One Love (Gypsy Brothers, Book Seven)
Amazon US: http://amzn.to/1zqpLuz
Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/1wUOUQe
B & N: http://bit.ly/1utEZPg
Blurb
*The final book in the #1 iBooks bestselling Gypsy
Brothers series*
Will Julz complete her mission for vengeance against the
Gypsy Brothers? Or is Dornan still one step ahead?
More shocking secrets will
come to light and lives will be lost in this final, devastating instalment of
the Gypsy Brothers series.
The saddest thing about
betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies.
CHAPTER ONE
“I want my lawyer,” I repeat for the
hundredth time.
There are two CIA agents in front of me,
and they’re playing a very cheesy rendition of good cop / bad cop.
We’ve been at this for hours. Boss Bitch
— Agent Dunn, as she’s since told me — on one side, and her completely dumb but
cute male offsider, Agent Brennan, on the other. In my head, to pass the hours,
I’ve nicknamed them Agent Bitch and Agent Dumbass. I sit across from them, my
hands in my lap, heavy metal cuffs weighing them down.
My throat is dry, my tongue parched.
Agent Dumbass has a fresh can of Coke in front of him, and I can see the tiny
beads of condensation running down the sides. I want it. I want to reach over
and grab the can. I don’t even need to drink what’s inside. I’ll settle for the
condensation making its lazy descent down the side of the bright red can and
onto the dusty Formica table that separates me from them.
“Let’s try this again,” the female cop
says, tucking a loose blonde hair behind her ear. The rest is up in a severe
bun that reminds me of a matronly grandmother, even though this woman only
looks about thirty. She’s got a slight southern inflection that reminds me of
Elliot’s grandma.
I don’t reply, waiting for whatever it is
she plans on doing next. Her next big thought, her latest overdone gesture, to
try and convince me that I should spill all of my dirty secrets onto this table
between us. So far she’s used threats against Jase, a plea deal that would
grant me immunity, and long stretches of silence.
None of that will break me. I’ve been
tortured by Dornan fucking Ross. This woman’s going to have to try a lot
harder, or maybe get out some pliers and start yanking my teeth out of my
mouth, before I’ll give her a single damned thing.
She snatches up a manila folder and opens
it, handing a photograph to her male offsider. “Stick these up,” she barks at
him, and he moves slowly, ripping a section of blue-tack from a large blue ball
of the stuff that must live permanently on the wall to my left. I watch, just
slightly interested as to what they’re going to try and scare me with.
They don’t disappoint. As I watch them
pin 5x7 photographs to the wall, I can’t help but feel some sense of
satisfaction for the lives that ended at my hands. I have to remain impassive
though, so I tamp down the gloating grin that wants to spread across my face
and settle for my resting bitch face instead.
Dunn peeks at me from the corner of her
eye, and I return her gaze impassively. She might think she can get under my
skin, but I grew up in the Gypsy Brothers MC for shit’s sake. I know how to
hold out in front of a cop.
“Chad Ross,” Dunn says, smoothing her
pants as she stands up and circles the table, coming to stand next to the
photographs her partner is sticking up in a haphazard fashion. I wait for her
to reach out and straighten them. Boom. Three seconds later, she does just
that, making sure all of the photos line up.
“Chad Ross was poisoned,” she continues,
tapping one manicured fingernail against the photo of his bloated death face.
“Looks nasty,” I reply.
“It’s a nasty way to die,” Dunn says,
peering at me. “The killer added pure methamphetamine to an energy drink he
later consumed. He was probably dead before he hit the ground.”
He wasn’t. He suffered. Thankfully.
“And you’re showing me this why?” I ask,
studying my own nails, bitten down to the quick. I never was a girly girl. It’s
not easy to keep your nails tidy when you’re constantly trying to claw your way
back from death.
Dunn looks at me pointedly before jabbing
her fingernail towards the second photo. Ahhh, yes. Maxi in all his naked,
bloody glory. His face is a mess from the coke I shoved underneath his nose,
the coke laced with strychnine that made blood gush from his nose like warm
water from a faucet. I still remember the way his blood felt on my hands. How
surreal everything was, bright and garish, as my skull burned with a small
amount of the poisoned coke I’d snorted myself.
How I’d nearly died in my quest to kill
him.
How it was so worth the risk to see the
look on his smarmy fucking face, when I whispered in his ear who I really was
and sat back on his lap to watch the fury rise in his cheeks.
As he realized a black widow was the one
who’d just fed him his last meal of poison and cocaine.
I glance at Agent Dunn, clearing my
throat and attempting to look bored.
“Strychnine-laced cocaine,” she says. “In
fact, the same thing you were admitted to hospital for that very night. Jason
Ross brought you in to emergency room. They said you almost died.”
“It was a hell of a night,” I reply
curtly. “My nose still bleeds just thinking about it.”
She raises her eyebrows in disbelief, and
in that moment I have no doubt that she’s cataloguing me as a sociopath or
similar.
“Can I ask you a question?” I say
suddenly.
“Shoot,” Dunn responds.
I reach my hand out slowly, methodically
and take hers, a bold move. She could pepper spray me, shoot me. You’re not
supposed to touch the interrogators. But she’s ballsy enough that she doesn’t
want to take her hand away, even as I watch her flinch minutely.
“How do you keep your nails so pretty?” I
ask sweetly, the saccharine in my voice not reaching the cold death stare I
give her. I hold up my other hand. “Mine are hopeless. You spend much time in
the field, Agent Dunn?”
She takes her hand away, and I let my own
cuffed hands fall back into my lap. I know her skin must be crawling from my
touch.
I hope the feeling stays there for a long
time. She should not have fucked with me.
“I take good care of myself, Miss
Portland,” she says briskly. “Which is more than I can say for you.”
“My child died,” I say blankly. “Physical
appearance isn’t on the top of my priority list right now.”
She bristles momentarily. “I am sorry for
your loss,” she says finally.
I sit back, crossing my legs. “No, you’re
not,” I reply.
She points to the third photograph, which
is… hell, I’ve got no idea what that is. I tilt my head, trying to figure out
what I’m looking at.
“It’s a leg,” Dunn supplies.
“Ohhh,” I say, nodding. “Thanks.”
It is indeed a leg, or at least part of
one. Charred and black, with spots of unmarred flesh and blood still peeking
through in sections. Huh. I wonder who it belonged to.
“Two Ross brothers were killed in an
explosion. Somebody put homemade bombs in their fuel tanks, can you believe
that?”
I shrug. “Sounds like they must have had
it coming.”
Dunn points to the final photos, and a
cloying heat bleeds up my chest and neck as I remember those three months of
horror and torture I endured at Dornan’s hands before I was broken out. The way
Dornan’s father Emilio flew backwards with a meaty thump as the top of his head
was blown clean off, blood and brains flying everywhere. Mickey’s look of
horror that didn’t fade after the bullet entered his face, such a satisfying
end for men whose only fault in death was that their ends were much too swift.
I imagine how much more satisfying it would have been to hang them by their
feet and burn their eyes out with cigarettes and blowtorches, or pull their
teeth out with rusty pliers, one by one.
That would have been much more fitting
for the men who tried to destroy me, the same men who murdered my father.
Still… they’re dead, and that’s better
than them being alive.
“That’s got to give you a headache,” I
joke, referring to the last two pictures. The blood and gore have no effect on
me. My stomach is made of iron after the atrocities I’ve seen, after all that
I’ve endured. If this bitch wants to rattle my cage, she’s going to have to try
harder.
“And then we have Jimmy,” she says,
sticking one last photograph to the wall. Jimmy’s face, still frozen in shock,
the trail of blood from his temple where Jase shot him barely noticeable in the
extreme close-up.
“He looks unwell,” I comment. “Thing is,
I’m still not sure why you’re showing me all of this.”
Dunn frowns so hard it looks like she’s
about to burst a blood vessel.
“Here’s the thing,” she says, throwing a
stack of photographs in front of me. “We’ve got you. We have your DNA on the
first two victims, and motive. We’ve got probable cause to take you to trial.”
I sift through them, suppressing a
twisted smile as I see what happened to Jazz and Ant after they bit the big one
when bombs in their motorcycle fuel tanks exploded, ripping them to pieces. It
isn’t pretty, what became of them. But to me, it’s beautiful.
I drop the photographs on the table and
lean back in the hard metal chair I’ve been sitting on for the past five hours.
“These people are — were — like family to
me. Don’t you think it’s a little tacky showing me all of this? I’m still
grieving for these boys. They were like brothers to me.”
Agent Dunn actually rolls her eyes at me.
At least she’s got some spunk somewhere in there. “Give it a rest, Miss
Portland,” she says impatiently. “You’ve got more motive than anyone else, and
no alibi for any of these murders.”
“Motive?” I ask sweetly. “And what might
that be?”
Agent Dunn hesitates. Go on, I think. Say it. They raped me until they
thought I was dead. The murdered my father, and you want to arrest me? Say it.
“I’m not authorized to talk with you
about an active investigation,” Dunn says finally. “But I really think you
should start talking, Miss Portland.”
I roll my eyes. “Okay,” I say finally. “I
give up. You got me. I’ll tell you something. Let me write it down.”
Dunn’s beady eyes practically wig out of
her head. She studies me for a moment, probably to see if I’m telling the
truth, and I stare right back at her. If she wanted a wallflower who’d stare at
the floor, she arrested the wrong girl.
After a beat, she stands up, turns and
bustles out of the room. I divert my attention to Agent Dumbass, who looks like
he’s about to fall asleep in his chair.
“I’ll make a full confession,” I say, “if
you give me that.” I point to the coke can and he eyes it dubiously. After a
pause, he slides the can over to me with one finger. With a smile, I pick up
the can between my cuffed hands and take a long drink.
The fizzy liquid burns on the way down my
throat, but it’s delicious. I drink as much as I can before Agent Bitch
returns, setting it back down on the table and smiling at Dumbass. I slide the
can back towards him with a wink. Let him think we’re friends. Let him think
I’m just a silly young girl who couldn’t possibly hurt anyone. He looks
surprised, taking the can back as Agent Bitch walks back into the room.
She looks between me, the can and the
goofy look on Agent Dumbass’s face and shakes her head.
Sliding into her seat, she drops a yellow
legal pad on the table between us as she addresses Dumbass.
“She killed a man by poisoning his drink
with pure meth,” she says to her partner. “You sure you want that back?”
“Allegedly,” I add.
The oaf stares at the can for a few
seconds. Finally, he pushes it back in my direction with an embarrassed look.
In the past five hours or so since I was
unceremoniously dumped in this interrogation room, I’ve gone through the whole
gamut of emotions. Fear. Shock. Despair. Now, I’m at anger. Anger that bubbles
within me. Anger that is thinly disguised as apathy to these two morons.
Dunn drops a blue Bic pen on the legal
pad and pushes it over to me. I hold up my cuffed wrists helplessly.
“I can’t write with these things on,” I
say.
Dunn gives me the filthiest look before
nodding at Dumbass. He stands and circles around to me, removing my cuffs
before returning to his spot.
I WANT A
LAWYER. I write
it as obnoxiously large as I can, underlining the word LAWYER three times.
Agent Bitch’s smile disappears, replaced
by a thin line of contempt at her mouth. I grin. Good luck getting those cuffs
back on me, motherfucker. I sit back in my seat and snatch up the Coke,
draining the rest of the can before they think to take it from me.
“We can play this game for however long
you want, Miss Portland,” she says curtly, fiddling with the stack of crime
scene photographs in front of her. I smile.
“I’ve got all day,” I say sweetly, even
though I really, really don’t. Dornan has Elliot’s daughter and ex-girlfriend,
and possibly Elliot himself, and Jase and I have twenty-four hours to meet him
and get the girls out of danger before he kills them. At least, that’s what I’m
assuming he plans to do to them. I can’t even comprehend what else he might be
planning to do to those poor girls to get back at us.
Agent Dunn shakes her head one last time,
gathering up the files and stalking towards the door. “I’ll give you some time
to think about your position,” she says.
“Isn’t this illegal?” I call out to her.
“I’m an American citizen. I have the right to an attorney. Get me a goddamn
lawyer!”
Really, I just need a lawyer to post bail
so I can get the hell out of here. Not that I’m sure I’d actually be bailed
out, but I need something, and talking to these two is proving fruitless. A
cold panic is building up inside my stomach, in the hollow space where my baby
once lived and died.
God, it’s still so raw, so vicious when
the memory of our tiny little baby takes hold and squeezes me. Sometimes,
selfishly, I wish I could forget about her, because losing her has cursed me
with more pain than I could ever imagine.
If I had any remnants of doubt about
killing Dornan before? They’re gone, bled from me in the moments after our
daughter was born, still and dead, in the early hours of the morning when the
world was still dark.
He took her from me. From us. And I
cannot rest until he’s dead and buried, a rotting corpse in the cold ground, a
memory and nothing more.
Dornan Ross needs to burn for the things
he’s done.
Agent Dumbass follows his partner out of
the room and pulls the door shut. I immediately stand up and go to the door,
testing the handle. Locked from the outside. Of course. I go back to my chair,
collecting the pen someone so thoughtfully left for me and shoving it into my
pocket. You know, just in case I need to stab somebody sometime soon.
Which, as it turns out, is sooner than
I’d anticipated.
About an hour later, Agent Bitch sticks
her head back into the room. “Your lawyer’s on the way,” she says, closing the
door behind her again.
This could be anyone. A cop posing as a
lawyer to get a confession on tape. A hit man, sent by the Gypsy Brothers or
the Cartel. I’m like a sitting duck in here, and I don’t like it one tiny bit.
But what greets me isn’t any of those
things.
It’s so much worse.
I don’t move an inch as the door swings
open and he walks into the room. Dressed in a suit I’ve seen before, clutching
a black leather briefcase by his side. He looks positively fucking amused.
“Well,” I say bitterly,
“They’ll let any motherfucker take the bar these days, won’t they?”Whoa!
Just because this is book seven of this series doesn't mean this isn't as intense as the first six books. I'm not sure how to review this without giving away spoilers, but let me just say that yes, there is bloodshed in this book (come on, were you expecting kittens and rainbows at this point in the series?). And yes, someone will die. Is it Dornan? Elliot? Jase? Julz?
Ha! I won't tell because if I did you wouldn't want to read it. And trust me: you want to read this book. In fact, you want to read the series. What better way to keep this holiday season in perspective than by reading a violent, dark, twisted series about the loss of innocence in the most heinous way, and one woman's thirst for retribution and revenge? I bet once you read this series, spending time with those family members who can chafe your ass will seem like a picnic compared to the Ross clan.
RATING
ARC provided in exchange for honest review.
Gypsy Brothers Series by Lili Saint
Germain
Seven Sons (Gypsy Brothers, Book One)
FREE
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Three Years (Gypsy Brothers, Book Five)
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Two Roads (Gypsy Brothers, Book Six)
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About the Author:
Lili Saint Germain
Lili writes dark romance, suspense and paranormal stories.
Her serial novel, Seven Sons, was released in early 2014, with the following
books in the series to be released in quick succession. Lili quit corporate
life to focus on writing and so far is loving every minute of it. Her other
loves in life include her gorgeous husband and beautiful daughter, good coffee,
Tarantino movies and spending hours on Pinterest.
She loves to read almost as much as she loves to write.
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