Empire Read online

  Dedication

  I loved you at your darkest.

  Romans 5:8

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue: Mariana

  Chapter One: Mariana

  Chapter Two: Mariana

  Chapter Three: Lindsay

  Chapter Four: Mariana

  Chapter Five: Mariana

  Chapter Six: John

  Chapter Seven: Mariana

  Chapter Eight: Dornan

  Chapter Nine: Lindsay

  Chapter Ten: Mariana

  Chapter Eleven: John

  Chapter Twelve: Dornan

  Chapter Thirteen: John

  Chapter Fourteen: Mariana

  Chapter Fifteen: Mariana

  Chapter Sixteen: Dornan

  Chapter Seventeen: Mariana

  Chapter Eighteen: Dornan

  Chapter Nineteen: Mariana

  Chapter Twenty: Dornan

  Chapter Twenty-One: Mariana

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Dornan

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Mariana

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Mariana

  Chapter Twenty-Five: John

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Mariana

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Dornan

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: John

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Mariana

  Chapter Thirty: Mariana

  Chapter Thirty-One: Lindsay

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Dornan

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Mariana

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Dornan

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Mariana

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Lindsay

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Mariana

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Dornan

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Dornan

  Chapter Forty: Dornan

  Chapter Forty-One: Mariana

  Chapter Forty-Two: Luis

  Chapter Forty-Three: Dornan

  Chapter Forty-Four Colombia, 2014: Mariana

  Epilogue: Mariana

  Excerpt from Cartel Cartel: The First Searing Novel In The Cartel Trilogy

  Excerpt from Kingpin Kingpin: The Second Scorching Novel In The Cartel Trilogy

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Lili St. Germain

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  MARIANA

  People aren’t born monsters.

  They’re made that way.

  After all, how do you fight the darkness when you’re thrust into it?

  Same goes for vengeful beasts. They aren’t born. They’re created, fuelled by one singular moment in time when the universe wrongs them and their existence shatters.

  I’d been with Dornan Ross for almost a decade. Slept in his bed, sewn up his wounds, tasted his blood, seen inside his soul.

  I was the mistress of a monstrous man. Dornan Ross, vice-president of one of the most feared biker gangs in the United States.

  Son of the most powerful drug kingpin along the West Coast.

  A man whose entire being was predicated on violence, blood and death.

  But even I wasn’t prepared for what he did.

  He killed our child. He put his boot into my stomach and kicked our baby to death.

  He killed the love I had for him.

  And he took away the only family his son had ever known. Left his mother in a bathtub full of blood and a hotshot still hanging from her arm, for a sixteen-year-old boy to find.

  I’d been foolish enough to question the brutality he’d delivered to his son’s mother, and lost my own child as punishment.

  I should have known it would always come down to this, from the very moment I laid eyes on him in that motel.

  I should have known his salvation was too good to be true.

  Because it’s all gone now, the dark secret love I had for him bleeding away in the darkness that came afterwards.

  Now, there’s only hate.

  Now, I just want to escape.

  Even if it means I have to kill him to be free.

  ***

  I loved Dornan Ross once. I loved him so much that he became a part of me. I loved him despite his darkness, despite the impossibility of us ever being able to have a real life together.

  I fucking worshipped the man. But false Gods always betray your devotion eventually. They peel off their mask, and you stare at a stranger. They are the shark and you are the prey, and you wonder how you ever thought you could trust them not to devour you on sight.

  CHAPTER ONE

  MARIANA

  You might’ve walked past us and wondered why a woman like me – twenty-eight years old, no tattoos, modestly dressed – was with him.

  The president of the most lethal biker club in California, the Gypsy Brothers MC – John Portland. Covered in tattoos, smoking, the crest of his brotherhood inked on the flesh above his heart. That tattoo was hidden from public view as we stood side by side on the Santa Monica Pier and watched his daughter and my kind-of-not-really stepson ride the Ferris wheel, two teenagers clearly experiencing the first stages of love. Fifteen and sixteen. When I was their age I’d already given birth to my only child and had him taken from me. I’d already been tainted by life.

  My not-stepson had found his mother dead, murdered by his father – my lover – a few months earlier, and it was safe to say he’d been tainted by life, too.

  John’s daughter had been too, to a lesser extent. Junkie mother. A father who presided over criminals and murderers. Despite her beginnings, she still had traces of the naivety that summer love and an overprotective daddy provided. She still slept soundly at night, from what I could gather.

  Sadly, it wouldn’t always be that way, but on that pier, in the sunshine, none of us had any way of knowing the horror that lay ahead, its gaping maw ready to scoop us up when we least expected.

  ‘We’ll have to watch out for him,’ I teased, tilting my head towards Dornan’s youngest son, Jason, as he rode the Ferris wheel with John’s daughter, Juliette.

  Beside me, leaning against the railing that flanked the pier, the man I was secretly in love with shook his head. ‘Don’t even,’ he murmured, rubbing his stubbled chin with his palm.

  I started to laugh, until I saw John wasn’t laughing. Or smiling at all. I gestured to the two teenagers as they rode in a carriage high atop the Santa Monica coastline. ‘They’re kids. You can’t seriously be worried about him.’

  John’s eyes cut through me, making me wonder if I should be worried.

  ‘John,’ I tried again, ‘he’s a kid. He’s sixteen years old.’

  John’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the railing feverishly. ‘He’s not a kid. He’s Dornan’s kid.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘He didn’t even know Dornan until a few months ago.’

  ‘Yeah, but he’s still Dornan’s blood. Still Emilio’s blood.’

  I shrugged. ‘She’s not that much younger than I was when Emilio came for my family.’ And left with me as a consolation prize.

  John appeared pained. ‘Jesus Christ, Ana,’ he said, his words like bullets, forceful and cold, metallic. This was our eternal impasse, our universal hesitation. We were in love. We wanted to run away, to flee Los Angeles and the eventual death it promised us.

  But he wouldn’t leave with Dornan’s son, Jason.

  I wouldn’t leave without him.

  And so we were stuck.

  ‘Will you miss him?’ John asked me.

  My heart squeezed painfully. ‘I’m not leaving Jason, John.’

  He shook his head, his eyes glued to his daughter as she laughed and pointed out things to her crush. ‘Not Jason. Dornan.’

  Oh.

  Dornan Ross, the man who’d been my lover for almost ten years, since the day he collected me from a dirty motel in San Diego and claimed me as his own. From the ins
tant he’d stopped his drug kingpin father from selling me as a sex slave to cover my father’s impossible debt.

  John Portland had been Dornan’s best friend for longer than I’d known either of them – twenty years or more, I’d guess. I knew they’d met as teenagers, formed a fast friendship, a friendship that soon became a brotherhood of bikers called the Gypsy Brothers, a club that John had presided over since its inception.

  I smoothed down my tank top, painfully aware that we were out in the open, an afternoon ice-cream date with his daughter and the stray I’d taken in. Dornan’s son Jason, the one he’d been unaware of for sixteen years, emerged from the fairground ride with Juliette, stepping back onto the pier, two teenagers in love, even if they didn’t know it yet. It was a rare day for any of us to be out, but the weather was so beautiful, John had collected us all in his beat-up car and brought us out into the sunshine for some fudge sundaes and a chance to dip our toes in the cold water.

  It wasn’t a typical outing, to say the least. On a day like today, I’d normally be working for my boss, Emilio, cooking his books and making sure his hefty cartel profits were funnelled into all the right places. Or, if I got a day off – rare for a Saturday – I’d inevitably be on my back, or my knees, or my stomach, with Dornan. But today was Emilio’s birthday, and he insisted on a great big family celebration – one that none of us were invited to. I was surprised Dornan hadn’t insisted on taking Jason to the family event, but I think he worried about how unstable Jason might be in a large gathering of the people who’d inadvertently caused his mother to die.

  Yes, I was sleeping with two men. I was in love with one of them, and I was terrified of the other. When I first arrived in California ten years ago I’d loved Dornan, but now I loathed him. I was ready to leave him, or kill him, or both. Anything to get away.

  But the world kept spinning, and the cartel kept trading, and I kept my feet on the ground, too scared to make a run for freedom lest a bullet find its way between my shoulder blades.

  ‘Can we go feel the water?’ Juliette asked her father.

  ‘Sure,’ John shrugged, his face lighting up for his daughter like she was the sun. And she was, to him. That made me fall for him even more than I already had, to see the love he had for his daughter. Without thinking, I reached out and placed my hand on Jason’s shoulder. He was only sixteen, but already well taller than me, and the picture of his father – all olive skin and deep brown eyes, a product of their Italian heritage.

  Jase flinched when I touched him; I pulled my hand away and smiled instead. I didn’t want to apologise and bring attention to how jumpy he was, so I left it. Juliette grabbed his hand – the contrast between them night and day, what with her bamboo green eyes and straw blonde hair – and pulled him towards the beach. He didn’t flinch when she touched him, and that’s how I knew it was already love in bloom.

  I realised I’d been daydreaming and turned my attention back to John. He was just as stunning as the day I’d met him, but age had weathered him in a way that only made him more attractive to me. He was barely forty, but the lines around his eyes told a story of far more trauma than a man his age should have seen.

  I loved his hands. Rough palms from the mechanical work he did, but smooth on top. Rough fingers that spread me open and worshipped me, not missing an inch of my flesh; smooth on top, for those times when he’d brush a knuckle along my cheek or put my hand on his as I travelled on the back of his motorcycle.

  Dornan’s hands didn’t have an ounce of smoothness; they were rough and big and good for holding over my mouth while he fucked me until I screamed. I won’t pretend that I didn’t like it. I lived for his brutal touch. I was addicted to it.

  But the addiction had become too dangerous. It was a nasty habit that was going to kill me one day, a day that would come very soon if I didn’t figure my life out and get out of Los Angeles.

  I was entirely certain that if I didn’t make a bold move soon – run, or hand myself over to the police, or just plain kill my dark lover while he slept beside me – I’d be the one who’d end up dead, dumped on the side of the road in a ditch somewhere, or maybe cut into little pieces and fed to the sharks. Because Dornan Ross had changed. He’d grown cruel. He used to use violence in the most delicious of ways – a hand over my face to stifle the noise that accompanied the mind-blowing orgasm he was giving me with his other hand; a subtle choke that made me see stars as my heart sped up in anticipation; a finger forced into my mouth so I could suck on it, tease him, pretend it was his cock I had my lips wrapped around. A violence that would have me smashed up against the nearest wall, fingers that bruised me with their passion as he wrenched my thighs apart and entered me so hard that I ached for days afterward.

  That violent love was the thing that made us. When we met I was only nineteen years old and his father’s property, thanks to a deal I’d brokered to repay a debt my own father had racked up, and to keep my family from being slaughtered. One set of parents. One sister. One brother. I had given my servitude for their lives.

  Emilio had killed them eventually, anyway. Loose ends and all that.

  That violent love reached its peak when I saw the blood on my lover’s hands and the body of the woman he’d killed for daring to flee from him. Her face had been so badly beaten she was unrecognisable.

  I still saw her when I closed my eyes at night. Stephanie. He’d killed her for concealing a pregnancy and leaving him seventeen years earlier, and he had punished her by beating her until she was almost dead, and then giving her a hotshot of heroin to finish off the job.

  That this was the man I’d fallen fiercely in love with as a young woman was impossible to me. This was a man who’d risked everything for me, a lowly Colombian slave on her way to auction. He’d defied his father, and in doing so, had taken my heart and my loyalty. He’d done it out of some goodness that existed inside of him, something that couldn’t bear to see me come to harm.

  ‘He’s struggling,’ I said, nodding my head towards Jason. ‘He has nightmares. He barely talks. He barely eats, and teenage boys are supposed to eat everything in sight. I’m worried about him.’

  John side-eyed me. ‘And your son? Luis? How’s he doing?’

  I immediately baulked at his line of questioning. He was inferring that I cared more about a boy who wasn’t my son than the boy who was waiting for me in Colombia, my beautiful son, Luis. He was thirteen. I hadn’t laid eyes on him since the day he was taken from me by my father – the day he was born.

  ‘He’s safe,’ I said, my throat itching. ‘He’s with family. And that’s where we should be going. All four of us.’

  John pulled a face. ‘You really want to take Dornan’s son after you saw what he did to the woman who kept him secret his entire life?’

  I didn’t want to think about that. About how Dornan had become the monster he’d been trying to save me from all those years ago.

  About how a lover could become your captor.

  I didn’t want to think about how a lover, in a rage over your incessant questions and your disbelief that they could murder somebody in cold blood, could beat you until the baby inside you, the one that was still a secret, died.

  Didn’t want to remember how a lover, in a post-murder-fuelled high, could pin you down and rape you, while still covered in the blood of the woman he murdered hours beforehand.

  Didn’t want to reconcile all the ways a lover could become the person you hated the most in the world.

  Especially because, if you were like me, black-hearted and completely corrupted, you already had another lover.

  John Portland. Of course he had to be Dornan’s best friend, just to dial shit right up to eleven on the crazy scale.

  It was complicated.

  It was wrong.

  I didn’t care.

  I was in love with a man who was not my lover, and soon we would leave this place.

  Together. I’d convince him that Jason needed to come with us. That he needed protecting
from Dornan, the man who would surely mould him into a beast if given half a chance.

  We were leaving.

  And we were never coming back.

  ***

  ‘Hey,’ John said, snapping a finger in front of my face. God, he was fucking beautiful, with his dirty blond hair, tanned skin and those brilliant blue eyes that looked just like the ocean we were standing before. With his tight black T-shirt and dark denim jeans, he looked casual. Add the steel-toed boots and the biker tattoos that covered his arms and neck, and he looked lethal. Casually lethal. That was my John.

  ‘Will you miss Dornan?’ John repeated. His question wasn’t born from jealousy, or insecurity. He seemed genuinely . . . curious.

  ‘I miss him already,’ I said, shrugging. It was so bright, and I could already feel my skin start to prickle under the Californian sun. I’d spent so long indoors over the years as the cartel’s captive that my skin didn’t know what to do when I was allowed out into direct sun. ‘I miss the person he used to be. Don’t you?’

  John nodded, running his tongue along his teeth, seemingly deep in thought himself.

  ‘Will you miss Caroline?’ I asked softly, my stomach squeezing painfully at the mention of John’s crazy wife.

  Yes, I was fucking not one, but two married men, one by choice, the other through necessity. I was not a good person. I was just trying to survive, stay one step ahead, and I was so fucking tired of it all.

  John shook his head. ‘Caroline was already an addict when I met her. I never got to know her well enough away from the drugs to be able to miss her.’ He paused for a moment, the lines around his eyes creasing as he frowned. ‘My wife and I are basically strangers who share a child.’

  I thought back to the countless times I’d seen John’s wife stumbling down the hallways of the Gypsy Brothers clubhouse, high as a kite, sometimes with a thin trail of blood still fresh on her arm from where she’d injected the heroin. I’d seen her in all kinds of trouble – a couple of overdoses, plenty of times when she’d plain forget that she was naked from the waist down as she wandered around.

  I’d seen the shame in John’s eyes every time she did something to embarrass herself. I knew the shame wasn’t for him, it was for their daughter, Juliette.