Epilogue
STONE
Las Vegas summers were scorchers. Triple-digit dry heat that could drive anyone to the brink of insanity and dehydration if they weren’t careful. And even if it was late, after two in the morning, the heat felt stifling.
“Sad, really,” Griffin muttered, taking in a deep inhale of his cigarette. “Shit that happens to people in the desert, am I right?” My lips twitched, but I didn’t full-on grin as I stared at the asshole in front of not just me and my best friend but the enforcer of the club and a prospect.
“Fuck you!” the motherfucker tied up to a chair in front of us spat. Griff shook his head.
“People always give you this much shit when you bring them out here?” Griff asked our enforcer; he just grunted.
“Usually. In about thirty minutes, he’s going to piss himself when I bring out my tool kit and show him each one and explain how I will use each piece on him.”
“I don’t think he has thirty minutes left.” I finally spoke. I squatted in front of him, close enough for him to take in my size and the expression on my face but not close enough for him to be able to get to me.
“Fuck,” Griff said, and I heard him take his side arm out of his holster. “I know where this is going.”
“You fucked up, man,” I said, unblinking as I stared at the man who had made my girl’s mom, may she rest in peace, life a living hell.
A man who had coveted what he should have known was forbidden to him and had tried to sell her off to the highest bidder.
Who had raised his hands to my girl’s sister before she’d run off, causing her to miss the last month of their mother’s life.
“You should have stayed away,” I said slowly.
Calm yet ice cold.
The fear in the asshole’s eyes was a living, breathing thing I let myself feed off.
A week after our movie night that didn’t happen because we were too busy and too insatiable for one another, she had told me everything about the douchebag in front of me after a bad nightmare she’d had.
I’ told her not to worry about a fucking thing because daddy had her. And I meant it.
But more importantly, she’d believed it because for the last three months, she hadn’t lost sleep over that motherfucker.
Even now, as she slept in our bed back in the casino, clueless this piece of shit had stepped foot into the building looking for her, nothing disturbed my woman’s dreams. Especially not the trash in front of me.
“Fuck you,” he spittled, but there was no missing the earlier bravado was quickly fading away.
“Scared?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.
His green yes shifted to look over my holder, where I knew Griffin had taken his shirt off and started to crack his knuckles.
“You should be,” I warned. Not that our plans for him should come as a surprise to him.
Not after asking for Jessie all over the casino and finding the ropes and drugs in his car.
He wasn’t some concerned stepfather looking for his missing stepdaughter.
He’d had other plans. Darker, uglier ones.
It’s why the moment Griff spotted him on the security cameras, we’d used the prospect to help lure him out the back entrance and into a waiting van. We’d driven out to our enforcer’s preferred spot in the desert and had Jessie’s ass of a stepdad dig his own grave for us.
“I won’t come back,” he blurted out, forehead smeared with a line of dirt and sweat. “I won’t try to get Jessie to come back,” he offered quickly, fear lacing every syllable out of his mouth in a way that made me smile like a fucking Cheshire cat.
“Uh-uh.” I shook my head. “You really think I am going to let my princess live in a world where she has to share the same fucking oxygen as the piece of shit who knocked her around? Who beat up her sister? Who made her mother’s life hell when all that woman did was love you?
” He swallowed hard, knowing his sins would start to get paid here on earth before his one-way trip down to hell.
“Look, I have… I have money.”
“Good for you,” I muttered and heard my brothers chuckle behind me. Even the prospect made more money that this fuck would have to offer us.
“Her sister—“ It was obvious he was desperate and scrambling now.
“Is safe,” I cut him off because if he thought he was going to use Jessie’s older sister as bait to stay alive, he had another thing coming.
Jessie and I got to know one another as well as two people possibly could these last couple of months.
There wasn’t a thing she didn’t know about me and vice versa.
From the shit this fucker did, to how she took her coffee and what her favorite movies were, both currently and as a child, were all locked in in my head.
Jessie had even confided in me where her sister was, and we had a plan to ride out to New Mexico to visit her next month after I made sure they reconnected.
Holding my princess’ hand when she called her that first day had been a fucking honor.
“Now, what you’re going to do is take your ass kicking like a good boy before we shoot you and toss you into the hole you so nicely dug for us.”
“Fuck you,” he spit just as I stood and shook my head with a sigh, over this whole scene.
“You know what?” I turned to look at my brothers. Griffin moved closer. “I think we shouldn’t kick his ass.”
“You do?” our enforcer asked, rising a brow, fully suspicious.
“It’s going to take too long. It’s hot as fuck out here.” I pointed at the desert. “I shit you not, I am pretty sure I have sand in my ass crack from just standing here.”
“It is hot,” the prospect mumbled.
“Leave me here!” he exclaimed, hope clearly rising inside of him. Dumb fuck. “I’ll walk back and—“ The asshole didn’t say another word. Not when Griff handed me his gun, and I shot the asshole square between the eyes without a second thought.
“Done,” I stated quietly.
It wasn’t the first and probably not the last life I’d take, but it was the easiest one. He had been a piece-of-shit human. Not just to Jessie and her family but those around him. That kill was justified because it literally made the world a better place.
“Shit, that’s messy,” the prospect said, and Griff shrugged.
“Saves your knuckles, though,” he muttered before turning to look at me. “I got this if you wanna go home,” he offered the moment our eyes connected.
“You do?” Griff wasn’t the kind to do shit out of the kindness of his heart.
“Yeah… I owe you anyhow, man.”
“How?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure I’d ever done anything to grant this kind of payback.
“You got sick, and I met Marty. I take care of the trash, you go shower and rest next to your girl, we’re even.
” He might act like it wasn’t a big deal, but Griffin and Marty were solid.
More than solid. I’d seen the diamond ring he had waiting for her once they were on the cruise vacation they were taking in two weeks.
“Thanks, man.” Usually, I handled my own messes, and I had been fully prepared to do that tonight, but I was far from stupid. I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Beers on me this week.”
“Right on,” the three guys muttered as I walked away to my bike and rode straight back home to my Jessie girl.
Jessie
The water in the shower cut off, and I forced my eyes to stay shut.
Shawn never left our bed without telling me where he was going.
Until tonight. He’d acted funny after work today, and when Marty stopped by to watch a movie with me after Griff and Shawn had been called to church, I knew something was up.
I’d felt the moment he slid out of bed about three hours ago, and thirty minutes ago, our door had opened and shut before he went straight in to take a shower.
The old me, the one who had existed before meeting Daddy, would have jumped to conclusions.
Stupid ones. That he’d been bored. Met someone else.
But that wasn’t going through my mind in that moment as Shawn slid his warm slightly damp body in behind me, wrapping his arm around my belly before breathing in the scent of my skin.
I stayed still pretending to be asleep but felt his lips kiss the shell of my ear.
“I know you’re awake, princess.” I opened my eyes and turned to my other side to look at him. Our bedroom was dark, only the spot light Daddy always left on in the bathroom for me after I’d had a nightmare shining through, dimly lighting our room.
“Is everything okay?” I asked. Something in my gut had told me something was up earlier, but I hadn’t wanted to intrude.
“Club busi—“ he started to say, but something in his eyes shifted. Changed. “I love you, princess.”
“I know.”
“No.” He shook his head. “You have no idea. Shit, I didn’t know it was possible to love someone the way I love you.”
“Baby—“ I started to say, but his hand stroked my face, and something in his touch made the breath hitch in my throat. Something in the air changed.
“There are going to be times in our relationship when I won’t be able to tell you what’s happening, and I’m going to need you to trust I got you.”
“You won’t be able to tell me because of the cub?” I asked, and he nodded. “Today is one of those days,” I guessed. He opened his mouth as if to confirm, but it was like he’d changed his mind.
“Tonight was a situation I can’t tell you details about, but there is something you need to know.”
“Okay,” I drawled out slowly.
“And when I tell you this, it might make you rethink letting me sleep next to you.” I rolled my eyes, and his brow rose.
“Nothing could do that,” I confidently shared, surer of that than anything I’d ever been up to that point in my life. Fully meaning it.
“I sure hope you’re right, baby girl.” He sighed. “The Steel Sinners, my club, we don’t always play by the rules.”
“Okay.” This wasn’t anything new. I’d assumed they did some morally gray shit to be where they were.
“But we have rules. We don’t fuck around with certain trades and we sure as fuck don’t peddle flesh.”
“Okay.” He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, whether it was from him telling me or things I’d heard from other people at work. My heart started to race a little faster at the tone in his voice.
“And we protect our families.”
“Like the guys,” I guessed.
“Yes but no. I mean, we protect the women in our family. We don’t let shit happen to them or the kids. Other clubs are like that, too. We don’t let shit that could be a seed of fear grow into something. We nip shit in the bud.”
“Baby,” I whispered into the darkness, suddenly almost hyperaware of what he could possibly be alluding to.
“Shit.” He sat up and picked me up, settled me on his lap, my thighs straddling his as I stared at the blue eyes of my future, the ones that held my heart with both hands.
“Okay, here goes. I can’t tell you everything, but what I can tell you, sweetheart, is that from here on out, you have nothing to worry about, Jessie,” he said pointedly, his voice slightly scratchy.
“Nothing at all. No more monsters under the bed or looking over your shoulder when you hit the first floor during work, or the way you do when you think I’m not watching when we go for rides. ”
My stepdad. He was talking about my stepdad.
“Shawn,” I whispered.
“I know that fear was what had you on the run and that motherfucker was the reason I lucked out that our paths crossed when they did and I found you. You just need to know you’re free of him.”
“But?” I asked, because with how he was looking at me, how his energy had shifted into almost this anxiety-filled pulse, I knew it was a big one.
“But I don’t think I can let you go. I don’t think I’m strong enough to…” My sweet, tender-hearted gentle giant’s voice cracked. My head tilted to the side as my brows bunched.
“You think now that… the monsters under my bed don’t—“ I licked my lips, using his metaphor“—exist, I wouldn’t want to be with you?” Shawn opened and shut his mouth.
“You wouldn’t need daddy’s protection anymore. You could leave right now and head to visit your sister.”
“Not without you.” I shook my head. My hands rose and held his face in place to force him to keep his eyes on me.
“I love you, Shawn. Everything about you. I’m not here because of some…
sense of duty. Sure, I feel safe with you, safer than I’ve ever felt with anyone else in my entire life but…
I’m with you because I feel…” My cheeks flamed.
“What? What do you feel, princess?”
“Like I belong with you.” The moment the words were past my lips, he flipped us around, my back hit the mattress, and his lips touched mine with a growl. The kiss was a branding. A claim. Hard and rough. Desperate and so full of love it swept over me.
“Say it again,” he gritted against my mouth. “Say it.”
“I belong with you,” I whimpered. He made an animalistic sound that vibrated against my chest.
“You fucking do, Jessie. Mine. All mine, princess.”
“Show me.” I wasn’t above begging.
“Oh, daddy’s going to do that and more, sweetheart,” he promised as a thrill washed through me. “Forever. There won’t be anything you have to worry about. There is, you tell me, and who takes care of it?”
“You do, Daddy,” I whispered and shivered when he ran his nose against mine.
“Exactly. You can always count on daddy. I promise.”
And I knew, even though as the years passed and Shawn proved it time and time again, Daddy never made promises he couldn’t keep