Iron & Bone (Lock & Key #3) (29 page)

She was leaving—with them.

I was a raging bull, nostrils flaring with smoke and fire. My neck craned toward them.

“What are you doing, motherfuckers?” I yelled.

Both Felipe and Alejandro stopped and turned, throwing me a casual glance, as they put the suitcase into the trunk of their hopped-up Dodge Coronet.

Felipe’s black cat eyes narrowed. “She’s ours now.” His voice was so fucking relaxed, so fucking confident.

“The fuck you say! Inès! What the hell are you doing?”

She only glared at me from a curtain of straightened glossy hair, her face still flushed. “I’ve had enough. Okay?”

“Okay?” I shouted. “Okay?” I stalked toward her, my limbs made of molten iron. I would singe her, burn her, make smoke and ash of her.

Smash her.

Hands shoved me back. “Hey, hey, hey.” Alejandro towered over me. “Stand down,
hermano
. She came to us, wanted to be our bitch straight off. Felipe and I have what she needs.” He palmed his crotch over his loose low-slung jeans, his tatted arm taut with the action, his jaw jutting out. “How can you compare yourself to the two of us?” He shoved his fingers in my face, grinning. “No way, boy, you can’t.”

But Alejandro was wrong.

Inès wasn’t just my hole, just the girl I shared a crib with, had on my arm at parties, or hung with around the hood. She was my mission. She was a part of me.

“She’s with us now. You understand what that means?” Alejandro said, his head slanting, dark eyes glinting.

Felipe leaned over and licked Inès’s willing lips with a disgusting flutter of his tongue as Alejandro wrapped a hand around her ass and rubbed.

“Time for you to try a
gringa
,
El Hueso
. I’m telling you, they come to us like flies.” Alejandro winked. “Wild side,
papi
.”

I stared at the three of them, my heart chugging in my chest.

Felipe’s eyes narrowed as he threw an arm around my neck. “She’s your cousin, man. You’re not supposed to be fucking your cousin. We saved your soul from
purgatorio
, for sure, eh?”

They both laughed, but Inès stood still, her hands gripping a leather handbag I didn’t recognize.

I pushed Felipe off me. “You know she’s barely sixteen, right?” I spit out.

Felipe only glared at me, his jaw rigid. But the gleam in Alejandro’s eyes was unmistakable, his tongue dipping against his lower lip. “Sweetest pussy ever.”

Inès raised a well-groomed eyebrow as she leaned her body into his.

The weeks of worrying about her, wondering what she was up to, who she was with, if she had lost it and was wandering the streets or had gotten raped and was trapped somewhere, her head chopped off, or…

But this? With them?

Felipe and Alejandro constantly dangled the carrots of more money, more responsibility, more advancement, more prestige, yet never delivered because they would hoard it all for themselves and enjoy the power of denial they lorded over the rest of us.

Inès was throwing me away for a joyride with these two? This was what she needed, what made her happy?

What about us?

All the bloodletting, all the beatings, the burning, the carvings, the cleaning—I’d done it all for them. The smell of acid, bleach, and charred flesh filled my nostrils as I gulped for air.
All for her, for us.
At the end of every single cliff I’d hung from every day, I’d clung to her.

White light exploded in my eyes, and a rush of adrenaline surged from my feet through my middle, boiling in my chest, pounding in my head. I charged through the air, screaming, yelling. Blows of pain shot through me, the smash of cement against my back, a sudden blinding, throbbing sting all through my middle. I gasped for air, and my eyes flared open.

Everything stopped.

Inès leaned over me, her knife in her hand—the one I had bought her, the one I had taught her how to use.

Now, it had my blood on it.

My bleary eyes drowned in her dark pools looming over me.

“Look what you’ve done, Santi! Leave me alone! Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

The blare of sirens rose down the street. Inès pulled her lips together and wiped her knife clean on my ripped shirt. Clutching the blade to her chest, she tumbled into the Calderones’ car, a figure pressing in after her.

A pointy boot end kicked me hard in the ribs, and I coughed up blood and vomit on the pavement, my body coiling at the pain shooting through me. Another boot jammed into my lower back, and my head knocked against the cement.

Suddenly, my body was jerked up, and Alejandro’s voice thundered in my ear. “Don’t you dare come near her again, or I’ll kill you. You will fucking regret the day you were born. I will find you, wherever you go, and you will suffer. I will find ways to make you pay.”

My body slammed into the cement once again, flopping open like a tossed puppet.

Car doors banged, an engine roared, rubber screeched.

A whirlpool of glaring sun and stifling heat enflamed the reek of garbage on the cement where I lay. My blood simmered on the pavement before me. My arms were heavy and wet, glued to my body.

I tried to focus through the daze.

My hands fell from my stomach, and a long slash of torn flesh branded my middle, blood everywhere.

Inès had left her mark on me.

Nothing came out of my mouth, but I screamed.

“Hey, Boner.”

Butler’s voice brought me back to Earth, to the club meeting room, to the empty gun case.

“What do you want to do about this?”

I rubbed a hand across my prickly scar. “Need to find out who took it and why,” I replied.

I have to be sure.

“Let’s do it.”

“Get ready. I got to go home, change clothes, change bikes, then I’ll meet you back here in an hour. We’re gonna pay the Flames in Nebraska a visit.”

Butler’s blue eyes flashed at me. “Right behind you, brother.”

“
HI
.” Jill was perched on my front steps, halfway up and halfway down. Her eyes skidded over me, and my stomach clenched. I’d done that—planted that hesitation, that doubt in her.

“Hey.”

“Um, I’m not bothering you, am I?” Jill gestured back to her car. “I can go—”

“No, you’re not bothering me. I just got out of the shower.” I rubbed a hand down my bare chest, and her eyes followed the movement. Her cheeks flushed, and she quickly averted her gaze.

She wouldn’t have done that before. Before, she would’ve grinned at me and made a flirtatious comment or made a move on me. Now, this fence of fucking propriety had shot up between us. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like a barrier between me and Jill, especially one I couldn’t see or climb or tear down with my hands.

“Get in here.” I held open my door for her.

She climbed up the last steps and shrank through the doorway, as if she were entering a portal to the dreaded realm of the unknown.

Her gaze spun over my living room furniture, the U-shaped open kitchen, the huge front bay window I had fixed up with a custom cushioned seat that doubled as storage. Her eyes finally landed over the fireplace on Lock’s huge charcoal drawing of me on my Harley. The piece was a blur of movement, thrill, and self-determination that he and Grace had framed for me last Christmas.

“That’s you, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yeah, Lock drew it.”

“He’s so talented.”

“He is.”

Jill licked her lips. “You said you’d be back from North Dakota this morning, and I just dropped Becca off at her Aunt Penny’s, so I thought I’d stop by.”

“Glad you did.”

“I like your house,” she said, rooted to her spot in the middle of the entry way.

“Thanks. Got it on a foreclosure about seven years ago. Been fixing it up here and there.”

She took in the polished wood, her eyes widening, as if she’d suddenly realized she was stuck in the center of an iced-over lake. “It’s beautiful. You don’t see this much anymore.”

“I finally refinished the floors. I’m a traditionalist at heart.”

She peered into my living room. “It seems big for someone on his own.”

“I like open space. My own, especially.”

She only nodded.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I completely understand. I haven’t had my own space in a long, long time.”

“You’ll get there.”

She raised her head and let loose a small smile. I captured that sunbeam in my chest and felt its heat diffuse in my system. But the distance between us remained like a cold slab of stone separating us.

“Jill, come here.”

Her posture straightened. “I came over to apologize for the other night and tell you that we don’t have to keep this charade going.” She let out a breath she’d seemed to be holding on to forever.

“What charade?”

Her eyebrows lifted. “I thought after the other night on the couch—”

“Jill, I wouldn’t have had you in my bed that first night at the club if I didn’t mean it, if I didn’t want you there.”

She fidgeted, one hand rubbing up and down her opposite forearm.

“Firefly.” I reached out my hand toward her.

She stared at it, and my throat burned.

“Jillee, please, baby.”

She took three steps toward me and laid her hand in mine. Cool, soft.

I brought it to my lips. “I’m sorry for getting up and leaving the way I did that night.”

“No, I’m sorry. I went overboard. I usually do. Not that I usually…you know…” She blushed. “What I mean is, I’m sorry I brought up all those difficult memories for you and made you uncomfortable, then I only made it worse when I said your name.”

I pulled her in close, and she finally pressed into my chest.

All the tension I’d been carrying in my shoulders and back released. “Stop. You didn’t do nothing wrong. I overreacted.”

“But if that’s the way you feel, Boner, that’s the way it is.”

“I’ve never shared my past with anyone before. Only Dig.” I smoothed the soft waves of her hair from her face. “But I couldn’t stop myself from telling you the truth. I wanted you to know. But when I heard you say my name—”

“You see her in me, don’t you? Your cousin, Inès?” Her face reddened, and she shifted her weight. “The wanting to keep me safe, like you kept her safe. I get that.”

Jesus Christ.
Nothing could be further from the truth, but I couldn’t tell her that now, I couldn’t tell her the whole horrible tale. I couldn’t.

I swallowed hard. “It’s not about her. This, what we have, is about you.”

Her eyes searched mine.

“When I lost Dig and Grace, that old futility came washing back over me, chaining me. I lost everything all over again. Couldn’t save anybody. But you—you’d survived your shit. You survived, Jill. I knew you would.”

“What do you mean?”

“I ran you off club property—at least, what? Twice?”

She nodded.

“I watched over you for a year after that, making sure none of them found you. Making sure you hadn’t told and that other assholes weren’t taking advantage of you. I made sure.”

“You watched me?”

“Going to school. Going to church. Youth group meetings. Going to football games with your girlfriends. Going on dates. To your therapist. I watched you.”

She stiffened in my hold. “I saw Dready off and on, but then he stopped showing up.”