Page 206 of American Hellhound
“My nephew. He thinks he’s got it all figured out. Get rid of me, take the crown for himself. Build whatever the fuck he wants.”
“Duane,” she said, carefully, “I don’t know what you’re–”
He kicked her foot again, harder this time. “Don’t lie to me. This is all your idea anyway. That boy was a good little soldier until you came along.”
She decided it was better to keep quiet.
“You started filling his head with all these big ideas, and now nothing’s good enough for him: not the club, not me. He’s got no respect for his elders. For the way things are done.”
He bent at the waist, leaning down to shove his face into hers. “You don’t got anything to say for yourself?”
So much for being quiet… “Ghost always had dreams,” she said, careful to keep her tone neutral. “He finally got brave enough to insist on them.”
He slapped her. So hard and so quick she didn’t see his hand pull back, was suddenly staring at the opposite wall, head kicked to the side, cheek stinging where his palm had smacked her. She made a ragged, unconscious sound of distress.
“I hate your fucking guts,” Duane said, without any special feeling. Just stating a fact. “You’ve ruined my boy.”
She darted her tongue across her lips and tasted blood in the corner of her mouth, on the side where he’d slapped her. Jesus. She turned, slowly, back to face him, making cautious eye contact.
Still crouched in front of her, he pulled a pair of leatherwork gloves from his back pocket and tugged them on. “He thinks he can work something out with all the idiot thugs of Knoxville,” he said, mostly to himself. “But what’s he gonna do when he realizes one of those rednecks killed his old lady, huh?”
And that was when therealfear took hold. He was going to kill her, and blame it on the Ryders, or someone else. Use her death to bring Ghost back into the fold.
He grinned at her, an echo of Ghost’s grin, sharp and white. “The shame of it is, I coulda really liked you. Too bad you had to fuck with my club like this. Things coulda been different.”
~*~
“Duane’s out of his damn mind,” Neil Ryder said.
Ghost snorted. “No shit.”
James said, “We understand that Duane has made some regrettable business deals lately. That’s what we aim to fix.”
“If we can all come to an agreement,” Ghost said, gesturing to the room at large, “then we can promise that Duane won’t interfere in any of the arrangements.”
“He stepping down?” Molly asked, doubtful.
“Something like that.”
~*~
He unlocked the cuffs and took a firm grip on her hair, dragging her into the center of the room.
Maggie gasped at the pain, reaching with one hand to claw at him in helpless reaction – it felt like he was pulling her hair out by the roots. With the other hand, she flailed for her boot, and the knife inside it.
He grunted as he wrenched her forward, putting his back into it. The concrete rubbed her jeans raw, and her hip on one side, where her waistband was pulled down and her bare skin touched the floor.
She scrabbled at the leg of her jeans, trying to get beneath it, fingers dancing for the hilt of the knife.
This wasn’t going to be some long, drawn-out, villain monologue moment like in the movies, she realized. He wasn’t going to tell her his master plan and taunt her like a cat with a mouse – there was no need. She knew why he was doing it. And she didn’t doubt for a second that he really would kill her.
“Quit it, bitch,” he hissed, as she clawed at the back of his hand. He threw her down to the floor and moved around her, straddled her hips, his knees on the floor, pinning her down. He took hold of her hair again, and with his free hand, he produced a knife as if by magic, pressed it to her throat.
He considered her a moment, their noses almost touching. He smelled like whiskey and sweat. Maggie could smell her own fear, acrid and sickly.
“Don’t take it too personal,” he said.
He’d made the fatal mistake of leaving one of her hands free, and in it she now clutched the knife Ghost had given her, a slender boning knife with a wicked length of blade.
