CHAPTER EIGHTEEN #2
Finally, Lucas of the Grave Sons swaggers toward me, unzipping his jeans as he comes. He pulls his cock out, semi-hard, and tips my chin up with one knuckle.
“Just give it a little kiss, baby,” he murmurs.
I stare affectless at his dick. I don’t think I can move—not that I want to. I just stare. If Wyatt were here he’d be furious, he’d be violent. But he’s not here. He’s looked in a room with broken ribs.
Big Mike and Reaper Jack take my shoulders, steadying me forward, lowering my face toward Lucas’s crotch. I don’t do anything. They tip me forward until my mouth brushes skin, laughing roughly, and then sit me back up. All I hear is laughter, laughter, laughter. Cheers. Waves breaking on the sand.
I’ve never been on a tropical vacation—any vacation, actually. I’ve never seen the ocean. Never heard the waves. Not in real life. I hope they don’t really sound like this.
Billy whoops. I hear, “You boys are really more deviant than I gave you credit for.” A horn blares once, slicing through the sound, and then engines scream, tearing down the airstrip.
The presidents’ attention is mercifully distracted from me.
Big Mike shields his eyes against the floodlights.
Reaper Jack cups his hands and hollers. Lucas punches the air.
My gaze floats to the floodlights above us, how the white light showers down on us like rain.
In a wave or a particle. Both and neither.
Onlookers in the crowd scream and whistle and then cheers break out. Someone barks through a megaphone, words lost to the roar.
Big Mike throws both fists in the air. “Mongols for the motherfucking win!” He grabs my face and kisses me again, harder this time, then drags both hands over my chest, squeezing my breasts through the t-shirt, a distant, surprising reminder that I still have a body at all.
“What do we need to do to improve my luck, sweetheart?” Reaper Jack drawls, hooking his arms around my waist like he’s lifting a child. He settles me on his lap and bounces his knee, jostling me and chuckling.
Then the horn is blaring again. “Iron Order!” Billy is shouting.
Hands slide up my sides, pulling my t-shirt up with them, warm palms fondle my breasts.
“I’m going to have you begging me for more,” a voice growls in my ear, but it’s not Reaper Jack.
Somehow I’m on the lap of Snake of the Vagos now and Reaper Jack is standing up by the microphone beside Billy.
Time is skipping. That’s what Rox said the blue pills would do, didn’t she? Fast-forward me through the worst of it?
“Grave Sons versus Vagos,” Billy is saying, his voice alternately too close and far away.
I think he’s talking to me, but he’s looking the other way, out into the fog and the lights.
“And representing the Order of Disorder, you know him, you fear him, my second-in-command and the meanest son of a bitch on two wheels—Silas Blackwell!”
Silas Blackwell. I hate that name. I lift my hands to look at them and notice how white they are in the light. They’re cold.
The roaring, the lights. It all starts spinning around me, blending into one bright blur. The sound peaks, then lowers. My head lolls back onto a shoulder and then fingers are threading through mine, hands are pulling me up, rough and hard.
“My victory prize,” comes the cold timbre of Silas’s voice.
He sits and pulls me onto his lap, one hand sliding up under my shirt, the other grinding me down against him. His mouth finds my neck and kisses my skin slowly, tongue moving in circles against my skin like he’s savoring me.
“No,” I manage to say, but it comes out as a whisper.
Not like this. Not Ryder dead, and Wyatt broken, and me on Silas’s lap, his hands all over me. A scream tries to rise in my chest and dies there.
“Final heat,” Billy says, the mic still in his grip, the show still going on. But his words blur at the edges. I catch only pieces.
“…our club…”
“…our rules…”
“…show you how it’s done…”
The crowd roars again. Billy steps off the stage to mount his bike. And strangely, I feel less safe without him.
For months, Silas has watched me with that unreadable smirk and those dark, glassy eyes.
He’s always made it clear that the only thing standing between me and him was Billy’s permission.
And now, at last, I’ve been handed over.
Passed like a gift to Ryder’s killer. Like I’m nothing more than an object.
“No,” I whine, low and soft. My voice is slipping out of reach, thinned to smoke. I try to twist away, to slide off his lap, but his grip only tightens—one hand on my breast, the other on my thigh, pinning me down.
“Go on and struggle,” he hisses in my ear. “I like it when you wriggle.”
A sob catches in my throat. “Nooo.” It’s breathless. Fragile. The word breaks apart as it leaves me. My body tries to fight, but everything’s wrong. I can’t seem to move fast enough. Even turning my head takes everything I’ve got, and all I see are lights spinning above me in dizzying trails.
“Mmm,” Silas growls. “This is just so perfect.” He yanks me tighter against him, then spreads his legs to pull mine apart with them, pulling the t-shirt up over my hips. He reaches between my legs and fumbles with his zipper, and then I feel the unmistakable heat of him against my skin.
“You know what’s going to happen now?” he murmurs.
I can’t say anything. I can’t move. Why can’t I move?
“I’m going to fuck you right here, in front of hundreds of spectators.
I’m going to be deep inside you when it happens.
” He chuckles viciously. “It’s fucking poetic.
In about sixty seconds, your boyfriend’s bike is gonna blow and this crowd is gonna lose their king, and when it happens, I’ll be balls-deep in his girl, probably coming as the fuel line—“
POP.
A white flash detonates across the stage, blinding and sudden, followed by a crack of concussive sound.
The world blinks white. Sound distorts. People scream.
Silas pushes me onto the chair to his right and jumps up, swearing. I slump to the side, heart thudding, ears ringing.
“The fuck was that?” someone shouts.
“Firework?” another guesses.
“No fucking way,” and then—
BOOM.
The airstrip explodes.
Flames shoot skyward at the far end of the runway. Screams crest in a single, massive wave. The crowd breaks. People surge toward the barricades. Phones rise. Someone’s yelling for EMTs.
“Billy!” someone screams.
Everyone is running off the stage, toward the explosion, leaving me behind, except for two figures breaking through the smoke.
Black hoodies pulled over their heads. They move fast, sprinting toward me.
Hands on my back, under my knees, and then I’m lifting into the air.
My vision swims. The lights, the smoke, the screaming—it all spins.
I see only flashes. I don’t scream. I can’t.
I’m being stolen.