On the Edge of Love (Mama's Brood Book 1) (2 page)

“Who are you? Not cops,” the woman said.

He liked her voice. It was low, husky. Didn’t reflect the fear he’d briefly seen in her gaze. He imagined that voice moaning, crying out as he buried himself deep inside her. It was getting damned hard to repress his need. A growl rose in his throat as he stepped toward her. The woman’s eyes widened, and she pressed back into Coen. The sound he made shifted from arousal to warning.

“Price, handle him, or I’m gonna put one between his eyes,” Coen said, finger on the trigger of his gun, gaze never straying from Zeus. Smart man.

“Everyone relax,” Price ordered. “Kragen’s men are dead, and we’ve got the woman. Let’s clear the building and regroup at Mama’s House. Zeus, you, Coen, and Bride will ride with me and Ms. Samora. Big Country, Lynx, Juarez, strip any info you can and follow us home.”

Big Country nodded.

“Ms. Samora, Sabrina, you okay to stand?” Price asked, extending his hand toward her. Zeus didn’t react when she reached out, trusting Price. “I know you’re scared, confused, but I promise we’re here to help you. This is asking a lot, I know, but can you look at the dead men who kidnapped you, tell us if you recognize any of them?”

“Can’t you just tell me what’s going on?” she asked. She was attempting to avoid looking at the men on the ground. “This shit is not real,” she whispered.

“They’re dead. That’s real. Touch ’em if you don’t believe it,” Zeus suggested. Hell, he could comfort too.

“Do you recognize any of them?” Price asked again.

“Keep him the hell away from me,” she said, looking at Zeus as if he were the one who had kidnapped and beaten her. Zeus smiled, and she stepped closer to Price. He would have told her that Price couldn’t keep her from him, but everything he did and said seemed to antagonize her. He’d let her believe Price could protect her, but he couldn’t wait to see her reaction when she discovered that nothing and no one could stop him if he decided to reach out and touch.

“These two broke into my apartment,” she said, indicating the gut-wound guy, then the slashed-throat guy. “Never seen him,” she said pointing to the femoral-artery guy. “And…Jesus Christ.” Her hand rose to cover her mouth. “Jesus Christ, that’s Barry, he works—”

“Worked,” Zeus corrected.

“Front desk security at my office building.”

“Big Country, scrub it down. Come on, Sabrina. We’re going to get you to a safe place and talk about what’s going on.”

“Jesus Christ,” she mumbled again as Coen led her out of the warehouse.

Bride, who was more resistant to conversing than Zeus, shouldered her semiautomatic and trailed Coen and the woman, Price taking point.

Zeus took one last look at his work. Big Country walked over, stopping at his side and sharing in the moment. Big Country. Brown-haired, green-eyed Louisiana guy was as tall as Zeus but wider, solid, like he’d been fighting gators since he was old enough to walk.

“Why leave her with me?” he asked.

“Juarez said you’d kill her before they did. Coen said you’d keep her safe. Price needed to know you were stable enough to work with the Brood.”

“I’m not.”

“I know.”

“
Puto
bastard,” Juarez muttered as he went to set explosives.

“You guys got history?” Big Country asked as they watched Juarez walk away.

“No. But I have a feeling his future will be painted in blood.”

“I’ll make sure Price lets you have your weapons in the future.”

Zeus grunted and walked away. He had blades hidden all over his body; he didn’t need Big Hick to do shit on his behalf.

Outside the warehouse he took a deep breath. The air was cool, crisp, slightly weighted with moisture. He caught Sabrina’s scent, his eyes lighting on the custom-made black SUV. She was inside, hidden behind the darkly tinted windows that reflected moonlight and wispy clouds. Even though he couldn’t see her, he knew she was watching him. His mouth hitched up slightly on one side as he walked to the vehicle, imagining he held her gaze. Opening the back door, he climbed in and slipped in the third row of seats, directly behind her. Bride sat in the passenger seat in front of her and Price sat opposite Bride, in the driver’s seat. Coen sat beside Sabrina in the second row, and Zeus sat at their backs. Foolish to leave themselves so vulnerable.

The woman must have felt the same way, because she kept glancing nervously over her shoulder. He didn’t move, simply sat there and stared at her. He closed his eyes when the SUV rolled forward and inhaled her scent, letting it fill him. Soon he would wear her essence as if it was his own. He would get so close to her that it would bind to him more completely than the blood drying against his skin. The compulsion to have her would drive him until he fulfilled its need. There was no resisting the compulsions.

He breathed in deep again, fingers coaxing his blade to dance in the darkness of the SUV’s interior. Images of the brown-skinned woman’s breasts merged against images of his most beloved weapon. Theirs would be a powerful union.

THE OLD WAREHOUSE exploded when they were about four hundred meters away. Sabrina jumped, her heartbeat accelerating when she looked back at the destruction. The bloody man behind her was superimposed upon the reddish-orange flames of the burning building. He appeared demonic as he sat there watching her with those metallic-gray eyes. The intensity of them made her skin crawl. She didn’t like being the focus of his attention, yet from the moment she’d fought herself free from unconsciousness, she’d known she had it.

Facing forward, she turned to look out the passenger-side window. It was too dark to see much because the moon had slipped behind a shield of clouds. She knew she was in some kind of industrial area, close to a port maybe. She’d smelled water when she walked out of the warehouse. They were close to either the bay or the ocean, most likely the bay, though, which hopefully meant she wasn’t too far from home.

Speeding toward she didn’t know where, she couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to her once they got there. Her mind flashed to the four dead bodies, remembered the man who had killed them aroused and dripping blood on her, his eyes promising she would be next. She doubted there would have been a quick death for her. He would’ve fucked her first, maybe fucked her during. Who knew the level of his derangement? She grimaced. She didn’t need to know. She needed to get the hell away from these people, hide, hole up, and figure out how and why she had been attacked and kidnapped. The dead guys weren’t Ernesto’s men; that much she knew.

Both the kidnappers and the people who had rescued her had addressed her as Sabrina Samora, her actual name, not one of the aliases she had used most of her adult life. Not until she’d run away from Ernesto in Florida and moved to New Orleans to be close to her sister Sam had she begun to use her birth name again. Ironically, it was the one name she’d gone by that Ernesto never knew. She sighed. At least she didn’t have to worry about that problem.

“You okay, Sabrina?” the man across from her asked. She nodded once, quickly lowering her eyes.

He’d held her, protected her in those first moments of confusion and fear. He was the only one to show her comfort, and she appreciated it. She’d guessed he was the defender-of-the-innocent type, but she knew by the way he’d spoken to the one who would do her irreparable damage that he could be as threatening as the rest of this group.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked because they sure as shit weren’t taking her back to her studio apartment in Oakland. She could see a freeway coming up, the golden lights of a bridge on the dark horizon, but not the Bay Bridge. They passed a sign indicating that an on-ramp for the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge was to the right. She knew then that she was somewhere in Richmond or Point Richmond, heading farther away from her home, not toward it.

“We’re taking you to a place where it’s safe to talk freely,” the driver said.

“Seems safe enough to talk in here,” she said, keeping her voice hesitant.

“Seems that way.”

Those were the last words spoken for the next hour or so.

The vehicle maneuvered seamlessly from road to freeway, highway to small-town main streets. They climbed up a twisting, two-lane highway sheltered by trees, which turned into a dense forest that blocked the moon. It was dark where they were, stretches of uninterrupted black except for the SUV‘s headlights. The streetlamps seemed spaced as mile markers instead of illumination devices meant to keep the darkness at bay. They were more like stingy oases of light engulfed by a desert of dark. At this early-morning hour they hadn’t passed another car for miles. She’d lost her bearings again once they had passed the Point Reyes area. The national park was the farthest she’d ever been in Marin County.

Shit. At this distance it was going to be hard to escape from them and get someplace safe and familiar. It’s okay, she reassured herself. She had done hard in the past; she’d do it again if it meant saving her ass.

They slowed and turned left onto a dirt road she never would have seen had she been driving.
This guy, Price, must have some kind of inhuman night vision.

The ride turned bumpy, the incline steep. The forest and vegetation crept ever closer as the road became smaller. There would be no passing if another car came from the opposite direction. One of them would simply have to drive in reverse until they reached a point where they could pull off to the side. Luckily they hadn’t met a descending vehicle.

They took a right on what felt like a gravel path, and the truck slowed more. Ahead, Sabrina could see a large shack of a building, above which a neon blue sign proclaimed it to be MAMA’S HOUSE.

Two other vehicles were parked in front of the building, and as she looked about, she saw another gravel trail toward the back right of the building. She supposed it was the road that led down the mountain.

The driver, Price, parked on the outside right of the other two vehicles and shut off the engine.

Sabrina froze when she felt fingers gently pull on one of the twisted locs at the back of her head, followed by a knuckle gliding down the back of her neck. The caress was brief, as if the man behind her had restrained himself the whole ride and could no longer resist the temptation to touch now that they had come to the end of their journey.

“Coen, keep her close,” Price ordered as he opened the door. “We don’t know who’s inside or what business they’re about.”

The woman they called Bride was typing into her phone, and Coen was checking his weapons, all oblivious to the threat posed by the sociopath fondling her from behind.

Sabrina leaned forward, feeling her hair slip free from his fingers, breathing easier when the break in contact didn’t provoke him into grabbing a handful of her hair and dragging her by the head into the backseat.

She reached for the door handle and eased it open. Coen’s hand settled on her knee, stalling her exit.

“The others are about five minutes behind us,” Bride said from the front.

Sabrina watched as Price walked up the porch stairs and went inside the building, exiting a minute later to wave them in.

“All right, Sabrina. When we get inside, I want you to stay close, okay? Don’t try and go off anywhere alone.”

She resisted the urge to look behind her. No way in hell was she going off alone with
him
around.

“Okay,” she whispered, moving out of the car carefully, not because she naturally moved so deliberately but because she was hurt and instinct cautioned that she didn’t make any sudden moves when being watched by a predator.

Coen followed her out of the vehicle, and the man drenched in blood was not far behind. Coen reached out as if to place a comforting hand on her shoulder. She took two steps back when the big man behind him frowned, reaching toward the small of his back.

“Hey, hey, I know you’re scared.” Coen tried to soothe her, unaware. “But we’ll keep you safe, Sabrina. I promise.”

She looked over his shoulder. The big man’s hand relaxed at his side again, gaze boring into hers until she looked at Coen and allowed him to steer her, without touch, toward Mama’s House.

“Doesn’t look scared to me.” The deep voice countered in the darkness behind them. “Anyone else wonder about that?”

Of course he couldn’t just be run-of-the-mill crazy; he had to be the kind of crazy that was too perceptive, watched too closely. Probably killed more effectively because of his uncanny insight about others. It didn’t seem to lead him to be more humane. Likely it led him to be more efficient at using, controlling, and killing.

I have to be careful, she thought as she entered the dimly lit establishment. She didn’t want him, didn’t want any of them thinking she was anything other than the terrified victim they had found on a warehouse floor.

“Well, if it ain’t Mama’s Brood…plus one.” A voice rang out from behind the bar. Sabrina leaned forward to see around Coen. The owner of the voice was a fiftyish man with long straight black and gray hair. He was about Coen’s height—five feet nine, five feet ten—and was whipcord lean in his worn blue jeans and indigo T-shirt.

“Chief,” Bride muttered to the older man as she sat at the bar and waved a finger toward a bottle of whiskey.

“Aw, Princess, I keep telling you I’m too old for you. You can’t come in here playing pretty and think I’m going to leave my woman and give you the world.”

Bride rolled her eyes and downed the double shot he poured, motioning for another.

Sabrina walked over and leaned against the bar beside Bride, opting to stand instead of sit. Coen stepped up on the other side of her and reached out to shake the bartender’s hand. Up close she saw the man behind the bar was Native American. He had the bearing of a leader, so it stood to reason that he could be a chief, but she had a feeling Bride was just being derogatory.

“Still got the mad dog playing tame?” the bartender asked, looking over Sabrina’s shoulder.

She snorted. She couldn’t help it. The idea that the man standing behind her could be tamed, even in play, was ridiculous. Maybe Zeus could be put down like a mad dog, but she had a feeling he’d be hell on hell just like he’d been hell on earth.