Inflamed: A Shadow Riders MC (33 page)

"What?"

"GET THE FUCK BACK INSIDE THE GODDAMN TRUCK, MOTHERFUCKER."

"Alright, asshole, fuck!"

Blue quickly jumped back inside and just as he closed his door, River slammed his foot back down on the accelerator and sped forward, bursting through the gates, not giving a single shit about the damages done to his truck, and stopping just before ramming into the tail end of that black car. When he hopped out, he left the engine running and stepped to the driver's side of the car. The window rolled down then and a bald-headed man with bright green eyes and a sinister smile looked up at him.

"Ricky," the man started, his Czechoslovakian accent clearly on display, "wanted me to tell you that he sends his very best, and that he's coming for what's his." When his hand reached for the keys which had already been stuffed inside the ignition, River's eyes grew wide and he screamed for Blue.

"It's a bomb, motherfucker!" he hollered out. "They fuckin' bombed this thing!"

River and Blue hopped back into the truck and sped back as hard and as fast as they could until they landed in the middle of the street, forcing cars left and right that had been coming from either direction to screech on their brakes. Two seconds later, the car on the other side of the gate blew up into what looked like over ten thousand pieces of leather, metal and flesh.

They each looked up into the sky with wide eyes and shook their heads as the once white clouds suddenly turned dark from smoke.

"Jesus," said River, as blood and flesh covered the walls of the prison.

"Mother of fuckin' God. This son of a bitch is even crazier than we fuckin' thought he ever was before now."

"
Shit
. We gotta get back to Crescent Beach and the goddamn club ASAP. Call Styx and tell him to get my mother the fuck outta there. She still doesn't know Fontaine is the one who fucked Mia up. Tell him Courtney's gotta stay and that we need Wolf and Verna, and that Mia's gotta stick around too. I got no choice but to fuckin' tell her about this asshole bein' on the loose now and sendin' out decoys to bomb and throw us off our fuckin' game." He threw his hand into the horn. "FUCK!"

The minute they heard police sirens, along with the ambulance and fire trucks, River wrapped his hand around the wheel and spun a three-sixty in the street and sped off before they could be seen, stopped, or asked any goddamn questions about what in the fuck had just happened outside the prison walls, and why.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The minute River stepped back inside the club ahead of his best friend and locked eyes with the woman he had kept his mind on from the time they had fled Tampa up until that point, as she sat at that table with Verna, chewing her lip, tapping her feet and panicked the fuck out of her goddamn mind until she saw him standing in front of her again, it was as if the clouds had opened up in front of his eyes and that motherfucker had just seen the face of the goddamn sun up close and fucking personal. The shit seemed to burn him like hell, but goddamn, was it beautiful enough to be worth it.

As Mia stood up from her chair and walked over to him, a half smile ticking up the corners of her mouth with each step taken, he met her halfway and stared directly down into those big grey eyes that seemed to speak right down into his goddamn soul like nothing else in his entire fucking life had ever seemed to do before, and he knew probably never would again. And he was good with that shit, strangely good, because if there was something of himself that had to be spoken to by somebody like that, he was damn glad that somebody was her.

After a few deep breaths that she used to force her nerves aside, she widened her smile and lifted herself up to the balls of her feet as a balance, and draped her arms around his neck, forcing him into their only second ever hug.

Blue stood back from the both of them and stared. "I guess I'm just chopped fuckin' liver." He went over to the bar and grabbed himself a beer from the other side of the counter.

Mia turned her face into River's skin and brushed her lips across the lines in his neck, forcing that motherfucker to release the breath he had been holding from the second he jumped out of his goddamn truck. As he felt her mouth twitch against him, as he felt her tasting the salt from his skin, he dropped his head and his inhibitions and draped his arms around her waist, grabbing her so goddamn tight that she gasped.

He grit his teeth the moment he heard that sharp breath escape from between her lips and slightly dipped her back while at the same time yanking her against him, forcing her to feel his cock as it grew in size. When she squirmed against it and released a soft whimper as a result, he thought about pulling back; he always thought about pulling back when shit seemed to get too goddamn real for him when it came to this bitch and how he fucking felt, but he couldn't bring himself to do it this time. He didn't fucking want to because he knew he needed this shit like nothing else he had ever needed before. He needed to fucking hold her, touch her, make sure she was still fucking real. He needed to skim his nose across her skin and inhale her scent until that shit was burned into his goddamn brain for the rest of his motherfucking life and even after it; he needed to brush his lips across her neck and make sure she felt that shit from her pussy right down to the tips of her goddamn toes and back again.

When she attempted to pull back to let herself breathe again, because the moment she felt the ache of his arousal pressing against her, all breathing ceased to exist, he kept her in place and shoved his fingers a few inches beneath her shirt with the purpose of pressing them down hard into her skin. This son of a bitch needed her to fucking know she was his without saying it, he needed her to fucking accept that shit without even responding with a single goddamn word of it.

And she did, she fucking did.

As he shoved his face beneath her jaw and soaked up every goddamn bit of her sweetness, sweetness that had violently inflamed every fucking part of his entire body, she brushed her fingers across his broad shoulders and gently glided them up and down his spine. Touching this man, being held by him like this made her feel whole again, made her feel as if everything she had ever been through in her life was somehow worth it if only to get to that single, solitary moment with him there, and inside that club.

"Even if you managed to get away, I still wasn't sure if you were actually going to make it back here in one piece," she told him.

He swayed her back and forth a few times before gently and hesitantly sliding his arms from around her waist and standing straight. As Courtney, Verna, Styx, Blue and even Wolf stared directly at him, his eyes never left Mia's face, or lips as she spoke.

"After Styx told us about that car blowing up right in front of you, I..." She stopped herself from going any further, from speaking the worst that didn't happen, and breathed in deep. "What the hell happened out there?" she asked him.

"A decoy's what happened, babe," he said. "Motherfucker sent out a goddamn decoy to send us a fuckin' message about him comin' after you."

Mia rattled her head. "I don't understand."

"He was gone before we even showed up," replied River. "Or so they fuckin’ said. At this point, we can’t even be sure of this shit anymore, not a goddamn single bit of it. All we know for a fact is that the son of a bitch somehow managed to take the entire fuckin' place into his hands and had assholes doin' his goddamn dirty work left and fuckin' right."

"Even had a fake guard out front to throw us off our game," said Blue. He took a swig of his beer. "Dumbass didn't even have a goddamn knife, gun, nothin', which meant he wasn’t even worth bein’ fuckin' collateral. Probably just some stupid motherfucker they paid in dope to take the fall. They didn't care what the fuck happened to him or anybody else on the other side of that goddamn gate, ‘least of all us. But I don't think they wanted us dead."

"No," said River. "That asshole didn't want us dead." River stepped closer to Mia and wrapped his hands around her face. "He wanted to scare the goddamn shit out of us 'cause the son of a bitch knows for a goddamn fact that we're the ones that've got you now."

She blinked a few times, then searched her eyes across the room as a thought of terror suddenly popped into her mind. "Oh my God, Avery--"

"She's good, doll," said River, reassuring her. "My mother's still with her after her and Styx picked her up from that homeschool teacher's house. That's some shit you don't need to worry about 'cause I'm gonna always have people lookin' after your girl. What we gotta worry about now is exactly where this motherfucker might be movin' to next in an attempt to hit us before we even fuckin' know what's comin again." He nodded behind her and focused in on Courtney. "And that's where this bitch comes in."

All eyes in the room turned to Courtney. She folded her arms across herself and glared at River. "I didn't know anything about him breaking out of the prison this morning until you called--"

"Why the fuck are you here and not back at the goddamn hotel like you're supposed to fuckin' be?" he interjected.

"You've got me locked up in there like it's a cage and I'm some kind of animal that only gets walks outside when told. For the last few weeks, I've seen nothing except for the inside of those dingy white walls!" she hollered out. "I was going out of my mind and feeling crazy. I needed to get out before I did something I regretted."

"And the first place you decide to come and spread out those goddamn wings is the club?" River eased past Mia and made his way across the room. Courtney fell back against the pool table and flinched the minute River stood in front of her. He leaned over her body, forcing her to drop back to her elbows as she kept her eyes up on his face. She gulped as his temples flared and he grit his teeth. "Did you know about Mia before you came to the club that night to try and fuck my brains out?"

Courtney glanced behind him at Mia, who frowned in confusion. She shook her head. "No--"

"Don't fuckin' lie to me," he told her in a low, hard voice. She trembled. "Before you came here with that other bitch that night, did you know about Mia comin' here first? You better be fuckin' goddamn honest with me about this shit because I WILL FIND OUT!"

"NO!" she wildly screamed out on the verge of tears. "I swear to you, River, I didn't know anything about her or Avery until I went to visit Ricky that day, I swear. Before that, he never even mentioned either one of them--"

"So he waited for the perfect time to do it, which is why he fucked you up like he did. Son of a bitch knew you'd come runnin' back to me first and tell me every goddamn thing about it in the hopes that I'd go after him for it. Asshole was plannin' his escape WAY BACK FUCKIN' THEN! But since I didn't come to him like he wanted, this was the goddamn result. A fuckin' DECOY bein' blown to bits outside the goddamn prison to 'cause a shit load of mayhem and enough distraction to make sure the motherfuckers who wanna put him to ground can't even find him to do it!" He stepped aside and threw his hands down onto the pool table, shaking it so hard that it nearly cracked in the middle. “FUCK!” Everyone in the room suddenly felt intimidated by him; everyone except for Mia.

"Why are you asking her if she had known about me before I showed up here that day to see you, River?" she asked him.

He hunched over the table and rested his hands against the edge of the wood, and angrily forced out each word. "'Cause this bitch is Ricky's sister."

"
Holy.
Fuck
," said Styx.

"Jesus," mumbled Verna as she covered her mouth and glanced over at a stunned and disgusted Mia.

River turned his eyes over to Wolf, who looked as if he could've ripped every single goddamn head from every single motherfucking body in that entire goddamn room, and tossed them straight into the nearest garbage disposal one, by one, by fucking one.

"And just when the fuck did that piece of goddamn info happen to fall into your motherfuckin' lap, asshole?" spat a pissed off Wolf.

River straightened his back but kept his fists down on the table. "Same night I told you she came to me to tell me everything else. After the goddamn auction--"

"Jesus Christ. For all we know now, this bitch could be a goddamn rat and you're keepin' her on the string with a pile of fuckin’ cheese!"

"If that hotel is the cheese, then--" she piped in.

"Shut the fuck up," snapped River. He made a face while staring at her. "If that motherfucker didn't learn from you that we were on our way out to snatch him the fuck up, then it means we got another goddamn rat on her hands--"

"
SHE'S
THE RAT, ASSHOLE," snapped Wolf. "This crazy bitch that you couldn't seem to stop fuckin' between waitin’ for--”

"I haven't spoken to Ricky since the day I left that prison," said Courtney. "I swear it. I'd put my hands on a stack of bibles if there were any around. Ask Styx. He's been with me every single day and monitoring every call I've made and every single one that's come in."

Styx stepped forward and nodded. "She's right, VP, Prez. There ain't been a single goddamn thing suspicious since I've been watching her."

River dragged his hands down his face and pressed his palms together. "Then like I said, we've got another goddamn leak. It's either one of those motherfuckers in the Dragons, someone in the Miami or Orlando charters..." His eyes shot back over to Wolf. "Or one of our own goddamn motherfuckers who couldn't wait to hightail it out to Tampa every fuckin' week for a quick goddamn fix for themselves."