Chapter 19
Grace throws me a murderous look as I approach. “Why am I still handcuffed? I’m not a threat, Decker. Take these things off me.”
I arch a brow. “I don’t know, Grace. Feels like every time you and I have words, you’re spewing some kind of threat from that pretty mouth of yours.”
She scoffs. “Ditto, asshole. But at least I’m not trying to get your clothes off while I do it.”
A humorless laugh escapes me. “You left me naked in a field.”
“And you fucked me and then threatened my life. I don’t think that’s the same.”
“Fine. Get up.” I unlock the cell door and slam it shut behind me, ensuring it locks.
As she stands, her eyes flash to the small area in front of the bars, to the camera in the back corner.
Smiling, I turn her around and work at unlocking her cuffs. “Cameras are off,” I whisper in her ear.
Goose bumps rush over her neck as my breath hits her skin. Fuck, I want to trace them with my fingers. Follow them to her shoulders and along the ridge of her spine. I want my hands on her, exploring every inch, tracing paths over every divot, every freckle, mapping the lines of ink on her skin.
My dick twitches. Yeah. Definitely not out of my system.
Teeth gritted, I release her from her restraints and step back.
She’s slow to face me, her attention on her wrists as she rubs the ruts the cuffs left behind, her usual expression in place. Furrowed brows, tight jaw, eyes narrowed and untrusting.
“That was completely unnecessary,” she says, her focus finally drifting up to my face.
“Which part?”
“All of it.” She moves forward a pace and crosses her arms. “How can you just stand there and let that asshole do whatever he wants? Regardless of your relationship with the club, with Axe, it’s not right, and you know it.”
She doesn’t get it. Letting Allen run around without a leash isn’t an easy thing to swallow.
And while I won’t lose sleep over the beating he’s likely laying out on Axe right now, I’m certainly not on board with his tactics.
He’s stirring shit up that’s best left in the dirt.
Bending the law more than what even I’m comfortable with, at least out in the open.
And he’s made bringing down the Donovan empire part of some personal vendetta.
I can’t see this ending well for the Sinners, which means it won’t end well for me.
Like Axe said, my usefulness may have run its course.
He ends up dead or in jail, my fucking life is over.
I smile. “I don’t really care what’s right.”
She shakes her head. “I’m disappointed in you, in who you’ve become.”
A weight settles in my stomach, pulling it down, a sickness of sorts churning my guts. It shouldn’t fucking matter what she thinks. She’s Jack’s sister. Axe’s sister. Wears my enemy’s last name like a fucking badge of honour.
I shouldn’t give a shit. I shouldn’t care that I’m a disappointment to her.
I can’t. I won’t.
I am who I am. I made my bed. And now every night, I get to sleep in it. Next to Emily’s ghost. Heavy with the burden of the lives I’ve taken, the uniform I’ve betrayed.
The badge I wear is not one I wear with honour.
“And stop looking at me like that,” she snaps.
“How am I looking at you?” I angle closer, dropping my voice. “Like I know how wet you get when I’ve got my hand around your throat?” I bridge the small gap between us with a step. “What you look like when you come? What your pussy tastes like, what it feels like wrapped around my dick?”
Her face stays passive, but her body tilts slightly towards me, her breath hitching. She’s so damn easy to read. Right in front of my eyes, her mind’s going to the same place mine’s been since that first night I touched her. Since the first night I saw her, really.
“Yes.”
“Well, I know all those things, so it’s a bit hard not to look at you like that.”
She fists her hands at her sides. “Try harder.”
I smile. “You know, that was good what you did for Kat. Not letting Murphy get to her. You took one for the team. Almost like you actually give a shit.”
“Of course I give a shit. These people are my family, Linc.”
I arch a brow. “Then why all the secrets?”
She cuts me a glare. “You know why. Axe finds out what I’ve been up to, he could for real kill me. And just so we’re clear. None of the Sinner women will end up in a cell with any of you assholes. Not if I can help it.”
I hum. “And I’m sure they’ll appreciate that. That’s where you can focus, Grace. After what you did for Kat, you’ve surely earned their trust. With any luck, that’ll give you access to information that might be useful to me.”
Her eyes narrow with distaste.
“Allen might be a piece of shit,” I say, “but he’s on to something. The Sinner women know way more than they should, so whatever they tell you, you tell me. Got it?”
She grits her teeth. “You think Allen is a piece of shit? Look in the fucking mirror, Linc.”
Sighing, I pull a cell phone from my pocket. This is the reason I came down here. I unlock it and open the messaging app. “Why don’t you get off your high horse. You’re no better than me. This look familiar?”
I flash her the screen, showing her the text dated almost two weeks ago. You want your shit? Then come get it, asshole.
“From where I’m standing, it kind of looks like you sent a drug-dealing biker to my fucking house.”
She swallows audibly, but she doesn’t respond.
Anger rises like bile in my esophagus. “What was the plan, exactly? Have him steal back the shit you stole so you could get square with them? Then what? He kills me?”
“Of course not. I thought?—”
“Thought what? That we’d just have a nice, calm conversation about the money and the kilo of fucking coke he’s after?”
“No. I just… I just thought you’d scare him off, all right? I figured he’d see the uniform and back off.” She tilts her head. “How… do you have his phone?”
“Oh, Keegan and I had a very long conversation.” I pocket the device. “Why don’t we talk about why he’s really after you. What you did to his brother.”
Grace sucks in a sharp gulp of air and shrinks back. “I… what do you mean?”
Men like Keegan, like Axe and Jack, like any of the Sinners, they’re all the same.
Loyal to the patch. They’d die before betraying it, before revealing anything that might put their club in jeopardy.
I respect it. It’s a hell of a way to live.
But with the right kind of pressure, they’ll crumble.
Find the right button to push, and these assholes will fold, tell you anything you want to know.
For the Raiders’ enforcer, the man who broke into my house and put a knife to my throat, it took some time, but he folded eventually.
Applying pressure. I’m good at that. Knife to bone, fire to skin, fist to face. It took a bit of prying, but over the years I’ve found that it’s the idea of permanence that really gets these guys. Pain is nothing. Pain is temporary. But permanent damage?
The man really didn’t like it when I cut off his finger.
The second and third were probably overkill, but I wanted to prove a point. Don’t fucking come for me. He got my message.
Grace stands a little taller, regaining her composure. “What exactly did you two talk about?”
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done? They know who you are now. Who your family is. You murdered the VP of a rival MC, and then you came here. That’s an act of war. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I was thinking I didn’t want to die,” she snaps.
“You should have considered that before you killed him.”
“I didn’t have a choice. You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me. And it better be a damn good reason, because South Bay is about to become a warzone. And you were the catalyst.”
Lips pursed, she steps back and hugs her middle, like she’s trying to shield herself from my questions. I know the look. Whatever she’s hiding, she’s planning on taking it to her grave.
No one talks. No one cooperates. The instinct was built into her DNA.
But it’s all about pressure.
“He offered me a deal, you know.” I slip my hands into my pockets and rock back on my heels.
Her eyes narrow to slits, but she only clamps her jaw shut harder.
“I keep what you stole, pocket the cash and offload the drugs myself, and he gets you. I deliver you, and they walk away. No harm, no foul.”
Grace goes back to where she came from, there’s no biker war, no gunfire, no bodies. South Bay is safe, and I come out of it with a little extra money in my pocket.
Then maybe she’d finally be out of my system.
The problem is that little part of me that won’t fucking die.
That little tug, the weight pulling on my stomach.
Along with that other feeling. With the understanding of what they’d do to her came that tightness in my chest. Blood-boiling, pulse-throttling, need-to-kill-something kind of rage. I couldn’t turn it off.
“You wouldn’t,” she says, her face paling. “I know you wouldn’t.”
I cock my head, swallowing down the sickness creeping up my throat. “You sure?”
She’s not. She’s been feeling me out. Trying to understand what kind of man I am, waiting for me to be something I’m not.
It’s finally starting to dawn on her. Grace is scared.
She believes me when I say I’m about to hand her over to a group of men who will give her what I know will be a very brutal death.
“Tell me, Gracie,” I say, voice dropping in warning as I step closer.
She doesn’t back away, but by the way her shoulders round and her eyes dart, she wants to.
“Tell me why you brought this mess home with you.”
A small sob racks her body, and she drops her eyes. When a tear runs down her cheek, I have to physically stop myself from wiping it away. “Broedy… Keegan’s brother, I was his old lady. And he—he put me on the block, okay? And I couldn’t…” She takes a breath. “If you don’t know what that is?—”
My stomach lurches. “I know what it means.”
In an MC, women are property. That can mean a lot of things to the men who think they own them.
Including gifting your old lady to the club.
A woman gets put on the block, and those assholes take it as a free pass to do whatever the hell they want.
Fuck her, beat her. Anything goes. It’s violent and brutal, and the women are rarely willing participants.
Axe has never pulled shit like that. I don’t think Jimmy ever allowed it either. But other clubs? Yeah. It happens.
“Of course you know what it means,” Grace snarls. “It’s what your father did to my mother, isn’t it?”
An icy sort of feeling bites at my chest. Yeah.
It’s exactly what he did. When the sperm donor who fathered me was chased out of town, he lost his woman and his club in one breath.
He wanted vengeance. So he rolled in, took Grace’s mother, the woman he claimed still belonged to him, and handed her over to his new MC.
It’s why Jimmy took off, why he packed up his family and left all this shit behind.
“Grace—”
“Screw you, Decker,” she says, voice quiet but angry. “You let them take me, and you’re just as bad as he was. No. You’re worse. Because you’re doing it for what? A little cash?” She jams her finger into my shoulder and pushes me back. “Fuck. You.”
The quiet that shrouds us is near deafening.
She’s right. I’d be just like him. Just like all the men I tell myself I hate. The last strike against my soul.
Obviously, that was never my plan. This numbness, this indifference when it comes to taking a life.
It wasn’t like that when I forced myself to imagine handing her over.
Dread swamped me first. Then fear. I wanted to throw up.
I couldn’t fucking breathe. Not when her face kept flashing in my head.
That pretty little smile. That scowl she wears every time she looks at me.
With a sigh, I rub my hand over my mouth. “Keegan is dead.”
It’s more than right versus wrong. Just the thought of Grace with them, what they’d have done, was like a hole punching through my chest.
So yeah. I got what I needed out of Keegan, and then I put a bullet in his head. Well. Maybe I made him hurt a little beforehand. He put his hands on her. He hurt her. So maybe I got a little… overzealous with my cutting.
Grace swallows, eyes locked with mine, searching, as more of those tears drop. “How?”
“It wasn’t quick, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You… killed him.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I… I don’t know,” I admit. “But I couldn’t let them have you.”
She’s quiet a long moment, like she’s thinking, processing. Eventually, she clears her throat. “What the hell was the point of this conversation? If you wanted to scare me, to show me who’s in charge, then you win. I get it.”
“No, you don’t.” I tilt her face up, angling closer.
She doesn’t understand what I’ve done. “I killed him, and all his club is gonna see is that one of their men died chasing you into enemy territory. A Sinner. Keegan might be gone, but that doesn’t mean you’re safe.
In fact, it means you’re in more danger.
We all are. The point of this conversation was to help me understand if the fucking shitstorm I just dropped at our doorstep was worth it. ”
She lets out a long, shaky breath. “Well? Was it?”
Another moment where I was sitting at a crossroads, waiting for a sign, something to tell me what to do. It wasn’t all that hard this time.
We’ve got a connection. A twisted little history, where the deadbeat I came from raised her, threw her around, put her mom up on the block and handed her over to a group of violent men.
The girl who hid in my treehouse to get away from him, who I share a sibling with.
The woman I can’t seem to keep away from.
Maybe this is my atonement. Like with Emily, when I carved up the man who took her life. The atonement I’m still paying for.
Throwing Grace to the wolves was never an option. Protecting her, keeping her safe. It’s just something I need to do.
“Yeah, Gracie. You’re well worth the blood I spilled.
But now we got a bigger problem. You might have started this, but I just hammered the last nail into the coffin.
And the Sinners, your brothers, have no fucking clue what’s coming.
What I did was a fucking war crime, and the Raiders will retaliate. ”