3. Luca
LUCA
Dear Diary,
I gave a serial killer a blow job.
Acold Scottish wind cut through the thin material of my shirt, and the darkness ate up the winding road we’d taken to the gates of MacGregor’s castle.
My father, uncle, and the two guards he’d brought with him stood to the left of me. Lynx, Dax, and Nyah stood on my right. There was barely a foot of space between my father and me, and yet it was clear it was a line drawn in the sand.
Headlights pierced the night, and my father lifted his regal chin, letting the light bounce over him.
“Dad,” I started, not knowing where the sentence was going.
He cut me off with a glare.
Enzo crossed the invisible line between our two camps and went eye to eye with me.
He grinned, like this entire evening had played into his hands in just the way he wanted.
“Run, nephew. You have no idea of the war you’ve started here tonight.
But it won’t end with Guerra blood on foreign steps.
Once we’re home though…Watch your back.”
The car pulled to a stop in front of us, and my father, Enzo, Bruno, and Viktor all got inside without another glimpse in our direction.
Leaving me, Nyah, Lynx, and Dax standing in the gutter like a ragtag bunch of street urchins.
The calm, arrogant, Luca Guerra exterior I had to have when I was around my father and his associates disintegrated into the night air. Anger and hurt and resentment bubbled up inside me, spewing out my mouth. “You’re fucking pregnant?”
There was no kindness in my voice. The feelings I had for her were all based on lies, so I didn’t dare let a hint of them out, even though they sat there, heavy on my chest, making it hard to breathe.
Lynx, even with his eyes unfocused, growled beneath his breath. His arms still wrapped around her like she needed protecting from the world. Or maybe like he needed her to hold him to it. “Don’t fucking talk to her like that.”
“Go to hell, Lynx. You knew, didn’t you? You’ve known all along. Is it yours?” I blew out a long, angry breath. “God, I’m such a fucking idiot!”
“It’s mine,” Dax said quietly, his face swelling from the punches he’d taken before Lynx had ended the fight in the most brutal way I’d ever seen. Which was saying something because I was no stranger to violence.
I stared at Dax. “Fuck. I really am an idiot. I should have known. From that day I saw you two talking on the steps in the house, I knew there was something between you. Yet I was stupid enough to believe your lies.” My gaze flitted to Nyah.
I’d avoided facing her because I knew how much it would hurt when I did.
I was right. Pain pierced through me. “You were pregnant when you came to the house. That’s why you were naked in my bed that first night, wasn’t it? Seduce Luca, the moron, so he’ll think the baby is his.”
Nyah shook her head, tears filling her eyes. “That’s not—”
“Not what? Not exactly what you wanted?”
Her shoulders sank. “I thought it was your father’s room. That’s the truth.”
I threw my hands up in exasperation. “Oh, that’s right! You never wanted me. It was my father you actually wanted to trap. That’s so much better.”
Nyah’s eyes grew cold. “Trap? No, Luca. If anyone was trapped, it was me and you know it. I never wanted to be in that house. Not for one second. I’m in love with Dax. He’s this baby’s father. I had a good life with him until—”
I couldn’t stand to hear another word come out of her mouth.
Not about how it was my father she’d lain naked for, rubbing her little clit and getting horny over taking him into her pussy.
Not about how she was in love with Dax or knocked up with his baby.
I didn’t want to see that it was still Lynx with his arms wrapped around her, her holding on to him like he was the one thing in this world that made her feel safe.
Jealousy ate away at me because I wanted to be all those things for her.
But she didn’t want them back.
I couldn’t stand here another minute. I took my phone from my pocket and started making calls. First to get us a ride out of here, then to the airport, booking four tickets on the first plane back to the States. All while the other three stared at me, none of them saying a word.
I didn’t know if they were in shock or what, but they couldn’t go to the airport like they were, clothes ripped and bloodied. Lynx, Nyah, and I all had our bags with us, since we’d come straight from the airport, but Dax had nothing.
“Do you have your passport?” I asked him, while the airport’s customer service rep pounded a keyboard in my ear.
Dax blinked, then nodded. “I was told to carry it with me as ID when you’re out of the country. But everything else is back at the hotel.”
I listened to the clerk confirm our flights and then hung up.
“Forget all of it,” I told Dax. “All you need is your passport. Everything else can be replaced.” I bent and rifled through my bag to pull out a set of fresh clothes.
“Here. Put these on. We’re probably the same size.
” I glanced over at Nyah and Lynx. “You two need to get changed as well. Now, before a car comes. Jesus fuck, Lynx, you’re covered in blood and you’re getting it all over her.
” I peered through the darkness, hoping for a spigot or, hell, a pond, or even a puddle would do.
Something with some water in it so we could soak a shirt and try to get some of the blood off him.
Of course, there was nothing.
Nyah moved out of his arms to find something in her bag. She came up victorious and tossed him a package of makeup-removing wipes. “That’s all I’ve got.”
She started putting on clean clothes, but Lynx just stood there, staring at her.
Even in the darkness, I could see the way his body trembled, shaking from head to toe.
Adrenaline crash. I knew the feeling well. Had gotten it many times myself after I’d put a bullet through the head of whoever my father had deemed unworthy of breathing.
But this seemed so much worse. Without Nyah to hold on to, Lynx looked like he was all up in his head, and I suspected there was more going on there than just whatever had happened tonight.
I didn’t have time for him to have a breakdown here. Or to even think about what he’d done to his victim’s back. Or that clearly Lynx was some sort of serial killer, if what that guard had said was true. The Lynx Killer? For fuck’s sake.
I’d given a serial killer a blow job.
“Lynx.” I snapped my fingers in front of his face, not giving a shit I was being an asshole. “You need to get changed. This car is going to be here any minute, and the ride share driver is not getting paid enough to be traumatized by a man who could have just walked out of a slasher movie.”
Lynx nodded, but whatever demons he fought in his head were winning. If it had been anyone else, I would have stepped in and slapped him.
But I couldn’t do that to Lynx.
Couldn’t fucking hurt him, even though he’d hurt me.
I fisted his T-shirt and dragged it over his head.
The blood had soaked through to his skin and was now drying and crusty.
He needed a shower, desperately, but that would have to wait until we got to the airport.
I grabbed a handful of the wipes and started working on his arms and face, the places that fresh clothes couldn’t cover.
The trembling only intensified. “I can do it,” he eventually got out, his words barely more than a mumble.
But his hands trembled so much I pushed them away. “Or you can just let me do it because my fingers are still working properly.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I didn’t want to hear his apologies. I wasn’t ready for them. Just hours before I’d had Nyah in my arms, Lynx watching the two of us, and I’d thought I’d had everything I wanted.
Only to find out the two of them had been working together behind my back, orchestrating the whole thing. I was angry, but more than anything, I was fucking hurt. And once again reminded that I had nobody. I never fucking had.
Except Isabella. “Shit!” I threw the fresh shirt I’d found for Lynx at him, hoping that now he’d had a moment he could at least dress himself.
I frantically called my sister, cursing when she didn’t pick up the phone.
What time was it there? It was night here in Scotland, but my brain was too scrambled to work out the time difference.
Would she be in school? I needed to slow down and think, but my panic was overwhelming.
“Luca?” Nyah asked. “Say words. What’s wrong?”
Apart from fucking everything?
“My sister,” I choked out. “It’ll be hours before I can get back to her. He’ll get to her.”
Dax shook his head. “It’ll be hours before your dad can get to her either. He’s got to make the same flight we do.”
He didn’t know my father. Or his connections.
“No, he’ll have men on their way out there now.
I broke the truce we had, where he left her alone.
Shit!” I paced the driveway, trying to call Mrs. Wilson, the elderly woman who I’d left to care for Isabella.
Now it was me who couldn’t get his fingers to work properly, and the phone slipped from my hands.
I scrambled around in the dark, searching for it on my knees, fighting off the urge to scream.
But below that, I wanted to fucking cry.
I hadn’t cried since I was a kid, and to do so now would be so incredibly weak.
Isabella loved her new life. She loved Mrs. Wilson and her school, and she had friends her own age for the first time ever.
And I was about to ruin all of that for her. Why the fuck had I said Nyah’s baby was mine? I could have just said nothing. Let her take the heat herself.
And yet I knew in my heart, I cared about her too much to do that. Fuck my stupid bleeding heart. Fuck these people. Fuck caring.
Nyah caught my hand as I stood. “What do you need?”
I stared down at her and her dark eyes that seemed so honest when she gazed back at me.
Like she actually truly cared, even though she’d more than proven tonight she didn’t.
But I had nobody else. “I need somewhere safe for my sister. That’s fucking it.
He’ll kill me as soon as we’re back on American turf.
I don’t care about that. All I care about is her. ”
Nyah’s mouth flattened into a concerned line.
But it was Lynx, who’d apparently snapped out of his adrenaline comedown enough to put on clothes, who picked up his phone. “I’m calling War.”
The president of the Slayers Motorcycle Club. A man I wasn’t exactly on the friendliest of terms with, and who was probably going to tell Lynx to go jump off a cliff before he helped me.
I opened my mouth to argue, but Lynx was already walking away, his voice clipped and stressed as he explained what had happened. He glanced back at me and then held the phone out. “Prez wants to talk to you.”
I reluctantly took the phone. “War.”
He didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “How long do I have to get her?”
I swallowed thickly. “Hours at best. He’s probably already got men headed there.”
“Can you call her? Get her to a safe place, somewhere they won’t immediately be able to find her? Buy me and my guys some time. We can get to her, but if your old man already has people on their way…”
As much as I desperately wanted War to go get her, I knew the man had kids of his own. Little ones. And so did a lot of the men in his club. Once upon a time, I wouldn’t have cared about that. It wouldn’t have even crossed my mind.
But the last year, of living in that tiny house with Mrs. Wilson and my sister, had changed me. It had softened something inside me to the point I could no longer just ruthlessly send an entire club full of men into a war I’d just caused.
Fucking hell. It had been so much easier when I hadn’t cared.
I clenched the phone harder. “If you do this, you’re picking a side. You’ll be just as much at war with my father as I am.”
War breathed heavily down the line. “What’s the alternative? I sit back and do nothing, and your father’s men drag your sister back to her husband to be raped over and over again? Lynx told me Carlos married her off to someone twice her age.”
Lorenzo was well more than twice Isabella’s age.
I forced out words that were hard to say. “She’s just a kid, War. They’ll punish her to punish me.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re well versed in how men like that work. Though I use the term ‘men’ loosely. Fucking spineless pricks.”
“I’ll owe you,” I added on, not sure what else to say. “I can pay. Or owe a favor. I don’t fucking care. I just need someone to get her and keep her safe until I can get her out of Saint View.”
War’s voice came back steady. “You don’t owe me for this. I’ll get guys on their way. Just get me an address of wherever she’ll be. I’ll have her by the time you get off the plane.”
Relief poured in so fast it shook my knees. Words I wasn’t used to saying tumbled out. “Thank you.”
“This is a colossal mess, you know that right, Guerra?”
I knew. Fucking hell did I know.
I’d call Mrs. Wilson until she answered. Tell her to go to one of her kid’s places to hide until it was safe. Then I’d call the school and tell them to send Isabella home with her best friend, Elsie. War could pick her up from there.
I passed the phone back to Lynx, and he put it on speaker so we could all hear War’s questions.
“Guerra, you got a safe house or something?” The Slayers’ prez asked. “What’s your plan here? I can keep her here until you get back, but beyond that…”
I didn’t know. I didn’t have a single fucking clue. Wherever I went, he’d find me. And if he killed me, my sister would be on her own again. Just like she had been when I’d let my father marry her off in the first place.
Lynx looked at me and saw it written all over my face. He was the one who answered War in a strong, clear voice, not a hint of hesitation. “Take her back to the clubhouse. When we get back to the States, I’m bringing my people home.”
Anger swarmed inside me once more. Because Lynx calling me one of his people was rich. “Not your fucking person.”
He might have been helping me now, but that was only because he and Nyah were the ones who’d caused this whole fucking mess in the first place.
As soon as I got back to Saint View, I was getting my sister and getting the hell out of there. Coming back had been a mistake.
Catching feelings for Nyah and Lynx had been a bigger one.