Cruz (Dark and Dirty Sinners' MC #5) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,8

features pleasant, her clothes non-descript.

But she wasn’t just a woman. Wasn’t just a soldier. She had moves. James fucking Bond moves.

Goddammit, I was lucky I’d made it out of that alley with my brains inside my goddamn head, and my balls still attached to my body.

Gritting my teeth as I recognized that today wouldn’t be the first and last I heard of Dog’s death, my truck’s engine shrieked as I jerked out of my parking space and surged into traffic. My plans for the night were irreparably altered; I needed to get back to the MC, blend in. Monitor Lodestar and make sure she wasn’t writing a death wish with my name on it.

But if this week was going to be my last, if Lodestar was just biding her time, waiting on a moment to get to me—I knew why she’d left now, after all. She’d known the woman was due to head out of the coffee shop—then I wasn’t going to waste a second more.

Indy, while she didn’t realize it, was gonna end up in my bed sooner rather than later.

No ifs, buts, or maybes.

If I only had days left to live, then those days were gonna go down in her pussy. My priorities had just shifted, as had my life expectancy.

Fuck.

Indy

The next morning

I wasn’t in the best of moods, but then, I never was when I slept. Nightmares were an endless plague, and whenever I was embroiled in the past again, it was difficult to shake off the mindset of being a terrified little girl.

I was a woman.

I was strong.

I was empowered.

“If I tell myself that enough, maybe I’ll start to fucking believe it,” I grumbled to myself after I climbed out of the shower, and started getting ready for the rest of the day.

Staring in the steamed up mirror, I saw a not-bad face, a pretty bitching body thanks to genetics and the fact I forgot to eat when I was working, but mostly, I saw my ink.

They were the parts that defined me.

The parts I liked because I had a choice in them.

Choice meant a lot to me.

Choosing whether to remember to eat or not made my ass tight, but it didn’t define me, did it?

My ink, on the other hand, did.

Maybe it wasn’t the most original stuff, a phoenix rising from the flames, its wings and tail as well as its fire wrapping around my forearm, circling higher and higher around my bicep, then down over my shoulder and onto my front. I liked to think it signified what I was—someone constantly trying to rebuild themselves.

Never succeeding, but always trying.

Then there was the ‘It Never Rains But It Pours’ quote on the back of my neck, and the cross that was a work-in-progress as it wasn’t complete since Laruso, my mentor, had died and I didn’t trust anyone else with it. There was also the sakura, Japanese cherry blossoms, wrapped around the Sanskrit word for Nirvana on my stomach, dancing down to my hip and upper thigh.

I’d never experienced nirvana, and the nearest the cherry blossom analogy helped me was that it was my favorite flavor of mochi, but whenever I looked at myself, they were the parts I liked and that didn’t outright disgust me. They also hid my scars, so they were a thing of beauty that hid something ugly.

Cruz suddenly flashed into my thoughts, because his tattoos were far more aggressive in nature than mine were. What was he hiding? What was the meaning behind his ink?

Pursing my lips as I shrugged into a black sports’ bra, I jiggled my tits to make sure they were sat in each cup correctly. As I did, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that fascinated men about a rack… Well, what fascinated Cruz in particular.

Wincing at the thought, I shoved him mentally aside, then pulled on the pair of yoga pants I’d grabbed earlier, as well as a Van Halen cropped shirt, one of the only hard rock bands I liked, which promptly went on over the bra.

With that done, I swiped on the wings of cat eye eyeliner, then opened the medical cabinet where I stored my make-up and selected a green lipstick. It made my mouth look as if I’d sucked off a tree, but I liked it, so fuck everyone else.

Opinions were like assholes.

Every fucker had one, and they all goddamn stank.

Grunting at the thought, I headed out of the bathroom and slipped on my black and white Vans that