Dove (Soldiers of Bedlam #2)

Prologue

Sean

The Altered Compass

“Today you take the first step to becoming a man, Sean.” My father grips the back of my neck, giving me a pat with his bloody hand, his chest heaving.

I look at the man on the floor and swallow down my own rage, because that man tried to steal from us and he hurt my mother.

She’s being taken away now by my aunt Theresa, a bloodstained rag to her face.

Switch and Ray, my dad’s VP and president, stand behind us.

I shouldn’t be in here, I’m only fifteen years old, but I needed to make sure my mom was okay when I heard her crying out for my dad.

“I won’t be here forever. One day you’ll inherit this family, and you will need to protect yourself and your mother. So, it’s time, son.” I look up at him, unsure and afraid, but I can never admit that to him.

“For what?” My voice cracks and I swallow down my fear. There’s no sense in being afraid, it doesn’t change the outcome.

“It’s time to alter your compass.” He pats me on the chest and walks me closer to the body on the floor with his arm around my shoulders. The man lying in front of me is barely breathing.

“See, son, morality only exists in a man’s mind.”

“W-what do you mean?” I ask as my heart thuds in my ears.

“I mean that only you can decide what is truly moral and what isn’t.

If you decide the world is a better place without your enemy, then I believe you were put in his path for a reason.

It’s up to you to decide, no one else. In this case”—he nods to the man on the floor—“I would say it’s up to you to finish him off.

For your mother, for the club. But the choice is yours. ”

A rush of fear and excitement that I can’t explain vibrates through me with his words.

I know my father—when he tells me to do something there is no arguing, so I don’t try to think of a way to get out of this.

Instead, I sharpen my focus, trying to evaluate the most effective way to complete my task.

I can’t use the floor to crack this fucker’s skull, and I can’t break his neck.

My father won’t respect that. He has to die by my fists. It will show my strength.

“You use your fists,” he orders, like he’s reading my mind.

I take a breath and focus on the man’s face, remembering the way my uncles have taught me to fight.

Pressure points, where to hit him, what will kill him the fastest. I swallow my fate and drop to my knees, pushing down every ounce of fear I feel, and I go to my thinking place.

The part of my brain that solves my problems. The part that makes sense to me when I have to analyze something.

I quickly calculate my body weight and the force needed for a punch directly to his temple. In his deteriorated state, I should be able to do the job in five punches or less. If I hit him with everything I’ve got.

“Go ahead, Sean,” my father encourages from behind me.

I roll my sleeves up to my elbows, twice evenly on each side, and take a deep breath.

I picture my mother after he bounced her face off the concrete wall.

I can’t let my father down. I close my eyes, still mentally calculating, and I swing.

I think I cry out but I still keep swinging.

Again, and again. I swing through nine punches, until my knuckles are busted up and bloody.

Then rage mixed with a need I can’t push down suddenly bubbles up and I keep striking him. I don’t know for how long, but I know I don’t stop until my father pulls me off him. I fight back against my father’s hold, thrashing. I need to make sure I’ve done my job and my task is completed.

“He’s dead, son,” my dad says, pulling me from my haze. I relax and blink back tears so he doesn’t see me cry as he lets me go. What kind of a pussy cries? I’m fifteen, for fuck’s sake.

When I look down at my bloody hands then back to the man’s face, I know my dad is right. I check the imaginary box in my head and breathe a little deeper when he says, “Atta boy,” and wraps his strong arm around me. “Your moral compass will be different now. It’s still intact, but altered.”

“How?” I sniff, resisting the urge to look back at the man I just killed.

“Well, it’ll still help you navigate, but it’ll never point true north again.

From now on your path will be different from that of a man who hasn’t handed out death.

This will be your truth, and that’s okay as long as you know why you took his life.

As long as you know it was justified, and it was. ”

I nod, feeling proud of myself, stronger. Feeling like him. My father squeezes my shoulder and kisses me on the top of my head.

“You did good. The kill doesn’t have to be perfect your first time, son. There’s room to improve … Now, let’s get you cleaned up …”

The altered compass is a piece of my father I’ve remembered every single day, in the desert and in the streets.

The things I’ve seen and done would horrify most men, but there isn’t a single thing I regret.

I don’t think about my choices after I’ve made them, or look back, because time can’t be changed, and it never stops.

At the end of my time on this earth, the only man who has to live my truth is me.

A truth that runs through my head repeatedly because I never, ever stop thinking.

I was dubbed a prodigy, a genius, at a young age.

I suppose I could have been an epidemiologist, or I could have gone to MIT and become an astrophysicist, developing technology NASA hasn’t even dreamed up yet.

But that was never my future for two reasons: One, I don’t follow the rules of any other man well.

And two, by my twenty-fifth birthday I’d killed so many men that I knew I would never fit inside the box that is the norm of society.

And I carry on my back the memory of every single man I’ve killed.

I remember the way each man’s pupils grew as they filled with fear while the last glimmer of life drained from them.

Those memories and a compiled stack of double standards are one part of my truth, because when in combat, death is justified by fighting for my country. For those deaths, society tells me I should be proud and they call me a hero. They give me medals for those deaths, for Chrissake.

But the lives I take on the streets, in a different kind of war—those earn me a different title.

Outlaw. Criminal. Monster.

The double standard is that death is only allowed when you’re granted permission from a rich man behind a desk who can’t wait to measure his dick against those of his enemies.

Death because some scumbag thought he could hurt the woman who would surely be my wife? Illegal. Unfortunately for the scumbag, death for my country and death in the streets is all the same to me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that.

Killing this man will just be adding another body to the pile and another clip to the never-ending reel in my head. One I won’t lose a minute of sleep over.

As I ride as fast as possible through the streets between my clubhouse and her home, I imagine all the ways I’ll torture him to make him pay for thinking he could go anywhere near her.

I think of the way her voice sounded when I answered the call …

muffled, distant and afraid. I didn’t know what was going on until I heard a man’s voice and then that was all I needed to know.

I get from my bike to her door in seconds, then enter the house on silent feet. I can hear him before I see him, and my blood boils as I pull my gun from my hip and take aim at the unknown, ready for anything and laser-focused.

“You have her eyes …” he bites out, his voice shaky and low. “It’s like seeing a fucking ghost …”

I hear her whimper softly and plead for all of one second—“Why? How did you find me?”—before I figure out where they are in her century-old house.

The stealth training ingrained in me doesn’t allow him to hear me coming.

Even if he could, the adrenaline rushing through my veins at the sight of her pinned against the living room wall gives me the strength of ten men.

The man holding her is a waste of breath, and he’s wearing a cut I can’t wait to burn.

“Please, just listen to me …” His tall, lanky body is pressed to hers, which makes me want to rip him to shreds. He’s already taken so much from her.

I think I hear him muttering something like, “You’re looking for answers and I’m gonna fucking give them to you …”

Then the familiar haze lines my vision and the monster in me takes over.

I replace my gun at my hip and yank his head back while allowing my fist to come down on his face with a deafening crack, breaking his nose instantly.

My arms wrap around his thick neck in a sleeper hold before he gets another word out or has the chance to lay a finger on her pretty head.

I drag him out the back door, not wanting one drop of blood to spill on her floor.

The sun is starting to sink behind the trees surrounding her property. It’s private and quiet out here, and I toss him to the ground behind a bush while garbled words do their best to spill from his blood-filled mouth.

“Motherfuck—”

I commit fully, straddling him as my fist comes down again.

The sound of his jaw cracking is like music to my fucking ears.

The thrill of the capture is subsiding, but the satisfaction of his demise is on the horizon.

And judging by the fear-soaked smell and this fucker bleeding all over his shitty, good-for-nothing cut, he knows it.

I keep hitting him as blood leaks from my busted knuckles.

Time passes, I don’t know how long, but it’s in this moment, with blood covering me, that I feel clearer than in any other.

At peace.

This is the other part to my truth.

I simply don’t give a fuck. Feeling this way isn’t barbaric, it’s cathartic.

It’s not just an eye for an eye. It’s a loose end that I need to tie up. A mental itch that must be scratched at all costs.

“Sean …” Her voice is shaky and soft, calling my name from somewhere behind me.

Even after such a short time, it’s the only voice that can stop my raised fist from crashing down on him again.

I blink, coming out of my haze and looking down.

Her attacker is out cold, but for now, he’s still breathing.

I let go of his blood-soaked shirt and turn to face her.

“That’s enough,” she commands softly. I take one look at her and grimace as I stand and make my way across her yard.

Relief that she’s unharmed and pure admiration for her ability to make it until I got here washes over me for the first time, and I feel like I no longer have my legs beneath me.

I take her into my arms and crush myself to her, muttering her name as she grips me tight.

I have no idea how long we stay like that before I finally move to the side of the house to turn on the spigot connected to a coiled hose.

I give my hands a rinse before ripping off a small length of fabric from the bottom of my t-shirt and running it under the water, then return to wipe her tear-stained face, removing his splattered blood from her soft neck and shoulders.

I can’t bear the thought of this worthless piece of shit’s blood anywhere near her.

“H-he says he has answers … could he?” she stammers, as I run my hands over her bare arms, warming her.

“I’m gonna figure that out.” I swipe her soft, fiery hair from her forehead and gently kiss her there before pulling her close. She takes a deep breath, and I feel her body start to relax.

“That’s better,” I whisper, inhaling her sweet scent.

Another detail I can’t forget. Even now, everything about her calls to me.

When I should be focusing on how to get this cocksucker back to my clubhouse, all I can think about is the taste of her skin.

I pull my phone out and send a message to Kai and Jake, my club’s enforcer and vice president, knowing they’ll be here inside of ten minutes.

“What do we do now?” Her voice is muffled by my chest.

“I do what I do, and you decide how deep into my world you wanna be.”

Her sultry brown eyes look up at me expectantly.

“I was hunting him. I wasn’t planning to kill him, but now …” I flex my aching fist. The one that just pummeled that motherfucker’s face into the ground. “You know exactly who I am …” I stroke her cheek with my thumb.

“Yes,” she answers, reaching her warm hand up, placing it over mine.

“But knowing that reality and seeing it are two totally different things, understand?”

She swallows down the fear I know she’s feeling and nods, side-eyeing him. “Of course,” she whispers softly.

I move into her sightline to bring her eyes back to mine.

“Don’t look at him. He’s lying there like that because he took from you, and I will never tolerate that. No one will ever harm a single hair on your head, or anyone you love, ever again.”

“I don’t have many of those … people that I love. But … do you think he does?” Her pretty face knots in confusion as she comes to terms with the fact that this man will likely die simply because he hurt her.

This is a “right from wrong” she’s never had to contemplate. I tilt her chin up to me. “Don’t do that. Look at me. He isn’t worth an ounce of regret. He made his choices in life … the wrong ones. This is his fate.”

I remind myself as I watch her struggle with this new reality that my brain works differently than hers—that she won’t find it easy to separate emotion from business when it comes to ending a human life, even one that took from her so viciously.

For me, this is only business. I don’t worry about this man’s family, or anyone who might care when he doesn’t come home tonight.

I only worry about two things. My club, and now … her.

I wait with bated breath as her fingers slide over mine, removing my hands from her face.

She straightens her shoulders and smooths her thick copper hair but doesn’t speak as she tucks the bottom of her shirt back into her cutoff jean shorts.

As if putting herself back together on the outside will hold her emotions together on the inside too.

I let her push past me and move to stand over her attacker’s unconscious body. Her chest rises and falls evenly. She doesn’t look afraid now. She looks bold and in control. She looks powerful. Her long hair blows loose and wild in the late evening’s summer breeze as she focuses.

I wait for questions that never come, for a more prominent fear or shock that never rises. Instead, she shocks me by simply embracing the calamity.

“I’m stronger than you think, Sean,” she whispers before dropping to her knees. Her small fist comes up and slams down onto his face as she cries out, and I watch in sheer fascination as she picks up a heavy, jagged rock from her garden, and her fist rises again.