Page 19 of Serendipity

The man sneered. “Our girl, huh?” He looked at Serendipity like she was scum and the edges of my vision began to turn the most beautiful shade of crimson. “How about you take your criminal asses down the road to Walmart, then?”

This guy was going to die. His partner looked at the Cowboy Cop like he was tempted to put a bullet in the back of his head too, but he had his gun out and pointed at my chest. Sera reached out and placed her hand on my arm. At her movement, the Cowboy Cop moved his gun in her direction and that was it.

“Get your fucking gun off her,” I growled, the sound low and primal.

Both guns swung to me, and the Cowboy Cop grinned. Fuck. “Get the fuck on your knees,” he yelled, and I wanted to rip out his throat and dance on his corpse. “On your fucking knees,” he shouted, and I knew this is what the little badged cocksucker had wanted all along. He wanted me on my knees, wanted the world to know that he held all the power.

“No.”

“On your knees now! Hands on your head!” The guy screamed in my face, waving his gun

haphazardly.

I looked at Sera, her eyes wide as her gaze flicked between me and the cop. I swallowed hard.

I wanted to kill this arrogant asshole. But I didn’t want Sera to be scared ever again. So I did something I didn’t think I’d do for anyone but the fucking Lord of Hell. I knelt.

The victorious smirk on the pig’s face made bile rise up in my throat. He looked at Solomon.

“You too, Pretty Boy!” he said, waving his gun at Solomon. His gaze landed on Sera. “Actually, you too. Though, I bet being on your knees is not such a big issue for you as it is for these guys, am I right?” His eyes were lecherous as they landed on her pregnant stomach. I growled low, ready to stand and smash this fucker into his next life.

Apparently, that was a line for his partner. “Fuller! That’s enough.”

The cowboy cop, Fuller I guess, rolled his eyes. “Fucking relax, Weston. These guys aren’t going to go to internal affairs. They don’t want people poking around in their shit, do you boys?”

I bared my teeth. I wanted to rip his throat out with my hand and then bathe in his blood for disrespecting Sera. For disrespecting us, and the Club.

Then Solomon looked at me, his face as serious as I’d seen it in years, the faint glow of power drifting through his eyes. “Doughnuts,” he whispered on the air. “Doughnuts.”

Then I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I didn’t stop when the cop screamed at me, or when he slammed his baton against my skull, making my ears ring.

Solomon. The fucking Horseman of Famine, had just basically cursed a cop to forever be physically ill at even the sight of motherfucking doughnuts.

Who knew that Solomon still had a sense of humor?

Somehow, laughing had been worse than ripping out Fuller’s throat, because we were all in cuffs and in the back of separate squad cars, being hauled downtown within minutes.

Worth it.

8

JUDAS

If the universe had a sense of irony, it would be embodied in Damnation’s lawyer, Thomas McCool. There was nothing even remotely McCool about Thomas. He was old as dirt, his eyes had started to yellow from too many business lunches rolling into business dinners and damaging his liver, and he wore ugly brown suits all the time. He’s snorted more coke than a music exec and has three ex-wives who all hated his guts. But he was a damn fine lawyer. The best, in fact, you could get that would willingly damage their reputation by representing an unruly pack of bikers.

“You guys can’t do a damn thing without being arrested. I was taking some goddamn German future clients to the strip club and now that stupid ass-licker Reginald is going to bust a stiffy in his fucking tan chinos and embarrass the whole lot of us, just because I have to come down and bust you and your latest piece of ass out of the fucking lock-up because you were trying to play house in the wrong damn part of town,” he ranted without pausing for breath.

He was the only one I let speak to me like this. If he’d been a prospect, I would have had him on the ground and be kicking his teeth in before he’d finished the first sentence. But I kind of liked McCool, and I knew how much he liked the girls in Apocalypse. Besides, he had a way with words that was pretty much unrivaled.

“Just fix it, Thomas. I didn’t ask for your opinion. And she is not a piece of ass. If you don’t want your dick to be detachable, you better keep that shit to yourself from now on.”

McCool wasn’t intimidated by my calmly delivered threat, probably because I’d been giving him the same threats for thirty years. He harrumphed and spun on his polished Oxfords, marching up the stairs.

I leaned against my bike as he stormed into the police precinct, Goliath in the truck beside us.

He’d take the guys back to get their bikes from where they still sat in some shitty alleyway beside the boutique they’d been detained in. Not arrested, detained for doing nothing more than looking at baby crap and looking scary.

I watched as the doors opened and out came Serendipity. She was dressed in Goliath’s shirt, looking like a damn goddess and I shifted my eyes across to my Brother to gauge his reaction. In anyone else, I’d say he was completely unphased by the beauty in front of us, her hair flashing gold in the late afternoon sunshine. But I saw the gentle tick of his jaw, heard the squeak of the suspension as he shifted his considerable bulk in the driver's seat of the truck. Goliath did not fidget.

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