A Sinful Vow: Inked Angels MC (5 page)

“Brothers?” Luke snorted again. “The Houston guys aren’t our brothers. Those guys are a disgrace to the skull, a disgrace to Inked Angels everywhere. They’re better off dead.”

“Croak’s got some balls of steel, though, brother,” warned Timber. “This ain’t his first rodeo.”

“That’s why we’ve gotta pull the wool over his eyes. That’s what this whole goddamn wedding is for, man. We let Croak think that we’re making nice, then while he lets his guard down, we move Lobo and his boys across the border and get this whole new operation started up. Once it’s all in place, then boom, we let Croak take a nice little swim with some cinderblock flippers, we let whichever poor bastard succeeds him know that Austin runs this state, and voila—the future is here, ahead of schedule. The way we want it.”

Timber sighed again. I could feel Luke gloating even without seeing him. Now anger was glowing in the pit of my stomach like hot coals. I was nothing more than a pawn in his game, just a shiny bauble to be swapped around so he could get what he wanted. This was beyond sick, it was beyond slimy, it was…

My hand, tightening into a fist, accidentally budged the doorknob. Being as old as it was, the thing squeaked like a shrill bird. I froze.

“What was that?” Luke shot out. I heard a knife sing as it was drawn from a sheath. Before I could move, the door was yanked open from the other side, and I tumbled through, right into Luke’s arms.

“Jesus Christ, Olivia, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Luke yelled. “I almost fucking stabbed you! Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

I punched him in the chest blindly, over and over, swinging my arms until they were numb.

“You’re sick! You’re sick! You’re a fucking traitor!” I screamed.

Luke clamped a hand over my mouth and hissed in my ear. “Shut the fuck up before somebody hears you. We have no idea who might be listening.”

I sobbed into his chest. I didn’t mean anything to him. My own brother was willing to sell me on the open market to the highest bidder, like I was some cheap whore. This son of a bitch. It was all so unfair. My whole life, I had been commandeered, pushed to and fro against my will. All I wanted was to be my own person. I deserved that much at least.

Luke sat me down at the kitchen table. He put a cup of coffee in front of me and waited until I was done crying. When my sniffling eased, he put his hands of top of mine. I wanted to recoil, but I had no energy left to fight back.

“Olivia,” he began. “I know this isn’t what you wanted.”

“Ain’t that the fucking truth,” I said, too tired even to speak with the venom he deserved.

“But now that you’ve overheard everything, I might as well give you the full story. I owe you that much,” he said.

I looked at him through red-rimmed eyes. I could see that there was no turning back. This was what was going to happen, for better or worse. That much was obvious in the fierceness of his eyes and the lock of his jaw.

“We’ve waited a long time for an opportunity to get back on top,” he said to me. “This is it. The problem is there are some old-fashioned motherfuckers who think progress is the devil. They aren’t wrong, necessarily—except that progress is the Diablos, not the devil. It’s time for us to reach out to our real brothers, the ones willing to take some risks and make some real money. I’m doing this to take care of you, baby sis.”

Luke reached out and wiped a tear off my face. I was a mess of emotion. He was still my brother, after all. He’d cared for me, found money to help us scrape by, even when both our parents had left us alone. He’d done right by me my whole life. But this was so much to ask.

“All I need is for you to help buy me some time,” he continued. “With this marriage, I’ll be able to smooth things over with the Houston charter long enough for everything else to get set. As soon as that happens, you’ll never have to see that bastard excuse for a husband ever again. Just a few weeks, maybe a couple months. Then you’ll come back to us, to your family. To your brother.”

Just a few weeks.I could hold my own for a few weeks. I could fight off any sick fucker who wanted to take advantage of his “wife” when they were alone. I didn’t have to love the man, open up to him, or give him anything, really. I just had to grin and bear it for the wedding day, then I could play defense until Luke came back to make everything right again. He’d taken care of me before, had taken care of me ever since I was five years old.

I loved him. He was family. How could I not?

I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I told him. “Okay, fine. I’ll do what you need.”

He smiled. “I knew you’d do the right thing, baby sister.” He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.

So that was it. I was getting married. Everything would turn out okay…right?

* * *

Church bells ringing overhead. A white dress that went all the way to my ankles, catching the drafty breeze that slunk through the massive double doors and fluttered lazily. Far on the other end of the aisle, a man clad in a black and white tuxedo, waiting to claim me as his own.

I turned to Luke. He saw the nervousness on my face.

“You’ll be fine, Olivia, I promise. Just a few weeks. It’ll be gone in a flash,” he said to me.

“You better be right, Luke,” I told him. “Or else I’m gonna kick your ass.”

He grinned. “There’s the fighter I know.” He playfully pressed a fist against my chin. “You don’t have to love this bastard, or even like him. Hell, I don’t care if you ever see him again after today. But just keep things lookin’ nice and proper and I’ll see you on the other end. I’ll be the one waiting for you with all the money.”

I forced a smile through my anxiety.

“You look beautiful, baby sister,” was the last thing he said to me before the music started playing and it was my time to walk down the aisle.

I gulped as Luke took my arm and we turned to face the rest of the congregation. Bikers littered the pews, with more leather and tattoos than this church—or, for that matter, any church, most likely—had ever seen in one place. Cigarette smoke hung over the room like a veil of its own.

Like a veil—how appropriate. Keeping people guessing as to what was going on underneath.

The music boomed through the rafters. Inked Angels from Austin sat on the left half of the church, while the Houston Inked Angels stayed on the right. No one dared cross over to the other side.

Luke and I started walking, one careful step at a time, so as not to trip over the hem of my dress. It hugged my hips tightly, then flared out in a wide, silky arc. My arms and shoulders were bare, and the thick edge of the corset was hardly tall enough to cover my breasts, so that my curves spilled forward and caught the light streaming through stained glass windows.

Inked Angels on both sides whistled as I passed them, hooting and hollering at me.

“Damn, girl!”

“What a beaut!”

“That’s a fine piece of ass, brothers.”

Biker weddings—was there anything else like them?

The music reached a crescendo as I passed the last pew, then descended into a hush as I reached the bottom of the stairs that led up to the altar. The whole time I was walking, I had kept my head down, making sure I didn’t bust my ass in front of a hundred men who would have killed me with their laughter. My heart was pounding a frenetic beat against my chest as I looked up slowly, and saw the face of the man I was to marry.

The world stopped.

I wanted to choke, to scream, to do anything that would let the shock of what I was seeing out of me, because there was no way that one single person could handle all of this emotion at once.

Blaze.

I hadn’t seen him since the night he was assaulted and kicked out of the Austin charter by the very man who now held my arm and escorted me down the aisle.

Blaze.

I hadn’t seen him since he kissed me in my driveway and sent me tumbling down a rabbit hole of desire that no one had ever shown me before.

Blaze.

What was the world conspiring to do to me?

I looked to my left and saw Luke’s face turning a thousand different shades of red. His eyes bulged, the veins in his neck stood out like railroad tracks, and his mouth babbled like a fish, jaw swinging up and down in a futile effort to find words that captured his rage.

“You, you son of a…you motherfucking…you cocksucking, traitorous piece of…” he stuttered. Spit flew from his mouth. His hands tightened into white-knuckled fists. Luke whirled around, trying to find someone to hit or something to smash, anything to let loose the maelstrom brewing inside of him.

Finding nothing, he reached into his boot and snatched out the blade he always kept there. It reflected the beautiful oranges and blues of the stained glass above. For a weird moment, I thought it looked almost beautiful.

Then he shifted, and the blade moved into a beam of blood red light.

Luke sprang towards Blaze, who had not moved an inch from his stance on the altar. His knife hand drew back with murderous intent, ready to stab seven inches of vicious steel into the son of a bitch who had first laid lips on his sister.

He didn’t get far enough, though, before a man with
Houston
spelled out in big block letters on his bottom rocker stepped in between Luke and the altar and pointed a gun square between Luke’s eyes.

Luke froze. The man’s pistol pressed into the flesh of his forehead.

“Easy now, brother,” said the man. “My name is Steezy. And I’m here to make sure that this whole contrived freak show goes according to plan, you understand?” His voice was calm and measured, but there was undeniable violence backing it up. “And let me tell ya, stabbing the groom is
not
on the menu for today.”

The Houston crew chuckled, a low, grating noise that sounded like rocks in a grinder.

Another man from Houston emerged from the first pew. He had gray eyes that looked like they had seen just about everything there was to see. He walked with a wince, one foot slightly cocked out, no doubt the victim of lingering pain from some ancient injury. The way all the men hushed each other and turned to face him, I knew that he had power.

“Gentlemen,” he said to everyone. He had his hands raised, almost in a gesture of peace. “This is not how a wedding should be. Before we proceed, why don’t we all put the weapons down. Eh?” He pointed at the knife in Luke’s hand.

Still boiling red, Luke lowered the blade and shoved it back into his boot. Steezy watched with narrowed eyes until he was confident the weapon was stowed. Then he, too, holstered his gun. The bated breath in the room eased some, but the tension was far from dissipated.

“Croak, this is a fucking outrage,” Luke snapped to the gray-eyed man. “This was not what we agreed to. I’m not letting my sister marry this fuck I see standing in front of me.”

So this was Croak. I looked him over. Everything about him was smooth and dark. This man had been through war and lived to tell the tale.

“Luke, this is what has to happen,” Croak said, both to Luke and to the whole congregation. “This is the union of two charters that have for too long been at each other’s throats. Is that how brothers should behave?” He scanned his eyes across the crowd. Nothing moved, save for cigarette smoke.

“It isn’t,” he said finally. “We need to fix this.”

“No fucking way,” Luke said. “Double-crossing me by swapping in this piece of shit for the man we agreed upon is no way to start a new kind of peace, you gray-haired son of a bitch.”