Page 6 of Grave Curse

“Don’t order her around, she’s not your servant.” Then I glanced over at a wide-eyed Roxie. “But if you wouldn’t mind,would you please call Misty and let her know we’re coming in hot?”

“On it.” With that, Roxie vanished back into the shop.

Olive, looking distressed, hung on to the shop’s open door like she feared she might drift away. “Ginger, I’m sorry you got hurt. Maybe we can take care of your hand here? Like I said, my brother—”

“Your brother is your problem, kid. Ginger is mine.” Tyr barely spared Olive a glance before tugging on my hands. To a casual observer, it probably looked as if he had me all tied up like I was his personal prisoner, and he was carting me off to his secret urban dungeon.Great. “Let’s move.”

“Tyr, I’m not your problem.” Really, I had to say it.

“If only that were the case. Now do me a favor and pipe down, yeah? I’ve got to get you across the street before you faint from blood loss.”

“I amnotfainting.” I hoped.

“Across the street” wasn’t as simple as it sounded. Tyr’s Gravediggers Motorcycle Club, or MC, wasn’t just one building, like a quaint little community center. It was a massive, fenced-in and heavily guarded compound that took up approximately one commercial-sized city block. It contained several buildings, including an old 1960s-style motor court motel that used to house a stable of strung-out, haggard, used-up prostitutes, including my mother. The motel was now called the Barracks, and it could house up to two-hundred Gravedigger brothers if they ever went on lockdown. That had happened at the beginning of the year, and while no one wanted a repeat performance, Tyr remained ready to pull his army in at a moment’s notice. The kitchens were always stocked, the place was kept immaculately clean, and if anyone wanted to throw down in a big way, Tyr was clearly ready to take care of his men during a long-term siege.

That, as much as anything, made him a great leader. He always put the members of the Gravediggers first.

But of course, I wasn’t a Gravedigger. I was just a woman, so I was something the leader of the Gravediggers had no problem sacrificing.

The bastard.

The Barracks hung on the edge of a huge parking lot that connected all the other buildings. To the right was a gray-washed, solid-looking structure that used to be a bank, but was now the Gravediggers Clubhouse. I loved that place. On the surface it looked harmless and vaguely contemporary, but on the inside it was a wondrous fortress that had sublevels to it that even I hadn’t been allowed to see. As far as security went, it was a masterpiece.

In the middle of the huge parking lot, there used to be an island of trees and bushes that had been ignored until was an overgrown tangle. Now it had been cleared, and in its place stood a small, elevated structure that resembled the wooden lifeguard towers you’d find on a beach. Last winter we’d had a couple of Hades’s men hide in that tangle, and once the hubbub from that incident had blown over, Tyr ordered that thicket to be mowed down so that a watchtower-slash-central security hut could be built.

On the left side of the large parking lot, a gigantic metal warehouse-like structure dominated the landscape. That was our destination, Ride Or Die Choppers, Tyr’s pet project and secret love of his life. A legit business pulling in almost as much money as the club’s less-than-legal enterprises had never been a part of Tyr’s long-term plans, at least as far as I knew. He’d just needed a legit business front to launder whatever money came in from the club’s “extra-legal” activities.

But over the past several years that the Gravediggers had become a separate chapter from the Chicago Gravediggers, Tyrhad come to love Ride Or Die Choppers like it was his own child. Now he gave it almost as much attention as he did to the other not-so-kosher business dealings that made his Gravediggers chapter thrive, and that told me where his secret heart lived.

Not that I believed Tyr had any aspirations of going straight and living a meek little civilian’s life. The very thought made me laugh to myself as he pulled me through Ride Or Die Choppers’ showroom decorated in grays and whites, with fantastical custom-built bikes gleaming under the showroom lights. I doubted he even knew what living a straight life was. He’d been born into the Chicago Gravediggers, a club his grandfather had founded, and from the start it had been exactly what a 1%er club was supposed to be—brutal muscle-for-hire for organized crime, running drugs, guns and prostitutes with impunity.

Tyr’s grandpa, Titan, eventually wound up in the gray-bar hotel—prison—for beating a man to death with his bare hands. The club had passed on to his son, Odin, Tyr’s old man, who hadn’t been any better than his pops. To prove it, Odin wound up beating a man to death when I was in middle school and got caught by the law, but this time the club didn’t get handed down to Tyr. Oh, no. Hades had taken control even before his brother had been officially convicted.

From that point on, Hades had ruled the Chicago Gravediggers with a tyrannical iron fist.

Hades taking control of the Chicago Gravediggers had signaled a terrible change in my life and in the lives of the Colgrave children. Gone was the protection we’d all enjoyed when Odin was around to be a natural brake on his brother’s cruelty. I had never been used as a whipping boy for Tyr, the heir apparent, when Odin had been in power. But that insanity started almost immediately after Hades came to power. We’d all been shocked by it, most of all Tyr and me, but clearly Tyr had never been so shocked that he actually stopped misbehaving. Ifanything, my torture sessions got worse the older we got, and always it was because of Tyr.

Tyr’s younger brother Loki flat-out left the MC life once he graduated high school and never looked back. He was now some kind of famous tattooist with a regular job and a passel of wild-eyed kids who were growing so fast they were threatening to be even bigger than he was.

Tyr and Loki’s little sister Hel now lived somewhere on the rugged Oregon coast. She did cute illustrations for children’s books as Helen Colgate, and unutterably nightmarish gothic paintings as “Hell Grave,” a play on her true name, Hel Colgrave. The last time I spoke with her, she was getting ready for her first solo exhibition and was a nervous wreck—which, for a Colgrave, meant she was bitchier and more acerbic than ever.

As unexpected as all that was, Tyr did the craziest thing of all. After trying to hold the Chicago Gravediggers together while under his uncle’s insane rule, it became apparent that the chaos-loving Hades wanted nothing more than to be king of the graveyard, with the members of his MC planted in the graves. Tyr and his closest friends bailed on the club his grandfather founded, and so did I. Not that I really had to at that point; I hadn’t been linked to the Chicago Gravediggers since my mother, Hades ol’ lady, OD’d when I was eighteen. But Tyr had convinced me that to be safe, I had to be clear in my affiliation with Tyr’s new MC chapter, the Gravediggers. I’d agreed to do this because I feared Hades would try to hold on to me even after my mother’s death, and Tyr was the only one strong enough to oppose him.

At the time of my mother’s death, I’d been designing lingerie and cute girlie clothing and selling my creations online. I’d been saving every penny I had to get the hell out of the nightmare of a life my mother had put me in, but when my mother died and Tyr broke free with the announcement that I was underhis protection, I decided to try to use the money I had to buy more inventory and make a real go of my online store I’d named Vixen’s Den. Within a year, Tyr had found the dated, single-story strip mall across from his new base of operations and loaned me the money to bring Vixen’s Den to brick-and-mortar life.

So far it had been a fabulous business decision. I’d already paid back Tyr’s loan, something that had been my first priority. The shop was wrapping up its best year yet, to the point where I could now invest in building up my online shop as well as advertise for a greater reach throughout Chicagoland. My own designs sold as well as any of the other pieces of intimate apparel I had in stock, and I was playing with the idea of starting up my own line of super-sexy platform high-heeled shoes.

You could say I was bringing sexy back, one woman at a time.

“Oh, no.” As we closed in on Tyr’s office at the back of the showroom, a statuesque blonde bombshell came out, looking distressed. Misty, my other best friend whose miserable upbringing was so similar to mine it wasn’t even funny, pushed the office door open wide so we could enter. “Girlfriend, what happened? I got the first-aid kit ready to go on the bathroom counter, but if you want I can drive you to the ER…”

“No one touches Ginger but me.” Tyr blew by Misty like she wasn’t even there, while his words smacked every coherent thought out of my brain. “Get up front, Misty, and if anyone needs me, tell them I’ll get to them in about an hour. Right now I’m in official Do Not Disturb mode.”

“Understood.” With one last worried glance my way, Misty beat a hasty retreat, leaving me to Tyr’s tender mercies.

I’d be lucky to survive to the end of the day.

Chapter Two

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