Lethal Temptations (Tempted #5) (33 page)

He said that.

I didn’t imagine it.

If there was a threat he would be the one protecting me. He wouldn’t send some prospect to guard me for a multitude of reasons but mainly because no one watched out for me like Blackie did.

Because no one cared for me like he did.

He told me he couldn’t give me up.

It wasn’t a lie.

Every moment we spent together was not something I conjured up in my head. Those moments were pure, and they were beautiful.

They were real.

Every kiss.

Every unspoken I love you.

Every time he held me in his arms and squeezed me to make sure I was real.

I didn’t imagine any of that.

And I sure as hell didn’t imagine the way he smiled.

I couldn’t have.

I didn’t imagine the rhythm of his heartbeat that played for me when I laid my head against his chest or the way he looked at me like I was his savior.

Like I was an angel.

You’re no angel.

Maybe not.

But for a moment in time I was his angel.

I don’t know what made me think back to that first night, but I remembered pulling up to the clubhouse and seeing Blackie’s bike knowing with every ounce of life in me he’d make it okay.

He’d take away my pain. 

I chose to think my maker was granting me a gift by allowing me to recall the memory. I held onto it and I chased that memory all the way back to the clubhouse, hoping for a repeat.

It could happen.

Tell me it could.

Please?

I pulled into the compound, didn’t even bother parking the car and pulled it right in front of the Dog Pound. I climbed out of the car, slammed the door and spotted Riggs sitting on top of a picnic table in front of the clubhouse. He lifted his head and my eyes zeroed in on the bottle he was holding onto for dear life. His eye was swollen and a fresh bruise grazed his cheek.

“I should tell you not to go in there,” he mumbled.

“Are you okay?” I questioned, taking a step closer to him as he doubled over in pain clutching his ribs.

“Run,” he ground out.

I disregarded his injury and lifted my eyes to his.

“What?”
      “Turn around and get the hell out of here Lacey. It’s a fucking war zone here—hearts are breaking all over the place,” he slurred, raising his hand from his abdomen to his chest rubbing the spot between his pecs.

“Heart,” he whispered. “What a joke.”

Listen to him.

I shook my head, swallowed the lump in my throat and forced myself to believe my heart and not my mind. I left Riggs to wallow in whatever misery he was succumbing to and walked into the clubhouse.

One day I will look back on tonight and wish I had listened to Riggs because the moment I stepped inside the Dog Pound I became a casualty of war.

I lost the war with my mind.

I lost the war with Blackie.

I lost everything.

Blackie lost too.

He didn’t even turn around to see who had walked in, too engrossed in snorting the line of cocaine off the bar to notice me.

Too busy fucking losing his battle with drugs.

“So, is this why you’re not answering my calls?” I questioned as I stalked across the room to the bar, slapping my keys on the table as I grabbed a hold of his hair with my free hand and lifted his head.

I turned his cheek and forced his bloodshot eyes to meet mine.

“Why?” I whispered.

He stared at me quietly, licking his lips before he brought his hand to his nose and sniffled.

“Why what?” he asked, turning back around using a credit card to push the left over coke into a line.

No, God…I had to stop him.

I had to do something.

I thought my purpose was to show him a new way, to show him there is more to life than grief but it was clear my purpose in Blackie’s life was to save him from himself. I stepped around the bar and bent my head, blowing the coke across the wooden bar with a big burst of air from my lungs.

I never feared Blackie until that moment.

Until he looked at me and I swore I saw the devil in his eyes.

And then I realized I wasn’t looking at Blackie anymore but I was now face to face with Satan’s knight, the Devil’s soldier.

“Don’t like it, girl? Don’t like what you see?” He asked as he pushed back his chair and stumbled onto his feet, gripping the back of the stool to steady himself.

“What’s the matter?” He taunted. “Got no love for the drug addict? No love for the man I truly am? This…,” he gritted, pounding his chest with his fist. “This is me, Lace, this is Dominic Petra the man you hold on a fucking pedestal.”

I shook my head and bit down on my lip to stop the tears from spilling because this wasn’t about me, this was about him. This was his war.

I was just an innocent victim of it.

“No it’s not,” I insisted. “The man I hold in such a high regard is the man who wants to better himself, the man who has been dealt a shit hand in life but plays his cards until the bitter end, hoping the dealer will throw him a
queen
.”

“That man is a myth, something you dreamt up inside that pretty little head of yours,” he hissed, lifting his hand to his head. “He don’t exist.” He pointed to me and then himself. “Neither do we anymore,” he ground out. “Go dream a different dream, girl.”

He knows I exist.

You can’t hide me anymore.

I was standing in front of Blackie, watching
his
lips move, listening to
his
voice but I couldn’t understand why
my
maker was controlling
him
. Every word that came from his mouth was something my mind would say to drag me down.

These weren’t Blackie’s words.

They were the words of my maker.

I dropped my head into my hands and fought for control.

For clarity.

For Peace.

And then it occurred to me I struggle every day to tame something I have no control over. Being an addict, that’s a choice, something you can control. I have watched him for two months choose himself over drugs but today he chose to be an addict. Today he chose to lose.

I dropped my hands and lifted my head to stare at him with vengeance.

Vengeance for not believing in himself, for not seeing what I saw, for not loving himself enough to love me.

“People have problems they can’t control, real issues that inebriate them and then there’s you who every single problem you have has been self-created. When are you going to stop doing this to yourself?” I shook my head. “Why won’t you let yourself be happy?”

“Who says I’m not happy?”

“It won’t work. You can’t lie to me. I’ve seen you happy now. I’ve seen you smile and I’ve seen you laugh,” I paused, brushing away the tears that fell from my eyes.

“I saw
you
, the man behind the mask and the layers of leather you use as armor. I fell in love with that man. I saw the real Blackie; I saw Dominic Petra.”

“Dominic Petra died a long time ago,” he sneered, grabbing the bottle off the bar and taking a swig. He didn’t even flinch as he chugged the poison. “And the man you think you know is nothing more than a guy who got his kicks off banging a young girl, someone who wasn’t touched, someone he could take advantage of. Your father sheltered you too much. He should’ve brought you around here more, then maybe you wouldn’t dream so much. But you’re young, there’s still time for you to learn…”

“Don’t do that. Don’t cheapen what we are because you’re fucking high
.”

He placed the bottle back on the bar and leaned in close pinning me with a cold hard stare.

His eyes were dead.

Just like his soul.

Another crack in my heart.

“What we are is nothing,” he hissed. “You are nothing to me but Jack’s daughter and a virgin pussy I got to play with.”

I didn’t even realize my actions until I felt the sting on the palm of my hand and saw the red handprint on his cheek.

It’s over.

“Again,” he ordered.

“No,” I shouted.

“Again!” he demanded, crooking his finger beckoning me to inflict more pain on him.

I backed away from the bar, shaking my head as tears rolled down my face. He dropped his hands and took a step back himself.

“Get out,” he rasped. “Get out and forget you ever saw
me
.”

It was all a lie.

I told you so.

I grabbed my keys from the bar before walking out from behind it and started for the door. I had nothing left to give, no fight left inside of me and so I surrendered.

I stopped in front of the door and slowly turned around to meet his gaze.

“I could’ve been your queen. All you had to do was let me,” I whispered through my sobs, before turning back around and walking out the door.

There are two sides in a war and only one winner.

So how come we both lost?

Chapter Twenty-seven

After my wife died I relived her death for six months straight. I’d wake up drenched in a cold sweat from the nightmare of looking into her lifeless eyes and being the one who forced them closed.

Whoever says history doesn’t repeat itself never walked a day in my shoes.

For the last month, since the night I ended things with Lacey, her face has haunted me.  I relive the moment I looked into her eyes and told her she was nothing but her father’s daughter and a piece of pussy. It’s the look reflected in her eyes as she rears her hand back and slaps me that consumes me, night after night—the look of pure defeat and unexplainable heartbreak.

She loved me.

Heard that shit with my own ears.

And she’ll never know how much I love her.

I lived life without fear until I fell for Lacey and, Boots threatened to use her against me. Not once in all my years on this earth, have I been afraid of anything. But after that message came through on my phone, that picture of her at school—I knew fear.

I hurt her.

I bruised her ego and broke her heart.

I wounded her with my words.

I saved her from me.

I saved her life.

I can live with the guilt of my actions as long as she’s breathing.

As long as she’s safe.

If you can even call this shit living.

No, this shit isn’t living.

I know what living is and for a short while I lived and I lived hard.

Living is holding her in my arms.

Living is watching her face light up when I walk into a room.

Living is Lacey’s smile.

Her laugh.

The way she blushes when I tell her she’s beautiful.

Her kiss.

And her touch.

Living is watching the woman you love take what she needs from your body and as she’s doing it, she looks into your eyes and you can see forever.

Living is loving Lace.

This is death.

The death of a man who was never good enough to live and share a memory with someone as pure as her.

I could’ve done it another way but even now, after time has passed, I can’t think of another way where it would’ve worked. Lacey saw through me, she saw passed the demons and the self-destruction. She saw the remnants of my soul and a glimpse of who I wanted to be.

I had to make her hate me.

Take that beautiful love she had for me and turn it into ugly.

I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to her, no matter how much I try to tell myself I had no choice, my angel didn’t deserve to believe she was worthless in my eyes.

She wished for me to live.

She wished for me to smile.

And she wished to be the one who made me smile.

She got her three wishes.

My only wish for her is to know she is everything good left in the world.

She’s beauty, and she’s hope.

She’s strength, and she’s passion.

She’s the light you look for when you’re stuck in the darkness.

She’s just…she’s an angel.

She was my angel.

And now she’s free.

I bent my head, pressed my finger against my left nostril and sucked up the line of coke through the right one.

“Fuck, I didn’t know anyone was in here,” I heard the new guy Stryker mumble. I had been too consumed by my thoughts to hear the door open He stared at the residue on the counter as I straightened up and glanced at him through the mirror.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I growled, glaring at him through the glass.

Wolf had done his job, found four lost souls willing to join the mayhem, and Stryker was one of them. He was twenty-eight years old, drifting from one charter to the next, looking for his place within the club and thought he’d find it here in Brooklyn. We had just voted these guys in—watched as they cut through the stitching of the patch declaring them each a nomad, replacing it with one that declared them a brother of Brooklyn.

Now, it was time to introduce them to the fucked up shit they signed up for. It was time to introduce them to Sun Wu and the Red Dragons to give them a taste of blood. Rocco Spinelli gave us the heads up on a shipment Wu was receiving down at the docks. Jack was ready to strike—it was time to send a message back to the Chinese motherfucker who shot up Pops.