Chapter 2
1885 Words
CHAPTER 2
ISABELLE
I wake to a beam of sunlight spearing into my eyeball. The cottage is pretty, modern with an old-world twist, but the architect who designed the windows is obviously a sadist. While the rest of the place is a mix of stone and log, the long, thin band of glass around the entire exterior is something forged in Hell if you like your sleep. Those windows give you panoramic views, but they’re too narrow to be useful for more than a breeze, and you can’t exactly string curtains over the entire wall. I mean, we could, but it’d be a giant pain. Someone thought it was cool, I’m sure. Conceptual. But once they moved out, the house sat empty, unclaimed for years… until we came along.
I sigh and screw my eyes shut. I worked all day on the house, fixing the porch stairs, sweating my butt off. I thought I’d just lie down before dinner to rest my aching shoulders, but I must have dozed off.
“It’s certainly not my fault,” Ryder says from the next room. “I measured everything perfectly.”
I love living here with them, but the size of the house makes it so that every little sound can be heard to the farthest corners of the cottage.
“Aye, bruther, it sure as shite wasn’t me.”
I smile. I’d be able to tell Rooster’s Scottish lilt anywhere, can almost see his red beard moving as I listen. A pan clatters against the counter—are they making dinner? I sure hope so. As if in response, my stomach grumbles, a wet, gurgling groan.
I raise my hands above my head and stretch. My right hands hits skin. I turn in time to see Cue mutter something and roll away from me. There’s nothing much beyond him to see; the only furniture in this room is two king-sized beds pushed together to form a giant expanse of mattress, the honey-colored walls acting as both headboard and sideboard on the right, entombing us in logs on two sides. There are two other rooms, both with queen beds and dressers—sometimes we swap around a little. It keeps things from getting stale, I suppose, though I’m not sold that I’ll ever get bored here. Despite my strange—and perhaps dysfunctional—attachment history, this is the first time I’ve ever felt at home with a man, and it just happens to be with multiple men. I finally feel… less hollow, like the emptiness inside my chest has been filled with something warm, something safe—something real that no one can ever take away. And though I’m too much of a pessimist to believe such hopeful notions logically, I can’t deny that the sensation feels real.
It’s intense, this infatuation, the kind of adoration born on the battlefield—we were fighting for our lives when we met. But that initial necessary attachment has, over the prevailing months, taken on the dreamlike quality of a fairy tale. I went from con artist to rolling with the hottest bikers I’ve ever seen, let alone met. What more could any storybook princess want?
The pans in the kitchen rattle again; someone swears—Ryder this time. I inhale deeply, relishing the aroma of salt and cooked meat. Thank goodness they aren’t going to try to force me to eat vegetables after a day of manual labor.
I roll onto my side. Cue’s facing away from me, but on first glance, it always appears that he’s looking at me; the back of his bald head is a giant tattooed skull, deep black sockets gaping, a slashing blade of sun scoring the nasal ridge. I snuggle closer to him and bring my fingertips to the crown of his head, then trace the eyes of that skull with my index. He remains still. Silent.
Always silent.
He can talk, I think, but he doesn’t—I’ve come to believe that he’s punishing himself for an awful past experience, some sin he can’t get beyond, but I still don’t know what it is. It has to be pretty bad for him not to tell any of the others. I suppose it doesn’t really matter—we all have a past. And he’s never needed words to communicate; he’s the boss because he finds ways to take care of us.
“Maybe it’s the new guy,” Ryder says from the kitchen.
Blade? “The Prospect”—that’s what they call him. He was an assassin for another biker gang, the one my guys still work for, but I think they’re keeping him on the outside because he’s my ex-boyfriend. I don’t think it’s jealousy though, not for most of them—they aren’t sure they can trust him.
Do I trust him? We have a history that might take me some time to get beyond, so I feel like I’m biding my time, watching to see what happens between him and the guys—feeling it out. I never imagined that I’d love so many men at the same time, and with such intensity, and I certainly hadn’t expected them to love me back the same way. Even my ex is growing on me under the circumstances. Men who save your life perhaps deserve a special place in your heart.
“Shite,” Rooster crows from the kitchen. “What’re we gonna do, bruther? Just start over, eh?”
I trace the inked nasal bone on the back of Cue’s head, but Rooster’s words make him stir. He rolls onto his back and turns my way. Despite the ink, he looks more like a model than a biker. High cheekbones, straight nose, bright white teeth, deep, dark eyes, lips that always look kissable. And the rest of him… well. They spend a lot of time lifting weights out in the barn. I think they probably go out there to visit their bikes more than anything else.
Cue smiles and runs a finger over my cheekbone, then down over my throat. I wonder, and not for the first time, what the inked hash marks on his arm mean. I’ve seen the way he traces them sometimes. Something terrible lurks beneath those lines, maybe even a body count. He was a soldier, I’m sure of that—I’ve seen him shoot.
Yeah, I think I’d rather not know.
Cue puckers his lips. I blow him a kiss back, and he pushes himself to his feet and heads for the bathroom—totally nude. The piercing in the tip of his p***s glints.
From the kitchen, porcelain clatters against the countertop. I wince.
I wiggle to the edge of the bed and swing my legs to the floor. Chill breeze kisses my skin, but my robe is hanging from the doorknob, and I wrap it around me as I pad toward the kitchen.
The short hallway smells of bacon—one of the larger concessions they made for my sake. They’re not vegan or anything crazy like that, but Rooster, farmer that he is, has always grown the majority of what they eat. Sure, they often aren’t in one place long enough to raise livestock, but I also think that living a life where brutality is celebrated squashes the desire to kill things in your downtime.
Three of them are in the kitchen, lined up in a hard-muscled row along the far wall, blocking the glass cupboards with their bulk—the cabinetry is one of the few things in the house that isn’t forged of light-colored wood. Ryder’s doing something on the stovetop; Cue is at the sink, filling a glass, Rooster at his side.
Rooster turns as I enter, his red ponytail and long red beard gilded by evening light. His tank top is smudged with dirt, but his muscular tattooed arms are clean. I can see the edge of the rooster he has tattooed on his chest peeking over the top of his shirt.
“Aye, how’s my lady this evenin’?”
“Your lady?” I c**k an eyebrow, but I grin as he strides around the narrow center island—white cabinets topped with a marbled green Formica—and lowers his lips to my forehead. I give him a squeeze.
Ryder turns from the stove. I was wrong about the bacon; there’s already a plate of kielbasa on the back counter, and now I can see the cast-iron skillet full of fried potatoes. He settles both on the center island as I slide onto the wooden stool.
“Where’s Mack?” I ask.
“He’s out looking at the fields with Blade,” Ryder says, his gaze cloudy. “Lots of plants dead or dying out there.”
I reach for a plate and spoon potato and meat onto it. My stomach grumbles again. “Does Mack know how to farm?”
The others fill their plates, too, but there’s not room for all of us at the two-stool counter. We have a four person table in the adjoining alcove to make up the difference. Apparently, the architect loved his stripe of windows, and hated all things that might be used for entertaining—like dining rooms. I suppose that’s fair. Most people aren’t living in an isolated cottage with a whole mess of bikers.
“Mack doesn’t think the loss of the plants is an accident,” Ryder says.
A prickle of unease rises on my neck.
Well, of course he doesn’t, I tell myself. Mack is the most suspicious person I’ve ever met, and he always looks for malicious activity first; hell, I caught him trying to research Blade’s past just a few weeks ago. And my path only crossed with theirs because I was running from Mack’s brother—a tech millionaire who’d kidnapped me. Mack knows real evil.
He’s also the one who believed me last month when I told them that I felt eyes on my back—this prickle of unease is not a new phenomenon. When I wake at night from what the others believe to be bad dreams and hear a subtle scraping on the log walls, Mack is the one who searches the woods. He’s never found anything of concern, though he once suspected that someone was tampering with our clothesline when his T-shirts blew away.
Sometimes evil is hard to tease apart from natural phenomenon.
Rooster slides onto the stool beside me. He smells of grass and sunshine; the scent of the outdoors.
The back door slams. Heavy boots thunk against the floor.
“Aye, speak of the devil,” Rooster says.
We all turn as Mack enters, clutching a blackened head of cabbage, the thing dead and dusty-looking—tiny in his fist. By far the biggest of the group, he’s a monster of a human, six-eight with a mammoth chest and arms like tree trunks. His long black hair makes his emerald eyes stand out all the more… well, his hair and the jewel-toned tattoos that cover his flesh from neck to toe—snakes.
“There’s no way this is an accident,” he growls in a rasp that seems to rattle the cabinets. “Someone is trying to sabotage us.”
- Writer
