Burn Down the Night

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Epilogue

Dedication

Acknowledgments

By M. O'keefe

About the Author

The Editor's Corner

Excerpt from
Worth It

I had a speech all worked out. Totally nuts, right? Like I was one of the bad guys in a cheesy movie.

Except I was the good guy. I swear.

And the guy I was going to hold the gun on, the guy I was going to threaten, kill if I had to—he was the bad guy. The villain. The nightmare made flesh and blood.

The thought of him made my skin crawl and the thought of him touching my sister made me gag. Made me want to rip out my heart so it wouldn't hurt so bad.

I was the good guy. I was. And he was so bad I would kill him if I had to. Both of us. If I had to.

Please don't let me have to.

Walking into a strip club chock-full of dangerous bikers and one drug-cooking lunatic with a messiah complex is kind of a Hail Mary. My last chance. It's this or a blaze of glory.

Trust me, I know how crazy that sounds.

But I've been the queen of crazy for the last few months. The last year, really.

Who am I kidding? My entire life I've been at the epicenter of crazy. I am the hurricane's eye.

This had to work. There was no Plan B.

The thumping bass line coming out of the strip club's sound system made the speakers buzz and crackle, but the beat was so loud it drowned out the doubt. The fear. My heartbeat started to pound in time. I could feel it in the palms of my sweaty hands.

I tried to pretend I wasn't scared, but my mouth was dry. Stress tears burned behind my eyes. I was not nearly as cool as I wanted to be.

Sure, I had more than a passing relationship with wild, over-the-top behavior. But this…

Fuck.

This had death wish written all over it.

I walked through the Velvet Touch with my cap pulled down low. I'd cut my hair, dyed it closer to my regular color—a color he'd never seen, no one here had seen me like this—and I was wearing contacts that made my green eyes brown. I was banking on the fact that in the dark strip club no one was going to look too hard at me.

That's kind of a rule at strip clubs. No eye contact. Feel free to look your fill at the naked muff all over the place, but eye contact makes everyone uncomfortable.

I was walking through the place seeing who was working and how many customers were in the chairs, the bars, and the tables in the back. The back rooms. Trying to get a handle on how many people I was going to have to get out of here in order to make my plan work. It was Saturday night and this whole thing would have been a lot easier on a Wednesday, but that would have been too lucky.

And if there was one thing I could bank on, it was me being unlucky.

This was the last night all the parties would be meeting here. After this, Lagan, the crazy cult leader, would go home to his legion of “brides” cutting cocaine in some backwoods stronghold and the Skulls Motorcycle Club, who would be distributing Lagan's product, would go back to their chapter base in Florida. After today, all the drug business would be done through phone calls on burner cells and cryptic messages passed through Zo.

So, Saturday night it was. And there were too many people here to just yell “fire” and think they'd all head out. Pulling the fire alarm would bring cops here—fast. Which wouldn't give me and my speech much time.

I would start a fire, a small one in the women's bathroom, right across the narrow hall from the back office/meeting place. The commotion would be a distraction. And I was confident that people would clear out before pulling an alarm or calling 911. This crowd had a pretty reliable save-my-own-skin instinct.

Sweat ran down my body under my hoodie. The hoodie in the North Carolina heat made me a little conspicuous, but I couldn't risk anyone seeing the gun.

A man coming out of the back hallway where all the secret rooms were bumped into my shoulder, knocking me against the wall.

“Sorry,” he said and that voice…fuck.
That voice.

My stomach jumped into my throat.

Max Daniels, you are not supposed to be here.

“You all right?” he asked in the low, rough drawl.

“Fine,” I said, trying to pitch my voice differently so he wouldn't recognize me. It's not that we'd talked a lot. But some. Enough.

I'd liked Max Daniels, the president of the Skulls MC. Which really just made him the president of a whole lot of barely functioning, criminal-minded assholes. But you know…whatever. People needed to find their family wherever they could. I get that.

But a few weeks ago Max had left.

Vanished. Just when the parties in this drug deal were showing their true colors and the scope of this operation was revealed. This wasn't small time. This was international. This, when it went bad—and frankly how could it not—was going to send everyone to jail for a very long time. And anyone with a brain or a will to survive would run far from this nightmare.

Max had been the only one to leave. Which, frankly only told you how stupid everyone else was.

And I had been glad he was gone. Hoped he was safe.

But then he came back, pulled back to this part of the world by his brother, his real brother, Dylan. Which, again, I totally understood. For some people family ties were the strongest. Even when they were dragging you down to hell.

So, here he was, hand on my elbow, lifting me away from the wall he'd shoved me against.

I doubted he'd know me by touch. He'd not been much of a toucher, but when I was working as a dancer, sussing the place out, getting the lay of the land as it were—he'd seen plenty of me. All of me, really.

There'd been that one night he broke his usual routine of ignoring the girls and sat down in one of the big chairs right at the edge of the stage. I caught his eye from the pole and it had been like the rest of this bullshit club fell away. My sister—gone. Drug deal, Lagan, Max's “brothers”—all gone.

It was me—my body spread open, laid out. And his eyes—looking their fill.

He grinned at me while I danced. Smirked, really. Those lips twisted in his beard. His blue eyes burned right through me.

I know you,
his expression told me.
I know every dirty inch of you. I know the shit you've done and the shit you're going to do and I will fuck you till you cease to care.

I will punish you, so you can stop punishing yourself.

The music ended and I walked off the stage, and I expected him to come tearing back to the dressing room. I was shaking and wet and wanted him to bend me over the makeup table and make good on the promise his eyes had been making me.

Punish me. Because I can't keep doing this on my own.

But he never came back there.

And when I went back out to give some half-assed lap dances and serve drinks, he was gone.

After that, I'd known the second he walked into the club. I'd feel his gaze, weightier and sharper than the gaze of other men. It had taken me a long time to get used to it. To stop hating it. Because it had felt like he was looking right into me. Right into my head.

A few days of that and I'd fingered myself raw. Found every woman in the place who'd been eyeballing me and fucked them raw.

Nothing seemed to help.

He never asked for a private dance, a trip into that back room, and I'd told myself I was glad.

But I was lying.

Because after he'd vanished, I'd missed it. That all-seeing, blue-eyed gaze. I craved it. Craved him.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Like I needed an affair with the dangerous president of a motorcycle club on top of everything else. But drama is kind of my thing. It's status quo.

And now he was here. Tonight. And the fact that his hand was practically burning a hole through my hoodie made me want to drag him back into that private room down the hall and fuck the stress tears right out of myself.

Frankly, the solid weight of his hand, the scent of his body—cigarettes and leather and something remarkably clean beneath that—made me want to tell him everything.

Tell him to leave.

Go. Leave. Before I get you killed.

But the truth was I didn't know where Max's loyalties lay. Lagan liked Max. And Max seemed to like Lagan.

And if Max stood in my way, trying to save Lagan, I was going to have to kill him.

“You okay?” he asked, pushing against my shoulder like he was trying to get me to look up.

No. Decidedly. No.

“Fine. I'm fine.” I shrugged away from his touch and walked down the hall toward the bathroom. When I was sure he couldn't see me, I wiped away my tears with rough hands.

He's an asshole, I told myself. All of them are. Everyone who might get hurt in this stupid thing deserved it.

Including me.

Especially me.

The girls used the bathroom backstage so the women's bathroom in the Velvet Touch was usually empty. Occasionally we got a bachelorette party from Cherokee, or a married couple looking to get their freak on, and a few women would come into the bathroom and see that there was no toilet paper. Or hand soap.

They'd complain. But Zo, the owner, didn't do much about it. He was too busy hosting drug deals. Being the crap conduit between madmen.

Tonight the women's bathroom was empty. Finally, one thing going my way.

I pulled the brown paper towels out of the dispenser one after the other until I had a handful. I sparked my lighter and lit the bottom edge and tossed the handful in the garbage can. I made sure it was burning and then ducked back out into the hallway.

Eva was coming out of the back room, readjusting her tits in the neon-green bra she wore.

One of the bikers came out after her. That Rabbit dude with the fucked-up teeth and the menace that surrounded him like stink. He smacked Eva's ass and then turned the other way, toward the back exit that led out to the rear parking lot.

Fuck.

My car, rigged to blow was in the rear parking lot. Like way out in the rear, practically buried in the tall weeds and kudzu. But still, I really was banking on that parking lot being empty.

Because it usually was.

It's all right, I told myself. It's a small bomb. It's mostly for show. They'd only get hurt if they were like…sitting on the car.

But even as I thought that, I didn't believe it.

If he gets hurt he deserves it. He's a sociopath.

That I believed.

Eva strutted by me and then paused. I held my breath. Eva and I weren't close, but she was fucking wily. I wouldn't put it past her to recognize me.

“You smell that?” she asked.

“What?”

“Smoke.”

She reached past me and pushed open the women's bathroom. Smoke came drifting out.

“Jesus Christ. Fucking Zo. Can't take care of shit,” she muttered and then before I could stop her she stomped up the hallway and pulled the fire alarm.

Lights flashed and the deafening siren drowned out the bass line, and without it, my heart pounded out of rhythm.

So much for my save-my-own-skin survival instinct theory.

At the end of the hallway I could see the minor pandemonium caused by the fire alarm as everyone made a beeline for the front door.

Good, I thought. At least that was going my way.

The door across from me was the door to the meeting room, which also moonlighted as Zo's office. That was the door I needed to open. Zo, Lagan, and Max, before he took off weeks ago, had been locked up in there for days. And I just saw Max leave so I knew he wasn't in there. Which just left Zo and Lagan.

Come on, come on.

Finally the door swung open and Zo, in his shitty rayon shirt straight out of the eighties, came out. He turned back in the doorway and over his shoulder I could see Lagan, in his white linen suit, his thinning black hair slicked back straight off his high forehead.

He was tall and thin, and at one point I thought he was handsome, which was hilarious. But I also thought he was kind, which only proved how unhinged I'd been months ago.

Because despite his pale skin, he gave every impression of being a crow. A vulture. Something that feasted on death and rot.

I could not stop the shudder that ran through my body. He'd touched me. That man with his disgusting hands and horrible heart. He had been inside me at one time.

“Sit tight,” Zo said. “I'm sure it's just some kind of prank.”

Apparently, Zo didn't see me standing sideways in the doorway of the women's bathroom, or smell the smoke seeping out from under the door behind me.

The power of the alarm drowned out every other sense.

Once he left the hallway, I slipped into his office, shut the door behind me, and hammered home the big deadbolt. The alarm was muffled in the room, which had been soundproofed against that heavy strip club bass line.

Adrenaline roared through me and I nearly felt like I was floating out of my body. I couldn't feel myself. My skin. My sweat. Every doubt and fear I had about this plan were fluttering down around me.

What the hell am I doing? A bomb, Joan? Really?

“Can I help you, sister?”

And just like that, I thundered right back into myself.

Sister. Fuck you, asshole.