Bones Page 7

  “I saw ‘Lockett’ on an envelope addressed to you when I was looking for aspirin the other night,” I say slowly, and her eyes widen as she realizes how I saw the article clipping.

  “And that is my name,” she says with a surprising sureness, as if she has rehearsed that in her head more than once. “The name I chose. Could you live with a name with that kind of baggage?”

  I crack a smile. “You’re talking to a guy named Bones, kid.” The smile fades as I continue. “But you’re right. Nobody would want to live with a name like that, by the sounds of things. But how does a girl your age...I mean, damn, I knew you were special, but how does a child figure all that out about her father?”

  She opens and closes her mouth a few times as she stares at the food I have a feeling is going to go cold. She looks like she has asked herself the same question a dozen times, but the edge of desperation in her voice makes me realize that she might well have never told anyone about this. She’s been so cagey about her past, but now that she’s gotten the first of it blurted out, maybe the rest will come.

  “Hey, I know I’m no therapist,” I say, reaching under the table and taking her hand gently. It’s so cold, but she curls it into a fist in my bigger hand and seems comforted by it. “I’m just an outlaw who knows a hurting soul when he sees one. Nobody’s listening to us out here.”

  She nods softly in acknowledgement, and even though it doesn’t look like much, I know she’s listening to me. I know the look on a face like that. She’s hard to reach, but she’s in there.

  “It was his shed,” she says at last before swallowing hard. “I was the same age as her. It was just the two of us, and he never let me go into the shed. He said it was off-limits. There were dangerous things in there. Rats and bats that would eat me, is what he told me when I was really little. You know, the usual stuff they tell you when you’re a kid. Things that are scarier than the reality.”

  She pauses when she says that, and she grimaces.

  “Scarier than reality is supposed to be,” she corrects herself, rubbing her eyes. “By the time I was twelve I...I had kind of figured out there weren’t really rats in the shed. I assumed he just didn’t want me poking around rusty tools or something. I was pretty well behaved back then. Most kids would have been driven crazy with curiosity, but I never had a reason not to trust him before then. I mean, I might have seen the signs if I had been looking for them.” She looks bitter, and one of her fingers scrapes along the length of her fork idly. “...I think I didn’t see the signs because of him.”

  “You think he was taking steps to hide things from you? That would make sense,” I say, nodding. “People like that are careful. Very careful.”

  “Not just that,” she says, barely above a whisper, and she shakes her head faintly before going on. “His birthday was coming up. I had overheard him mentioning wanting to get a plaque for his basement. I don’t know what it was for, I just figured, a little wood and glue, how hard could it be? I wanted to surprise him. So I went in.”

  I watch her relive the moment with simple disbelief in her expression. The way she speaks and looks makes me think she has either kept this day out of her mind as much as she can, or she relives it every moment she’s alone. It’s hard to say which.

  “I kind of rummaged for a bit, but I didn’t know what I was looking for,” she says, shaking her head and closing her eyes as she put a napkin to her nose for a moment. “It didn’t take that long to hear the crying.”

  My heart drops, and I can’t keep the wince off my face.

  “Everything is kind of a blur after I found the hatch hidden under the floorboards,” she says, keeping her eyes shut to prevent tears from falling out of them. “I remember trying to explain what I found to the police. And you know, it never hit me on that day when it was all happening that Dad had any idea the girl was in there,” she says, opening her eyes and looking at me with a heartbreaking smile.

  “How could you have?” I ask, shaking my head and furrowing my brow. “You were a kid, Lauren. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “My family didn’t see it that way,” she says with a scornful laugh. “My father was...he was the favorite, plain and simple. He had always been the one the family knew was a good man who would be the most successful out of everyone. I think they saw me as slowing him down, I’m not sure, but they definitely thought I had opened the floodgates on the wrong man.”

  “Wrong man?” I ask, crossing my arms.

  “They just couldn’t believe what they were seeing on the news and what the detectives told them over the next few weeks,” she says. “They couldn’t believe their prodigy was capable of that. I’m not even sure what all they thought. Maybe they thought it was all a misunderstanding, and that because I misled the cops, the media had blown it out of proportion and ruined his life. I don’t know.”

  “Jesus,” I breathe.

  “They didn’t want anything to do with me,” she says, sniffing. “The detectives found three more bodies in the woods where he used to go hunting, but they couldn’t like them to him, and they just couldn’t believe it.”

  “Where did you go?” I ask.

  “Oh, I stayed,” she says, “but I emancipated myself when I was sixteen and went as far away as I could. Now I’m here.”

  To my surprise, she picks up her fork and starts eating her steak and potatoes as if we had never had the conversation. I stare at her blankly for a few moments before speaking again.

  “You said something about another reason you didn’t suspect your dad,” I say, and she stops eating again. This time, she seems unsure about whether to go on.

  “I told you I have a darkness in me,” she says quietly.

  “If you’re trying to tell me some of your dad rubbed off on that sweet twelve year old little girl you were,” I say, trying to be reassuring. “You’ll have hard time convincing me.”

  “You don’t know me,” she says, and her eyes flit up to mine so softly I’d barely notice, yet so sharply it almost stings.

  “And you don’t know me,” I say, leaning on the table and giving her a thoughtful stare as she resumes eating. “And sweetheart, I know darkness.”

  “Do you?” she asks with simple interest.

  I hesitate for a moment. I don’t talk about my history, because I’d rather leave it as history. But Lauren just got a lot off her chest, and I can already tell she’s starting to punish herself for it in her head. She wants to withdraw and let her own memories eat her up, and she might just succeed, if I don’t take a step forward.

  “I’m from Southern Cali,” I say at last, leaning back and cutting into my cold steak. “Not much to tell you about how I got started. Fell in with some other assholes who had a lot of anger and nowhere to put it. Mom couldn’t afford me, Dad wasn’t interested in me, so it just happened over time. I didn’t wind up in the good schools, I got the ones people gave you looks for,” I say, chuckling at the memories.

  They aren’t the fondest, but they made me who I am today.

  “What’d you do?” she asks, sounding almost like she wants to try me, find out what I’ve really got up my sleeve.

  “The usual,” I say. “Hotwire a car here and there, rob some asshole who’s out of town for the week, get into fights I had no business getting in—and winning, most of the time,” I add, glancing down at an old scar on my forearm. “That was shaping up to be my life, until my crew decided to knock over a convenience store just outside town that a buddy of mine owned.”

  She raises an eyebrow.

  “It was just some guy I knew from high school before I got sent to correctional,” I say, waving a dismissive hand. “Wasn’t like we were best buds or anything, he was just a decent guy whose family owned the place. It was all they had, I didn’t want to see them lose that. But you don’t just say that to your gang of half a dozen pissed-off teenagers looking for some quick cash.”

  “So it was let him get robbed or…?” she asks, tilting her head to the side.<
br />
  “Or figure out something else,” I say with a shrug. “I figured the easiest thing to do would be to warn him, so I did. Thought he’d pack up and leave, or close up shop and try to move it.”

  “Your friends found out, didn’t they?” she says, eating more slowly now as she gets more interested in what I’m saying.

  “Nah,” I say, setting my utensils down and chewing a tough piece of meat for a bit. “That would have been too easy. Instead, my buddy was waiting for us with a shotgun.”

  “Oh my god,” she breathes.

  “We weren’t in that store twenty seconds before one of my other friends was bleeding out on the ground after taking a shot dead-on,” I say, staring across the table at her. “We ran and scattered, and I knew it was only a matter of time before they figured out I was the one who’d tipped the place off. Sure enough, it wasn’t even a full day before I got a text from a friend telling me there was a price on my head. So, I packed up and rode. Rode across half the damn country until I fell in with a club that felt alright.”

  “And that’s where you met the people I saw?” she asks. “Breaker, and the other guys?”

  “Yes and no,” I say. “We were running with a guy named Buzz back then. Older biker. Knew his way around the state. But not long after I joined, found out they were getting into human trafficking, and none of us liked that.”

  She looks shocked, as if she hadn’t even considered that bikers would be in on that kind of trade.

  “So, Breaker killed someone who had it coming, which is how we usually open the negotiating table,” I say, remembering that night years ago and the chaos that had followed. “And we all broke up again, and we fell back together here in Crooks County. And that’s what I know about ‘darkness’, since you asked,” I add. “Spent my whole life in it. Lost friends over it. Killed because of it. People like me, we don’t get a choice. We deal with it. Just like you.”

  “It’s not the same,” she says, getting up and going to the window, but I get up and follow her, not willing to let her get away from this one.

  “Isn’t it?” I ask.

  “It lives in me, Bones,” she says, staring out the window as I stand behind her, ready to grab her if need be. “He’s my flesh and blood. He was able to do all that to those girls while I lived right there with him. That monster helped make me, what does that make me?”

  “You can’t blame yourself, Lauren,” I say, taking a step closer.

  “Everyone else did,” she says, grasping the counter, and I step forward and hug her from behind. She holds back a sob as I hold her against me, but soon, the tension in her back eases and she drags her nails over the backs of my hands where she holds them. “I...I just want to let go for once, you know?”

  “You can,” I say in a low tone.

  “No, I meant like last night,” she confesses in a voice barely above a whisper before she turns to face me in my arms. “That’s what last night was about. That’s...why I even went out in the first place. I didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe I did, I just- I’ve had my guard up so long, and I wanted to see what it was like to let it down and see what I can really be like. To see if I’m really...bad.”

  The way that word sounds on her lips tells me it has been haunting her all her life. And it explains so much while making me wonder so much more about this strange, incredibly strong girl. I hug her close to me and speak into her ear through her hair.

  “You’re not a bad girl, Lauren,” I say in my deep, gruff voice. “You’re not even an okay one, you’re incredible. You lived through more before age sixteen most people do in their whole lives, and you came out of that fire. And I know good when I see it,” I growl, and I press a kiss to her lips.

  She gasps, but sighs into it slowly before a sob comes to her throat again, and she pulls back, turning her head away. I don’t stop her in the slightest.

  “I’m ashamed of myself,” she murmurs.

  “For what?” I ask.

  Her soft eyes turn to mine, and I can see that glimmer of excitement buried deep down past all those shadows she’s been keeping up. She looks me up and down, biting her lip, and her cheeks burn bright before she can muster the words.

  “I...I liked it when you were...hard on me,” she says. “When you took control like that. I wasn’t expecting it, but…”

  “Like this?” I growl without missing a beat, and I reach around to pinch her ass with one hand while running my hands through her hair and grasping it, pulling her hair back a touch just to kiss her on the neck.

  I feel her laughing through the kiss, and I can’t help but smile as the tension melts away in the room. At least, it fades to make way for a very different kind of tension—the kind I like much more.

  “Yeah,” she says with a playful light in her expression. “Yeah, like that.”

  She puts a hand on my chest, slowly curling her fingers in, and I loom over her, looking down at her with nothing but pure adoration as my heavy heart thumps harder against my muscled pecs. I swipe my tongue over my lips and squeeze her ass more aggressively this time as my cock hardens, and I pull her tight against me. She whimpers softly as I start grinding my hips against hers, almost humping her against the kitchen sink before I swing her around to the table, holding her over it and running my hands up and down her body.

  “Are you sure you want this, Lauren?” I ask, running my hands slowly and possessively over her. “If you want to explore the darkness with me...I can do that, but I need to know you’re ready.”

  “Do you want this?” she asks, looking up at me with excited yet almost terrified expectation. “After everything you know about me?”

  I lower my head until our foreheads touch, and I speak in an almost ominous growl.

  “I’ve wanted you from the moment I saw you, Lauren,” I rumble. “And I’ve wanted to keep you for myself so much that it scares me.”

  I feel goosebumps on Lauren’s arms as she whispers, “Good.”

  “If you’re ever not okay with something I do,” I say, idly squeezing her breasts to show her just how much I can possess her. “Say ‘heartbreaker.’ Magic word. Everything stops.”

  “Oh,” she laughs softly, “is that what your friend’s name stands for?”

  “Biggest turnoff I can think of,” I laugh, and both our cheeks are rosy before we kiss again.

  And this time, I feel my own darkness welling up inside me as I bite down on the soft, innocent flesh on her neck and bend her back.

  Lauren

  “Do you like it hard and fast, little girl?” Bones hisses into my ear. “Do you want me to fuck you senseless? Until you’re out of your mind?”

  A tingle of warm, delicious pleasure spreads down from that soft point, through my whole body. A shiver runs down my spine, tiny goosebumps rising up on my skin as Bones takes both sides of my face in his hands. He strokes my cheeks, his thumbs slipping down the gentle slope of my nose, down to press at my full, plush lips. His thumb pushes against my bottom lip and I slowly part my lips, allowing him to push inside. My tongue lathes around his thumb and he lets out a low, aggressive growl. I close my lips around his thumb and suck on it, reveling in the bliss of having part of him in my mouth. He presses against my cheek from the inside, giving me the sensation of stretching out. It’s a strange aching feeling that borders on perverse pleasure, and I moan, my eyes slowly closing as I give in to the feeling. But then I feel his free hand slide around to cup the back of my head. His fingers tangle softly into my hair, wrapping locks of my dirty blonde locks around his digits to get a stronger grasp on me. I can feel the raw, barely-restrained sexual energy burning inside of him, emanating a frantic glow that is more infectious than any disease I can think of.

  His desire is contagious and addictive. It hits me in delicious waves and I feel my pussy starting to get slick and wet between my legs even though he’s barely touched me anywhere yet. Just this mysterious stranger’s presence is enough to light a fire in my heart. My eyes flutter open again, my long
lashes trembling as I meet Bones’s deep, penetrating gaze. His eyes look dark and deep, like two pools at the back of a cavern, filled with all manner of shadow and darkness. A sharp zap of fear electrifies my body. My brain sends a parade of panic signals, but I just let it wash over me.

  I said I wanted to embrace the shadows that lurk inside of me. That is exactly what I intend to do. And there’s not a single shred of doubt in my mind that Bones can take me there.

  I tilt my head back, leaning into his arms as he cradles me backward onto the table. As he moves me, his arms and my ass shove the utensils and plates out of the way. Forks and steak knives clatter to the floor in a jangling heap. I let out a soft gasp of surprise and Bones immediately grins, that fire building ever higher in his eyes. Bones pushes me down, pressing me into the kitchen table hard. He leans in and grazes his teeth across my vulnerable throat, dragging a jagged line as though he’s trying to slit my throat with his teeth. I can scarcely remember to breathe, my lungs constricting with mingled fear and adrenaline as he begins to bite down on the soft, ticklish flesh of my neck. First gently, then harder. I groan and shudder as the ache gets deeper. Sharper. I wonder for a moment if he’s going to break skin.

  I tremble in his arms, almost recoiling from the sharp pull of teeth on my neck. But he’s so much stronger than I am, and he holds me in place, giving me no opportunity to get away. I know I should be afraid. There’s a soft voice in the back of my mind, warning me that I am in danger. Reminding me that I am small. I am soft. I am putty in his hands, malleable to his every whim and wish. For so many long years I have lived in fear of accommodating the dark desires that fester and grow inside of me. I’ve been afraid to reach out and touch it, for fear that one touch will be more than enough to destroy me, turn me as dark and evil as the blood from which I was given life. I don’t want to be like him. I refuse to be like him. And yet, I find myself here, lying open and unrepentant across the boundary line between what is good and what is evil.