It wouldn’t do to be seen or, even worse, noticed.
I was waiting, and I had been for three hours in the very dead of night when the rest of the good citizens of town were long gone to sleep.
I didn’t mind the waiting.
Predators never do.
It was an intrinsic part of the hunt. The lull before the strike.
It wasn’t passive or boring.
It was tension itself, energy gathering momentum to unleash itself at the right moment.
To a man like me, the waiting was as heady as that lingering moment before the first kiss, all electrifying chemistry and eager anticipation.
Not that I’d ever felt that way about a kiss.
Only about the woman I imagined kissing.
The woman who was everything kind and lovely, completely devoid of sin.
So, my opposite.
We might as well have existed on different planets.
Beatrice Lafayette saw everything through rose-tinted glasses, sometimes literally because she had a habit of wearing ridiculous sunglasses shaped like hearts and flowers.
I saw everything as it was and would be. Waiting to die, tinged in the grey rot of time.
She was not for me.
To even entertain ideas of kissing that full, cotton candy pink mouth could have amounted to one of the most disturbed thoughts to ever cross my admittedly extremely disturbed mind.
I tried not to let myself think beyond the possibility of a kiss.
Because I was not a soft man or a kind soul.
I was a killer fashioned by the hands of monsters. When I fucked, it was just as brutal as when I fought or just as coldly efficient as when I killed.
I liked to choke the breath out of a pretty neck to heighten pleasure, paint pale skin in livid red bites, and play with a pussy until it was swollen, drenched in so much cum it ran down my wrist and my partners begged me brokenly to stop.
There was no romance or flowers, no intimate smiles or…cuddles.
All things Bea would want.
Things she deserved.
So I thought about that kiss for a fleeting moment as I leaned against my bike, then considered what a nineteen-year-old girl might be doing on a Friday night while I staked out my prey.
Leaves crunched behind me, alerting me to someone’s presence.
I didn’t turn, didn’t even flinch when a massive frame moved into sight at my periphery.
“Looked for five minutes, could barely see you in the dark, and I was lookin’,” Wrath Marsden grunted as he crossed his arms and stared into the dead street before us. “Gotta admit, you’re good. Surprised your name’s not Ghost.”
I let out a sharp exhale that was as much effort as I was going to expend on my indignancy.
Wrath shifted beside me and irritation spiked through me. He was a big ass motherfucker, nearly as big as our prez, Zeus Garro, and he drew attention to himself through sheer size alone.
I was tall and compacted with lean, sharp lines of muscle, but I moved like a shadow while my brother lumbered like a bear.
“Don’t need you here,” I said, snapping open my curved Karambit blade while I fished the untouched block of cedar wood out of my pocket. I touched the tip of the steel to the soft wood without thinking, my fingers moving it with efficiency and purpose. I never knew what I would carve before I finished it. My hands spoke to the timber in a language I couldn’t translate in my head.
“No,” Wrath agreed, crossing his thick arms over his chest, bracing his feet apart in a physical display of his desire to stay. “Asked Prez if I could come by. Figure I better start earnin’ my keep if I wanna stick around.”
“As I said,” I repeated coldly. “I got this covered.”
He ignored me. “Motherfucker dealers, eh? You think it’s a requirement they’re dumb as fuck or just coincidence?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. In my opinion, most people were stupid.
“Sellin’ drugs to minors, gettin’ girls hooked on coke to lock them into prostitution. We gave them a warnin’, they chose not to heed it.” My voice shifted seamlessly into the language of my brothers. I was a chameleon, if chameleons were armed with teeth, claws, and deadly intent. “He deserves to die. They all do.”
“How’re you doin’ it?” Wrath asked with mild curiosity, like we were discussing the weather.
He was the former enforcer for the disbanded Berserkers MC so he knew a thing or two about killing.
But he was a blunt force instrument, all muscle and fury. No finesse in his torture, no art in his murder.
He would never be as good as me.
Not many could be, no matter how hard they might try. Most people, like Wrath, had some kind of social conscience, a voice in the back of their head that whispered what other people might think or feel about them.
I didn’t have that voice.
Just my own dark whisperings echoing in a vast, black abyss.