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Of all the people I had expected to see on my doorstep, John had been the last one. I loved him. And up until that moment, I had truly believed that he and I were the only two that were aware of that fact. Tears pricking at my eyes, I stared at Guillermo.
Could I really trust him?
Was this a test?
Was Guillermo in with Emilio?
I couldn’t begin to imagine what he was thinking or who he was allied with, so I turned my attention back to John. He entered my apartment, closing the door behind him and standing silently in front of me. He was a sight to behold – ripped jeans and a tight black shirt that showed off his muscles to fine definition. He looked hot, not just in the sexual sense, but because sweat was beading on his forehead, his shirt sticking to his chest.
‘Did you run here?’ I asked. Did you run here? What kind of stupid-ass question was that?
His expression was grave as he looked at the gun I gripped tightly by my side. ‘Heard you weren’t doing too well. You know me. I can’t help myself.’
I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
CHAPTER SIX
JOHN
He’d been smoking on the back porch when the message came through from Guillermo.
Get here now. M is going fucking crazy.
John had peered into the house to see Juliette talking on the phone, like she always did these days. Caroline had bailed a couple of days earlier, and John was beyond taking to the streets of LA to look for his drug-addled wife. His stolen moments with Mariana had made him realise that the only person who could really help Caroline was Caroline herself.
Plus, a very tiny part of him – the part that he liked to pretend didn’t exist – imagined a day when the police would turn up and inform him that his wife had finally taken too much heroin, or crossed the wrong dealer, and ended up dead in a ditch.
One could always dream, right?
‘Julie!’ John hollered at his daughter through the screen door, making sure to hold his cigarette away from the mesh so that smoke didn’t seep into the house. ‘I’m going out for a little while. You okay here?’
‘Yeah, Daddy,’ Juliette’s voice filtered back to him. ‘I’m on the phone!’
John rolled his eyes. She was on the phone to that kid again. Long-lost son of Dornan. The kid who’d had to discover his own mother dead in a bathroom covered in her blood, before meeting his father – her murderer – for the very first time. A terrible feeling swept over John as he locked the door. They lived on a quiet street, safe enough, but you could never be too careful when you were the president of the Gypsy Brothers MC.
Truth be told, that sinking feeling he lived with these days wasn’t because he was worried about the neighbourhood he lived in. It was the constant recall of the casual manner Dornan had displayed in the wake of murdering Stephanie, the woman he’d once loved above everything else.
It was the abject terror that Dornan would find out that John was fucking Mariana. That John loved Mariana.
It was the way his imagination presented Mariana’s death to him in countless grisly ways.
John checked the locks three times before he felt confident enough to leave his daughter alone.
* * *
Ten minutes later, Guillermo was letting him into Mariana’s apartment in Santa Monica.
‘He told me you weren’t yourself,’ John said, hoping those words were benign enough to appease her.
‘Not myself,’ Mariana snapped, her eyes flashing with what looked like rage. Oh, shit. He’d never, not in ten years, seen her like this. Mariana Rodriguez was poised, she was controlled, she was almost annoyingly detached unless you pressed her in just the right way. Usually up against a wall, with three fingers and a tongue. That was the thing that inevitably made her icy exterior melt away, the thing that made her turn to butter under John’s touch.
But he could hardly fuck the rage out of his little spitfire in front of Dornan’s lackey. Guillermo didn’t know about their relationship, and John very much wanted to keep it that way. Keeping his head attached to his body was high on his priority list, and if Guillermo ratted him out to Dornan, he’d likely cut John’s head off and have it mounted on the wall at the clubhouse as a trophy. Disturbingly, he and Mariana had spoken at length – more than once – about how Dornan would choose to kill them if he ever found out about them. Decapitation always seemed to be at the forefront of their predictions.
Shaking that image from his mind, John focused on the woman he loved. She was shaking, pacing, tapping a gun against her leg. In some terrifying way, she reminded him very much of Dornan.
She looked like she’d finally lost her mind.
Maybe she had.
