Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 113996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
I’m coming for you.
It needed my focus. Because at the end of the day, we didn’t know what we were about to see. Yet somehow, sitting there with my brothers, my mind wandered back to my encounter with the kid and his big sister the day before.
I’d be lying if I said it was the first time I’d thought about her.
Because it wasn’t.
In fact, there wasn’t an hour since I’d met her that I hadn’t thought about her.
And it was no secret why.
She was wildly beautiful, with eyes as dark as black stone and hair the color of redwood tumbling down her back in a thick ponytail. And that mouth on her. Jesus. She wasn’t afraid of me. Hell, I didn’t think she’d be afraid of anything. She was a strong woman, and just as fiery as her blazing hair. I admit, seeing the passion in her eyes as she yelled at me had made me hard. And seeing those perky nipples pressing against the soft fabric of her black tank top had almost driven me insane with lust.
Now I couldn’t get her out of my damned head.
But she was much younger than me. At least by a decade and a half. And I wasn’t into young ones.
Hell, wasn’t that one of the arguments I’d had with Ruger when he’d fallen in love with Chastity? He was sixteen years older than her, and I thought that was too much of an age gap.
And yet, here I was fantasizing about a woman who was at least that much younger than me, like a hypocritical asshole.
I told myself it was because I hadn’t been laid in weeks. That the mayor and I were done, and without the regular release I found in her bed, my body was sending crazy messages to my brain.
But I needed to focus.
Needed to keep my head on straight.
Draining my coffee, I forced her out of my mind, telling myself that later, when I was alone, I would fuck her out of my head with my hand. Because I didn’t need any distractions. The club had put a lot of effort in tracking down Martel’s associates, the ones who continued to help him as he marinated in perverted bliss during his exile, and I couldn’t afford to be distracted by a woman.
Even if that woman was a five-foot-seven redhead with wild eyes and a killer body.
“Are we ready to do this?” I looked at my sergeant-at-arms and VP.
Cade and Ruger nodded. “We do what we gotta do,” Ruger said as we left the clubhouse and headed for our bikes.
We rode through the gray dawn to the seedy motel outside of town. It was a lonely place where the scum of society moved about in blatant sordidness, marinating in bad choices, and festering in their resentment for the hand life had dealt them. Here they robbed, lied, cheated, and scammed, passing their misfortune and disease onto whoever had the bad luck to cross paths with them.
Long ago, back when Nixon was president, the motel was the jewel in the crown of a thriving motel chain. It was clean and well-kept, a popular place for families to vacation, for respectable traveling businessmen to stop on their travels, and for respectable young women to lie by the pool in their modest bathing suits and big, floppy hats.
But those days were long gone.
The decay began when the highway bypass was built back in the early eighties, cutting traffic past the motel by more than eighty percent. Eventually, the families stopped coming, the pool turned green, and the respectable traveling businessmen only dropped in to bring their mistresses or paid-by-the-hour hookers.
The emptiness and little traffic also attracted the kind of people who liked to live in the shadows so no one could see what they were doing. They wanted the seclusion. The quiet. The anonymity. It was a melting pot of drug dealers, black market concierges, and killers.
When Ruger, Cade, and I pulled onto the gravel driveway, the only noise was the crackle of stone beneath the tires, and the tired hum of a neon sign that blinked, T E PINES M TEL.
We entered through the side door, slipped into the office and met with the manager who was waiting for us. No words were exchanged, only the three promised Benjamin Franklin notes I had agreed to when he’d contacted me the night before. I passed over the cash and he passed me the key.
Room 17.
It was on the second floor.
We crept up the concrete stairs, and the stench of piss and puke violated my senses. You could see the nicotine stains on the walls and feel the depravity hanging in the air. Nothing good ever happened here.
My disgust registered in my brain. I would put a bullet in my head before I lived a life that led me here.