Page 19

I was a Wolverine the second I was born, raised and groomed to be a weapon. I didn’t just use guns and knives but words. Threats, purrs, shouts, whatever it took to survive. If I had to use my body, fine. If I had to play parts, fine. And I did it all for my father.
I did everything for my father. I was everything. I was his little girl. He was my hero.
But now, as I sat there tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse with a man who could snap an arm like a twig, that had changed.
I never thought of leaving. Never thought of even considering anything outside of the Wolverines. What I could be outside of Walter Bates’s shadow. What I could be beyond a psycho bitch.
I could be a better leader, that was what. I could do a better job running the club than my father.
Walter Bates’s glory days were legendary, sealed with blood and fire. But when we rolled into Reno and started trying to swallow the town whole, he lost sight of his own principles that the Wolverines were built on. He used to walk the line between brutality and progress. He brought in those who needed a home and gave them one. If the violence didn’t move him forward, it wasn’t worth it.
Now?
Now, violence was an impulse he couldn’t resist. It had become his nature—and his obsession.
Ever since he killed William Black and Jackson Black returned, he’d been obsessed with making the Devil’s Luck bleed until the streets ran red. And I helped him. I did despicable things to their members. Two of them were several months pregnant at this point, and Father still wanted them dead.
I prided myself on my heartlessness. But that was a line not to be crossed.
“You might be loyal to Daddy, but you’re looking for a way out. You want this whole thing to burn down, don’t you?”
Knox’s words came back to haunt me. They set my teeth on edge—he had set my teeth on edge. What a cocky, know-it-all bastard who didn’t know what he was getting himself into.
“You go back to him now,” he had said with such intensity that it had sent a shiver down my spine, “and he’s gonna make an example out of you.”
And he ended up being right.
“I don’t have a choice,” I had told him.
And I had been right too.
Vane leaned back in the chair, his massive arms crossed. I glanced up, then back at the chipped tile.
“Bullshit. You always have a choice.”
I hated that the Devil was right. I hated that he had shone a damn spotlight on the feelings that had been festering in my soul for months.
If I wanted to get out of this life, I had to do it cunningly and slowly.
Vane’s low but booming voice startled me out of my thoughts. “Your old man do this shit often?”
The nonthreatening question disarmed me for the briefest moment. I looked up at him. “What?”
He was still playing with his blade—threatening. Vane pointed it at me and the chair I was bound to. “Tie you up and leave you for the dogs?”
I considered not entertaining any kind of conversation, then said coolly, “First time.”
Vane’s smile was Joker-like. He kept his eyes pinned on me as he rested the edge of the knife on his knuckles.
And then cut his own skin open. I watched a line of blood ooze from the slices and slide down his hand.
Who the fuck is this guy? Where did my father find him? Better yet, after finding him, why did he decide to hire him?
I knew it wasn’t just to be a bodyguard. My father, even if he was losing his mind, wouldn’t have hired this brute if it wasn’t for a bigger, more deadly purpose.
The lighting in the office shifted as the sun set over the distant skyline. Only the dull fluorescents provided illumination, buzzing faintly like they might give out any minute. It cast an ugly yellow sheen over Vane as he sheathed the knife in his boot—as he moved toward me in slow, measured steps and made me feel a sharp pang of something I hadn’t felt in a long-ass time.
Fear.