Chapter 5
VENOM
T he cabin breathes like a beast at an uneasy rest. Fire ticks and pops in the grate, wood gross under the weight of freshly fallen snow. The old timbers creak as the storm shifts and new weight lands on old branches.
I mentally reach for Willow who sleeps beside me. She is warm and calm in the darkness. The world outside is bleak white noise. But here with my snow angel, I feel a calmness as fragile as it may be.
It’s the silence that changes first.
Not the storm. That animal has been damn near a constant for hours on end now. No. It’s the space inside the wind—how it thins out and then pauses as it whips through the trees. It’s like the world is holding its breath with me.
My eyes snap open. Every nerve ending pricks awake.
Something’s wrong. I don’t have much in the way of comfort amenities like end tables and alarm clocks. I don’t see the need in them when I’m hardly here, so I don't know what time it is.
My best guess is that sunrise isn’t too far off.
I slide from the bed without jostling the blankets. Cold kisses my skin where her heat leaves me. She turns once in her sleep, a little sound caught in her throat, and I’m a bastard for leaving that sound behind, but this is why I’m breathing. To keep her doing the same.
I dress fast. Jeans, a shirt and a flannel, knife at my back, and a Glock in my hand.
I kill the interior lamp and leave only the low orange of the fire as I pad to the window.
The glass is fogged with heat on cold, but I can still see the smear of white and the black bones of the trees.
Headlights would paint shadows. Footsteps would carve them.
I scan the fresh powder from the edge of the glass.
There.
Movement along the tree line catches my eye. It’s low. Careful. Too careful for it to be some stray animal.
The Vultures are here to take what they can’t have. I wondered how long it would be.
I crack the door and winter floods in, a knife of air along my ribs. The night smells like pine, iron, and the old ghosts that love a good killing.
The wind drops long enough for voices to carry over the howl. Someone hisses a curse and then everything turns into a murmur of words I can’t make out. But it’s too late. The fucking lot of them are all amateurs with death wishes.
The swirling sound of snow swallows the crunch of my boots as I edge along the wall of my cabin. When I get to the edge, where the shadows are the thickest I head for the treeline and circle in behind the voices unseen.
Five shapes form in the darkness. Vultures. I recognize the stench of booze and drugs on them. Willow’s father isn’t among them. I know his shape and the huskier man isn’t known for his fighting skills. He rather send in his flunkies to take a beating and that’s fine by me.
One of the clueless fuckers points at my door with his chin. “Prez’s girl is inside. Da Boss wants her breathin’ boys. Says we can do ‘bout anything we want to the Savage piece of shit. Let’s go. My balls are ice cubes and I wanna get this over with. Da girl is mine.”
The hell she is.
I pull in a slow breath and level my weapon at the first shadow who is stupid enough to make a move toward my cabin. My finger dances over the smooth steel of the trigger to my weapon. But I hold steady.
“You lost, boys?”
Five bodies jerk toward the sound of my voice.
Muzzles flare and shouts sound off into the darkness. The closest Vulture doesn’t finish the word he is about to spit out because he chokes on it and my bullet.
He collapses neat as a felled tree.
From there, chaos blooms. The second Vulture pivots and fires wild; hot rounds crack bark next to my ear. I’m already moving, a ghost skimming through the blackened trees. He’s too slow and affected by the winter so every bullet he fires off misses.
The dumbass fumbles with his stance.
I don’t. I pop off two to center mass, and he drops where he stands next to his buddies who look like they are fighting a ghost.
Shock is stamped across all their faces like they’ve never believed a Savage could outdo them.
The third rushes me with a knife because there’s always one who thinks he’s made for the old ways. He slashes, but he’s sloppy in his handwork and it’s no effort at all for me to catch his wrist. I feel the tendons flex and twist. My grip tightens until bone pops.
“You should have stayed home, Vulture.”
His scream warms my dead soul.
I ram his own blade under his ribs, up and in. Heat hits my hand. He sags against me, breath a wet rattle in my ear.
Three souls tonight. Two to go.
I ease the filth looking to take Willow from me into the snow because I’m not cruel, just efficient, and because I don’t want Willow waking to the sound of a man dying outside her window.
I’m not a monster without a conscience.
Numbers Four and Five break left, heading straight for the front door of my cabin.
“Fuck dis,” he shouts and to me that means he’s going to get Willow any way he can. Alive or dead.
I can’t let that happen.
Rage burns through me, clean and electric. No one points their hardware at my home and lives.
I move swiftly across open ground, gun ready. A familiar calm pulls over my thoughts and I get tunnel vision.
My finger smooths over the trigger, and I pop lead into the thigh of Number Four. He screams, pivots, and I put him down with a clean headshot before he can decide if he’s brave enough to shoot me.
The last man freezes, long enough to see the fires of hell in my eyes when I step out from the shadows and put my blade at his throat.
“Jesus Christ, man. Where’d you come from? You’re spooky at fuck.” His voice trembles with the sweet sound of fear. The scent of piss hits my nose and I take a half step back so I don’t get any of the fuckers urine on me.
“Tell your president he needs to send better men if he wants his daughter back.”
With that I let the pussy ass Vulture run off into the night. Given the direction he’s heading, he probably won’t make it past the patches we have on guard, but he can try. It should be a fun night for all of them. Good target practice for the patches, at the very least.
Is that cold of me? Hell yes. But fuck him. To tell you the truth, I hope they send every fucking Vulture in their crew. It will give me an excuse to drop them all and bury them out back in a deep, frozen grave. Put that backhoe Reaper bought to good use.
“Run, you bastard. Run straight into the jaws waiting for you.” Too bad he can’t hear my warning. Oh, well.
I sweep the yard in a slow circle, ears pricked for any stutter of breath that isn’t mine. Nothing but the hauling wind and the hiss of falling snow on fresh blood fills my senses for the next few seconds.
My heart is steady. My hands are steady. The only part of me that shakes is the part that wants to burst through my own skin and get back to the woman I pulled from the ice.
I strip mags, pocket phones, kick guns under the porch for later. When I’m certain there’s no second wave, I wipe my boots on the mat and step inside.
Willow’s awake and radiant with fury and a flurry of energy. She’s dragged the kitchen stool sideways, the overhead light is on low, and she’s laid my counter out like an altar of weaponry. My field knife, smaller kitchen blades, spare mags, my backup Glock, the shotgun from above the pantry.
I pause, my brows rising in surprise.
Christ. The woman even found the ankle piece I keep hidden under the sink along with the emergency burner phone, too.
I hear the padding of feet on the wooden floor a second before the ice-blue eyes snow angle rounds the corner with the last of my weapons in hand.
She looks up at me, eyes clear, hair tussled from sleep looking like sweet chaos. She’s wrapped in my bed sheet and nothing else.
My heart does something loud and stupid.
“Good girl,” I say, voice rougher than I mean it to be.
“That was some ugliness outside,” she answers, chin tilting toward the door.
She’s trying for light, but her hands tremble as she places the last of my guns on the countertop.
She stills them by sheer will and keeps talking.
“I didn’t want you to come back to nothing loaded in case my father’s men came in waves and you needed more firepower. ”
I set my spent Glock down, step into her space, and pull her against my body. Her cheek is warmer to the touch. I can smell wood smoke in her hair and the faint bite of my soap on her skin. I close my eyes and press my mouth to her crown.
“You’re safe. They are all gone.”
She physically relaxes in my arms. ‘Thank God and thank you, venom.”
The fear in his voice leaves my heart nearly dead in my chest.
“I didn’t want you to see that side of me,” I murmur into her hair. I say the ugly truth. Lies won’t get me anywhere and she grew up in the biker life. She would smell a lie the second it fell from my lips.
She leans back far enough to meet my eyes, and there’s nothing soft about her now. Hard steel stares back at me. “It was them or us. I pick us every time.”
I could fall to my knees right now and worship this woman. Instead, I cup her jaw, thumb sweeping away the tiniest of tears. “Do you know how they found us?”
She nods, mouth flattening. “I do. My father’s crew has a repeater rigged on the ridge.
My phone must have caught a signal at some point tonight and led them here.
In my defense that damn thing didn’t have a signal all night and well, after the crash, my head was fuddled.
I should have turned it off, but I was desperate to call for help.
Not that there was any signal at the time. ”
I nod. “I should have looked for a phone but I was more worried about getting you warm.”
“He’s coming because he can do with you as he pleases,” I say. “That’s what men like him do. They count people like currency.”
“Thinks?” Her brows lift, testing me.
“Thinks,” I confirm, sliding my palm down, pressing it low to the soft plane of her belly, a claim I feel in my bones.
“Because you’re not his anymore. I took you, Willow.
In every way a man can.” I settle my hand over her abdomen.
“My seed’s in you. Odds are, you’re already carrying what’s ours.
” My voice drops and what I say next is nothing short of a vow.
“You’re mine. I’m yours. Better or worse, snow angel.”
A thousand things cross her expression. First shock and then heat.
I love watching as something that looks dangerously close to hope replaces the heat.
And then she smiles and launches herself into my chest. I catch her, laugh once, low and quiet, because in a life like mine, laughing feels like sin.
“Then you need to know something,” she says into the crook of my neck.
She tips back, and the light is sharp on her cheekbones.
“He’s not coming to save me like you might think.
He’s coming to off me and take my phone.
There's nothing pretty and flowery between me and my father. He’s an evil man with ill intentions toward everything he touches. ”
I tense. “Your phone?”
Her shoulder sag with the weight I wish I could take from her.
“Yeah, it has everything he wants,” she says. “All the?—”
A heavy fist pounds the door twice. The room jolts with it.
I pivot, haul Willow just behind my hip with one hand, and rack the shotgun with the other.
“Stay low and behind me.” I take aim at the front door, already mentally mapping our exit strategy out the back door. I’ve never known the bad guys to knock, and I never figured the Vultures for having manners.
Willow tucks close to my back without argument, but her hand snakes out for a gun.
That’s my girl.
“Come in nice and slow.”
Reaper swings the door open slowly. “Stand down, Venom. It’s just us.”
The Savage Reign President strides in dragging something with him.
“I see you found my little gift.”
Reaper drags in a heaving half-frozen Vulture, bleeding from the cheek where what looks like a branch kissed him on his sprint through Savage land.
Reaper tosses him to the floorboards like trash that they missed on pickup day. Snow spins off his shoulders and collects on the floor as he pushes to his knees.
His eyes cut to mine, then past me, clocking Willow and then the room. He turns to look out the front door to find shadows moving between the trees.
My brothers. I can tell from the size of the silhouettes and their gate.
We are a special breed of men who carry an aura of power and death with us.
It clings to every inch of us and the enemy can see it.
Especially when we bring the energy of death.
And tonight it tethers our souls together like a band of brothers.
“Found this walking around,” Reaper says dryly, jerking a thumb at the whimpering runner. “Someone left the back gate open.”
The runner looks up, lips blue, realizes where he is and who he’s with, and makes a sound like a rabbit under a coyote’s paw.
I thumb the safety on the shotgun, set it aside, and give Reaper a nod.
“That was me. I thought it locked correctly, but I admit I wasn’t really focusing on it the latch caught or not.”
“It happens.” Reaper's scowl turns into a grin that makes me think he enjoyed chasing the Vulture through the woods.
“It seems you had a bit of fun tonight. How many bodies are outside?”
“Four. It would have been five, but I needed this one to take a message back to his president. I had hoped he would make it.”
Reaper’s smile turns predatory as he crosses his arms over his chest. “Sounds like I’m about to hear a damn good story.”