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WRAITH
W hen I found Hallie and Lottie, I remember this profound wish that I’d come home to them sooner. It didn’t even matter when the autopsy results showed they’d been dead for practically as long as I’d been out of the house.
This time, I’m taking no chances.
But I know this for sure: if Marco has harmed one hair on either Raven’s or Fen’s head, then he dies.
Fuck, I’m gonna kill him just for scaring the shit out of my woman.
Not one of the five men in the club thought I was overreacting when I received Raven’s message and yelled for them all to get on their bikes.
And while Butcher, Smoke, Catfish, Grudge, and Atom are riding with me, it’s going to be mano-a-mano between me and Marco when I get there.
My bike is finely tuned. I’m gunning it at the absolute top of its speed. We hug the curves of the road, taking the racing line.
Fuck formations.
I blast past Tanner and don’t even look back to see if he’s getting in his cop car to follow us.
Might be better for Marco if he does. I have to avoid killing the fucker in front of a cop if I don’t want to serve time.
Hell, I’m willing to do time either way if he’s hurt Raven or Fen.
But beneath my mental bravado, I need to admit there is a part of me terrified I’m going to arrive to a bloodbath.
When we pull up outside, I abandon my bike and race to her door. I don’t need to knock. Though this is the first time I’ve used it, I kept the second key when I installed new locks on the door for her.
I let myself in and run up the stairs, only to find the man I assume is Marco sitting on the recliner, with no sign of Fen or Raven.
“Where the fuck are they?” I say, lunging at the man and getting three solid blows to his face before he has a chance to raise his fists to shield his head.
“What the?—”
I stand and tug him out of the chair, then drop him to the floor in time to see the bedroom door open and hear Fen cry out from the bathroom.
“Wraith,” Raven cries, and she hurries to me with such speed that I’m almost knocked off-balance when she throws her arms around me. “He has a gun.”
And he’s about to draw it when Smoke comes in and kicks Marco in the side of the head.
The man howls in pain.
“You okay?” I ask Raven as I press a kiss to the top of her head.
“This has nothing to do with you,” Marco cries out with a whimper.
I glare at him. “Pretty sure it does when you scare the shit out of my woman.”
“Mom,” Fen cries from the bathroom.
“Go to him,” I say. “He must be fucking terrified.”
“What are you going to do to him?” Raven asks.
“I’m going to have a little word. You and Fen don’t need to see it.”
“But I should?—”
“Do as I say, Blue.”
She looks as though she’s about to argue for a heartbeat, but then she turns to the bathroom.
“Good girl,” I say.
I wait until she’s gone, while the rest of my brothers appear at the top of the stairs.
“Do we need a tarp?” Smoke asks. “Because I’m too fucking tired to get blood out of floorboards today.”
I shake my head. I don’t know where the line is. Part of me wants to kill the fucker. Part of me wants to hand him over to the Bratva and hope for some peace for a while. Part of me remembers he’s Fen’s dad, and what kind of future am I going to have with Fen when he asks what happened to his father?
Marco climbs to his knees. He looks once, to take in who just hit him, then looks again, this time at my cut.
I can tell the moment he realizes he fucked with the wrong people.
Again.
“Let’s get him outside. Fen doesn’t need to hear any of this.”
I grab his leg and drag him down the stairs by his ankle. His limbs flail. He tries to grab hold of the stair rail, to fight me. But nothing is going to prevent the back of his head from smacking on every wooden step.
“What the… please…let me…ahh.”
His words come out punctuated by groans and moans.
Atom laughs. “Look at the fucker bounce.”
“Those hips don’t lie,” Catfish sings.
Marco’s phone falls out of his pocket, and Atom stamps on it, smashing the screen.
I can’t help but grin. We manage to get him out the door without being seen and drag him into the alley behind the store.
Unused cardboard is stacked up next to the dumpster. Tenacious weeds grow up through cracks in the concrete. Best of all? It’s deserted.
There is a small stack of wooden pallets, and I shove him down to sit on them.
“He’s gonna shit himself,” Grudge says.
Butcher chuckles. “We talking about Wraith or the fucker on the pallets?”
I glare at my president for a second before returning to Marco.
“You want to tell me why you’re here when I told you explicitly to leave her alone?”
His eye is already puffy, red, and streaming. “She’s my fucking wife.”
Just hearing those words from his lips set my teeth on edge. I hate that she was with him first. I hate more that he left her with battered self-worth.
“Every time you forget to say ‘ ex ’ in front of ‘wife,’ I’m gonna pull a fingernail from your hand with pliers. She’s your ex -fucking-wife.” I look at Atom. “Hold his hand down?”
“Just let me go,” Marco says as he tries to fight Atom’s hold, but no one can get out of Atom’s solid grip. “I need to get out of here.”
Butcher climbs behind him on the pallet, putting his skull in a headlock. Marco’s face goes red as he still persists.
“Who, specifically, did you con?” I ask as he fights and contorts his body, but he stands no chance.
“Fuck you,” he spits.
“No thanks, I’d rather fuck your ex-wife. Who did you con?”
He snarls at me, and I tip my head to Atom. “Keep his hand down.” I pull the pliers from my cut and grip his thumbnail.
Marco tries to fight, but I rip it out, and he lets out a guttural scream.
I toss the fingernail into the dumpster. “You got nineteen more nails, and I have all fucking day. So, I’m gonna ask again. Who showed up at your house looking for you, after you ran and left your wife and kid home alone to face them?”
“I didn’t know they’d do that,” he says, a bubble of snot escaping his nose.
Butcher snatches his arm from around his throat. “Jesus. Got his fucking boogers on me.” He pulls his knife from its sheath and puts the tip right up against Marco’s neck. “Move around now, fucker. I dare you.”
Marco stills. The knife tip scratches his neck enough to make it bleed.
“Now that we’ve got your attention, talk,” I say.
“The Bratva. The Zakharovs.”
Atom sucks in air between his teeth and tongue. “Fuck.”
I’m still reeling. Unlike the Mafia, which tends to spread power among the five famiglias and their cutthroat version of respect, the Bratva is run by one unyielding family.
The Zakharovs.
Rurik Zakharov is their leader. But he has seven sons who have all infiltrated senior positions.
If Marco pissed those guys off, it’s a wonder Raven escaped.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“It’s high-risk investment. They loved when it was hitting high, but then the markets tanked. I told them it would rebound. But they want their money back. I brought in other clients, was trying to use that money to pay them back, but…”
“You started a fucking Ponzi scheme, you low-life piece of shit,” Smoke says.
Marco looks up with pleading eyes. “I can fix it, if I get some capital to work with. But they wanted all their cash, and I don’t have it. Can’t liquidate everything I have fast enough.”
I huff. “Don’t look at me like I’m giving it to you. How much do you owe them?”
“Seventeen million.”
“Fuck,” Grudge says. “We don’t need to kill him. The Zakharovs will find him, no matter where he runs.”
If it had been a hundred thousand, I might have pulled the cash together and paid the Bratva directly to get them off Raven’s back. But seventeen million…
No one has that kind of money kicking around.
And even if I did, I still wouldn’t hand it to the Bratva to get this sniveling heap of shit out of trouble.
Then I smell it. The piss stains his trousers.
“Fuck’s sake,” Butcher says. “Some men are literally a walking cum-stain.”
“What do you want to do with him?” Atom asks.
“One day, Fen’s gonna ask me what happened to his dad. Don’t want the answer to be that I gutted him in the back alley while Fen was in the apartment upstairs.”
Smoke slaps my shoulder. “Wise move. Want me to do it for you?”
“No,” Marco says. “Please. No. I’ll leave.”
“Why did you even come here in the first place? How did you know Raven was here?”
Marco looks down at the ground. “A friend who does contract work tracing phones for the cops. I just wanted to drive her back to Seattle.”
“And then what?”
Marco shakes his head, so I slap him hard to get his attention.
“Fuck,” he shouts. “Okay. I was going to tell her to go into the house and get what I needed while I…”
I’ve got the picture. “You were going to keep Fen with you to make her do it, weren’t you?”
Marco snaps. “Fen’s too much of a pussy to do it on his own, so of course I’d ask her to do it.”
My fist is in his stomach before I even realize. “Fen’s not a pussy, he’s a fucking five-year-old kid who deserves to be protected and loved, not abandoned and used, you fuck.”
I could kill him for not seeing his own son as he is.
Tears flood Marco’s eyes. “I’m desperate. If I get arrested, I’m screwed. If the Bratva find me, I’m screwed.”
“Yeah, well. You met me and now you’re still screwed.” I think for a moment. “I want three things to happen in the next month. One, you’ll sign the divorce papers and make no contest to anything she asks for in the settlement. Two, you’ll sign over your legal rights to Fen. You left that kid to face the Bratva and were about to use him as a hostage to coerce Raven into helping you break?—”
“I didn’t know they’d?—”
The contact between my fist and his jaw rattles my bones. Marco’s head spins, and he spits blood as he moves.
“Don’t fucking interrupt me. You left your wife and kid unarmed and alone against an enemy you knew you were in epic shit with and who knew where you lived. You don’t deserve either of them, so I’m taking them from you.”
Marco reaches for his jaw and winces. “You can’t…just take…my family.” The words are mumbled. Guess I broke the fucker’s face.
I take my gun out of its holster, jam it under the jaw I’m certain I broke, and shove it hard. “I’m taking them or your life, your call. And I get them both either way.”
He tries to hold my gaze, but like any dog when he knows he’s beaten, he looks away. “Fine.”
“Good. And three, you’ll never contact Raven or Fen again. Everything can go through lawyers, and you better not ever step foot in Colorado.”
Marco nurses the thumb I ripped the nail out of. It’s bleeding. Not so much that it’s a messy cleanup, but enough that it’s seeped down to his palm. “I won’t.”
I snatch my gun from his jaw and re-holster it. “Oh, and if you have any thoughts that so long as you get away from here, from me, you won’t have to follow through on any of what we just discussed, know this: There are Iron Outlaws chapters in every state. We’re a bigger presence in the continental United States than the Bratva. Fuck me over in any way, and we’ll chop you up into pieces.”
“Can we kick him about a bit before we let him go?” Atom asks.
I nod. “Do what you want. Just make sure he can drive out of here.” I look to Butcher. “Could you follow him out? I need to check on my family.”
Butcher nods. “Felt like taking a long ride today anyway. We’ll get him a hundred miles from here.”
And knowing my brothers have got my back, I go and find some peace with Raven and Fen.
Table of Contents
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- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39 (Reading here)
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