Page 81 of Life Or Death

I close my eyes. The generator hums beside me, and somewhere behind me, Mammon grunts as he hefts a tarp-wrapped body over his shoulder. I should be fucking helping my men with the carnage. Instead, I’m on the fucking phone, trying to find out why my wife took off and has been ignoring my calls.

“She was pretty pissed when she took off,” Homeboy reveals. “I think she and Ginger got into it.”

My free hand curls into a fist at my side, and I press my knuckles against the corrugated metal wall hard enough to feel the ridges bite into my skin.

Fucking Ginger.

I should’ve put that cunt down a long time ago.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

JESS

A woman’s intuition is her superpower, but when she ignores it, she makes a fool of herself. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing until it was too late, or maybe I was just too overly sexed to truly give a flying fuck.

But the signs were all there.

Lucifer fucked me senseless, told me I was his, covered me in every part of himself, and then he walked out the door like he hadn’t completely upended my world the night before.

It was supposed to be just sex. A release of tension that had been building between us for weeks. More like months if I really think about it, because even before the fire and the forgery, that man was on my mind. It was just easy to push him out of my head back then because he was still an enigma. A man whose entire existence was woven together by secrets and sins.

Now, I could lie and say that somewhere between his tongue between my thighs and his cum dripping down my stomach, it became more than sex for me. But the sex was just the icing on the cake. It cemented everything I already knew but was too afraid to admit.

I got a taste of what life could be like as his wife, and it bled into more. I wanted a future with him, one where I fit into his life as his ol’ lady.

It was delusional for me to want that, though.

I could sense something was off when I kissed him and he pulled away. No part of me wanted to believe it. I know he had club business—that much wasn’t a lie. I mean, the entire club took off. Half of them hadn’t even slept, so whatever was going on had to be serious, and as the president of the club, I’m sure it all weighed heavily on his shoulders.

I excused his coldness and clung to the scraps he threw my way by offering me his bed while he was gone, figuring I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. He could handle whatever was going on with the club, and when he got back, we’d either pick up where we left or decide where we’d go from there.

Thinking about it now, it sounds kind of grim, but I really did have hope. Until that bitch, Ginger, got in my head and set things straight for me. I don’t want to give her credit because I know deep down she said everything to me with malicious intent.

Call it mean-girl energy or whatever. It doesn’t change the fact that she had a point or that she opened my eyes to things I allowed myself to forget.

After Lucifer left, I fell back asleep. Months of self-created insomnia had finally caught up to me, and I felt safe in his bed even though he wasn’t there. When I woke up, it was much later in the afternoon. The scent of him still clung to the sheets, and my hand subconsciously stretched across the mattress, my fingers trailing over the indentation of where his body laid beside mine all night.

When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I helped myself to one of his T-shirts and made my way to the bathroom so I could shower. I didn’t have any clothes at the clubhouse, so I had to dress in the same clothes as I wore to the party—minus my panties because those were still in the pocket of Lucifer’s cut.

I thought about having Homeboy give me a ride to my apartment so I could pick up some clothes, but he was nowhere to be found. In fact, the clubhouse was eerily quiet. Silence had replaced the bass that thumped through the walls all night, but the carnage from Nightmare’s birthday party was everywhere. Empty bottles littered every surface. Sticky rings of spilled liquor stained the bar. A pair of stilettos sat abandoned on the pool table, and clothes lay scattered around the room. I knew right then and there it was going to take me all day to clean the clubhouse, and I dreaded finding out what the state of each individual member’s rooms was like.

Before I got started cleaning, I went behind the bar and grabbed my purse. I figured I’d call Tori and see if she was around. Maybe if it wasn’t too much trouble, she could drop off a change of clothes for me. But my phone was dead, so I threw it on the charger and got to work.

I was elbow-deep in a trash bag, stuffing it with empty bottles, when the front door swung open. The redhead who hung all over Lucifer, the one he admitted to fucking, strode in wearing a short black dress that clung to every curve, the hem barely reaching mid-thigh, and a pair of fire-engine red stilettos. Her hair wasn’t a matted mess like mine—no, her fucking hair was perfectly styled.

Another reason to hate her—you know, just in case knowing she fucked my husband wasn’t enough.

Her eyes swept around the room before they landed on me, and her lips pursed. I wanted so badly to tell her to leave, but I knew I had no right.

“Forget something?” I asked.

“Is Dread here?”

“No.” I tied off the garbage bag and set it by the door. When I turned around, I found her sitting on one of the stools.

“What about Lucifer?”

“No one,” I clipped.