He had to speak up to be heard over the violent barking, but his voice remained as dead and emotionless as before. “I thought I was clear in my instructions, Duchess.”
There were so many places where he could have concealed himself. Nearly lost to her own paranoia and terror, Dillon couldn't do anything but stand there and shake like a big, half-naked target. She had nowhere to hide.
“I did exactly what you said,” she forced the words to form even as her tongue felt swollen and too dry to speak.
“You said, 'Drive to Austin, go to the Perdition MC compound, deliver this message directly to Nasa, and your job is done.' You didn't say I had to deliver the message face to face. He was watching me through the cameras. He saw it.”
A long sigh filtered through the line, and Dillon could practically feel him looming over her, that knife in his hand, pressing against her cheek as he impressed upon her the consequences of failure.
“Give him the phone, Dillon,” he eventually drawled. “Our deal is done.”
Without turning around, Dillon stretched her arm back, offering the phone to whoever was within reach. As soon as it was out of her fingers, she practically ran for the truck before the Reaper had a chance to change his mind.
Dillon got in and shut the door, her violently trembling hand immediately going for the keys still stuck in the ignition.
Elka leapt in through the passenger side window as Dillon went to turn the engine over, but all that happened was a sputtering click.
She tried again, and again, looking up in time to see the huge wrought iron gates that looked strong enough to withstand a direct hit from a tank and not buckle, slowly rolling shut across her only exit.
“Much as I don't look forward to telling you this, you're not going anywhere.”
Elka leaned over Dillon to face the window, lips peeled back to expose every single one of her pearly white teeth.
Dillon looked to see a tall, lanky redhead, holding up a tangle of wires in his hand with an apologetic look on his face.
At any other time, it would have thrilled her to see the guy's throat work nervously in response to the look Elka leveled on him, but not today.
Today, Dillon was trapped, surrounded by strangers, and there was nowhere to hide.
“Shit, I think my balls just ran for cover up my ass,” the redhead muttered, wisely taking a few steps back.
CHAPTER TWO
From the moment the blue Bronco rolled past the open gates to park in front of the garage, Nasa had been watching. He'd seen the woman and her monster of a dog get out, fearfully looking around like Jason Voorhees was about to pop out from behind the oak trees and whack her.
Taking note of her short shorts and the enormous sweatshirt she had on, Nasa had his finger on the button to call the bomb squad, just in case she had a vest of explosives on under there.
No doubt, the woman was gorgeous. At least six feet tall, with an edgy haircut that kept her wheat-colored hair out of her face. A closer look revealed sharp features and velvety brown eyes. Tiger eyes, blazing defiantly from a face that could have launched a thousand ships.
A quick search using his facial recognition software got a hit on her name, and Dillon DeLoughrey didn't have so much as a parking ticket attached to her driving record.
A six-foot-tall blonde woman wasn’t exactly what one would normally envision when thinking of a suicide bomber, but the readouts from his sophisticated security system tagged her heart rate at a million miles an hour. She was terrified, and people that scared took stupid chances.
Never in his life had he expected her to whip off her hoodie to show him and the rest of the club the harsh message written across her body.
He'd sat in his chair in the basement, struck dumb for a minute, slow to move. By the time he'd leaped up and ran upstairs to demand answers, she was already heading for her vehicle.
Nasa shouted at her to stop, but if she heard him, she gave no indication of obeying, and none of the guys made any attempts to reach out and stop her themselves.
Not with the huge fucking dog she had, eyeballing them with her teeth exposed, eagerly daring them to get close enough to bite.
There weren't many reasons why a woman had a dog like that, and the scars covering almost every inch of Dillon's back suggested her reason was as ugly as those scars.
It was the familiar sound of frogs croaking that stopped her cold. Nasa watched her shoulders leap up around her ears, her entire body trembling when she lifted her cell to her ear.
She spoke too softly for Nasa to catch everything she said, but he moved when she reached out blindly to offer up her phone.
Confused as hell, he took it, shock compounding shock to hear the voice on the other end.
“You know, I went through quite a bit of trouble to ensure my little Duchess hand delivered a message to you, and you couldn't be bothered to come outside to meet her? Tut, tut, Nasa. Your manners are sorely lacking.”
Rage turned his vision red to hear that creepy, dead-ass voice in his ear. “Fuck my manners, and fuck you, you coward. Sending a woman to deliver your bullshit message? You too scared to come down here and face me now that all your buddies are in jail, is that it?”
“You know better than to try and bait me, Nasa. It won't work,” Ghost sighed in a mockery of exasperation.
“For some reason, it disappoints me that after all this time, you still don't know the truth.”
“I've disappointed you? I knew you were a psycho, but you really are out of your goddamn mind—”
Ghost went on as though Nasa hadn't interrupted, “I thought I could kill the proverbial
