Betraying Beauty (Sons of Lucifer MC): Vegas Titans Series Read online

  “Wait,” I croak. Then clear my throat and try again, as loud as I can. “Wait, no, I’m not going! There’s been a mistake. I’m not trafficked. I don’t belong here. I’m not going with you and I can’t keep silent. No! You’re insane if you think I’ll come with you. I’ll wait for the police. I want the police. I saw you murder people tonight. You murdered Danny. I saw you kill him! You killed everyone! Murderers! Murderers!”

  My voice has grown hysterical as the shock wears off and rage and helplessness take over my body. I find myself hurling useless fists against Dirtbeard’s enormous chest, but my hands bounce off like water off a duck’s back. He’s chuckling down at me, and catches my wrists in his hands.

  “Yo Prez,” he laughs over his shoulder. “Got a feisty bitch here doesn’t want to be rescued or play the silent game. What you reckon, should we feed her to the cobras?”

  “It’s still weird when you call me Prez, Dirty.” This voice comes from somewhere behind me. “I’m not used to it yet.”

  Dirtbeard grins down at me. “Name your poison, peaches. Is it the Sons of Lucifer, or the cobras?”

  I thrash, trying to wring my hands free of his grip. “Let go of me! Let go! You can’t make me go!” I’m kicking at Dirtbeard’s shins and drawing chuckles from some of the other bikers. “I’ll tell everyone what I saw here, the world will know. I’ll tell the police. I’ll tell the papers. I’ll tell my Father! He’s a powerful man. You can’t get away with this! You can’t just murder people like this! I’ll make sure you don’t get away with this!”

  A firm arm wraps around my waist from behind, lifting me off the ground still kicking and screaming. I hear a soft laugh near my ear and feel the prick of someone’s five o’clock shadow against my temple. He lifts and carries me over to the wall and sandwiches me against it, his body pressed along my back.

  “Whoa, whoa, easy princess.” I can feel Prez’s breath on my neck. “Just calm down. No one’s going to hurt you, all right? I swear to god. Take a deep breath and think it through. We’ll wait.”

  My breathing grows deeper and slower, but my rage doesn’t subside. “I won’t keep quiet,” I hiss. “I’m a witness to a mass homicide. It’s my moral obligation to report this crime and make sure you pay for what you’ve done.”

  “That’s not a very smart thing to say to a killer, now, is it?” the voice whispers in my ear, and my blood runs cold. “Though I admire your sense of civic duty, just exactly who do you think you’re trying to help here? The men we killed were killers and human traffickers—or their clients. They sold people to perverts and murdered innocents for monetary gain. We’re fucking heroes, setting the captives free. Just who exactly are you?”

  He steps back, arms still framing me on either side of the wall, giving me just enough room to spin around and face him. I do, livid past the point of fear. “I’m someone who’s not afraid of you and doesn’t need your help!”

  I stare up at a rugged, dark face, framed by black wavy hair, looming on top of a powerfully muscular body, but I’m too distracted by his body to look at his face. It’s so close to me, I feel a tendril of sensation through my stomach in reaction to his proximity, his masculinity. I can see his pecks and biceps bulging even through his leather jacket, his trim waist narrowing to lean hips that I catch myself staring at, trying to guess the size of his…

  His eyebrows are so arched it looks like he’s raising them dangerously, but he’s not. It’s just that even at rest his face is arresting, commanding. His cheekbones are high and smooth, his nose straight, his lips full.

  And he’s fucking gorgeous.

  There’s one scar cutting through the apex of his left eyebrow, and green-brown eyes that seem to change color with his thoughts.

  But what kicks me in the guts at the sight of him is searing, blistering recognition that drops to the bottom of my soul and bubbles up in a strangled gasp. I know that face. I know those eyebrows.

  I know those lips.

  “Oh my god,” I whisper, “It’s you. How can it be you?” My hand flutters up to my neck, needing the feel of my own skin to know I’m not completely crazy. For a brief moment his name escapes my lips like a prayer.

  “Dominic?”

  Chapter Four

  Dominic

  I know before she even says my name that she’s recognized me, too. All I can think about right now, staring down at her heart-shaped, perfect face, is the cold weight in my stomach and a shiver down my spine that pisses me off to no small extent.

  “Harper,” I breathe.

  I choke on the name. Fucking Harper fucking Sinclair. She’s standing in front of me just like I’ve dreamed about every day for ten goddamn years, ever since the moment she left me for dead on the shore of that lake in upstate New York. I want to reach out and touch her. Part of me doesn’t believe she’s real. It’s like I’ve started bleeding internally, my organs turning to mush.

  Harper.

  For a minute the shock of seeing her makes me forget to be mad and I’m caught off-balance, my pulse racing and the crotch of my pants suddenly growing uncomfortably tight. She’s got a lot of fucking nerve, getting a reaction out of me after all this time. What the fuck? What am I, eighteen again?

  “You remember me?” Harper asks breathlessly, blinking up at me.

  I can’t honor that stupid fucking question with a response. How could I possibly forget the woman who ruined my life? I just stare at her, up and down.

  “Dominic, what are you doing here?”

  “No. What the hell are you doing here?” I demand, fighting for control.

  She shakes her head, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she whispers. “I don’t know how I got here. Please, get me out of here. Please, please, help me. Let me go home.”

  God must be laughing at me, if he exists. This is really fucking surreal. I rake a hand through my wiry black hair and take a step back, putting safe distance between us, and survey the woman before me in disbelief.

  She’s older, of course. Leaner. Her body and face are lithe like a movie star, toned and manicured and oozing wealth. I notice she’s got the same perky breasts and the same surprisingly full hips that always drove me crazy back at Camp Adirondack a decade ago. But the awkward, warm tomboy I remember is gone.

  This woman in front of me now is sophisticated, smart, and a million more miles out of my league.

  I take a moment to painstakingly remind myself that all of my sweet memories of Harper are a lie. In reality, that golden summer of ours by the lake was a just a rich girl slumming it with the help. I was just something to laugh about to her rich white friends like Tiffany and Ashley and Victoria or whatever the fuck they name rich white girls. She must have thought I was a total fucking idiot. Shame, humiliation, and anger flicker through my veins.

  To her, I was just a summer fling. A mistake. To me, she would always be the woman who scraped me empty and left me for dead.

  And here she is again like a ghost from another life. This woman is everything I’ve never had, a punch in the face adding insult to injury. Part of me hates her on principle, from her highlighted hair and pearl earrings down to her $1,500 shoes or whatever the fuck they cost. I’d hardly recognize the way she carries herself if it wasn’t for her eyes. They’re so fucking huge and the palest of blue, like watery moons, with the same doe-eyed innocent act that took me in before.

  Well, I won’t fall for her again.

  “Fuck that,” I growl at her. “You’ve seen way too much and just threatened to run your mouth off to the cops. No way we can let you go. Guess this just isn’t your lucky day.”

  Harper’s lips are parted, reminding me of our unfinished kiss from years ago. She reaches her fingertips toward my face, but before she can touch me I jerk away and catch her wrist roughly, pushing her away from me. Her hand falls to her side, but those blue eyes never waver from staring into mine.

  “You haven’t changed,” she says.

  Boy, is she ever wrong.

  “
You have,” I sneer. “You look a lot more expensive.”

  She winces and tears spring in her eyes. “Dominic, what’s going on? All those people, dead! You killed them!”

  Oh no, she’s not going to get me with the waterworks. I take a deep breath, reminding myself who I am now, what I’ve learned since the last time those fucking baby-blue eyes blinded me to common sense.

  I am Dominic Thorne. I am Mohawk. I am white. I am two worlds and two people in one. I am a fighter, a survivor, and need no charity. I built my own tribe of brothers for myself and I am now President of the Sons of Lucifer Motorcycle Club, following Heath’s legacy. I take revenge. I kill or be killed.

  “I promise you, no one died tonight that didn’t deserve it a million times over,” I say, more to myself than her. Killing never sits easy with me, not even for vigilante justice like tonight.

  “What are you talking about?” She whispers. “What’s going on Dominic?”

  “It’s none of your fucking business what’s going on,” I bark. “And you’re going to keep your mouth shut.”

  Her cheeks flush again and her eyes fill with tears. “It is definitely my business! You killed Danny!”

  “Danny?” Something about the way she says that name puts two and two together in my brain. “You mean petty boy Daniel Hollis?”

  I laugh, comprehension dawning. She was here with that prick as a fucking client!

  Holy shit, any lingering illusions I’d had that she may not have been a complete monster are instantly shattered. My eyes are lethal as I stare at her.

  “Of course,” I purr. “You’re the perfect couple, you and Hollis. So you came here tonight with your sociopath boyfriend looking for a…new experience? Or maybe this isn’t your first visit to the Depraved Club. Maybe you’re a regular. You people make me sick.” I let my eyes roll down her body. “Guess you’re not playing the blushing virgin anymore, not like the last time I saw you. That trick stopped working for you, I guess? Apparently you like the rough stuff now. Too bad you didn’t feel that way when we were eighteen. Might have made that summer worth it.”

  Harper’s eyes go icy cold as she slaps me across the face. Without thinking, I find my hands curling around her upper arms and lifting her closer to my face until I can feel her breath on my neck.

  “Don’t worry, princess,” I sneer. I look her dead in the eye and say with fierce sincerity, “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole if you were the last woman alive.”

  “What are you going to do with me, then?” She goes pale in my grasp but stares right back at me cool as a cucumber. “Shoot me like Danny? I know you, Dominic. You’re not a murderer.”

  She knows me?

  In spite of myself, I admire her balls. I let her drop to the ground, disgruntled and puzzled. God damn it, she’s getting to me all over again.

  What does she know about life on the rez, of being bi-racial and hungry and poor? What does she know about survival, rejection, and loss? Fuck, the worst thing that’s ever happened to Harper is probably a broken nail.

  And she thinks she knows me.

  “You don’t know shit,” I say, but somehow the words only make me feel hollow.

  I shake my head, my mind whirring and ears buzzing as I fight for calm in this storm of feelings. You don’t know me…

  But I know me. I know me very, very well: the dark horse, the unwanted. My mother told me the story countless times, how moments after I was born Grandmother cursed us both. “He’s a half-blood,” Grandmother spat at my mother. “You can’t hide it any longer. You are a fool and no daughter of mine.”

  Half-blood. Childhood at the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation was no picnic; everyone on the rez was too busy surviving to really help out my mom, and her family was a bunch of pricks that pretty much shunned her on account of me. I wasn’t Native enough for their purist idea of “real” Natives, not white enough for any white.

  My white father never claimed us, not even when my mother drove her brother’s old Thunderbird an hour and a half into Plattsburg to sit outside his office in a snowstorm and beg him for child support. We waited hours, mom distracting me by building paper airplanes out of McDonalds napkins from our breakfast. Then suddenly her laughter froze and a tall handsome man appeared in the doorway of the building. “Wait in the car,” she’d told me.

  I was seven, and I remember peeking through a flurry of snow at my white father, seeing him for the first time from the backseat. I watched, confused, as he smacked and shoved my mother over. Her face hit the curb and blood splattered all over the ice as she fell, unconscious.

  “Mom!”

  I remember jumping out of the car, helpless. She was out cold and my father was running away. He didn’t even bother to look at me, just sprinted to his car and drove off. Anger pumps through my veins even now just thinking of how it took three weeks for my mother’s body to heal after that meeting with my father. Fury fills me when I remember how my mother defended him, explaining to me that my father was married to a white woman and didn’t want anyone to know about us. Rage and shame harden my heart as I remind myself to read between the lines yet again: we weren’t good enough.

  Yeah, that’s good Dominic. Get angry.

  That early lesson stuck with me, about not being good enough. I think it stuck with my mother too, because that’s about when she started drinking and I got hungry to prove myself. I’d started running drugs and alcohol over the Canadian border with the older boys on the rez, to fit in to the pack. By the time I was eighteen, I was frustrated as hell and my mother was scared.

  “Dominic,” she’d begged me, “Don’t be your own worst enemy. Don’t be like me.”

  Desperate to keep me out of trouble, she’d called in a favor from a cousin who worked for the Adirondack State Park. Cousin Steve got me a job in the maintenance crew at a summer camp. And boom, In walked Harper, derailing my life.

  Harper. God, thinking of her back then makes my bones ache. Young, sweet, and unlike anyone I’d ever met. Flashes of memory rip through my mind; Harper introducing herself at staff lunch table and asking if she could listen to our stories, Harper wanting to see my Mohawk tattoos hear about life on the rez, Harper rocking my world with her soft lips during our first stolen kiss, all innocent blue eyes and curiosity and laughter.

  I fell for her like a ton of bricks, the moment I saw her. Love at first sight. She was so beautiful, so open, and she listened to me; I thought maybe, for the first time, someone gave a flying fuck about me. I’d loved her. I’d wanted to spend my life with her.

  What a fucking moron I was.

  Flash forward to the last thing I remember about our golden summer together: the image of Harper’s back marching away from me into the trees as my burning lungs tore me awake from oblivion. I’d almost drowned and she left me there in the sand like trash. It had hit me in that painful, crushing moment that I was just like my mother bleeding in the snow, and Harper just like my white father walking away. I’d been bleeding ever since.

  After Harper and her dick brother had left me for dead, the guys I worked and lived with that summer came and found me.

  “Dude,” I remember Jose saying, “Did you know she’s a Sinclair? I thought her last name was Simpson.”

  Sinclair, Sinclair. Even in my haze of pain and shock the name had rung a bell.

  “Must have lied on her camp papers,” Marcus had said, shaking his head as they lifted me between them and threaded my arms around my shoulders. “A fucking Sinclair, man. The Las Vegas barons. That brother of hers came roaring through here looking for you and we figured there’d be trouble. You’ve been dating a fucking heiress, man. Did you know?”

  I hadn’t. But looking back, it all made sense. There had been lots of little, normal things she just hadn’t known about. I remembered that she’d never had bubble gum. At the time I thought it was cute, but who the fuck has never heard of bubble gum? Princesses in ivory towers, that’s who.

  That’s when my heart really came crashin
g down.

  Of course she hadn’t loved me back: she couldn’t have. I wasn’t even suitable for middle-class whites like my father. No way was I acceptable dating material for Blue-blooded aristocrats in the same tax bracket as the Hiltons and Trumps.

  And now Harper’s here again, saying she knows me.

  My jaw clenches.

  Harper wasn’t just another episode in the continuing saga of Dominic not being good enough: she was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After her, I never went back to St. Regis or my mother.

  I did what every heartbroken angry man in New York state does; I went to New York City to make my fortune or die trying, and I damn near did die. Then I found the Sons of Lucifer, the motorcycle club that saved my life and made a man out of me. Then I met the Las Vegas chapter’s President Heath Tate at a summit. He talked me into transferring over to his charter, starting a new life in a new state. Trading snowstorms for sunshine.

  The man damn near raised me from the dead.

  Heath was the one good thing I’d ever had, the only person besides my mother who ever really cared.

  Former President Tate, that is—may he rest in peace. My predecessor. My mentor. My savior.

  Heath Tate. Thinking of his name jars me back into the present moment, into the flaming wreckage of the Depraved Club warehouse. I’ve got to think of Heath, the reason I’m here tonight and the reason we raided this fucking twisted sex club. He’s the reason we’re at war.

  I can’t afford to let anything or anyone distract me from what needs to be done.

  A dark, hollow voice accuses me inside my head: Heath died because of you, Dominic, because you weren’t good enough to save him. You’re never good enough.

  Letting out a bellowing roar, I slam my fist into the sheet metal wall a few inches from Harper’s face, denting it and bloodying my knuckles. Stupid. At least I get the gratification of seeing Harper scream and jump about three feet in the air, shaking, as she squeals like a scared piglet.