Maverick: A Dark MC Romance (A Dark & Dirty Sinners' MC Series Book 6) Read online

  So much more.

  He’d married me to protect me, to let me stay in the U.S. and to have some freedom to come out to the cops, to tell the authorities what the Lancaster family had done to me. How the father and son had enslaved me as well as three other women.

  It wasn’t the green card which kept me safe. While I knew Maverick thought that was why I’d gone ahead with the wedding, it wasn’t. He was. With him, I felt safe, and that was a rare and precious thing in my world.

  Hope aside, I was pretty sure that, at some point in the future, ICE would track me down and haul me back to Ukraine, married or not, but when he’d asked me to be his wife, a strange calm had overtaken me.

  In all honesty, thinking back to that moment, when he’d proposed in the most unromantic setting imaginable, calmed me now.

  It helped me breathe.

  Helped me turn to the doctor.

  Helped me feel like my skin wasn’t too tight for my body.

  I turned around slowly, trying to use the time to get myself back on track. The doctors didn’t often talk to me because Stone, a doctor at the hospital but also Steel’s Old Lady, usually did the explaining. Not just to me but to the council too.

  These words… Old Lady. Council. They were new to me. Not to my vocabulary, just new to me.

  I’d somehow found myself in a whole other subculture within a culture. It was both fascinating and terrifying.

  Until now, I hadn’t been scared. Because of Maverick.

  Why did he have to go back to the clubhouse?

  Someone had targeted the place where the Satan’s Sinners MC lived and worked, someone had bombed it and destroyed it. In the aftermath, the place had been nothing but rubble, more wreckage than shelter, and Maverick had entered the building in his wheelchair, where the roof had collapsed on top of him, then he’d ended up here.

  Out of a wheelchair.

  So much was going on, so much made no sense.

  A woman I’d been imprisoned with, enslaved with, had turned traitor on the Sinners. In the aftermath of the bombing, Tatána’s body had been discovered amid the rubble, and Maverick had been injured and unconscious ever since.

  I’d never imagined this was how it would have gone down.

  Never could have foreseen him losing his memory.

  Even knowing why he’d returned to the damaged clubhouse, I still resented it. Would club business always take precedence? Even above his own safety?

  I blinked at the doctor, mad at myself for failing to hear him talking to me. Gulping, I whispered, “I-I’m so sorry, sir, but I—”

  He frowned at me a little, and I shrank back at his annoyance. Then he surprised me by asking, “Are you all right?”

  Fiddling with my leather cuff, something Stone had given me in the early days so I could hide the slave brand on my wrist, I shook my head. “My husband just woke up. He doesn’t remember me.”

  His eyes softened, even if they dropped to the cuff I was still messing with. “I’ve just checked him over.”

  “You have?” I rasped disbelievingly—exactly how long had I been out of it? My mind a blur?

  “Yes,” he murmured, reaching out, his hand going to my shoulder.

  I stared down at it, the free and easy way he’d just moved to touch me…

  Was he only trying to comfort me?

  Maybe that’s what people did here. Normal people.

  Someone was distressed, they reached out to comfort them. But for me, the doctor’s hand was like a bunch of spiders crash-landing on my shoulder.

  I stared at the digits edgily, feeling as if each one was an insect that was going to crawl up my neck and into my ear, down my shirt collar and beneath my clothes.

  Out of nowhere, my breathing began to grow worse once more, and the doctor, sensing that something wasn’t right, backed off.

  Not far, just a step, but his gaze was sharper now.

  Meaner?

  I didn’t know. My brain was too frazzled to read his expression.

  I wasn’t used to being touched anymore. Not by anyone. Maverick could, but he wasn’t just anyone, and that had nothing to do with him being my husband.

  He’d been there.

  From the start.

  In my sick bed, he’d visited me.

  When I’d hovered at death’s door, he’d stayed with me.

  He’d sat there and eaten with me as I struggled to get food down.

  As Giulia and Stone had changed my bandages, dosed me up with antibiotics, he didn’t leave.

  He’d held my hair as I puked.

  He’d let me hide my face in his throat when things got to be too much.

  His arms, his touch, had become a haven.

  And I’d just been locked out of the one place I’d never thought I’d lose.

  Yes, never.

  Hope was a drug I’d become addicted to, because even though I feared ICE would destroy the life I was building, I’d started thinking in terms of ‘forever.’

  What a fool I’d been.

  I should have realized that forever wasn’t something a woman like me would ever have.

  “Mrs. Ravenwood?” the doctor asked, drawing me from my heavy thoughts.

  “Y-Yes?”

  “I’ve long since suspected that Mr. Ravenwood has been suffering with CTE.”

  “CTE?” I repeated, questioning my level of English because, at that moment, he might as well have been speaking Mandarin. “What is that?”

  “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a neurodegenerative disease which causes severe and irreparable brain damage. Unfortunately, it’s something that can only be truly diagnosed upon a patient’s death, but there are signs, and those signs are what Jameson has been displaying for a long time.”

  “You know him?” I queried, confused. “How?”

  “Well, back in the day, we attended the local high school together. Then, after he was transferred out of Bethesda, about three years ago now, he came here before he was fully discharged. I was his doctor at the time.” He pulled a face. “The second he was out of the hospital, he never did as he was supposed to, never even bothered returning for checkups, but his recent scans merely confirm my belief. His Diffusion MRI and CAT scan—” He sighed when I looked at him blankly. “They’re special ways to take photos of the brain.”

  “Oh.” My brow puckered, and I thought about why Maverick was in the wheelchair. I’d thought about it before, but I’d never imagined he had a problem with his head, just with his legs. Hence the need for the chair. “You thought he had something wrong with his head before?”

  “As I explained, it’s not as simple as that. CTE is something that has no cure, no real way to diagnose outside of an autopsy. But his behavior, his moods, everything at that time indicated, to me at least, that he was a sufferer.” He sighed. “This recent response merely confirms it in my mind. The amnesia after yet more trauma to the brain is—”

  “Is what?” I rasped, terror filling me.

  Maverick was the smartest man I knew. His life went down behind a computer screen, his brain whirred into action whenever he was on one of his investigations. How could that same man have brain damage?

  Confusion had me doing the unthinkable.

  My hand snapped out, and I grabbed the doctor’s arm, holding it hard enough to gain his attention—which I’d had anyway, really. “Please, tell me you can help him.”

  “There’s no cure, ma’am.” He winced. “I’d like to run a PET scan—”

  Was that expensive?

  “Go for it, Barry,” Steel rumbled, and I whipped around to look at him, relieved he’d made an appearance at that moment.

  How was I supposed to approve a PET scan, whatever that was, when I didn’t even know how any of this treatment was being paid for?

  So many Sinners were in the hospital right now thanks to the bombing. As a foreigner, one who’d always lived on the less than legal side of the tracks, I didn’t know how any of this worked.

  The doctor ca
st a glance at Steel who was, I noticed, scowling at him. Biting my bottom lip, I flickered my gaze between them, then watched as the doctor nodded and bustled away.

  “He shouldn’t have come to you about this,” Steel groused, twisting around to watch the other man leave.

  “He’s my husband,” I whispered, clinging to that label because it meant something to me.

  I knew it had meant something to Maverick too, at least before all this.

  What was happening here? How had everything gone so wrong?

  “You don’t know his medical history, and you don’t know what insurance he has,” he said gruffly. “He should have spoken with all of us, is what I mean, Ghost. I’m not taking away from the fact that you’re his wife.”

  “One he doesn’t remember,” I remarked bitterly, and then I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Steel. I have no rights at all to know anything about Maverick, do I? You’re very patient with me, letting me sit in there instead of you—”

  He grunted and reached out, then his hand hovered on my arm for a few seconds before he pulled back and muttered, “Ghost, you have every right to be in there, every right to know the nitty-gritty details of Maverick’s shitty medical history and his current condition. You brought my brother back to life. Fuck, he was a living corpse before you came along. Only got up in the morning to do shit for the MC. Being treasurer was his only reason for being.

  “Then you appeared and changed that. I can never not be grateful for you, Ghost. Ever. And I know all my brothers feel the same way. It’s just there are legalities and shit you don’t know about—yet. Which is the keyword.” He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “It speaks to the man and his state of mind that he could hide from everyone who fucking loves him that he could walk, Ghost. That he didn’t need that goddamn chair.

  “Plus, I only just found out he served in Afghanistan because of this Nic guy, for God’s sake. We only knew about his deployments in Iraq and Libya.”

  Nervously pleating my hands together, I murmured, “I never even imagined—”

  “Why would you? None of us did either. I’m just confused as to what his game was.” Then, he reached up to rub his eyes with a weariness I felt in my own bones. “It’s not the first time we’ve heard mention of this CTE though. Stone was just explaining it to me the other day.”

  “She was?” I clung to that because I trusted Stone. This wasn’t her department—she worked in the ER—but she came along to help liaise between the MC and the hospital staff as, to be frank, they wouldn’t listen to anyone but her.

  Being in this hospital was more of a clue than ever before that the Sinners ran West Orange.

  I’d known it, partially, for a long while. When Giulia, my friend, had been raked over the coals by the authorities for murdering one of the men who enslaved me, and whose death led to the MC liberating me and the other girls who’d been trapped in that horrendous cabin in the woods, it hadn’t been by the local sheriff.

  Lancaster had brought in detectives from outside because the sheriff was in the Sinners’ pocket.

  Here, in the hospital, rather than being tossed out or laughed at for insisting on special treatment, the men got it like they were royalty, and I knew for a fact they weren’t.

  Steel grunted again. “I think Barry mentioned it to her before when Rex asked Stone to run interference on Mav. For a long while after he came back from overseas, he was in Bethesda, which is a military hospital, for, Christ, thirteen months, and then he was brought here. Rex would only deal with Stone, and she learned the ins and outs of his case back then.” He sighed. “Ghost, this CTE shit, it’s not good. It’s a kind of dementia.”

  His sigh, the pity in his eyes, and the unhappy twist to his mouth all spoke louder than words.

  “You don’t think he’ll ever remember me again, do you?”

  His jaw gritted, and though I already knew what he was thinking, the slow shake of his head was like a death knell to my heart and, somehow, I was supposed to call my baby sister and tell her that Maverick wasn’t okay like I’d promised.

  Making me just another adult who’d lied to her…

  Three

  Ghost

  The following day

  “This is for me? Well, Maverick and me?” I spluttered, aghast and overwhelmed at the sight of the home Lily had guided me to.

  We’d walked through her mansion that was like something a Tsar could live in, then we’d roamed over a manicured backyard that consisted of more land than what a communist leader would consider adequate for a palace… All of this had led me to a large building in the center of the plot.

  It was like something from a dream.

  A bad one.

  Because I’d swap the luxury of this place for the crowded attic where Maverick had made me feel like a normal human woman again.

  I plucked at my bottom lip as I twisted around, staring here and there as I tried to process what was actually happening.

  I felt like I was standing in the middle of a golf course, only with a looming house at the back of me that overlooked this majesty. The rich green lawn was so plush that it seemed like velvet. Then there were the beds of flowers that, even though it was a dull day, seemed to shine and blossom to order.

  I wasn’t sure if money could make flowers grow or bloom, would have thought that was a biological impossibility, but I was looking at proof of tiny daisy-like flowers I didn’t know the name of, that were unfurled and peering toward the day’s meager sun.

  These flowerbeds were ornamental, with expensive-looking urns amid them that tumbled water into the ground in a fancy way. If the velvet lawn and the flowers that defied biology weren’t enough, then that was nothing compared to the pool.

  I’d never seen anything like it.

  In pictures, I’d seen the Grand Canyon, and I could only liken the pool to that. Except it was a miniaturized version. Bright red rocks were cosseted by a body of water that could have been a lake. The walls were built up, craggy as though nature had plunked them down there, shielding a pool that was majestic in the extreme. Amid that grandeur, amid the canyon-esque walls was a house.

  A miniature version of the big house.

  My new home.

  Lily felt guilty. I understood that. But it wasn’t like it was her fault her brother and father had done what they had to me, Tatána, Amara, and Sarah.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to stay here, but I thought this way you could have privacy, could be close to Katina, and also have room for Maverick to—” She sighed. “There are a couple of bedrooms. I know Luke lived here,” she said in a rush. “But you can totally tear it to pieces, Ghost. Like, I wouldn’t blame you. I can even bring the sledgehammers and wreck everything he owned.”

  I shot her a look, but though my smile was small, my amusement wasn’t. “How wasteful.”

  She crinkled her nose. “I just want you to be happy here. Link and I can move in if you want, and you can use the house—”

  I moved around in a circle, eying the property that was funded on blood, sweat, and tears. Her mother’s. Hers.

  She was talking as if she hadn’t been victimized as I had. As Amara had.

  No, she hadn’t been held captive in a cabin in the woods, made to do things a normal, sane man wouldn’t ask of animals, but she’d been sexually abused. She’d witnessed her mother’s murder.

  So, yes, this house was built with blood money—not just mine and her mother’s, but hers too.

  Maybe I should be bitter, but Lily was such a sweet person. So kind and caring. She’d been through so much, and though I knew Tatána had been resentful, maybe Amara just a little as well, I didn’t feel the same way. I just couldn’t.

  Was that because Maverick had given me security?

  Perhaps.

  I didn’t know, could never know what had led Tatána to turn her back on the men who’d kept us safe, who’d taken us from hell, who’d saved us from the worst kind of death…

  Had Amara been in o
n it? I wondered if the MC was monitoring her, maybe they were keeping their eye on me too. It would make sense.

  I couldn’t blame them.

  I would even help them if I knew how, because they hadn’t just saved us, they’d fed us and made sure we were healthy. This was, in my opinion, the worst kind of betrayal. For Tatána to be sneaking around in Rex’s office, a place that was out of bounds for everyone other than the council, was tantamount to an admission of spying.

  If she hadn’t died in the blast, hadn’t died at the site of her crime, they’d have killed her for it, and I couldn’t fault them. Her betrayal cut deep and left behind a lot of unanswered questions.

  Who was she spying for? We didn’t know anyone outside of the clubhouse… At least as far as I was aware. What had her game been?

  “Ghost?” Lily asked warily.

  “Tak?” Realizing I’d spoken in my mother tongue, I murmured, “It’s okay, Lily. You don’t have to look so guilty.”

  She bit her lip. “I don’t?”

  I shook my head. “No. You don’t. And I don’t need a sledgehammer.” I grinned at her. “You Americans truly are so wasteful.”

  Her nose crinkled again, and the little wrinkle was so endearing that I reached over and tapped it gently with my finger. She was surprised by the gesture, and considering I didn’t particularly appreciate people touching me, I was taken aback that she didn’t slap my hand away.

  I wasn’t the only one with issues, after all.

  Instead, she reached for me, entwining my fingers with her own, then murmured, “Ghost?”

  “Yes, Lily?”

  “I’d like to be friends.”

  Smiling, I shook my head at her. “Silly, we already are.”

  She shot me a sheepish look. “I felt that way, but I just wasn’t sure, you know?”

  Her father truly had ruined her self-worth.

  Funny, wasn’t it? How I could be standing on a property worth tens of millions of dollars and the owner of it all wanted to be friends with an illegal immigrant, and she was the one who was scared of rejection.

  I tightened my fingers about hers. “Well, you have no need to doubt.”