Wrath was the kind of biker who’d been adopted into it. Raised by two alcoholic parents, mum a stripper and dad the bouncer at a nightclub, he came from rough and learned early that the easiest way out of poverty was to channel his sheer size—six foot six at the age of sixteen and fully grown—as a tool to lend to the gangs that ruled the streets. He started as a lowly enforcer for the Triad, the Chinese crime syndicate, and then quickly discovered the appeal of a Harley between his thighs, prospecting for Berserkers at the age of eighteen and now, twelve years later, he was VP. This was no little thing given his youth and it was directly correlated to the amount of blood he’d shed with those hammer-like fists and the amount of blood he’d saved from being let within their own ranks thanks to his above-the-average-biker IQ.
As if this wasn’t terrifying enough, Wrath was good looking. You think there isn’t something threatening about beauty, you haven’t seen it, not really. There is so much power in a pretty thing, in its capacity to rule your thoughts and puppeteer your actions. It’s a shiny thing and we’re all just crows, helpless against its appeal.
Wrath was one of the shiniest things I’d ever seen, so beautiful it was terrifying and so terrifying it was, to someone who appreciated such things, beautiful. I’d never seen a bigger man, not even my goliath dad was as tall and carved from granite muscle, but all that hardness was softened by a thick, lustrous fall of golden-brown hair and large eyes so clear and pale a blue they looked like the placid surface of a lake. His mouth was lush, a thick curve above and below that cut up the darkness of his beard and amplified its ridiculous prettiness.
Over the years, I’d made a study of Wrath Marsden but not because he was pretty.
No, I’d made a study of the Berserkers VP and ruthless killer because he had made a study of me.
I had the feeling that if his cousin hadn’t met me first, he would have had me in his bed in a heartbeat.
He watched me then, his jaw tight but his face otherwise impassive. There was a threat there somewhere, I could read it in the absence of his expression.
He didn’t buy the story of his cousin’s death.
More than that, he didn’t believe I hadn’t had a hand in it.
Fuck.
“Harleigh, baby,” Reaper said, his voice as smoldering as the plume of smoke billowing out from his cigarette plugged mouth. He opened his short, stocky arms to me. “Come to Reaper.”
I went without hesitation even though the thought of being touched still sent violent chills through my body.
Reaper Holt wasn’t someone you disobeyed.
He wrapped me in a tight hug, his nose burrowed into the crook of my neck because we were the same height with me in my tall boots. I tried not to shudder as he took a deep whiff of my scent, and his fleshy hand fell down my back to curl over my ass, giving it a pat before he released me.
“Lookin’ good, baby,” he told me, his bloodshot brown eyes twinkling.
He was somewhere in his fifties, but he had the libido of a teenager. He’d never been married but as far as it was known, he had twelve kids, all by different women, and those were only the ones who’d had the balls to come forward to get money for child support. I didn’t understand the appeal but then, you didn’t have to find Reaper appealing to bang him. I’d spent my entire life watching women drawn into the biker gang fold, entranced by the thrill of rebellion, of taming a bad boy, of revealing in sin.
Sleeping with an outlaw was like sleeping with a wild animal. Only the very stupid or very courageous braved the risk that that animal would turn, tear out your eyes and eat out your throat before you could blink. I knew women who’d chosen well, the brave ones, like my step-mum/best friend Loulou Garro and my brother’s woman, Cressida Irons. They hadn’t tamed the mustangs they’d found, they’d just learned to ride ’em well, over the uneven terrain of their biker lives and through the wilds of their often-violent realities.
I knew the stupid ones too. Tons of them.
I was also one of them.
Cricket was an animal and not even one worth trying to tame or trying to ride. He was something small, shifty and feral, a raccoon out in the daytime that’s starvin’ and crazed.
For the millionth time in the last four years, I wondered how I ever could’ve been taken in by him?
And for the millionth time, the same answer came to me.
There a small part of my self-esteem that was corrupted, sunk through with a rot so deep that all the confidence on top of it was startlingly precarious. And that rot stemmed directly from my bitch of a mother.
I’d been loved by men all my life, I trusted them to take care of me, even more than that, to treasure me.
It was a woman who had taught me to hate myself, that I had nothing to offer and nothing to gain from life because I was nothing myself. Not even worthy of my mother’s love.
So, I’d made a mistake. I’d chosen to trust the male gender implicitly and I’d shunned that putrid corner of my soul where self-doubt and loathing hung out like high school slackers. And in ignoring them, I’d allowed them to vandalize my entire soul with their anarchy until I’d become exactly what my mother wanted me to be.
Nothing.
Cressida had done her research, frantically trying to find answers in her precious literature that could explain where they, the family, went wrong in raising me. I could have told her it wasn’t her or them, least of all my father. Sometimes all it takes is one bad egg, and all that.
She hit on the statistic on the Canadian Women’s Foundation and Child Help website though.
Children of abuse are twice as likely to be abusers or victims of abuse in their adulthood. They are almost nine times as likely to engage in criminal behaviour as well, which made me laugh. King was a prospect for my father’s outlaw motorcycle club, and I’d had a rap sheet since I was thirteen.
It didn’t make me feel better to know that there was science behind my pathetic actions, but it helped my family so I stayed quiet while they hunted down information to feed the gaping maw of despair in their guts.
The monster in the pit of my belly stayed starved.
“Sorry ’bout Cricket,” Reaper interrupted my ill-timed daze to say. “Good kid.”
I could feel Wrath’s sharp eyes digging into my chest like the point of a blade so I was careful not to make a disgusted face at those words. Cricket was not a kid, he’d died at twenty-four, and he was in no way, shape or form good.
Instead, I let tears fill my eyes to the brim but not over. It wouldn’t do to overact, and they would expect me to be tough twice over, as an old lady and, more, as a Garro.
“Can’t believe it,” I whispered, looking from Reaper to Grease to Wrath and back again so they could all catch a look at my drowning blue eyes. “Tell me you know who did that to him. Tell me you’ll get ’em.”
Grease stepped forward, his pockmarked face further textured by a nasty grin. “Oh, we’ll get ’em. Got solid intel that it was them fuckin’ Red Dragons.”
I whistled gently and rocked back on my heels, genuinely surprised that the cops had thought to pin it on the Asian organized crime syndicate based primarily in downtown Vancouver. It was a ballsy move, way beyond moving a pawn on the board, they had placed their Queen in jeopardy on the off chance of taking down two gangs for the price of one.