Page 28 of Beautifully Wounded

“Charity, I don’t keep a head count.” I admit, annoyed, and she shrugs under the blankets.

“More than ten?”

“Yes,” I admit.

“More than twenty?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

She studies me for a long moment before she speaks again. “Do you enjoy it?”

“This is a weird morning conversation. I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”

“I feel like I would enjoy killing Daniel.”

Her admission would sit me on my arse if I were standing. There’s no way I ever expected those words to fall past her lips.

“You might, for a second,” I agree quietly. “But then you’d realise what you did, and that you can never take it back. Living with it is the hard part.”

She shakes her head. “The hard part is knowing he’s still walking around, free to…” She trails off.

“Free to do what, Charity?”

This time, when she shakes her head, she covers it with the blanket and mumbles, “I’m tired.”

“Then sleep.”

“Okay,” she whispers, like it’s that easy to just fall asleep, so I’m shocked when I hear her breathing deepen a few minutes later.

Kidnapping Abbey was my job. Getting personally involved wasn’t part of it, yet I want to get involved so fucking much. I want to hunt down this Daniel fucker and make him suffer through everything that he’s done to her, and then I want to torture him some more until he’s begging for death. And even then, I won’t kill him. I’ll keep him alive for years if I have to just to make sure he experiences everything one hundred times worse than what he’s done to Abbey. Maybe then I’ll finally kill him.

My MC isn’t in the business of conducting hits. Mostly we are middlemen, and when there is a death involved, it’s usually because someone tried to cross us, or another club is trying to encroach on our area, which typically turns into an all-out MC turf war. What I did by taking Abbey wasn’t part of the MC, yet I involved some of our members and brought her here, risking getting caught with her.

Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to it, but I’m glad I did now. I’d hate to think what would have happened to her if we hadn’t swooped in to save her from her crazy fucking parents.

When I can hear that Abbey is sleeping deeply again, I pull back the blankets so I can see her face. I feel like a fucking creep laying here watching her sleep. She’s so young and innocent and I’m an old fucker that lost any hint of innocence when I was a few years younger than she is now.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

I jerk up in bed at the banging on my door, the move jolting Abbey awake to sit up in a gasp, and I lurch toward her, slapping my hand over her mouth.

Her chocolate eyes are wide, terror already trembling through her body, so I release her mouth and press my finger to her lips.

“Shhh, Angel. Stay quiet for me.”

Thump. Thump. Thump.

“Wake up, Ringo. Let me the fuck in.”

“Fuck,” I hiss.

“Who’s that?” Abbey whispers, clutching the blanket to her chest.

“My Prez,” I whisper as I tug the blankets from her grip. “The President of the Southern Sadists MC. Smitty.”

“Oh.” She mouths as I stand from the bed and point towards the back corner.

“I need you to go into the bathroom and don’t come out until I say you can.”

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