Page 56 of Hades

Only as the clearing of his fever moved from his brain did he realize she was never here. The feminine scent around the strange cabin wasn’t like the girl he’d known.

It was different, strong fruity and all wrong. And not his sweet love.

Maybe he was mad and dreamed it. Maybe he was deranged.

He searched the cabin and found it empty, he ate food in the back pack abandoned on the living room floor, staying there for four days, re-dressing his leg until he was able to bear weight on it once more and thinking.

So much thinking. Until his brain bled.

And his anger raged.

The laugh coming out of his throat was feral and evil. Somewhere in the last days of trying to reason with himself that he needed to get out of town, to leave his revenge behind had fucked with his mind and he was left … different.

That’s what happened to a man with no ties, nothing to hold him back from descending into the monster he was born to be. It was organic. A preordained date.

Without the structure of his club to keep him sane, it was freeing to know there was nothing to stop him now.

Kill Rider Marinos and leave town. Start over with his tattered life. It was doable. He’d dragged himself up from the gutter when he was a mere boy, what he could do as a fully-grown animal was limitless.

But he couldn’t leave until he tasted the blood of his enemy.

As luck would have it—or not as the case was, that would never come.

He stared impassively as he spied on the Renegade Souls compound.

For days he returned to that same unseen spot, eating what he could find in garbage bins. Eating from the fucking garbage like a damn tramp. It fueled his angel, focusing it on one man, on one club. He made the entireSoulshis focus.

There’s no resting, Hades hardly slept an hour at a time.

He saw them coming and going. Laughing and living their lives.

Never knowing they were heartbeats away from their stupid fucking lives being demolished.

And still Hades waited.

Without the trappings of the modern world, no money, phone, the media, he was left with only his own thoughts for company. Often, they took him to a time he’d rather forget, but it was there, plaguing his mind, watching as his father bled out on their kitchen floor, the life force depleting as easily as the thick, red blood dripping from his fingers. At the time he felt like a big man, finally, he was the one in the position of power, for the first time he wasn’t the one being beaten.

It had felt euphoric. That fast minute of giving death to someone.

And yet now, he’d known his wrong path had started there and he was bound to it now like a loveless marriage. Whatever happened in the coming hours and days, he would have his revenge, it was too late to ignore. An eye for an eye.

Sleep started to seduce behind his lids, hunched in an alleyway like a common vagrant, in clothes he’d stolen and the wind howling, it was far too late for him.

With a mind to leaving a few days later, hunger gnawing at Hades belly, he was goddamn sick of foraging for food like he was a fucking gopher, he’d watched three of his men being dragged into a shed-like building within the RS area. He hadn’t known any of them lived so the surprise seeing T-bone was a rare true emotion, for an instant he had a pang of guilt, gone a second later. They were big boys, and could take care of themselves, or not as the case was a few hours later when eyes on that same shed Hades watched the RS members walk away, blood covering their clothes.

The obvious death aside, it held no sentient thought for Hades, what did, and what tormented his fucking mind buzzing like a hornet’s nest in his brain, was an hour before that he’d watched Hawk escorting the girl …his sweet love… to that same shed.

She was alive.

Burning relief pulsed through his intestines. How? Why? Where? What? He found himself smiling both inside and out, framing plans to steal her back from their grasps.

Until his happiness dropped off his face.

Until it was replaced with pounding anger.

She was alive, and she was here at the Renegade Souls MC.

He’d been about to walk away leaving Rider’s death up to someone else. All that changed the moment he saw her.

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