Page 11 of The Queen of Nightmares

“Fuck you, Devil,” he croaked out.

I stepped closer. “No thanks. Though, I could have been fucking my woman right now if I didn’t have to deal with you. You’ll pay for that, too.”

“Fuck your whore. Oogie is going to ruin her pussy when he gets ahold of her.” He tried to be brave with his foolish words, but the wobble at the end gave away how scared he really was. He was fucked, and he knew it.

Without responding to his taunt, I reared back and punched him in the ribs, right where the knife wound was. His body swayed wildly as his scream echoed around the room.

“Fuck, Prez. That was brutal.” Shock winced and rubbed a hand over his own ribcage.

I grunted and walked over to the table already laid out with tools, selecting a long, thin blade typically used for filleting meat. “What do the Boogeymen have planned?” I gritted out as I strolled back over to the young man who had settled into whimpers. His wound was flowing freely with blood, a puddle forming underneath him and rolling into the drain. There was an interesting pattern of blood splatters over the floor where he had swung before one of my men stopped him.

I expected the man to be defiant and tell me to fuck myself again. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut and whimpered.

“Prez plans to get your woman from behind your walls. He’s pissed you built them and made it harder for us to get in.” He let his head drop, and his voice was slurred as he continued spilling his secrets as his blood ran thickly from his side and down his leg. “He thinks if he gets the woman, he’ll be able to control you. Once he has her, he’ll have the town.”

He wasn’t fucking wrong. I would gladly give up everyone in the town to save my Queen. I ground my teeth so hard my jaw ached, and I could feel a throbbing pain behind my eye from the headache that was forming.

“How does he plan to get her?”

“D-don’t know. I just fully patched in last—” he took a breath and then started coughing, blood spraying from his lips. “I’m new, so I don’t know anything,” he finished in a hoarse whisper.

The kid was almost gone. I wouldn’t get anything further from him. I sighed, then swiped across his throat with the knife, making sure to cut deep enough that he would bleed out quickly. His body jerked once before going still. I turned away and dropped the knife on the table for one of the men to clean.

“I shouldn’t have to say it, but I’m going to anyway,” I said as I looked at each of my men in the eye. These were my closest men, the officers of the Devil’s Nightmares, and my inner circle. I trusted them, but I still needed to make sure they understood the seriousness of my words. “Sally is mine. She is to be protected at all costs. She never leaves the compound without me. There needs to be a guard on her location at all times. That means day and night, someone will be guarding my house.” I glared at them, daring them to challenge me.

This was new territory for the club. A few members had old ladies, but none that had been under direct threat before. Sally was more than an old lady to me. She was my Queen, and that meant she was Queen of the fucking Nightmares, too.

“She is your Queen. You will protect her and show her the same respect you show me. Is that understood?” I jerked my head and narrowed my eyes to glare at Barrel as he stepped forward.

“Just saying, Prez, but that was a given. We get it.” He looked around at the other guys, and they all nodded or grunted their agreement. Shock folded his arms over his chest with a grin on his face. “We’re happy for you. We like Red, and we like seeing you happy.”

My chest felt strangely warm at his words. As I glanced at each of my inner circle, they all had the same look of agreement and grins. I resisted the urge to rub at my chest. I grunted. “Good.” I turned to walk to the door without looking back. I needed to get to my girl after hearing Oogie’s plans for her. I would give him whatever he asked for to get her back, but I didn’t want him to lay a finger on her. I knew if he did somehow get past me, he wouldn’t leave much of her to retrieve. Just the thought alone had cold sweat trickling down my spine.

I punched in the code to the heavy door of the processing room and swung the door open to breathe in the fresh, cold air. Snow was coming soon. The clouds hung heavy and thick in the sky. My breath came in puffs of white as I strolled from the shed to the back of the clubhouse. Before I made it halfway to the main building, the back door flung open, and one of my men came running out. He stopped in his tracks when he saw me. I could clearly read the urgency on his face.

“What’s wrong?” I demanded as I quickened my pace.

“It’s Sally…”

Before he could finish speaking, I began to run, throwing the heavy back door open hard enough to bang against the wall, and ran down the hall to my office, where I’d left her to wait. The door was standing open, so I pushed inside.

“Sally!” I glanced around the room, not finding my woman. Instead, there was a cardboard box on my desk that hadn’t been there before. Red caught my eye, and I looked down to see another box lying on the floor. I blinked at the disgusting mess of insect bodies squashed into the thin carpet.

Before I could turn around to search for my Queen, the same man who had run outside to tell me something about her came into the room, breathing heavily from running.

“Doc took her to the hospital. I don’t know what happened. He just told me to find you and tell you to meet him there.”

I knew what happened. I walked over to the red box and picked it up, looking inside. There was a bug about the size of a dime that tried to run out and down the side of the red box. I snatched it between my fingers and squeezed. I wiped my hand on the leg of my jeans and plucked the black card out of the bottom of the box.

I tried to do this the easy way, Bones.

I warned you two months ago.

You should have just done what I told you when I left you that message.

Give up the town, or your woman suffers.

This was only the beginning.

---