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Chapter Fourteen
Alexandra
“How many more times are you going to do that?”
I straighten, wiping my face. There’s perspiration on my forehead and my vision swirls at the edges. “Probably a lot more times before the night is over.”
In the distance, drunken laughter fills the gaps between the sounds of a pumping rock band. More than once, there’s the sound of a gun firing skyward. Cars, motorcycles, trucks, a few SUVs with black-tinted windows all line this long stretch of driveway off a country road in the mountains east of Sacramento. We’re on the borderland between the dry Central Valley and the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains, but it was long ago that we crossed the border between sane and insane. It smells like sage brush, dry pine, and sulfur. Because this might actually be hell.
No, it is. It definitely is.
“Wife? If you’re feeling ill, we can get back on my bike and I can take you home. Nothing is more important to me than your health.”
He says it so easily, so casually, that it makes me even more nauseous. I turn back to the base of the scrappy pine I was just kneeling against, and spit up a little.
It’s sick. But what twists me up even more is that there’s a part of me deep down that shivered in a not-unhappy way at hearing those words.
“I hate you so much right now,” I say.
“What is it, my love? Tell me, and we’ll figure it out. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”
There’s a smirk on his face that I want to smack off with the thick end of a baseball bat. Dixon laughed his ass off the moment we left Seraphina and Kyle’s bar, having agreed to pretend to assume the fake identities of the couple of nomad, free agent biker hitmen named Lars ‘Bison’ Buckowski and Maria ‘Destiny’ Delray.
“You want to know what you can do? Go to hell.”
“You think it’s heaven, being married to you?” He says, then pauses, just long enough for me to open my mouth to retort, but not long enough for me to actually speak. “Because it is. Still wish you would’ve taken my name along with taking my heart.”
“I like to think Maria, as dumb as she was for falling for you, was at least smart enough to hold on to some shred of dignity by not taking your name.”
“Getting married to you was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Dixon says, grinning, as we walk along the stretch of driveway toward the gated compound in the distance. Even this far away, it’s clear the security is intense. Besides the walls topped with barbed wire, there are two men toting guns in holsters on their waist out front, watching our approach like a pair of hawks with a hard-on for murder.
“You know, we’re not even there yet. You don’t have to talk like this.”
“How can I fight it? Love is just such an overpowering emotion. It guides my life. It’s… destiny.”
What remains of my lunch rises in my throat. “I hate you.”
“Hate you, too, princess.” The words slide off his tongue with an ease that sounds forced. “Shame you got a stripper’s name for a fake identity. Yet, it suits you, Destiny.”
I stay silent. I can’t speak. The only thing that wants to come out of my mouth right now is vomit.
Which gives me an idea.
I turn and look down at his boots — they’re genuine leather and glisten like they’ve been freshly shined. They mean something to him. And it’d mean something to me to soil them with a bit of…
“Don’t you fucking dare, or I will give our identities away as soon as we get to those guards,” he says, as if reading my mind.
“You wouldn’t.”
“I’ve still got that death wish, remember?”
“You really don’t care about the truth?”
He shrugs, his eyes forward and on the gate as we draw closer. The two guards both have their hands on their weapons. We’re in range, and any mistakes now — intentional or not — will be fatal. “I do. But don’t think there isn’t a part of me that wouldn’t derive some serious satisfaction from seeing that shocked look on your face just before the end. Might make the whole mess worth it.”
“You’re insane.”
“No, but I hate you enough that it just might be worth dying for.” His voice drops low, burns with warning. “You need to decide now, princess: are you going to cooperate, or are you going to test me to see how far I’ll go?”
