Page 1 of Biker's Dark Revenge

Prologue – Lee

I tossed down another swig of vodka, the burn biting the back of my throat. I had already made it through the better part of a handle, but it didn’t feel like enough. Nothing was enough to wipe even a small part of the pain from my mind and heart.

I smashed the bottle against the ground, the pieces shattering around my feet, the remains of the toxic liquid draining into the dirt below me. I leaned against the wall and stared at the bar across the street. How long would he make me wait? How long was I going to have to stand here and hold out for the moment he showed his fucking cowardly face?

I didn’t care. I didn’t give a fuck how long it took. I was going to make sure he saw the look in my eyes when I made him pay for what he had done to me – what he had done to Dina.

I reached back to grip the gun at my hip, reminding myself that I was ready to take the shot the first moment I could. I should have been more careful, should have been more cautious in how I went about this, but I didn’t give a fuck right now. I wanted him dead. Nothing else would satisfy me, not after what he had done.

I could still see it, the image burned into my mind. The moment that car came screeching around the corner – Dina, crouched on the edge of the sidewalk, her chalk in her hand, drawing out shapes on the concrete a few feet from my apartment building. I was sitting there on the steps, watching her, wanting to enjoy every minute of time I had with her. Since her mother and I had split, I didn’t get to see as much of her as I wanted, but that had started to settle down, as Caylee and I got over the worst of our animosity toward each other.

The car had torn around that corner, and I sprung to my feet at once – the moment I saw the look on that guy’s face, I knew something was off, and my instincts kicked in. I rushed towards Dina, reaching out to grab her, but she looked up as she saw the car drawing closer. She tripped on the edge of the pavement, the chalk falling out of her hand and cracking into two pieces on the ground beside her. And then...

Fuck. I couldn’t even let my mind go there. I couldn’t even think about the moment I saw her under the wheel of that car, the sight of her, my little girl – she looked so small, so broken, and I had known in that instant that she was dead. There was no way she could have survived that. My heart spun helplessly out of control as I dropped to my knees beside her, but, before I could call out to the guy in the car for help, he backed up, and sped off down the street. Fucking coward.

I rushed her to the hospital, with the help of one of my neighbors, but it was too late. She was already gone by the time we got there. But the moment the doctors told me that there was no chance she was coming back, it felt like my heart had been ripped straight out of my chest – leaving a hollow space that I knew I would never be able to fill. My girl, my daughter, my baby, was taken from me when she was just three. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t live with it.

Neither could Caylee – she had packed up her shit and moved across the country the week after Dina’s funeral, telling me she didn’t want to be here anymore, begging me never to contact her again. I got it, I did. It was too painful to even think about everything she had lost here. She and I might not have made things work, but she loved our little girl, and saw it as the one good thing that had come out of our relationship – and now, with no warning, she had been taken from us. Ripped away , our lives destroyed in the seconds it took for that car to come screeching around the corner.

I started drinking, just to be able to sleep at night. I was drinking so much I couldn’t see straight, but still tormented by the images of seeing my baby girl lying helpless in the street. I replayed the memory, trying to work out if there was anything more I could have done – something I could have done to stop it from happening. I knew there was no point torturing myself, but how could I not? I was her father. I was meant to be the one who protected her against anything and everything the world threw at her, and instead – instead, she was in the cold, hard ground, and I was still alive. Still alive and more alone than I had ever been.

The face of the man behind the wheel of the car was still fresh in my memory. I had gone to the cops with everything I remembered about him, and they had taken it all down, but they’d warned me that the chances of anything coming from it were pretty slim. Hit-and-runs, they told me, happened all the time. The drivers get so spooked by what they did, they don’t stop and think, they just react. – I despised the man who took my innocent child’s life, more than I could put into words, for fleeing like the coward he was. If he had stuck around, and tried to help, maybe things would have ended differently.

I became consumed with the thought that he was out there in the world, living his life as though nothing had happened. How was it fair that he got to go on with life like normal? Like this was okay? I needed to find him. I needed to make him pay for what he had done.

I started stalking the city’s bars, trying to track him down – I was sure he had been drunk when he got into his car that fateful day, and there was no way he wasn’t drinking even harder now, given what he had done. I knew he had seen and felt it, and I knew he understood the sheer extent of what he did to my little girl. I wanted to look him in the eye and make him pay for the harm he caused her, for the pain he caused me. I didn’t want him to walk away from this. He needed to pay.

Eventually, I tracked his car to a run-down dive bar on the edge of Atwood – he hadn’t even changed his vehicle. I stared at the bumper when I saw it sitting there in the parking lot, wondering if Dina’s blood was still painted into the teeth of the metal. And I watched as he stumbled out of the bar, still drunk, not having learned his lesson, and drove home.

Okay. So I knew where he went to drink. Now, I just needed to come prepared. That was exactly what I had done this evening – I'd talked to some of my shady friends and landed myself a gun that wasn’t registered anywhere, just the way I liked it. Nobody would know it was me. I could fire the shot, and watch the life leak out of his eyes the same way it had done to...

I pushed that thought away, pressing my back against the wall. I couldn’t get distracted. Not now. Not when I had come this far. There was no way I was going to screw this up. I had to get to him and take him out.This might be my only chance, and I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of it.

Finally, I watched as he stumbled out of the bar, staggering toward his car. It was late, and there was hardly anyone else out on the street. I strode toward him, the adrenaline pulsing in my veins, the blood screaming in my head.

"Hey," I called out to him. He turned to me, and I expected to see his face react with some recognition – but he locked eyes with me, and his gaze stayed as drunk and stupid as it always had been. He had no idea who I was.

Somehow, that made me even angrier. Didn’t he give a shit about what he had done? Didn’t he care about the damage he had caused to my family? Did he even think about it, or did he go to bed every night and sleep peacefully, certain he hadn’t done anything he needed to feel bad for?

"Hey," he called back, his voice slurring. "What’s up-"

But before he could get out another word, I pulled the gun, and drove it into his gut, pushing him back against the car behind him. The blood drained from his face.

"What the fuck are you-"

"Do you know who I am?" I growled; my voice low. He stared at me – and, finally, I saw it, his face registering what was going on.

"Oh, fuck," he muttered, as he tried to pull himself away. My grip on him was tight, he wasn’t going anywhere.

"Don’t even fucking try it," I told him. I pushed the gun against his gut, holding it there, letting it dig in beneath his ribs. I could have pulled the trigger right then and there, but there was something in me that held back – maybe some part of Dina, some part of her I still carried close that didn’t want to let her down. I didn’t want to be the kind of man who killed someone...

But after what he had done to her, didn’t he deserve it? I narrowed my eyes at him.

"You killed my daughter," I spat at him. Fuck, even saying those words out loud didn’t feel real – like it all had to be some sick, twisted joke, and I would walk back through the doors of my apartment, and she would be waiting there for me.

"I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sorry," he blurted out. "I was drunk, and I-"

"And you left her there," I told him. I could feel anger building, unlike anything I had experienced before taking control of me, commanding me, demanding that I pull the t trigger. My finger was hovering on top of it, ready to squeeze down. That was all it would have taken, one shot, and he would have been dead – there would have been no way out of this for him, no way to escape. He would have been found the next morning, and the cops would have put it down to a barfight gone wrong – they wouldn’t have bothered looking into it. I could have gotten away with it.

---