Chapter Nine
Chef
If only the world had stayed dark forever.
Despite working most days until midnight, I usually awoke with the first light of day. That was why, when wintry-pale gold light slipped in through my bedroom window, I opened my eyes with a stretch and a yawn.
And saw I was in bed with my worst nightmare.
The Chicago Gravediggers Motorcycle Club emblem, a scythe-carrying Grim Reaper etched onto a tombstone in the colors of black and green, was an image that was forever branded on my brain. That emblem meant pain. Fear. Humiliation. Ultimately wishing for death.
And it covered Romeo’s chest in a massive tattoo.
A near-soundless scream whispered from my clenched throat, and I jerked away from the poison of that tattoo and everything it stood for. The arms around me tightened, triggering me to fight with all my strength to get away.
“Whoa, Shiloh, wait—”
“No!” At last I ripped out of his arms and flew off the bed, grabbing my robe hanging off the footboard as I went. It wasn’t the Kevlar suit of armor I wanted, but it was better than nothing. “Get out, do you hear me? Get out, get out right now!”
Sleep-rumpled and naked, Romeo pushed the bedclothes aside and stood. “What the hell, Shy. Are you having a bad dream, or do you need to take some meds I don’t know about?”
Prick. “I want you out of this apartment and out of my life, you… fucking… Gravedigger.”
The effect that one word had on him was astonishing. In an instant his face changed from sleepy confusion to hard, cold murder. “What the fuck did you just say?”
“If you didn’t want me to know—and obviously you didn’t—you should have kept your shirt on.”
Understanding dawned in his eyes and he ran an absent hand down his chest as if to wipe away the damning evidence. “So what’s the big deal? That shitheel Radar basically gave it up that I was in a club. Who cares what name’s attached to it?’
“Oh, it’s a big deal, and you know it. You know it, because you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to hide that you’re a member of the Chicago Gravediggers,” I shot back, seeing it as clearly as the tattoo on his chest now that it was too late. “That stupid jacket with the weekend-warrior patches is the biggest clue that you were trying to trick me into thinking you were harmless, and certainly not a part of the Chicago Gravediggers. The question is why? What do you want from me? Does this have something to do with Marvel?”
If he’d looked dangerous before, dropping that name turned his expression positively demonic. “Marvel? Hades’s son?”
“Like you don’t know,” I scoffed, shrugging into my bathrobe and knotting the belt tightly around my waist, as if that would somehow make me less exposed. “Why else would you be here? Why else would you be so intent on fucking me, just like Marvel? Should I look around the apartment to see if you’ve got all your friends, my own goddamn brother, stashed away somewhere watching us just so I could be humiliated? God, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I added on a sudden wave of self-hatred, hitting myself in the head hard just so I could feel punished. “You and Marvel, the only two men I ever allowed myself to show any interest in. Why am I attracted to trash? Why?”
“There’s going to come a day when you beg my forgiveness for comparing me to that fucking little prick,” he growled, at last realizing this was a moment that called for clothes. He yanked his jeans on, then shoved his feet into boots without bothering with socks. “And I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about when it comes to humiliating you. That fucker Marvel did that to you? Tell me.”
I bared my teeth. “You’re his brother. Ask him.”
“I’m not his brother and I don’t belong to the Chicago Gravediggers.”
“Oh, really? You might want to check in with your tattoo, just to get your stories straight.”
“I did belong to the Chicago Gravediggers, but a bunch of us splintered off from Hades and his crew. We founded our own chapter, the Gravediggers, five years ago.”
I rolled my eyes. “Uh-huh, sure. Two factions of the same gang living in the same city, the same territory. I don’t know much about motorcycle gangs, but even I know that’s not allowed.”
“You’re right, it’s not, but when blood-related family is involved it gets complicated. And the term is clubs, not gangs.”
“Don’t you correct me. I said what I said.”
He made a sound of impatience. “We splintered off from Chicago Gravediggers because Hades and his crew are all about running everyone over, even members of their own club. There’s no loyalty unless it’s to Hades, and Hades alone, and Hades sure as fuck never returns that loyalty to anyone, except maybe his son Marvel. That doesn’t bode well for the health of anyone around him. Putting that club down once and for all is a goddamn public service, but I’m not going to waste my time talking about that asshole and a club that’s been sentenced to death. I want to know what Marvel did to you to humiliate you.”
“You want me to relive it so you can get more laughs out of it? Share it with the rest of your brothers back at the ol’ clubhouse so I can be humiliated all over again? Is that it?”
“No, I wanna know exactly what happened so I can kill everyone who hurt you.”
The promised violence in his voice almost made me believe him. Almost. “For all I know, you were even there.”
“Where?”
“The Chicago Gravedigger clubhouse.” My throat was so tight it nearly strangled the words before I could get them out. “The place where Marvel took me. The place where he held me for three days. The place where he… he took pride in deflowering a virgin. Me.”
A snarl escaped him, his face terrible. “Fuck.”
On that, we agreed. Wholeheartedly.
“Marvel was the guy you mentioned earlier? The biker who kidnapped you?”
I nodded, feeling sick. “I still can’t believe I was stupid enough to not question why he suddenly asked me out. I mean, I was just out of high school, and he was older. I was shy, boring, and I knew nothing about men. But I didn’t question his sudden interest, because I was so pitifully grateful for it. Can you imagine? Grateful. God.”
The silence was almost worse than his snarling.
“Tell me what they did to you.” The words sounded as though he’d forced them out one by one. “You said they had you for three days. Tell me.”
“I was nothing to Marvel. To any of them, except maybe a joke. A thing to be laughed at once Marvel got me into this horrible, wood-paneled room at the back of his father’s clubhouse, where there was only one way out. I’m sure you know the place I’m talking about.”
“Rumpus Room.” Again, the words seemed dragged out of him.
As far as I was concerned, that was as good as a confession. “Were you there to watch when Marvel raped me that first time? I mean, it got boring for everyone by the third day, but that first day there was a whole crowd to watch me scream for my life. Horny old bastards loved it when I screamed. Were you there?” Because if he was, I’d give serious thought to killing either him or myself here and now.
The baring of his teeth twisted his handsome face into something animalistic. “If I’d been there, I would’ve gotten you the hell out.”
If only I could believe that. “I still have nightmares of that room. Of those men watching me as I lay there helpless and violated. And… and Josh, being forced to watch, with tears rolling down his face.”
“Jesus fuck,” Romeo gritted, looking so enraged I almost hated looking at him. “Jesus fuck.”
“I wanted to die. God, how I wanted to die. They made me feel so damn dirty and used, I swore I’d never have sex again. And that’s a promise I kept until last night. Oh God,” I moaned as horror washed through me, and I dropped my face into my hands. “What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I have the most God-awful taste in men? It’s like I’m cursed to attract only the worst scum on earth.”
“Don’t.” I heard movement before strong hands shackled my wrists to pull them from my face. He was there, mere inches away with that disgusting tattoo right there for me to see. I should have hated that—and I did—but the physical synergy we created made my nerves thrum wherever he touched, even as his sea-colored eyes blazed into mine. “Don’t you compare me to Marvel, that goddamn shitbird. I am nothing like that spoiled piece of scum, you hear me? I’m not going to try to control you through whatever kind of games he played with you, and I’m not some weak little bitch who’d ever hurt you just because Daddy told me to.”
It was shocking, how much I wanted to believe that. “You would. You’re a Chicago Gravedigger. That means your brothers are your family and everyone else, your victims.”
“No,” came the fierce response. “It’s just you and me here, Shy, you understand? No one’s here playing games with you. It’s just the two of us being together because it’s what we want. What we need. No one else can touch us here. I won’t let them, I swear it.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that he was full of it, that I could never want a man who rode with the Chicago Gravediggers, and I certainly couldn’t trust him when he chose to meet me without wearing his cut. But before I could utter a single word, the unexpected slamming of the apartment’s front door sounded, followed by a voice I hadn’t heard in four years.
“Shiloh,” my brother Josh called out. “You here? We need to get you out of Chicago.”
*
Romeo
Of all the roadblocks I’d come up against since this whole crazy ride began, the one filling Shiloh’s bedroom doorway had to be the stupidest.
By far.
As I stood at the end of Shiloh’s rumpled bed with Shiloh standing near the bathroom door a few feet away, I stared at Josh McKeen, AKA Chef of the Chicago Gravediggers. For his part, Shiloh’s brother glared pure death at me, his curly hair sticking out in all directions and his right hand behind his back in a pose I knew all too well. I’d bet my prized custom chopper that his hand was wrapped around a gun tucked in the back of his pants, and he wouldn’t hesitate to pull it out and fill me with holes if I so much as twitched.
That was the only thing that kept me from throwing his ass out the door as far as I could. Considering the twitch in his eye, he’d probably miss me and hit Shy.
“Josh?” Clearly unaware that her brother was a sketchy-ass bomb primed go off, Shiloh gaped at her brother. “My God, Josh, I… What are you doing here? How did you even know where I live?”
“I’ve kept tabs on you from the moment you left home, because I knew everyone else would be doing the same. Case in point.” Josh jerked his stubble-covered chin my way. “We got ourselves a real fox in the henhouse, so to speak.”
“Be very careful,” I advised him quietly, picturing in my head just how I could take him down. Fucking close quarters. Not too many ways to take him out without putting Shiloh in the line of fire, and she was priority number-one. But if I could get him closer to me… “This fox has fangs and doesn’t like assholes breaking into his ol’ lady’s place.”
Josh’s face, so startlingly similar to Shiloh’s, twisted with barely suppressed rage. “Bullshit, cocksucker. Shiloh isn’t your old lady. You’re just using her.”
“For what?” I raised my brows, keeping my eyes trained on him while keeping Shiloh on my radar. “I mean, besides sex, because let me tell you, dude, when it comes to fucking, your sister is out of this goddamn world—”
“You motherfucker.” Out came the gun, a wicked flash of motion as Josh surged toward me. Ready for it, I stepped into Josh, surprising him, and that was all the opening I needed. Grabbing his wrist with one hand to keep the gun pointed away from Shiloh, I grabbed him around the neck with my other hand, stepped into him and flipped him over my hip. He hit the bedroom floor with a crash, and I took a second to give thanks that Shiloh lived on the ground floor before slamming my knee down on Josh’s chest and into his neck.
“Romeo!” Shiloh yelped my name, and I fully expected her to launch an attack on me. Instead, she stepped forward and kicked her bare foot at her brother’s hand holding the gun, dislodging it and making her cry out in pain. In an instant she started hopping around, holding her stubbed toes, while I couldn’t stop from staring at her like the frigging miracle she was. “Damn it, damn it, damn it… you made me break my toe, Josh, you dick! What the hell do you think you’re doing, pulling a gun on Romeo? You could have killed him!”
All my bloody thoughts of how to dispose of Chef’s body vanished like magic, and suddenly the world was filled with light. “Shy, baby. You were worried about me?”
“Josh.” Other than flicking a glance of pure death my way, Shiloh chose to focus solely on the man beneath my knee. “Explain. Why are you here? Why now?”
“You’re. Being. Set. Up.” Tugging ineffectually at my knee pressing into the base of his neck, Josh’s face slowly turned the color of puce. “Get out. Of Chicago. Don’t trust… anyone.”
“Who’s setting her up?” I demanded while his words sent ice pouring through my veins. “Give me a name.”
“You,” Josh croaked, his green eyes watering under the pressure of my knee on his carotid. “You’re the fucker… setting her up. Tell me… I’m wrong.”
“You’re wrong, dickhead.” I’d never taken such pleasure in saying those words more. “The only bad guy in this scenario is you.”
Fuck. You. I’d never—”
“Let’s review. Who was the bastard who brought sweet, innocent Shy into the orbit of Hades in the first place, huh? Who came in waving a fucking gun around like a wild-eyed amateur? I know it wasn’t me.”
“Get off him, Romeo.” Still clutching her injured toes, she sank onto the edge of the bed, her free arm curling around the bedpost where her robe had been hanging only minutes before. “I want to hear what he has to say.”
“It’ll be garbage, whatever he spews.” Especially if Hades had a chance to put his special taint on it. But since I was feeling generous thanks to Shiloh having my back even when she thought the worst of me, I got up with one last dig of my knee into Josh’s neck and went to retrieve the gun that had slid all the way to the bedroom door. “Just so you know, Shy, I’ll shoot him with his own gun if he makes a move I don’t approve of, so tell this moron to be a good little boy and mind his damn manners while he’s around you.”
“I’m not worried about what my brother would do to me. He’s my hero.” Shiloh hugged the bedpost tighter, staring at her brother as he gingerly pushed to his feet. “I never thought I’d see you again, Josh. After… after what happened, I kept trying to reach out to you to apologize, but you ignored me every time. Not that I blame you. I know I ruined everything. You sacrificed your entire life just to keep me safe.”
That got my attention. “He what?”
“Shaming me in front of Josh was just the beginning of what you Chicago Gravediggers did.” The slender fingers gripping the bedpost turned white while remembered terror filled her haunted eyes. “They wouldn’t let me go until Josh agreed to join their gang. They held me for three days in that back room. My poor parents… They filed a missing person’s report. They thought I’d been kidnapped, maybe even killed.”
I remembered well the room she’d been kept in. Major shit went down in the Rumpus Room, a lot of it good, some of it not. But the thought of a teenaged and traumatized Shiloh being held hostage there, raped and suffering all manner of shit, while club members went in and out to do God-knew-what… “You were kidnapped. You did nearly die.”
“I walked into that place of my own free will, like an idiot.”
“But you weren’t allowed to walk back out. And you,” I added, turning a snarl Josh’s way, “should’ve manned up right away, done everything you could to get her out the very same day that Marvel—your so-called friend—walked her into that trap.”
“I gave up college, my whole future, so Shiloh could go free,” Josh shot back with a respectable snarl of his own. “You think I wanted a life with the Chicago Gravediggers? Short answer—fuck, no. I had a full ride to Northwestern, asshole. I was already being headhunted by a dozen pharmaceutical companies around the world, clamoring for me to work for them. Now I’m stuck with no future except surviving from one day to the next. But I can at least make sure my kid sister doesn’t get stuck right along with me. She needs to leave Chicago and never look back.”
Pharmaceutical companies? A full ride to Northwestern? “So you’re a real brainiac, huh?”
“He is.” Shiloh made a sad little noise that broke my heart. “The pride of our family, really. Our mom’s a teacher, our dad’s a handyman, and I’m completely ordinary, too. But Josh? Pure genius and the first in the family to ever earn a full scholarship. He’s amazing.”
Curiouser and curiouser. “So, genius, how’d you cross paths with Hades’s kid and his crew? Clean-cut, suburban-raised college boys don’t usually come across any of our kind unless they’re dipping their toes into places they shouldn’t.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Shiloh snapped, throwing me a look of furious disdain while I watched her brother’s gaze flicker away. “Before you people got your hands on him, my brother was exactly as you said—clean-cut and focused on a future that was as brilliant as he is when it comes to science. It was Marvel who made everything bad happen.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get that,” I said absently, turning it over in my head as I studied Josh. “But the question stands. How did Josh and Marvel get to know each other in the first place? I mean, did you all go to school together?”
“They met in college while I was in my senior year in high school.” Sounding less certain, Shiloh looked to her brother for backup. “That’s what you told me, right?”
Josh stared at her like he didn’t know her. “Shut it, Shiloh.”
“But, I remember that’s what you tol—”
“I said shut the fuck up.”
“I think I get what happened—and just so you know, I’ll smack the lips off your little bitch face if you disrespect your sister like that again,” I said, looking at him with new eyes and hating everything I saw. “I do know a thing or two about you, Josh McKeen. For starters, I know what your road name is. Chef, yeah? They call you Chef?”
His eyes snapped back to me, screaming with tension, but said nothing.
“Not talking, huh? Okay, we’ll do it another way.” I nodded toward the collar peeking out under his parka. “You got your cut on, I can see it from here, and I know your road name’s on it. You can either tell me and your sister what your road name is, or… I can go over there, beat the fucking shit out of you before peeling your parka off, and read your road name for myself. You have three seconds to make the choice, but before you do, you should know I’m an expert when it comes to pistol-whipping people into shape.”
“Jesus,” Shiloh whispered on a shaky breath, sending a small needle of pain right through the center of my chest. “Jesus, don’t, Romeo, please. What does it even matter what his nickname is?”
“Road name, baby,” I corrected, struggling to keep my attention trained on her brother, who looked like he had a colony of fire ants biting his balls off. But focusing on business was damn hard to do when she sounded so scared. “It matters, Shy. Road names reveal one helluva lot about the men who earn them. Take mine,” I added with a shrug. “I’m known for having a way with the ladies. So your brother’s name, Chef, tells me that he’s an excellent cook. Right, Chef?”
“Fuck you, you piece of shit.”
“A cook?” Clearly baffled, Shiloh looked from me to her brother and back again. “This shows just how wrong you are, Romeo. Maybe things have changed since I last saw Josh, but the brother I knew couldn’t put together a plate of eggs and toast without setting off the fire alarm.”
“Food isn’t the only thing a man can cook, Shy girl.”
Her blank stare told me she wasn’t getting it. “What else is there?”
“Shut up,” her brother said again, this time to me, with a sweaty desperation that told me I was right on target. “Just shut up, you sonofabitch.”
“Chemicals, baby.” I said it gently. Not for his sake, but for Shy’s. Destroying her innocent belief that her big brother was heroic was the last thing I wanted to do, but being oblivious to how dangerous Josh was had gotten her into trouble in the first place. No way was I going to let that happen again. “There are always chemicals. And good ol’ Josh here said it himself—the pharmaceutical companies love what he can do. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
Understanding bloomed along with horror in Shiloh’s eyes as her brother remained stonily silent. “Josh?”
He looked away and let his silence damn him.
“Josh.” Shiloh’s ferocity kicked in, and I literally watched it stiffen her spine as she glared at her brother. “Tell him he’s wrong. Tell me he’s wrong.”
Silence stretched, horrible and damning.
“He can’t, baby.” Which was actually a good thing, at least to my mind. Much of the person Josh McKeen had once been had probably been devoured and lost forever—Hades’s specialty, of course. But at least Josh still gave a damn about what his little sister thought of him. I could work with that. “You’ve been cooking up shit for a long damn time, haven’t you, Chef? Long before Hades got his hooks into you. Yeah?”
The side-eye he gave me was a startling echo of Shy’s. “I’m not talking to you.”
Oh, yeah. These two were totally siblings. “Meth, molly, fentanyl, X, designer cocktails and all that shit. You cook it all, because you’re just that book-smart. That’s why Hades went hard on recruiting you, to the point of kidnapping your baby sister. That soulless bastard wanted to bring you to heel because you were selling that shit when you were in college, and probably making a ton of money. Hades wanted that action—and your special brand of genius—all for himself.”
“No.” Horror brought Shiloh to her feet, only to wince when she put weight on her injured toes. “This has gone far enough. My brother isn’t a… a drug dealer. Or if he is now, that’s what he’s been forced to become. Tell him, Josh.”
“Yeah, tell me, Josh,” I mocked, and my smile felt like a dangerous baring of teeth. “Tell your sweet little sister—who for years has been left to think you heroically saved her, when in fact you’re the unforgivable bastard who put her in danger in the first place—how you really met Marvel. Go on, tell her.”
“I was just trying to make a little money to get through college, Shiloh, I swear. Then I bought a Harley, because the guy I sold my product to had one—”
“Marvel,” I offered, and his wince told me I was right. “You became Marvel’s supplier, and he told Daddy all about it.”
“I had no idea what kind of attention my actions would bring me.” All at once, the facade of the vicious, hard-bitten biker dropped, revealing just another scared guy struggling not to get crushed under the weight of Hades’s might. “But now… Look, I’m just going to say it. I’m the bad guy, okay? I’m not your hero, Shiloh. I never was. All I can do now is try to save you. That means getting you away from this bastard here, because I promise you he’s a drop of poison as far as you’re concerned. There’s nothing good he can bring to your life, because you’re nothing more than an assignment to him.”