Reaper's Claim Book 2
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Simone Elise
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30
Painkillers
SEASON 2
‘Produced by: Jenn Sherman’
‘Written by: Ilan Benjamin & Ellis Stump’
‘Sound by: Oskar Allen & Fionn McNeill’
ABBY
How did I get here? How the hell did I get here?
That’s all I kept asking myself as I watched the guys around me throw bills at the half-naked girl sliding down a pole.
I was sitting in a plush chair in the Red Flower, a high-class strip club in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by strangers and the stink of sweet perfume and cigarettes in the air.
Two hours East of Satan’s Sons territory.
Two hours away from my home. From my father, my twin sister, from him…
Kade.
But none of that mattered now. I had a new home. A new purpose. And, whether or not I cared much for strip clubs, I certainly had good reason to be distracted right now.
“Beautiful, I am taking you home with me!” one of the men shouted at the poor girl, making it rain.
I rolled my eyes. No woman, stripper or not, would touch that fat, hairy jerk-off with a ten-foot pole.
Still, as long as the men were looking at her, it meant they weren’t looking at me.
And that, I could live with.
I took another sip of my whiskey, trying to swallow down all my regrets, doing anything to avoid dwelling on the past, when I felt someone slip into the seat beside me.
“Enjoying the show?”
I turned to see Damon, a gin and tonic in hand, his slick signature houndstooth suit hugging his muscular frame.
The guy was built like a cage-fighter but dressed to impress. His teasing light brown eyes revealed what a player he was.
Look long enough into those, and you’d swear he was your protector. Women flocked to him. Hell, I guess I was even guilty in that regard.
But, hell no had I given into the man’s advances. After what I’d been through...men, all of them as far as I was concerned, weren’t worth a bloody second of my time.
“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” I said, taking another bored sip of my whiskey, enjoying the burn.
“That’s what I like about you, Abby,” Damon said with a chuckle. “You can’t be surprised. Not by a naked girl. And not by a man, strapped to the teeth.”
I vaguely noticed the outline of his handgun beneath the suit jacket. A snubnose from the look of it.
When you were raised around bikers, you learned to recognize these kinds of details.
“There a reason you’re talking to me right now instead of getting a lapdance?” I asked, exasperated.
“There is,” he said, nodding. “And you know exactly what it’s about.”
Business.
He needn’t say it for me to understand. Ever since I’d met Damon in a dive bar off the interstate, apparently his dive, he’d made it abundantly clear what I was to him.
Not just a sharp mouth with a pair of nice tits. No, what Damon saw was potential. He saw a coldness, a brutality, in me I hadn’t ever recognized until…
Until Reaper left me alone after all he had promised.
Until my heart was shattered into a million pieces.
Until I decided to leave the Satan’s Sons and drive toward nowhere with only one goal in mind: destroy the person I’d always thought of as Abby Harrison.
And become someone new.
When Damon had introduced me to the Hellbound gang, I’d been wary at first.
So they didn’t have patches or Harleys, so what? They were still a bunch of killers.
Their glitz and glam didn’t fool me for one second. Buy all the high-shelf liquor you like; a gang is still a gang.
But unlike the MC in which I was born and raised but never allowed to be a participant, Damon was making me a legitimate offer. Not just to be some slutty club girl.
No, Damon wanted to give me a job within the ranks of Hellbound.
A job, he claimed, that only a girl like me could do.
“Well?” he asked, impatient. “Blake isn’t going to wait forever.”
Blake. The boss man. Damon’s cousin who rarely came out to bars like this, who preferred privacy, and who ran Hellbound like a tight fucking ship.
I still hadn’t met him. But everyone spoke about Blake as if he were some sort of God. All-knowing. Scary as fuck.
I felt a shiver go down my spine at the mention of his name and tried to hide it by finishing off my glass of whiskey.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “You’re asking a lot.”
“Look around, Abby,” Damon said, putting a hand on my shoulder.
The feel of his calloused hand against my bare skin almost made me flinch. I hadn’t let any man touch me since Kade and for good reason.
But Damon was just trying to reason with me. Not flirt. For the most part, anyway.
“You see these guys around you?” he asked, pointing from one to the other. “Eric, he’s been a part of our family for six years.
“Liam?” he continued. “Only a few weeks. Green, but he’s already given up a lot to call himself Hellbound.”
I looked from Eric to Liam. I hadn’t spoken much with either, but I could recognize their loyalty from a mile away.
“And?” I asked. “What about them?”
“They proved themselves to be a part of this family, Abby. Are you ready to do the same?”
It was hard to believe that a sweet-looking kid like Liam, blushing as a woman stuffed her tits into his face, had done what Damon was talking about.
Liam had killed.
And now Damon wanted me to do the same.
“What do you say, Abby?” he asked me again. “Are you ready to be one of us?”
I may have killed the idea of Abby Harrison.
But was I ready to become a real killer?
REAPER
The moment I first met Abby, I knew the girl would be the death of me. And, killing the Reaper himself, that’s saying something.
Yup. I knew she would be a disaster. I knew she would fuck me up and leave me in pieces. I knew it all, and still, I chose to call her mine.
And look what it’d fucking done to me. Nothing could have prepared me for this.
“You want another line, baby?” the girl purred beside me.
She was wearing nothing but a G-string, but everything about her—from her raccoon eyes to her insatiable appetite for substances—repelled me.
I kept her around anyway. Company, even the worst kind, is better than nothing.
“Give it to me,” I growled.
She did as she was told, handing over the mirror with the coke cut up with who-the-fuck-knows-what.
We’d been doing eight-balls for the past two weeks, only stopping to buy more booze and occasionally mess around.
No fucking, though. I knew nothing good would’ve come of that.
That and, perversely, I guess I was still trying to save myself for Abby.
Which is fucking crazy considering she’d high-tailed it outta there after I left. Before I could come back and try to fix things.
Why had I let Amber blackmail me into running away?
Amber, who was halfway across the country now, doing God knows what. The whole Shields clan had fucked off, leaving me in the wreckage.
And now Abby was gone, too. Ghosting me. Would either of us ever get a chance to explain ourselves?
At that moment, I didn’t care about the sins of the past or the mistakes made. I cared about what she was doing right this second and if I’d ever hear from her again.
Hope, that’s what really fucking kills ya.
I was about to snort another line when my phone buzzed on the glass table. I’d been ignoring it for ages, but seeing the name of the sender, I couldn’t help myself.
I had to check.
Trigger
heads up
Trigger
roach is comin to see u
Reaper
The fuck does he want?
Reaper
How does he even know where I am?
Trigger
ur not a hard man to find, reaper
Trigger
think its about abby
I lowered my phone, eyes widening in disbelief. What could Roach possibly want to talk to me about? Ever since he’d caught me fucking his daughter, I’d basically been dead to him.
I’d assumed ever since I ran away, after Amber’s threats, that Abby had been done with me. That she’d returned to Kim and her father’s side and that was that.
But if Roach was on his way here right now, this had to be serious.
I threw aside the mirror, the coke, all of it, and stood up with a start.
“What the hell?!” the girl said, scrambling to gum the scraps. “Why would you do that?”
“Get out,” I said.
“Are you ser—”
“Now.”
She looked into my eyes, and I saw fear take over. She knew I wasn’t fucking kidding. She got up and, without another word, ran out of the room.
I took a breath. I had no idea how long it’d take Roach to get here, but I had some cleaning up to do.
Before I could even stash away the remains of the drugs, though, there was a heavy knock on the door.
Fuck, that was fast.
“One second,” I said, stuffing what I could into a drawer and making my way toward the front door.
I opened it to see the Prez himself, looking pissed that he even had to be here.
But worse than that—the man looked worried.
“We need to talk, Reaper.”
***
I was pacing, unable to sit still, losing my shit. I couldn’t believe that she’d been gone for three months and Roach was only telling me now.
Abby was…missing? What the fuck did that even mean? Missing like lost keys or something?
“Where the hell did she go?!” I shouted.
“I don’t fuckin’ know!” Roach roared in return. “Ya think if I did, I’d be here?”
I shook my head, feeling two weeks’ worth of blow and zero food taking its toll on my strung-out body.
“Will you sit down already for Chrissake?!” he said, exasperated.
I didn’t feel like sitting. But I did it. Just to get more answers outta the bastard.
“Spill,” I said. “What do you know?”
“Nothing,” he admitted. “The only reason I’m even here now is because Kim went looking for her on her own. She’s gone too now. Both my girls. I...”
Roach choked up, looking away. I knew this was the one tough bastard’s soft spot. The idea that both of the twins were missing.
It was clearly fucking him up.
Now, who knew where either of the girls were.
“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. “You’re the last person on fuckin’ earth I’d want to turn to, but if they’re in danger...”
“You need me.”
He nodded, only now taking in my appearance and the shithole apartment I called a home.
“I mention ya look like shit?” he asked.
“I’ll put on make-up for you next time,” I spat back.
For a second, Roach almost smiled. But then the dread settled back into his expression, and he looked down at his hands. A father, terrified for his children.
“What the hell do we do, Reaper?”
I stood up. “I’ll tell you what we do, Roach. We find ‘em. Both of ‘em.”
He looked into my eyes and could see I meant it.
Shit, Abby Harrison might have turned my life upside down. But I wasn’t about to let her disappear.
I’m coming, Abby, I thought. Even if it kills me, I’m going to find you.
