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It took another hour in Sunday traffic on I-81 to get home, but once she was there and her finds were put away, she realized that…she had no other ambition for the day. Now that she wasn’t out and about with things to distract her troubled mind, she was left with oh so many thoughts, none of which were good.
She didn’t want to go into her room because the sheets on her bed still smelled like Patriot. She didn’t want to sit on her couch because she still remembered how he’d dined on her just a few days ago while she’d been trying to watch Dean and Sam stalk a demonic scarecrow. But, realistically, she couldn’t just stand in the middle of her house and do nothing.
Biting back tears of frustration, she nearly came out of her skin when her cell pinged a notification. Clutching at her chest, she felt the frantic pounding of her heart under her palm. Swallowing, she dug her cell out of her where she’d dropped it, and checked the screen.
Patriot: I know I have a lot to make up for and I will. Trust me, baby.
She stared at the words, blinking, then re-reading them.
Trust me.
What the hell did that mean? Trust him about what? His intentions? That he hadn’t lied to her for weeks, or that his behavior at Cool Hands was out of character? How much more trust did he expect from a woman he continued to let down? A woman who’d been repeatedly burned by his club—mostly the women—and him.
I have a lot to make up for….
And I will….
He certainly did…but how exactly was he going to make up for humiliating her in front of his MC friends and their bitches? How was he going to fix the cracks in her heart that she’d barely mended before she’d met him? She’d spent most of her life not belonging anywhere, then she’d met Stephie and realized she wasn’t the only one who felt like that. She’d pushed through, made a life for herself, but still felt like she was on the outside of everything. Then she met Patriot, and she’d been introduced to the Unchained. And while she was having the time of her life, living for the first time in her twenty-two years, the club was just tolerating her—if the Slutketeers were telling the truth. But even if they weren’t, the truth was that Patriot…had felt like home.
And now that home was crumbling around her, teetering on the edge of a cliff.
Suddenly furious, her body trembling with the urge to scream, to hit something, to throw her new desk lamp against a wall, she lifted her cell, dialed the number, then waited for him to answer.
One, two, three…four rings later, he answered.
“Baby, now’s not the time?—”
“No,” she snapped, ignoring the rush and butterfly flutters in her tummy she always got at the sound of his deep, sex and whiskey voice. “You listen here, jerk face.” She wanted to stop at the sound of his grunt, but she just kept right on, like she hadn’t just insulted a badass biker. “I am sick and freaking tired of being pushed aside with silence and lame ass excuses. If you aren’t man enough to come to me, face to face, and explain your bullshit from Cool Hands, then I don’t want to hear anything else you have to say.” She was on a roll—her heart racing, her chest heaving with her accelerated breathing, and her voice rising, she was having an out of body experience. “You have a lot to make up for? You’re going to make it up to me, Patriot? You want me to trust you?” With every word, her voice rose until she was shrieking into the phone. “You can’t make up for years of feeling like the ugly, fat, unworthy, unlovable neighborhood trash. You can’t make up for all those months of me feeling like you and I had something special, and then ripping that away from me when the truth about you and Jaime finally slapped me in the face, courtesy of your friendly club bitches,” she nearly sobbed, her heart aching, but she continued. “You cannot make up for the embarrassment and degradation I experienced in that bathroom the night the Slutketeers made it plain that I wasn’t welcome at the club. And you cannot make up for the betrayal and absolute furious agony I felt when you let those same women tear down, piece by piece, every bit of me that I’d spent years trying to rebuild. Because you were too busy protecting the ‘club’s business’ to protect me.”
To add to her frustration, tears slipped down her face, but she whipped them away.
“I don’t trust you, Patriot. I can’t,” she rasped, her words barely audible to her own ears.
Once she was done, it was like her bones gave up on her, and she collapsed onto the coffee table, her heart thundering in the silence of the room.
And it was silent because Patriot hadn’t spoken a word.
But he was there…she could hear movement and murmuring voices in the background. She wanted to care where he was and what he was doing, but she was fresh out of fucks.
Sighing, she opened her mouth to speak, to end the farce of whatever they were for good, but a man’s blood curdling screams made her blood run cold.
“Patriot? What?—”
“Got to go, baby,” he interrupted, irritation clear in his tone. “But we are not fucking done talking about this. I will make it all up to you, I will prove that you can trust me, or I will hand you my kutte and let you set it on fire. I promise you. I swear it on my life, Cilla. Be ready.” He hung up, and she gaped. Shocked.
His kutte? But…that was everything to a member of an MC, right up there with his bike and his balls. Why would he swear on something as important as his Unchained kutte if he were just using her, playing with her?
God…what the hell was she going to do? She didn’t know how long she stood there, staring at her silent cellphone, she only knew that, eventually, she needed to…get ready.
But for what?
SEVENTEEN
Cursing at Cilla’s timing, then stashing his cell in his back pocket, Patriot sneered down at the waste of human fleshed zip-tied to the metal folding chair in the small shed out behind the Unchained clubhouse. The clubhouse sat on twenty acres of flat land just outside of Kingston. The property had been a bitch to fence in but worth it, because when the club got down to dirty business, they needed to be sure their business was just that—their business. No one in Kingston needed to know that the club that was all legit as shit on the outside was hiding a dark and deadly underbelly.
“Come on, man! I was just doing what I was paid to do—I wasn’t really gonna hurt nobody!” Roger Adams screamed as Horde planted another fork in the man’s already tenderized thigh.
Horde, the sick, sadistic fuck, called this form of torture “forking fun”. The forks were heavy, solid steel with four tines the sicko had filed down into sharp points, like four tiny stilettoes, with a swirling floral pattern on the handle…because he’d bought from an estate sale, so they were previously owned by some old Jewish lady who liked putting on formal dinners.
