of her grip and turn it on her. Boom. Problem solved.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride . . .
“Debatable. But another time.” She stared at her fingers, pretending I was of no more consequence than a fly on the wall. “As for the mask and the weapon, I’m already prepared.”
A pink mockery of our own masks flashed through my brain, a fleeting image I’d seen before I gave in to the gas she’d thrown in the storage unit with us. Sure enough, she wasn’t kidding. She already had a mask ready to go.
As for the bat?—
I’d seen the beaten-in faces of the targets she took out before we could reach them. She had a bat, or I’d eat my shorts.
“You planned for this, didn’t you?”
Her look of indignation spoke volumes. But why go through all the trouble if she didn’t plan to take over us?
“My plan was never to join you. It was to eradicate you.”
I chuckled as she shifted beneath my intense gaze. “Plans change, kitten.” I glanced back at Coyote, growling in the back of my throat as a warning. “You’d better know what you’re doing.”
Trust me, his eyes seemed to say, pleading for the trust he’d always so blindly given me.
I had no reason not to. He’d never once betrayed us or done anything to endanger us. I doubted he’d start now. I just had to figure out what his reasons were, and I couldn’t do that right now.
So, I made the decision to ride it out and see where this led. And when I had him alone again, I’d wring the answers out of him if it killed me.
Because being this woman’s bitch boy just might do it for me if I wasn’t quick to turn the tables.
“Okay, say we go along with this?—”
“Do or don’t. There’s no time now for hypotheticals. I’m not too keen on letting you live, so if you like your heart beating and your blood pumping, I’d take the deal while it’s still on the table.”
She held out her hand like some sort of businesswoman making a run-of-the-mill deal at lunch with a client. Warily, I offered her mine in return, gripping her dainty fingers hard enough to cause her pain.
I had to give her credit; she didn’t flinch at all when I finally released her. Instead, she turned to Dingo, doing the same with him. He was less wary and more curious than anything as he shook on the deal that could make or break us in the long term.
And then came Coyote.
The fucker didn’t just shake her hand. He took hers in his, went through the same motions as the rest of us, and then, after she’d pulled away, he fucking smiled at her again.
Like a loon.
Boy was certifiable. She was the enemy.
Never smiled at us that fucking often.
I had known Coyote for years. Fucking years. And in all that time, he hadn’t spoken as much or smiled as much in one sitting as he’d done today while our lives were on the line. Maybe when we got ourselves out of this, I’d drag his ass to a strip club, show him some hot tail, remind him there was more than one woman on this planet who looked good out of her clothes.
Hell, he hadn’t even fucked her. If anyone should be pussy whipped for the girl, it should be me, or, to a lesser extent, Dingo.
Man didn’t even have experience with women. For him to decide out of the blue that this was the one he wanted to break himself in with?—
There were way better options.
An hour and a half later, we were sitting in the head office with our boss, Lilly St. Clair, and our newest ‘member,’ Ivy.
St. Clair eyed us across the table when we brought her in, like we’d lost our collective minds. And she wouldn’t have been wrong, but keeping our lives hinged on making her believe we weren’t doing this against our will.
Well, scratch that. One of us was definitely not being coerced into this arrangement. He and I would have words later.
Lilly shoved her reading glasses up the bridge of her nose with that long middle finger I’d seen her use to poke a man’s eyeball out before. The woman was equally deadly and professional, organized insanity, as it were. Some days, I wondered what made her give up the actual killing to run this place filled with psychos.
“So you’re telling me you’re adding a new member to your ranks. A miss . . . I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Ivy,” our tormentor answered simply, leaning back in her chair like she was on top of the world. “My last name isn’t that important.”
“Unfortunately, it is for me. In case of emergencies, I need to know who to contact?—”
“I’m on my own.” Her eyes narrowed, and I saw a flash of anger rise from their swirling blue depths. “No significant others, no kids, no strings.”
“I have to list someone,” Lilly tried again, shoving the paperwork toward her again. “So pick someone. And I still need that last name.”
“Last name Go Fuck Yourself, first name Respectfully.” She shoved the papers back, scrunching her nose like a little bunny. “Put whatever you’d like on that line, ma’am. I ain’t giving you mine.”
Lilly sighed and turned to me, rolling her eyes as she regarded the dead look in mine. “You idiots are perfect for each other. Three unruly dogs who know no master, and one very headstrong bitch with trust issues who bucks authority as a rule.”
My jaw fell open, words refusing to form as I made a lovely new fly trap for St. Clair’s office. Her assessment of us, of her, spoke volumes. She knew more than she was letting on about, but for some reason, she refused to say anything more. I cringed inwardly, hating that we were so easily pegged by our boss.
She didn’t see enough of us to know us so well.
“Are you watching us on your cameras here? Got one hidden in our rooms?” I quirked a brow and leaned back, smiling as our new cohort’s body went rigid next to me.
She was as worried as I was.
Lilly smiled, her perfect white teeth lined up in a neat row, so unassuming, unless you knew what she’d done with those chompers before. “Not in your bedrooms or bathrooms, obviously. But I do have cameras hidden in every hallway, and there may or may not be more you don’t know about.” Her eyes cut to Ivy, narrowing slightly. “How did you learn about the Guild? And good lord, how the hell did you get mixed up with these men?”
She shrugged, trying for a nonchalant air. “Let’s just say we have similar interests, and fate brought us together to create the perfect partnership.”
“Okay, miss no last name?—”
“Just Ivy is fine,” she retorted, crossing her arms. “Is there anything else? Maybe my Guild pin? Or a key card for the garage?”
She’d crossed a line, and she knew it. The second the words were out of her mouth, I watched the cocksure amusement leech from her expression and move right over the table to find a new home on St. Clair’s lips in the form of a shit-eating grin.
“How would you know we need a key card for our parking garage? Or about the pin and its significance?”
Game, set, match. This bitch was done for before she even got in the ranks .
I should have known she would be a step ahead. “I mean, we discussed a lot before I accepted their invitation to join them. Obviously, their daily life and such would come into play. And maybe the public knows a little more about the Guild than you think.” She fingered the pin on the edge of my jacket pocket, smiling softly. “You could say I have an eye for shiny things.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat from having her hands so close to me, yet still so far away. “We’re not all that bad, St. Clair. And you have to admit, chicks love bikes. Just look at the Bone Boys and their girl?—”
“Skeleton Crew, Jackal?—”
“Semantics, Lilly. Who cares what I call them? Point still stands.”
She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “There’s a huge difference between Angel Blackwood’s fancy street bike and your muddy, bloody dirtbikes.”
“I’m not exactly a squeaky clean kind of girl,” Ivy mumbled, making my cock twitch in my pants. Down boy.
I could attest to that statement with my whole being.
I winced as my shirt rubbed against the still-sore burns from the lit end of her cigarette. Fucking ouch.
If I didn’t get those cleaned soon, they’d get infected. And I didn’t have time for that. “Just put me down as her emergency contact, and let’s sign the contract, yeah?” I stared pointedly at the clock on the wall, a relic of a bygone era when time meant something to me. “I have shit to do.”
St. Clair sighed but tugged the paperwork back to her side of the table and jotted down a few things. “Okay, well, I’m not happy with the lack of information, but since you three are responsible for your members, it’s on your asses if she’s not trustworthy or steps out of line.” Her gaze pinned Ivy to her chair, filled with promise and a little threat. “And I will be watching. So don’t screw up or step out of line.”
I processed the words she’d said as Ivy reached for the pen and signed the contract with the Guild. Then processed them again, and froze, the full implication of her words hitting me in the face. “Wait a second. So if she screws up, it’s on us?”
Lilly smiled. “Yes.”
“What about?—”
“If Ivy Go Fuck Yourself screws up a contract, steps out of line, or breaks a Guild rule, then you’re all out.”
I didn’t miss the cracking of a smile on the edge of Ivy’s lips. “How is that fair?”
“Surely, if you trust her enough to join your crew, you trust her not to mess up too badly, right?”
St. Clair had me there. Either I admitted we were all playing an elaborate ruse to save our lives and revealed how we’d managed to be bested by a civvie, or I played the game and took the very real risk of losing everything we’d worked so hard to build.
Coyote leaned forward and signed his name next to hers as a witness and a sponsor. “We do.”
Lilly smiled. “Good. It’s settled, then. Oh, and the usual contractors are running a deal right now, if you’d like to have your dorms restructured to accommodate your new member. Provided she needs her own room, that is.”
Another jab that hinted she knew more than she let on. This one was one I wouldn’t take sitting down, though. “She’ll need other accommodations outside of our unit.”
“Request denied.”
Dingo smirked from his seat to my left as I slammed my hand down on the table and growled in indignation. “What the fuck do you mean, denied?”
“I said what I said. The last three wings still need a hazmat team to come in and remove the asbestos and lead paint. They’re still walled off for that very reason. And all my other rooms are filled up. Which means you’re stuck with her in your house. As it should be, considering you’re a crew. None of my other teams have asked to be split up.”
Dingo chuckled under his breath. “None of your other crews are us.”
“You’re a team. Act like one.” She pulled a folder from her pile of files as an afterthought, offering it to Ivy. “Here’s the next contract for the Neon Dogs. I hope to see good results from all of you.” She handed Ivy a pin, bright and shiny and new, just like ours had all been once upon a time. “Welcome to the Guild.”