Home > I Am Dressed in Sin (Death by Daybreak MC #2)(2)

I Am Dressed in Sin (Death by Daybreak MC #2)(2)
Author: C.M. Stunich

“When?” Giulia asks, clearly amused. She pauses in front of me and folds an arm under her breasts, resting the elbow of her other arm in the palm of her hand. A laugh escapes me, bitter and broken. Now that I’ve actually done it, made my big break from the club, I feel like a lone sailor floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Nobody knows I’m here. Nobody cares. No one is coming.

“It’s never an if with the club, it’s a when,” I tell her, and I can’t hide the small streak of pride in my voice. After seeing Queenie’s name on that baseboard, with the flowers on her Qs and Is, I don’t know what I believe anymore. Cat must’ve known the truth; she had to have told him her feelings for Kian. “They’ll find us eventually. And then they’ll kill your last remaining son and bury me alive in the same unmarked grave.”

Giulia doesn’t look fazed. Why should she be? She’s married to the Don of the West Coast’s most powerful crime family. I’m sure she’s heard—and seen—much worse.

“Mom,” Grey whispers, his voice softening. “All I did was fall in love.”

“All you did was go to the casino with a rowdy group of your asshole friends. And now look at you, sitting tied to a chair next to the club’s last, little princess. It’s a fitting punishment.” Giulia reaches out and touches a strand of my hair before letting her mouth stretch into a tight smile. When she turns and leaves the room, there’s a tangible difference in the air pressure. That woman is a tour de force.

“You know they just put us in here together, so we’d talk,” Grey says with a sigh, shifting in his chair. I can’t see him, but I can feel his movements as he struggles to find some iota of comfort. Me, I’m already too far gone to even consider it. And as the shock wears off, and the pain comes rushing in, I realize that I’m in serious trouble, too.

“About our torrid love affair?” I ask, closing my eyes and wondering how the fuck my life managed to get worse. I lost my sisters, pushed my best friend away, poisoned my classmates, got my dog’s leg shot off, managed to get a girl killed, had a gun pointed at my head by my own father, and now … this. It really is the icing on top of the cake, huh? “There’s nothing to talk about. We’re both going to die here, Grey.”

He doesn’t respond which I’m grateful for. I’m too tired to play the charade of melancholic lover.

For the first time ever, I think my body’s just as wounded, just as broken as my soul.

And neither of them looks like they’ll be put back together anytime soon.

Ticktock, Gidget, looks like your time is finally up.

 

 

When I next open my eyes, I’m not tied to a chair anymore. Instead, I’m lying on a bed in a small, dark room with a low ceiling. There’s a single lamp on in the corner, but it hardly illuminates the shadows in the room. Anyone could be hiding there.

I’m so damn tired, it’d be so easy to just close my eyes again and never wake up, but I need to get a handle on the situation. If I’d known I was actually falling asleep in the chair, I’d have put a stop to it. Passing out here, in this den of wolves, is not the best of ideas.

Trying to sit up doesn’t get me anywhere; I’m chained to the bed.

But my legs don’t hurt anymore, and there are clearly bandages on my hands. I feel lightheaded, too, and there’s an IV in my arm that I can only guess is filled with painkillers.

Is the mafia healing me to hurt me?

The only place I have to go when I close my eyes, is into my memories.

 

 

One and a Half Years Ago …

 

 

After that night, the one where I partied and fucked, the one that I couldn’t forget if I tried, I learned some valuable lessons about myself.

The club life … is not my life.

In fact, I don’t want anything to do with it.

Gidget Kesselring is getting the hell out of Dodge, first opportunity she gets.

Leaning against the side of the house, I keep the grocery bag clutched in my right hand. With the other, I smoke a cigarette. Had to steal a pack from the front seat of some guy’s old Mercury Cougar while he was inside the convenience store paying for gas. I’m too young to buy them for myself, and lately, there’s been nobody around to bum them off of.

I frown with purple-painted lips, the bruise-like color staining my cig as I study the gray smoke billowing from the end of it. I’ve decided that the harder stuff—the cocaine, the LSD, the meth that flows like water on the compound—is not for me. But while I’ve recently sworn off most vices, I need a little something here or there to get me through the day. Life is just too stressful otherwise. So, a cigarette every now and again, some light drinking, and that’s it.

Inside the grocery bag is a pregnancy test. I need it because I let Beast screw me without a condom. More aptly, I encouraged him to. I squeezed my thighs around him and held him in place, and I loved every second of it.

I once read a quote from some long-dead dude named Robert G. Ingersoll. It said, “In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.”

This is a consequence of my actions.

With a groan, I tap my knuckles against my forehead, sending ash scattering into the wind.

I knew better than to take four devils into my bed, my body, my heart. This is where it’s gotten me, on the edge of ruin and teetering. It isn’t that I regret what we did, that I didn’t enjoy it, that I didn’t revel in the feel of being worshipped by skilled but nefarious hands.

It’s the aftermath that I regret.

It’s been an endless cycle of prospects at the house instead of those four asshole officers. When I dared mention it to Cat, his response was cutting. “You think they don’t got more important things to do?”

More important than me? Apparently, since I only see them in passing, coming and going from the house only when they have business with Cat.

I chew on my lip, smearing purple across my teeth.

The sound of a motorcycle engine makes my heart thunder, just as it always has. When I was young, it was in excitement to see Daddy. When I got older, it was out of dread. Then … then there was passion and want and longing. Now I don’t know what to think, so I just stand there and wait.

It’s one of them. I fight back the urge to hiss, maintaining a cool, detached sort of demeanor that is quite literally the embodiment of a lie. There is nothing cool about me at all, just a raging fire tearing through my soul and turning what’s left of the old Gidge into ash.

“Hello, Gidget,” Sin says after pulling into the driveway on his bike and removing his helmet. It’s a strange bit of déjà vu, like we’re flashing back to that night. A night that was only three weeks ago but feels like forever.

I’ve changed a lot since then.

And the guys?

Well, you know what they say? Can’t teach old dogs new tricks. That’s what they are to me: mutts.

Crown’s words ring in my head each and every time I see him: “Go to your room, Gidget, and keep your mouth shut.” He said that after making love to me, and he hasn’t spoken to me since. At this point, his mere presence is like a knife to my heart, each word he doesn’t say to me a twist of the blade.

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