Tyrant (Satan’s Angels MC #1)

Chapter 3

Tyrant

S ix months can’t change someone like this. Not on the outside. Yet, they have.

People have this vision of Washington in the winter. They think it’s a tropical paradise just because it doesn’t have mountains of snow unless you’re really up in the mountains. The rest of us who actually live here know that it isn’t true. You can’t ride a bike when it’s constantly raining and when it’s cold enough for that rain to freeze and become deadly and dangerous. The days are short, the rain gets into your bones until you think you’ll never be warm again.

It’s late. The streetlights cast eerie shadows as I stand leaning up against a lamppost. There isn’t anyone on the road except the occasional car, but they’re so few and so far between it’s almost like they don’t exist at all. It’s just me out here in the street, playing Raiden’s words over and over in my head as I wait for Lark to come out of her parents’ house.

She wants to be left alone, leave her alone. She has a life and it’s hers alone now. We guarded her until she was an adult, old enough to make her own choices. I never wanted to chase her away. She shouldn’t have to leave to live. This is prison. I’m the one locked up, not her. Let her go if she wants to go. Give her space. Don’t have her followed. Don’t pay anyone. No tabs. She’ll always be my sister, but she’s not a baby anymore. We have to respect her wishes.

I did as he asked, but I’m here now, watching Lark slink out of her parents’ front door, shutting it quietly so she wouldn’t wake them up, and the only thing I feel is regret powerful enough to send me to my knees.

I knew that nothing was okay when Lark texted me just after two in the morning, asking if I could meet her here. If she wanted to see me, all she had to do was ask during regular hours. Even if her parents didn’t like it, they wouldn’t have prevented it. Fuck, she could have texted me anytime in the past five months and I would have driven up to Seattle in an instant, in a goddamn heartbeat, no matter what I had going on here, no matter what Raiden said.

My eyes rake Lark’s body, noticing all the ways she’s changed. Her hair is freshly dyed that same jet black. It shimmers when she walks, but it’s the only part of her that seems alive. The rest of her is haunted, like she’s made of dust and shadows. She’s no ghost, but the specter of happiness hovers around her.

She tugs the collar of her black peacoat up tighter and does the top button as she walks down her parents’ little sidewalk. It splits their yard in half. She’s wearing leggings and something that looks like slippers. Not nearly warm enough for the way our breath gathers in the biting chill, but she doesn’t appear to notice.

When Lark tips her face up to find mine, searching me out intrinsically in the darkness, my heart hammers in my chest. She finds the lamppost a few houses down from her parents’ place like I’ve waited there every night of my life for her. Our eyes lock. We stare each other down for a few moments. Yes, moments. Neither one of us moves. My feet are frozen in my boots. I grabbed the wrong pair, and they’re not insulated. I parked my old car a few blocks away, just in case she was texting late because her parents were giving her a hard time about something.

I hoped that’s all it was, but that’s clearly not it.

The sweet girl I took to prom in June is gone. It’s a few days before Christmas now. Only a matter of months and she appears troubled. Sad. Broken.

Fury rises inside of me, warming me with its potent fire against the cold night. Something is wrong. I’ll fix it no matter what it costs.

“Gray,” she breathes in a voice heady and thick, so unlike her normal lighthearted, laughing tone. Despite everything that happened, Lark always found a reason to smile.

Not now.

“Can we go somewhere?” Her dark eyes are liquid damp in the streetlight.

“Wherever you want.” I’ll take her to the ends of the earth if only that would put a smile back on her face.

“My parents said you bought a house, but no one really knows where it is.” Her lips quiver, but the motion doesn’t reach her eyes. They look flat and glassy, like she’s not even in there.

That scares me more than anything.

“I did. I’ll take you there, right now.” I force myself to slow down, calm my frantic heartbeat, the adrenaline oversaturated in my bloodstream. “If that’s what you want.”

A slow sweep of velvet soft black lashes against milky pale skin. “Yes. Please.”

There’s no mention of the time, her parents sleeping in the house just beyond, the date. Christmas is only a few days away. That’s why she’s here, back in Hart. Seattle is only an hour away, but she hasn’t come back since she left in July in that ratty beater of a car that her parents bought her as a gift for graduating high school. It didn’t look safe. I didn’t come to see her off. I was trying to take a step back and respect her as an adult. She wrote to Raiden asking us to back down after she left, to give her independence and surprisingly, he agreed.

It didn’t sit well with me, but I resisted every single urge to check up on her. I knew she was writing to Raiden, and she had my number. She could call or text me whenever she wanted.

I open the car door for her. She slips into the passenger side. I try not to notice how good she smells now, how soft and small, innocent and fucking tender she appears. Fragile. It makes me want to drive slow and extra cautiously so I don’t accidentally hurt her in any way.

I crank the heat up so that she’s not cold. She’s not shaking, but her aura of warmth has fled. She could never be hard. She’s not built that way. Vulnerable, though? She’s that in every way and it presses hard into me with jagged edges, biting deep into my protective instincts.

I take us to the edge of town, until we hit a gravel backroad. Mud, more like. I kill the lights. We’ve done this before. I haven’t stopped thinking about that night. Even with all the other shit going on, it’s kept me awake when I should be sleeping, fuzzy and hazy when I need to be focused.

“Why aren’t you using your headlights?” Lark whispers.

I focus on the road, gripping the wheel harder than I have to. Honestly, the stupid saying about blindfolds is probably true. I could do this drive without looking by now. I know every inch of my property and every rut and curve in the road that leads to it.

“It’s safer this way.”

“Yeah,” she breathes. “Because some people, now and in the future, don’t and might not like you.”

“We all have enemies. I sleep better at night knowing the majority of them can’t find me.”

“I’ve heard your dad is getting worse. The club wants him out. The brothers want you.”

How the fuck has she heard that? Did Raiden finally cave and let her visit? Call? No. He wouldn’t change his mind about that and even if she did get a call through, he wouldn’t say anything over lines that were monitored.

We creep along, me fighting with my silence, wondering how much I can tell her. Nothing would be best, but she already knows something.

“Dad told me right after I got home today. He just stood there and gave me this catch-up speech, like he’d been rehearsing it for weeks. It was weird. I hated it. It’s almost Christmas, our second one without Raiden, and they still won’t talk about him. I hate how they’ve cut him out of this family like he’s dead.”

“He’s not. Raiden is fine.”

“I know he’s not dead I know. But he’s not fine . And neither are you. He’s not safe and you’re not safe. Not if what my dad said is true.”

Her dad doesn’t know everything. Whatever he’s gleaned from people around town, he couldn’t know. I’m the only one who knows, and my own father has no idea that I have the information that could ruin him. I would never have betrayed my own flesh and blood. My own father. Thinking about harming him is akin to patricide, even if I were never to take things that far. Ousting him from the club would kill him. I’d be responsible for his death. Telling any of my club brothers what I know would seal his fate. Keeping it a secret makes me a traitor to them and my best friend. The hatred and bitterness is cutting holes and festering inside of me.

I let us creep along, the car plunged into silence. The heater pumps and ticks. Ticks, ticks, ticks. It’s going to start to squeal soon. I know I should bring it into the garage and work on it.

It’s pitch black out here. I’m not even sure if Lark can make out any details. I’m not sure she’s trying. I won’t take my eyes off the road, afraid if I look at her that I’ll startle her into opening the door and fleeing into the vast night, knowing all the while she’d never do anything that stupid, but she seems flighty and afraid.

Not of me. She never would have called me otherwise.

It’s not fear for me that made her send that text. It’s something else.

I wait until we’ve parked, surrounded by the tall shelter belt planted to ring the yard, the woods to our left. My hand stays on the key in the ignition even though I’m not going to shut it off. “You’re out here with me at past three in the morning because you want to know about club business?”

She lets out the longest, most painful sigh. It cuts straight through me. Her hands cover her face, her hair swooping forward to hide her like a privacy curtain. I freeze, undone. Right now, I’m not the legacy project of our club. I’m not a patched in one percenter. I’m no big, tough biker. Instead, I feel like a boy, lost for words. I don’t know what to do. Don’t know how to fix this or comfort her. If she’s crying, it’s going to tear the soul from my body.

She’s not. When she lifts her face and stares at me in the dark, all the shadows highlighting her delicate cheekbones, the swell of her lips, her black and fiery eyes, I see that her face is dry.

“I wanted to go to Seattle. I thought if I left here, put a little bit of distance between myself and Hart, it would change who I am.”

But you’re perfect. You always have been.

Her expression, the intensity of her eyes on my face, strip me down to nothing. I’m not the one who is twice her size. I feel small and nearly frantic. Girls have been staring at me all my life.

No one has ever looked at me like Lark is now.

Like she can see through skin and bone down to the essence that no woman has ever wanted to touch, let alone harness and own. She’s looking at me the way one person looks at another when they already know that you’re in ownership of their soul.

Stupidly, I turn my grease-stained, calloused palms up on my knees, expecting to see the ghostly outline of the very essence of her being residing there.

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I used to think of you as a brother, but then it was more. It was so much more.”

Her pale throat juts above the collar of her coat, my hand aching to brush against her soft skin just to see the vast difference between my rough inked fingers and that milky cream. I want to press my thumb to her pulse point and feel her life hammering beneath my touch.

“It’s been more for years. I didn’t just worry about you. I missed you. Wanting you is a weapon that would obliterate our lives. I never wanted to tell you this, to turn you into a dirty secret. You kept me safe, you and Raiden. I thought if you let me go, I could move on. That I could stop being so desperate and pathetic. I was so stupid.”

I can’t accept this. Can’t process.

“What happened?” I sound like a feral beast. I’m barely in control of myself. I know what she’s just said and hearing it is the most taboo, unimaginable expression in the world, but her tone changed. There’s something that hurt her and it’s not me.

“I was so desperate to try and move on. That’s what they look for. For stupid, vulnerable people like me who are na?ve and all alone.”

I want to smash my fist through the window. “Who? What’s his name? Who hurt you? I’ll—”

She laughs, the sound sending a shiver up my spine. “Find him and kill him and put him a shallow grave so that you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life? No. That’s not why I’m here.”

“I wouldn’t put him in a shallow grave. The fucker would never be found. I’ll find him and cut off his hands for daring to touch you. Give me his name.”

She frowns, but there’s a new, strange serenity about her. “Jordan Thatche. He took me to his house, and it felt like he wouldn’t let me leave. He cornered me. Kissed me. Groped me. I kept telling him I wanted to go, but he wouldn’t stop. I kneed him in the nuts and grabbed a knife out of the knife block—he was stupid enough to trap me in the kitchen—and swore I’d cut his throat. I let myself out. He never bothered me again. Guys like that don’t appreciate girls who can fight back. He wasn’t the type to rape me. Just wanted to feel me up. He would have stopped. He was a coward.”

I doubt that very much. He seems exactly the type.

“I wasn’t there. Raiden—”

“I know.” Her eyes change, lighting in the dark, spotlights that land on my face and rake over me possessively. This is no tale of woe and accusation. Her gaze is hot. No longer that of a child, but of a woman. I’m pinned in place, at a loss, robbed of my breath and my eloquence and all my power.

“That’s not what’s wrong with me. What’s wrong with me is you. I can’t eat or sleep. I can’t fucking function.” The curse on her sweet lips feels wrong. It’s far worse that I want to dip my tongue between them and taste it, lap at the bitterness and feed her back fire until she’s nothing but sweet moans and renewed strength. “I don’t want to be in Seattle. I want to be with you. I’m not in love with you, so there’s no way I’ll ever fall out of it. I am love. I’ve always loved you. I need you to fix me. Fix my life. Make it livable. Give me something I can keep. I know it’s wrong. I know that, but I can’t stop wanting. I want to be the one on the back of your bike. At your side. I’d ask you to leave, to run away with me, but I know that once you patch in, you’re in for life. I know you can’t walk away. I’ll never have you like that and leaving would only break you, just like me trying to remove myself from Hart and get a clean break with the past has eaten away at my soul. You’ll rule this town one day and I want to be your queen. I want to give myself to you. I want you to take me.”

My heart twists in my chest, brutal and bitter over the thoughts I’ve had since I took Lark to prom and saw her looking like a goddamn woman for the first time and noticed that she’d grown up. Not just thoughts, but dreams. Moments I’ve indulged in like the sick prick I am. My stomach bottoms out because this isn’t a dream. This isn’t some fantasy while I stroke my dick in the shower or the dead of night, guilty as fuck about doing it and wanting her. This is real.

I’m half desperate to reach for her and half appalled. “The only way I’m taking you is back the way we came, to your parents’ house.”

She reaches out, her tiny, dainty hand hovering in the space between us. I pull back immediately, flattening myself to my seat. This isn’t self-preservation. This is ruin.

She doesn’t touch me. Her lips twist in that same sarcastic, pouty way they used to when she was still a kid.

Not a kid. She was a teenager by then, full of sass and fire and she could give far better than she ever got from you and Raiden. She was smarter. Straining at the repressive seams her parents sewed around her so they wouldn’t lose her too. She’s always wanted a taste of the darkness. That’s all I am. Just temptation. She wants to see what it feels like to sin.

“Fuck that, you’re not.” She moves fast, her hand changing direction. She grabs the keys out of the ignition, throws her door open, and marches straight around to the front of the car. My two-story farmhouse shimmers like a beacon in the dark, the ancient white wood siding with the peeling paint, watching us, the red barn beyond that.

Lark has no plans on marching up to it and using my keys to let herself in. She rounds the front of the car, arches her arm, and throws them as hard and as far into the dark night as she can. She turns and her glowing eyes meet mine through the windshield. “At prom… you looked at me. The things you said… I know you’ve thought about me too. I tried to get away, to break the hold you have on me, but how can I do that when you own every single bit of me? It’s broken me, brought me back here, brought me straight to you. We’re dealing with this. Now. Tonight.” She loses the feral determination, a pleading note entering her tone. “I need you to fix me because you’re the only one who can.”

I can’t.

I’ve already fucked up her brother’s life. I won’t fuck hers up too. I might want her. I might have pined for her and thought about her and let her invade my mind since fucking June, but I won’t spread that sickness to her. I won’t let it infect her. She needs to be far, far away from here.

I hurtle out of the car in search of my keys, but she steps into my path. I gave my vow to Raiden. To my club. They’re all I have.

Lark’s hand cups my cheek, shockingly warm even though it’s frigid out here. Her other hand curls through my unzipped leather jacket. I run hot and always have. Her touch invades me, her small palm flattening out on top of my heart. The worst mistake I ever made was trusting that blood comes before anything. It blinded me to what my father truly was, and Raiden paid the price. I’ve known for months now that I’ll burn the world down to set things right.

My world is burning down alright. Just not the way I ever could have imagined.

My hands move without my consent or my command. One buries itself in that soft, glorious mane of hair and clamps down hard and possessive on the back of Lark’s neck. I crush our foreheads together, our breath painted white clouds.

“I can’t, Lark.”

Her eyes flutter closed. “I know. I know.”

But she tilts her face up and straight through the dark I can see the loneliness, the longing, the desire, the very thing I can’t define because I’m fucking afraid to. I’m afraid to touch her because I know that doing it means ripping my own soul out and entrusting her with it. It means replacing it with her own, a bloody carving and swapping that will only make us both hemorrhage. She’s off limits even for me, a man who doesn’t entirely believe in laws.

She whimpers, the sound so pained and distressed.

You need to fix me because you’re the only one who can.

I need to obey the same rules I set for every other prick out there who ever thought of laying a finger on Lark Gardiner. One wrong move and it would tip the scales. Lark is the kind of woman that a man wants to own. She’d make a glorious queen and I know that if I even think about having her, I’ll never want to let her go.

I can’t. I can’t, and I won’t.

But she can and she will.

She reaches up and wraps her hands around the back of my neck, claiming and possessing me like I just did with my own big palm. She arches up and brings my face down. There’s the tiniest sigh, like a little bird in its death throes, crashing from the sky and plummeting to the earth.

I live in sin and carnage, smoke and blood. It’s where I’ve lived my whole fucking life. It’s impossible to make her understand when I’ve done everything I can to keep it from her. Corrupted. Rough. An outlaw. I’m not good at many things, but I am good at being a biker. It’s in my blood, right from my own grandfather.

“Lark…”

“Shh.” Her finger presses to my lips.

She doesn’t want my confession. She just wants me.

I’m a strong man, but the dark of my soul cries out for her. We’d be corruption and innocence. I’ve burned for her right down to ash. The idea of her shamed me, but the reality of her eviscerates me. My vows. My honor. This moment is my downfall.

The oldest tale in the goddamn world.

Another sigh spills from Lark’s lips, breathy and shocked, when I wind my fingers through her hair and tug brutall y , tipping her head back to the dark of night. Looking up at me like I’m the god who painted the night sky into existence, her eyes truly light up for the first time tonight. A low groan rumbles out of me.

If I’m going to feast on her, I’m going to have my fill.