Verek (Savage Kings MC - South Carolina #3) - Lane Hart Page 0,13

getting distracted by how soft and kissable they are before my hand drops away in embarrassment. “Someone could hear us.”

“Sorry,” he says softer, clearing his throat. “Now I know we’re doing the right thing.”

“We are,” I agree. “These men, they’ve probably killed women, no telling how many, but only after they hurt them beyond repair.”

“I’m sorry,” Verek says again, this time meaning for what they did.

“You should probably go ahead and make your lap around the place before the sun comes up.”

“You’re right,” he agrees with a sigh. “I don’t like leaving you here alone.”

“You’ll be close enough that you’ll hear me if I shout your name,” I point out, even though I’m not keen on him leaving me either, even if it’s just for a short while. “Go,” I whisper.

“Okay,” Verek says before he climbs off his bike and removes his helmet. He grabs a black mask from the saddlebag. “I’ll be right back,” he tells me. As he walks toward the large, white, two-story funeral home that takes up the entire corner, he waits to put on the mask until he’s well away from me, as if he’s afraid he’ll scare me. There’s nothing he could ever do to make me afraid of him, although, I think he’s worried that I’ll look at him differently if we go through with our plan. If he can eliminate the monsters from my nightmares, then I’ll be forever grateful to him, more so than I already am for the night he saved me from hell. I know it wasn’t just Verek but Roman and the entire Savage Kings MC working together to find us, but it was Verek’s face I saw first.

After the pain and humiliation I had been through for hours, I thought I was dreaming about him. God knows my first thought when I woke up restrained, alone with four men, was that I wish I had just gone home with Verek. It would’ve made me a horrible person, and I would’ve hurt Paul when I told him, but at least I could’ve lived the rest of my life practically normally, other than losing my fiancé. It was the less evil of the two choices I was unaware that I had earlier in the night. Verek wouldn’t have hurt me. Well, maybe just my heart after he treated me like one of his usual one-night stands. But I would have survived and moved on with my life, not be sitting out here, plotting the murder of several horrible men.

Before that night, I never thought I would be capable of condoning such violence. I guess that’s the strange thing about surviving such a horrendous ordeal – it made my conscience go numb like it’s been injected with a big dose of Novocain. Or maybe I lost my conscience completely…it died in that storage unit even though my body refused to follow. I was a good person before, and bad things still happened to me. Nothing could be worse than what I survived. If there is a hell, it was those hours I was abused, so I’m not scared of a hell in the afterlife.

Another way to think of this, what Verek and I are doing, is that sometimes, even bad deeds can be good. By killing these four men, how many women are we saving in the future? How many have they hurt and then disposed of so that they’re never seen or heard from again?

Death is the only punishment they deserve, and they would never get it from the criminal justice system. The other women and I would have to relive our nightmares over and over again in trials and appeals. No, I couldn’t go through with that or put that burden on Cari, Robin, and Sandy. They barely survived after days and weeks of being held compared to my twenty or so hours.

When we get home, I can’t wait to tell them that the assholes who hurt us are finally dead.

Chapter Six

Verek

* * *

“I didn’t see a single camera,” I tell Tessa quietly when I get back to her, still sitting on my bike. I shoved the mask I had worn into the back pocket of my jeans just in case I need it later.

“Guess they’re not concerned about people stealing bodies,” Tessa comments.

“Guess not.”

“So now we wait?” she asks.

“Now we wait,” I agree as I look over my shoulder toward the back of the funeral home. The parking lot is in front of us, but the entrance