The next night at The Lotus was crazy busy. It seemed every single brother of The Fallen and every single one of their friends was in the club, laughing, drinking and reveling in the beauty of the dancers. I was so busy behind the bar and backstage helping the dancers that I didn’t have a single moment to make my way over to Zeus’s booth. I’d had a brief flare of creativity and a good giggle that morning when I’d gone into the big department store halfway to Vancouver and got a little plaque made specially for the booth. God of Thunder, it read in red letters on a black lacquered background. I’d had Harlow help me drill it into the end edge of the table that morning so that when Zeus arrived, it would be there glowing under the red-tinged lights for him.
I’d been too busy to see his reaction when he showed up just after eleven and I was dying for a chance to hear what he thought. It was a stupid gift really, the kind a little girl might give her dad. But in some ways, I knew I would always be that little girl Zeus had saved in the parking lot of First Light Church and he would always be that guardian monster. There was something beautiful about the fact that our relationship had changed and evolved as we aged but that purity would always remain.
I caught glances of him whenever I could though, unable to keep my eyes from straying his way.
I couldn’t stop watching his hands, his enormous, strong-enough-to-kill-a-man hands. They rested on the blood-red table, one loosely wrapped around his sweating glass of whiskey on the rocks and the other relaxed palm down on the lacquered wood. I found myself sweating just like that glass, imagining the way those fingers could destroy me, how they would tear apart my body at the seams with rough, sure strokes and unceasing pressure. I was certain to my bones that those hands had killed a man, maybe many but definitely all who had dared to fuck with him. And I now knew from personal experience that those hands could be yielded with the same amount of passion and ruthless intensity on and deep inside a woman’s body.
I wanted those weapons of mass destruction on my skin, wrapped around my wrists like shackles, parting the folds of my soaking wet cunt like a hot knife through butter. I wanted the stretch and burn of each thick digit inside me and then I wanted him to wrap the other big paw around my throat like a threat, like a benediction and claim me as his while I came all over his palm.
I had the time now to go over because the club had just closed and only a handful of The Fallen remained, most of whom I recognized. The low murmur of voices from the back was dissolving into quiet as the girls left for their beds and most of the other servers had already gone home. Only our janitor Michael and my manager, Maja, remained.
But Maja had her eye on me as she had done all night, so I didn’t want to scamper over to Zeus like some eager beaver when I didn’t even really know where we stood on things.
Sure, he’d said I was stuck with him, but what did that mean?
I’d never felt so young in my life as I did when I tried to answer that question.
I was wiping the bar down and cleaning the runoff from the beer taps when Maja scooted onto a stool and said, “Pour me a big vodka, will ya?”
I pulled the Grey Goose off the top shelf and slopped three shots into a rocks glass for her.
“No ice, already dissolved it,” I explained as I pushed it across the slick bar and into her waiting hand.
“Leave the bottle,” she told me when I went to put it back. “And grab a glass. I have a feelin’ a girl talk is in order and I only do that shit when booze is—heavily—involved.”
I bit off my grin as I grabbed a glass, poured myself a thimble full and hefted my ass onto the counter on my side of the bar.
“What’s up?” I asked.
She was a middle-aged woman who looked her age because of her hard living but still wore it well. I’d never seen her without big hair, smoky eyes and seriously tight, flared jeans on. She was a biker babe and she rocked it hard. I didn’t know much about her history other than that she was married to Buck, the VP of The Fallen, and I only knew that because my friend Lila liked to come have a drink at the bar sometimes and she was a font of biker knowledge.
She looked at me then like she had some serious shit to say, serious shit that I wasn’t going to like.
Without meaning to, my eyes darted over to Zeus at his booth where he sat talking to Buck, Bat and Nova.
Maja laughed her loud, smoker’s laugh. “That’s what’s up, baby girl. You eyein’ the beast like you don’t care he bites.”
A blush worked its way into my cheeks before I could stop it, but I shrugged casually, desperate to pull it off. “He’s hot. A girl’s allowed to look.”
“Oh, she sure is and it’d be a crime not to appreciate a great, big beast like that. So pretty you could just walk up and stroke him, hmm?”
The woman was playing with me, smiling over the rim of her glass like a tigress playing with a cub.
I bared my teeth at her in something meaner than a smile. “A beast is just like any other animal… touch them just right, even they purr.”
This time, Maja threw her head back as she cackled and slapped the table with her free hand. “Yes! Damn, I knew I liked you, girlie.”
My grin softened. “Thanks, Maja.”
“That said, I still gotta tell ya to go carefully with this one. It’s my responsibility as an older woman to stick my nose in where it ain’t wanted and give advice, so bear with me a tick, yeah? I wouldn’t be sayin’ nothin’ if it weren’t for the fact that Zeus Garro hasn’t even blinked twice at a woman since he got shot of his bitch ex-wife and now he won’t stop fuckin’ starin’ at ya like you’re his last meal on Death Row.”
“Oh,” I said because wow, it felt good to hear someone say Z wanted me and that it wasn’t just all dreamt up in my head.
“Oh is right. You ready to take on the beast, girl? He’s fuckuva lot’a man for a grown woman, let alone a young one and he comes with a wealth of fuckin’ baggage. You ready to be a mom to two kids your age and a whole host of brothers in the club? ’Cause any woman of Zeus Garro’s is gonna have to pick up that mantle. Don’t get stuck in if you don’t intend to stick.”
“You’re really laying it out, huh?” I asked her to buy myself some time.
I took a sip of the vodka and hated it. Tequila was so much better.
She nodded, drained her glass and poured another. “Only way to do it. It’s part of the life, girlie. You live balls to the wall, say what you think and do what you feel. Know you got a life somewhere outside of here and I seriously doubt it’s a life like that. Remind me too much of my girl, Queenie. I can smell the blue in your blood.”
“My blood’s not got anything to do with this.”
“Like fuck it doesn’t. You want to take on not just a biker but the biker, you better be willin’ and eager to drown that blue out with green and black, the colours of The Fallen, ’cause that’s what you’ll be.”
I crossed my arms under my breasts and blinked at her, done talking about my relationship with Z with a virtual stranger. “Who says I even want to take him on?”
“Girlie, there’s only one man I know with hands that large,” she said with sparkling eyes as she gestured to my bare midriff under my cropped top. “Next time you want to keep somethin’ a secret, maybe hide the evidence, yeah?”
I looked down to see the faint bruises Zeus had left on my hips last night and glared at her. “One of the brothers blabbed about the dance, didn’t they?”
She laughed like a wicked witch again. “You betcha. Brothers are worse than a group of old biddies but don’t tell ’em I said that. Nothing stays secret in the club for long, not once you’re accepted into the fold.”
I rolled my lips under my teeth and voiced one of my worries. “Bet that’s easier said than done.”
“Darlin’ the Vice President’s wife just sat down to have a drink and a chat with you. Think that process has already begun.” Maja downed the rest of her drink with a wink then slid off the stool and sauntered into the back.
There was a commotion at the doors and I turned my eyes from Maja’s great ass to watch as Cy and Boner escorted a well-dressed man into the club.
I recognized him immediately as one of the men with Quentin Kade the night he’d shot at me. My heart leapt into my throat as my eyes swiveled to Zeus. He was watching me too and the moment I looked over, he tipped his chin at me. I didn’t know what that meant exactly but I stayed behind the bar, relaxing slightly when Mute appeared from out of nowhere and sat at the bar beside me.
“Garro,” the newcomer said, grinning uneasily as he sat down in the guest seat at Zeus’s booth. “How’s it goin’, man?”
“Good, Hiccough, how’s the trade?” Zeus asked casually, adjusting one of the silver rings he wore on his big hands.
The man named Hiccough looked down at those hands and swallowed so roughly, I could see it from all the way over at the bar.
“Good, can’t complain. Got rid of the last’a that fucked up shit the Nightstalkers sold me last year, just like I told ya I would.”
“Yeah, ’bout that. Haven’t seen you around in a while. If business is so fuckin’ good, where you gettin’ your shit from?” Zeus finally looked up from his hands, slowly exposing his face to the reddish light in a practiced way that was still cool as fuck and so scary it gave me tingles.
“Oh, uh, man, you know I actually decided a while back to maybe diversify and try to support the small guys, ya know?” Hiccough laughed nervously, and it sounded exactly like his name.
“You happen to go to the same ‘small guys’ as Quentin Kade?” Z asked as he adjusted enough to pull a wicked curved blade from somewhere on his person. It glinted in the light as he laid it on the table, gleaming red like a physical foreshadowing.
I gulped at the same time as Hiccough did.
“Well, man, I mean it’s a small community really so there, uh, may have been some overlap. You know how these things work,” the stupid man tried to backtrack but even I could see he was falling backward and right into their trap.
Zeus was playing with him.
“’Course.” He nodded sagely. “Get that, Hiccough, you gotta think ’bout your business. What’s loyalty if you don’t have any cash to back it up, right?”
“Right.” Hiccough jumped on his chance to agree with Zeus. “Knew you’d understand.”
Zeus nodded slowly as if he was distracted then called, “Lou, bring me another whiskey. Hiccough, you want somethin’?”
He nodded like a bobblehead. “Beer would be great.”
Zeus tipped his chin at me and when I hesitated, Mute nodded from beside me. I didn’t want to get close to the guy but I quickly poured the drinks and made my way over to them. Hiccough was facing away so he didn’t see me until I was beside him, planting his drink on the table. He looked up to smile at me or maybe thank me but then caught sight of my face, the faint scratch the falling brick from the bullet had made across my cheek, and froze.
Before he could do anything else, Bat and Buck were hemming him in and Cy was tugging me out of the closing circle. Zeus’s mighty hand went slamming down on top of Hiccough’s and he tugged it forcibly in his grip while he began to talk, and as he began to talk, he took that wicked knife in his other hand and worked it slowly into the back of the other man’s hand.
“You think you can go behind my back and make a deal with the fuckin’ Nightstalkers and I won’t know about it? Think you can come into my house, the business of my brothers and scare one of our fuckin’ girls, Hiccough? I don’t fuckin’ think so.”
Hiccough whimpered and tried to pull back his hand as Zeus opened a flap of skin, held it to the blade with his thumb and slowly began to pull it back over the length of his hand like he was skinning an apple.
“Now, my boys are going to take you to the fun farm to ask you a few questions about the motherfuckin’ Nightstalkers and if you answer correctly, you’ll be free to go back to your pathetic fuckin’ life. If you don’t, I have ’bout twenty pigs who haven’t eaten dinner yet.” Zeus’s grin was wide and manic as he ripped the last bit of skin and let go of Hiccough’s hand with a flourish that had blood spraying across the table.
Hiccough was howling and whimpering now, and I was struck dumb with shock at what I’d witnessed. Zeus wiped his bloody blade on either side of Hiccough’s cheek to clean it.
I’d always known Zeus was a monster, but this made it an irrefutable fact.
I didn’t have time to process it because the brothers around me were moving, two of them carting a sobbing Hiccough between them out the back while Nova pulled out a fucking handkerchief and cleaned the blood off the table with it before putting it back in his jeans pocket.
“Meet you there,” Zeus told his brothers then turned to look at me.
I turned on my heel and fled behind the bar. It wasn’t that I was scared of him—though I was—it was that I needed the space to think about what I’d seen and how it made me feel.
Mostly, I wondered if it was wrong that I felt vengeance burn like the satisfying heat of whiskey down my throat and in my gut; that I loved the look of that fucker’s fear because it so accurately mimicked my own when his friend had leveled a gun at my face.
I was thinking these thoughts as the club emptied out, leaving Zeus and I alone.
A predator and his prey in one big cage.
“Lou, look at me.”
His voice settled over me like a cloud of marijuana smoke, sweet and heady enough to make me forget myself.
I looked at him.
He stood at the entrance to the bar, blocking my exit. I watched as he prowled toward me and I instinctively backed up until my ass hit the opposite end. His grin shone in the shadows cast by his wild mass of hair.
“You scared, little girl?”
He leaned into me, looming so close that I could feel tingles erupt over my skin just from the proximity and the threat of his touch.
“No.” I swallowed thickly.
“Do you know why I wanted you to see that shit?”
I dragged a deep breath into my lungs, caught the forest and smoke scent of him and forgot to breathe again. “To scare me.”
“To show you. This is me. This is the monster you’re so desperate to make your own. There’s no goin’ into this with eyes closed shut, Lou. I’m the kinda man, someone wrongs you, I cause him the equivalent in pain. I’m a man of loyalty and vengeance, violence and sex. Won’t make apologies for it and won’t have you romanticizin’ it. I’m an outlaw and this is an outlaw’s life. You sure you still want that?”
I hesitated, caught in the silver web of his gaze.
He wrapped his huge hand around my delicate neck and squeezed. “You want me, little girl? You want the man who’ll always right your wrongs with blood and teach you all’a the dark ways of life, includin’ how to take a cock and make it come? Who’ll tell you what to do to please him and expect you to obey?”
My eyes flashed rebelliously but I knew he felt me swallow hard against his grip.
I was terrified of him like this, a man turned volcanic with rage.
There was no getting around the sheer masculine power of his enormous frame or, beyond that, the cold intelligence that lurked at the depths of his blade-grey eyes. It didn’t help that I’d just seen him peel a strip of skin off the back of a man’s hand with his Swiss Army knife as if he was casually peeling a carrot.
Yes, I was terrified of Zeus Garro, and rightly so.
The little girl who’d been drawn to his dark spirit now understood as a woman the violent realities of it.
But that fear pooled between my thighs like a hot tide that ebbed and throbbed with the tempo of his temper.
I was a woman now and that seed of intrigue had blossomed into something darker, edgier; a desire that was watered with danger and fertilized by fear.
And he was dangerous with fury now. Angry with the men who’d wronged him, angry with the Nightstalkers for fucking with him and his kin, angriest with me for being seventeen years old, off-limits and constantly in his face.
“You get me,” he murmured darkly, reading my thought through my hammering pulse under his thumb. “You want to get up on this counter and offer your sweet, wet cunt to me. Open up those golden thighs nice and wide under that little skirt so I can see exactly what it is you’re offerin’ me. I’ll teach you to touch that pretty pussy for me until you’re so wet I can smell it, then you’ll come exactly when I tell you to, and we’ll see if you’re good enough to be mine.”
“Yes,” I hissed, tipping my head back in his grip like a beta wolf submitting to her Alpha.
With one hand at my throat and the other at my ass, he hefted me on the counter and grinned that wicked grin. “Open wide.”
I stretched my thighs open as far as the counter would let me and swallowed thickly again as he flipped up my skirt to expose the seam of my slit, overstuffed with a swollen clit and plump, glistening lips.
“Spread yourself open for me,” he ordered as he took a step back, crossed his thick arms over his thick chest and leaned a hip against the counter to watch me with half-lidded but fervent eyes.
I used two fingers to hold myself open for him, feeling the heat of his eyes on the wet pink skin like a physical touch.
“Two fingers on your clit, gentle circles so it stands up nice and high for me.”
“Oh God.”
“You feel you’ve gotta pray to get through this ’fore I give you the okay to come, you do that, little girl,” he drawled. “Now dip one of those little fingers into that tight cunt but careful not to break the seal. My cock’ll do that soon enough.”
Holy fuck, he was fire and I was wax, melting under his attentions. My wetness trickled under my ass and onto the counter.
“Harder on your clit, another finger in your pussy,” he told me a minute later.
My eyes closed as I tossed my head back. It was too much, his voice coiled around me like wicked bondage, my fingers attached to puppet strings he maneuvered over my sticky flesh.
“Eyes on me,” he barked.
I opened them with effort but was rewarded by the sight of him palming the huge bulge in his black jeans. My mouth opened and my tongue darted into the air as if I could taste him.
His lids fell even lower, his voice a deep rumble as he said, “You come for me really pretty, Lou, I’ll reward you with my cock next time we play.”
“What if I want it now?” I dared to ask.
I watched his eyes flare open then sink back down. “You want me, you do what I tell you to do, little girl.”
A full body shudder ripped through me.
He stalked closer and leaned down to stare at my pussy like I was some interesting painting on display in a gallery. I watched him watch my fingers churn through my juicy pussy and knew I was close to coming.
So did Zeus.
“You can come whenever,” he muttered then blew a cool gust of air over my clit, leaned forward and gave it a short, wide lick with the flat of his tongue.
The sight of his head and broad shoulders between my thighs tuned me from solid to liquid. He watched my cum splash out against my fingers, watched me jerk against the counter and whimper. Then, when I was finally done, he used a single finger to follow a trail of wet up my inner thigh and then licked it off his skin.
“Good girl,” he praised with dark eyes.
I narrowed my droopy eyes at him and closed my legs over his hand. “You sound surprised.
“Can’t surprise a man like me, little girl. I’ve seen it all.”
“Yeah?” I taunted, too vulnerable and hating his coldness. “Because you’re an old man?”
“No, ’cause I’ve seen more in one year of my life than most people ever see in the entirety of theirs. I’ve seen grown men weep, loved ones kill loved ones over money and greed, little girls get shot because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and other kids hungry in the fuckin’ dirt ’cause their parents are too weak ass to provide for ’em.”
“Seems like all you’ve seen is bad,” I ventured softly, my anger cooled by the travesty of his words.
His gaze collided with me like a hand at my neck, squeezing and lifting until I felt unbalanced, unable to breathe.
“Saw you in the parking lot of First Light with velvet fuckin’ bows in your hair lookin’ at me like I was your saviour. Saw you drunk as fuck outside Nova’s girl Lila’s house lookin’ like somethin’ I dreamed up even stinkin’ like you did. Saw you again in this club in hardly anythin’ at all charmin’ near everyone around you with that halo of good you wear in your golden hair… Little girl, I told you, I’ve seen it all. But until you, didn’t know if any of it was worth it.”
He closed the sliver of space between us then spread his whole hand across my chest, over the spot where the scar we shared rested beneath my shirt. “Need to make sure you were cool with it, the monster in real life. Now I do, you need to know. I was serious about not lettin’ ya go. And by that, I mean fuckin’ ever.”
I snaked my arms around his back and pressed him to me, relief and love so bright a thing in my chest, it burned.
“The first seventeen years of my life, I fasted. I kept my body clean and my spirit pure. Now, I want to feast like a glutton, spread lust on my breakfast toast, shoot violence and sip greed. And I want you to teach me, sinner man, because you’re the only man for the job,” I told him.
His workingman’s hands abraded the sensitive skin of my neck as he worked them up my throat to cup my face in his wide palms. My breath caught in my throat as I wondered if this would finally be the time he’d kiss me. If this would be the kiss I’d been waiting for in one way or another since I was seven years old.
His thumb ran the length of my jaw then up to pull down my full lower lip. My tongue came out to taste the salt of my sex on his thumb and his eyes flashed like neon lights. I gasped as he dipped down to glide his tongue over the inside of my pouting lip then groaned low in his chest like a beast after his first taste of blood, and sealed his mouth to mine.
He tasted like whiskey and smoke, hot and sinful on my tongue and I knew if wickedness had a taste, it would be him. I moaned as he tilted my head and plunged deeper, his tongue like hot silk in my mouth and his beard rough against my cheeks. I sank my fingers in his soft, tangled mane and clung to him mindlessly because no amount of little girl dreaming or hoping could have prepared me for the earth-tilting reality of Zeus’s mouth on mine.
When he pulled back, he smoothed that thumb over my kiss-bruised lips, his eyes reverent and dark with the kind of desires a virgin couldn’t understand. I shivered as he bent his knees so we were on eye level and said, “Welcome to the dark side, then, little Lou.”
