Outcasts (Badlands 3)

My balls were already lifting to spill. I’d found heaven, and it was inside her pussy.

She clenched around me, grabbed my hair, and pulled.

I fought the urge to come like a little bitch and fucked her like she was a whore.

She began moaning so loud she could’ve woken the man with the missing scalp lying on top of the elevator just a few feet away from us.

I belatedly realized she was saying my name. I usually hated that shit, but Brat could do no wrong. It was a quick, thrusting in and out, pounding my balls into her cunt hard and fast type of fuck. She came when I bit down on the side of her neck and slammed her into the wall, like the good little pain-slut she was becoming.

I came with a low grunt, pumping every drop of my come into her. She shuddered against me, breathing heavily.

“Damn, we should have been doin this a long time ago.”

She smiled up at me, and my chest constricted so goddamn hard it almost hurt.

The advice I’d been given echoed in my head—when you know, you know.

“I like that you’re filthy. I like that you’re mine.” She smiled again, planting a kiss right at the corner of my mouth.

Maybe I should have done this shit a long time ago, but then we wouldn’t be who we were right this second. My fucking emotions didn’t know whether to be up or down. I stared at her with my usual mask in place. Maybe I’d gone crazy, maybe I was fucking weak, but I could never set her free.

I think she got it wrong, because I felt like she’d just grounded me—like an anchor wrapped around my balls. Looking at her like this, I found what I’d been searching for but saw it from a different angle. It wasn’t sunlight I was seeing at all.

Fuck Romero for always being right.

Her halo was broken, but there was brimstone burning in her eyes. Her hatred was beautiful.

I’d give her a crown forged of blood and bone from every motherfucker who’d laid a hand on what was mine.

I hoped she was ready to paint some shit red. We weren’t going home until their bodies were at our feet.

Chapter Fourteen

Assume the worst. Expect it to be even worse than that.

That’s how I was going to think of all the things Dad could’ve done. Grimm said he’d tell me on the road, and I was patient enough to wait. Besides, I wasn’t really excited to know how much shit Dad had started. Cobra’s ridiculous code talk hadn’t gone over my head. I knew full well what a coach and quarterback was.

I wasn’t surprised he’d had help from over the wall, either—just who it was helping him. Why Noah? What role did Romero have in it?

They were questions I didn’t even know if I wanted the answers to, but couldn’t afford to be naïve about.

I followed behind Grimm with a bottle of water, munching on a pack of old saltine crackers he’d procured for me out the duffel after a pee break. I had his atomic bag on my back, the straps tightened so it wasn’t slouchy. I was assuming we were about to head out; course, Grimm was being mysterious and didn’t explain it, but he’d gathered up our minimal supplies, shoving them in the bag I now carried, so that was my guess.

The sun was starting to set, giving the old hospital a creepy aesthetic. We found the chapel easily enough.

Cobra hopped up from an overturned rotten pew the moment he saw us.

“They’re here. Talk fast before I lose my signal again,” he said into a cellphone that looked more like a giant walkie-talkie with a long antenna. I hadn’t seen one of those in ages, but I’d heard they got reception best in situations like these.

“I’m sending some acolytes to Plymouth. Go to Lucy’s and she’ll have a lead waiting along with them.” Romero’s voice crackled over the line, and it didn’t take a magician to figure out he was pissed.

“From there, you do what you have to do, but I want Noah alive. I’m gonna piss on him as he bleeds out like a fucking pig over a fire.”

“I can feel the brotherly love from here,” Cobra joked.

“Are you sure about this?” Grimm asked.

“Don’t ask me stupidass questions, and Arlen, don’t fucking die.”