Good Gone Bad, page 1
Copyright 2018 Giana Darling
Published by Giana Darling
Edited by Ellie McLove
Proofed by Michelle Clay and Marjorie Lord
Cover Design by Najla Qamber
Cover Model Sahib Faber
Cover Photograph by Alikhan Photography Inc
Formatting by Stacey at Champagne Book Design
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
Eleven.
Twelve.
Thirteen.
Fourteen.
Fifteen.
Sixteen.
Seventeen.
Eighteen.
Nineteen.
Twenty.
Twenty-One.
Twenty-Two.
Twenty-Three.
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five.
Twenty-Six.
Twenty-Seven.
Twenty-Eight.
Twenty-Nine.
Thirty
Epilogue.
Playlist.
Thanks, Etc.
About Giana Darling
To the Love of My Life.
You are the man who taught me that still waters run deep, that Prince Charmings can be bad boys and that love is all the more beautiful for the obstacles you have to overcome within yourself and outside of each other in order to be together.
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a dead body, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. Not living the kind of life I did as both a student nurse and the daughter of an outlaw motorcycle club Prez.
Blood didn’t freak me out.
Violence didn’t deter me.
One was simply biology and the other was basic MC theology.
I’d seen enough cadavers to fill a classroom, too many bodies to fit out in the pigpen at Angelwood Farm where The Fallen took their dead bodies and so many injuries it was no wonder a bleeding wound seemed as insignificant as spilled beer.
Still, I’d never seen a dead body like this.
Probably because I’d seen my boyfriend, Cricket Marsden, a lot of ways—angry, manic, happy, high, and humored—but I’d never seen him dead.
The blade was wet in my hand, slipping against the blood coating my palm like grotesque red satin gloves. I couldn’t stop staring at Cricket’s handsome face paralyzed in horror and wrath long enough to drop the cleaver to the ground.
Honestly, I didn’t even know why I owned a cleaver. But it had been there when I’d reached blindly behind me into one of the kitchen drawers and grasped the first cool handle my hand made contact with.
I’d expected—at worst—a wooden spoon to jam into his eye. At best, a butter knife to stab him painfully but not mortally in the shoulder.
Instead, fate or something like it had pressed the awful square weight of a cleaver into my hand and in my mounting panic, I hadn’t realized the significance of my improvised weapon until it was lodged in the junction between Cricket’s long neck and his tattooed shoulder.
Blood was everywhere in an instant, all over me like I’d jumped into a rain shower. I choked on the blood as it sprayed between my lips but I didn’t take a step back because my eyes were hooked on Cricket’s brown ones, which were obliterated by his blown pupils from the mammoth amount of drugs in his system. They widened in shock at the impact of the sharp metal as it tore with blunt force and no finesse through his connective tissues and his mouth opened like a second wound as it embedded irreversibly in his clavicle.
We watched each other as I killed him, caught up in a tangle just like we always had been. Our union was destructive, something I’d first sought out just to taste the tang of danger and feel the thrill of rebellion. I was an MC princess, so I knew outlaws, but Cricket wasn’t smart enough to be called even that. He was reckless and always had been, searching for the next thrill because he always grew bored with the last. The only thing he’d never grown bored with was me.
At first, I’d been flattered. He was a hot guy with an addictive personality and I was the drug that lit him up and burned him from the inside out. In different ways with the same heady result, Cricket gave that to me. I was a girl surrounded by men too busy to pay attention to her with a mother who’d rather hit up smack or snort coke than brush my hair.
It was a cliché, but clichés existed for a reason.
I just wanted to be loved and Cricket did that.
He did it so hard it left bruises; metaphorically at first, just around my heart like strangle marks, and then later, physically too.
The drugs whipped his love up like a storm, epic and powerful in a way that had me paralyzed in awe even as it swept me up in its fury.
I’d been telling myself for a long time not to let him hurt me anymore.
I wasn’t the kind of girl to have an abusive boyfriend.
I had things going for me that included more than my abundance of hair and bluer than fresh denim eyes. I knew I was good looking, full of personality and pretty damn smart if I put my mind to it.
I had good friends and more, the best family any girl could ever have known.
Resources to get me out of the thick, stinking mud of Cricket’s hold.
I didn’t use any of them.
At least, not until now, not until it was too late and the only resource I had left at my disposal was an inconveniently placed cleaver.
The blood was cooling on my skin, drying in abstract patterns that pulled my skin tight the way old sweat does after a workout.
Still, I remained there, kneeling over my boyfriend’s dead body.
I was almost a fully qualified nurse, so my training should have kicked in while I watched the blood arch like calligraphy drawn in red ink through the air and over the walls of my small kitchen, over the pristine white of my thin dress. But they don’t train you in university what to do if you accidently sever the carotid artery with a meat cleaver when your high, abusive boyfriend tries to rape you with the butt of his gun.
So, when he’d fallen to the linoleum with the knife lodged deep in the junction of his shoulder and neck, I forgot everything, dropped to the floor beside him and started to pull the thick steel blade from his neck.
Blood gushed over my hands, warm and slippery so that the wooden grip glided through my fingers and thudded to the floor.
Cricket gargled in protest, blood pooling at the sides of his mouth.
It reminded me that you should never pull out a foreign object until you have a way to staunch the blood flow and you know exactly what the damage is to the surrounding area.
It reminded me that there is approximately 5.5 liters of blood in the human body.
It didn’t take a nursing degree to know that most of that measure was pooling hot and smooth like wet silk under my knees.
A man was dying on the floor of my apartment.
Not a man, my man.
And he wasn’t just dying. There was no heart attack, no car accident.
Only me.
His murderer.
My man was dying on the floor at my feet because I had killed him.
I searched wildly for something to save him with even though I knew—I knew—he was going to die and do it soon. My eyes landed on the phone Cricket had knocked to the floor when he’d caged me against the counter. I slipped in the blood as I lunged for it, ignored the bloody smears my fingers deposited on the screen as I dialed the number.
I was on autopilot, but that didn’t explain why I called him.
My dad was the best person to call. The President of The Fallen MC and a ruthless protector of his loved ones, Zeus Garro would know exactly what to do with a dead body, how to clean up the mess and make it seem like nothing had ever happened. He’d make it so I could return to my life as I’d known it, princess of fallen men but removed from the taint of their sins. I could wake up tomorrow morning and do as I always did, grab my Double-Double coffee at Tim Horton’s and make my way to the last of my exams as a normal student, your average girl. The blood would still coat my hands like phantom gloves as I filled in the little bubbles in the answer booklet but no one else would know because my dad would have disappeared the body and the trauma of it all like some kind of outlaw magician.
I could have called my brother by blood or any of the brothers by the club, Nova would have charmed me out of my panic while Priest, silent and competent as a predator, took care of the body. Curtains would make it seem like Cricket had never even been to my apartment, deleting snapshots of footage from random street cameras that had captured my dead boyfriend on his way to my house. They’d think about calling in Cressida, my brother’s girlfriend and one of my best friends, but they wouldn’t because they’d know better than I would that it was my dad’s wife I needed, the husky, strong tones of Loulou Garro in my ear telling me I was a warrior just like her and I’d fought a battle there had been no choice but to win.
I could have called them all, but I didn’t.
Instead, I called a ghost, a man I hadn’t seen or heard from in three years. A man I’d had a crush on since I was a girl because he was everything good and straight and true. Even as a child I’d known, he was too good for me. We existed in the same world but in the way of the hero and the villain. We crossed paths but only in times of disaster, when I found my mother blue with near-death on the floor of our kitchen, when my father went to jail for manslaughter or when I stabbed a pencil into Tucker Guttery’s thigh because he stole a kiss from me in seventh grade. I was a storm of calamity, cast adrift on a sea of black doings and loosely drawn rebel rules. He was an old growth oak with roots sunk deep into rich earth, limbs stretching wide across the sky, standing sentry across centuries as the world toiled away beneath its leaves. I could whip around that kind of man, cause hurricanes with my spirit, quake the earth with my tempers, but none of it mattered. He would remain untouched no matter what I did, no matter what anyone did.
He was just so simply and profoundly good. I think that’s why I always liked him.
And it might have even been why I called him.
To punish myself by facing a man who wouldn’t disappear my sins but rectify them. It was his duty as a cop to arrest me for what I’d done to Cricket and part of me yearned for that kind of justice, and to be properly defined as an outlaw in a way that my outlaw family refused to do. To be punished for the first time in my life for all of my many misdeeds, big and small.
I didn’t expect him to answer, not really. Not after three years and no contact, not on his old number.
But he did.
“Harleigh Rose?”
I breathed short puffs of panicked air into the phone.
There was a pause and I knew that wherever he was, he would be shifting to the left, curling his shoulder into his ear to create a protective barrier, us against the world. Only then did his deep, smooth voice deepen further as he said, “Rosie? Tell me what’s happening.”
A sob bloomed in my throat, the petals clogging my airway and the thorns tearing up my throat as I choked on the wet rose of his name for me.
Rosie.
Like I was some sweet, young, innocent thing with pigtails in her hair instead of human blood and plasma.
“Lion,” I gasped through the wreckage of my throat. “I did something bad.”
These were the words I always said when I called him to get me out of trouble.
Countless misdemeanors throughout my youth: underage drinking and public intoxication, bodily assault (that pencil stabbing and some other—warranted—attacks), trespassing and some minor theft.
They were the same words but a different tone.
Usually, I was a brat, taunting him with my rebellion, trying to get a rise out of a man who was interminably calm.
Not now, and he knew it.
“You at your apartment?” he asked.
I nodded my head then realized he couldn’t see me. “Yes.”
“Twenty minutes,” he said in a way that made it a promise. “Hang tight, Rosie.”
He hung up before I could ask him how he knew where my apartment was or that I even had one.
The phone fell from my numb fingers as I looked down at Cricket again.
He was dead.
I stared into glassy brown eyes and gave into my shock.
It seemed to me that I blinked and he was there, looming in front of me like some righteous angel come to condemn me to hell. The waning sun filtering in through the windows cast a halo around his broad fame but obscured his face in a veil of shadows. I didn’t need to see it to know he was handsome. I’d memorized his features a long time ago, the broad crest of his forehead over the strong brows, the pure jade green of his eyes and the way they creased at the corners in a constant brooding squint or in a rare grin that broke open the planes of his face so that his blazing spirit poured through like light through cracks in the darkness. He was handsome enough to be famous but worn in a way that made him sexy, like a weathered cowboy or a sheriff from the Wild West. He even smelled like that, warm and comforting like sun-kissed man and freshly tilled earth.
Even submerged in a deep haze of shock, I knew him.
I’d know Lionel Danner anywhere, anytime even if I was blind, deaf, and struck dumb.
“Jesus Christ,” he cursed as I blinked up at him.
He was in front of me in two long strides, his rough tipped fingers delicately pinching my chin. I stared up at him as he took stock of me with implacable eyes, noting the blood drying on my skin and clothes, the dead carcass that was Cricket lying on the floor at our feet.
He seemed more concerned with me than the very dead body.
“What the fuck did that piece of shit do to you?” he grumbled low in his chest.
I blinked and wished that I could find my voice because I wanted to laugh at him.
I wanted to tease him and ask why he wasn’t assuming it was me, as it always had been, who had done something wrong.
I wanted to cry and ask him what hadn’t Cricket done to me?
But for the first time in my life, I had no voice.
I was just as much a body without soul as Cricket was dead on the ground.
“Rosie,” he said, more of a breath than sound.
I watched him from deep within myself as he shifted into a crouch before me and his fingers on my chin slipped in the blood splatter then tightened almost painfully.
The hurt grounded me, but it was the vivid clarity of his green eyes that pulled me like a hand from the depths of my wretchedness.
“For once in your goddamn life, you are going to listen to me and obey. I’m going to get you up out of that bloody swamp you’re sittin’ in and put you in a chair. Then I’m going to call this in. While we wait for the police to show, you’re going to look me in the eye and tell me what happened here. You hear me, Harleigh Rose?”
I was nodding before I could even process his words.
His glare hardened. “Wanna hear that voice.”
“Why do I need to look you in the eye?” I asked, surprisingly steady.
My soul felt weak and failing in my chest and I wondered if murderers killed their goodness right along with their victim.
“’Cause you don’t distract me with those pretty blues, I’m going to murder that piece of shit all over again for whatever he did that made you feel the need to stick a blade in his neck.”
Emotion rumbled under the ruins of my spirit and threatened to bubble up my throat.
Danner read the question in my eyes and his stern face softened from severe creases into smooth, rumpled silk.
“You didn’t murder him in cold blood, Rosie. I don’t need you to give me those words for me to know the truth of this.”
“You haven’t even seen me in years,” I whispered through the tears that were sudden and insistent at the backs of my eyes. “How could you know that?”
He moved his other hand around the back of my neck and wove it into the sweat damped hair there then tugged it back firmly, just enough to make me hiss in surprise. The action was oddly calming and without conscious thought, I found myself tilting my head to expose my neck to him. Taking my cue, the hand on my chin slid down my jaw and wrapped around my throat, his fingers and thumb pressing gently at my pulse points on either side of my neck.
“You think I don’t know that under all that thorny sass you got a heart as tender as a budded rose, you can think again,” he said in that flat, sure tone.
Like he was reading someone his or her Miranda rights or reciting a code from the police academy. Like what he was saying was an irrefutable, absolute fact.
In a way he was, if there had ever been a chance of me not loving Officer Lionel Danner, it was obliterated by that moment and those words. My heart was imprisoned by his, regardless of his lack of interest.
“I still gotta call it in,” he told me, stern but gentle, a contradiction he’d mastered. “If you thought I was gonna let this slide because you’re you to me, you were wrong. You didn’t call your daddy, you called me, and I’ll get it sorted just like he’d get it sorted for you but my way will be a fuckuva lot different and more legal than his, yeah?”
