Smother: Hinton Charter, #2

By Lee Dawna

Some of us die long before our hearts stop beating.

 

Tessa believes she's the reason a serial killer is targeting the residents of her small town. All of Hinton's victims have some connection to her and if that's not enough, her cousin Gary, leader of the local charter of the notorious Leidolf biker club, has assigned the man she hates most to be her bodyguard—her ex-boyfriend, Warren.

 

Adding to the tension of the already stressed town is the presence of a rival bike charter. They may be in town to help root out the killer before the next gruesome murder, but values are clashing and control of Hinton's club is at stake. No one can be trusted. A charter war is on the horizon and it will only take an ember to set it ablaze.

 

Gary's right-hand man, the sadistic Chopper, has a close relationship with Tessa that makes him more protective of her than ever. When he metes out brutal revenge on her behalf in front of the entire town and media, the spark of war is lit. But it's Tessa's own explosive secrets that are the catalyst that blows everything up, setting in motion a deadly blaze of events no one is prepared for.

 

Broken trust, shocking betrayals, and volatile secrets rock the Hinton charter as their small town is brought to its knees.

 

When there is no one left to turn to, revenge is the only answer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LeeDawna Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781949192193

Lee Dawna

Lee Dawna is a thriller, suspense, and romance author living in the rolling mountains of West Virginia. An avid traveler and outdoorswoman, you may bump into her along a remote trail where a meandering stream whispers her next story. [e-mail] Connect with her on: Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/leedawnabooks Twitter https://twitter.com/LeeDawna_author Instagram  https://www.instagram.com/leedawna_author

Book preview

Smother

Hinton Thriller Book Two

Lee Dawna

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LeeDawna Books, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 Lee Dawna

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

First edition

Cover design by Premade Ebook Cover Shop

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ISBN 978-1-949192-20-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-949192-19-3 (ebook)

Published by LeeDawna Books

https://leedawnabooks.com

[e-mail]

PO Box 205, MacArthur WV 25873

Contents

Dedication

1. ~1~

2. ~2~

3. ~3~

4. ~4~

5. ~5~

6. ~6~

7. ~7~

8. ~8~

9. ~9~

10. ~10~

11. ~11~

12. ~12~

13. ~13~

14. ~14~

15. ~15~

16. ~16~

17. ~17~

18. ~18~

19. ~19~

20. ~20~

21. ~21~

22. ~22~

23. ~23~

24. ~24~

25. ~25~

26. ~26~

27. ~27~

28. ~28~

29. ~29~

30. ~30~

31. ~31~

32. ~32~

Acknowledgments

About Author

Also By Lee Dawna

~ This book is dedicated to every fan of true crime. ~

~1~

Chopper

When Tessa’s on the back of my bike, the Mamba rumbling over the road beneath us and her hands resting at the base of my hips, I’m tempted to keep driving. Out of this town. This country. Straight to turquoise waters and tequila. A place where I can lay her down in white sand and tangle my hands through the soft curls of that wild hair she never manages to tame. She’s nineteen years my junior and I have obligations to the Leidolf, a descendent of the wolf before I’m anything else, especially a lover. Still, maybe I’d do it, keep driving until my wheels hit waves if she’d slide her hand up under my kutte the way she used to.

I don’t expect her to be wanting me anytime soon, though. She had her fill of me before she started dating Matt, and she’ll be even more done once she learns that I’m cutting him out of her life. Their relationship has run its course and it never should have been started to begin with. He swooped in when the club was busy with more important things than keeping up with Tessa’s dating life. She’s not usually one to bed down with anyone, other than me on occasion, so the insurance salesman came as a surprise. So have her actions since she started dating him.

She leans in close to my ear, her breath warm and voice strained. I need to stop by my house to see if Matt is there. I haven’t been able to reach him all day and he’s probably worried about me.

I consider her request. I haven’t thought much about how I’ll break the news of her terminated relationship to her because I don’t care about doing it gently. Her feelings on the matter are of no concern to me. Not because I relish hurting her, the very fact that I’d even consider leaving my club for her is enough proof that my affection for her has gone too far. But I can tamp down all the things I feel for her and stomp all over everything she feels for anyone else when it comes to the greater good. Getting Matt out of her life benefits everyone. He’s a coward. A big man with a small ego who likes to whine to Tessa about how the club controls her while doing little more than puffing a few tail feathers when he’s around any of the Leidolf. Warren hasn’t dated her in years, yet he still speaks his mind and has forced us to beat him down more times than Gary has liked.

Warren’s willingness to endure those beatings without ever losing an ounce of resolve has earned him the respect of every wolf in the club. His problem is that he was dumb enough to break Tessa’s heart to begin with. Their breakup is the reason her head is so messed up that we now have a Matt problem. In her right mind, she wouldn’t like the soft-handed insurance salesman.

In her right mind, she also wouldn’t have let me touch her that first time, so I’m glad for Warren’s mistake in that regard, even though he didn’t hurt her intentionally and I never thought there was anything for her to be mad at him over.

Still, her perception of what Warren did made tears fall down her face in thick sheets and the sight of them stoked an urge inside me. One that demanded penance. So while Tessa stood on that riverbank and threw every memory she had of Warren into the bonfire, I watched the shadows. I knew he’d come for her as sure as I know that, one day, Warren will join the Leidolf. He’s a wolf at his very core. A hunter. And when it comes to Tessa, she’ll never be anywhere he can’t find her. Tessa is Warren’s home and he came to her that night, but I was already in his house and my beast was hungry for retribution.

I slide a hand to where Tessa’s is resting casually on my hip and I pull her palm around to rest on my stomach, holding her to me tightly as I change course and drive us away from Riverside Grille instead of toward it. It’ll be dark soon so I’ll take her where she wants to go, giving her this one piece of what feels like freedom of choice because she deserves to be happy for a few minutes. I felt the way her body seized when I told her Marcie’s little sister was the latest victim in a spree of murders plaguing Hinton. And I saw the way she looked at Warren when his arms were comforting Marcie, the woman he’s currently calling his girlfriend, though no part of his heart has ever belonged to anyone but Tessa. Whether he’ll ever work things out with her, I don’t know. Tessa is proving she can hold a grudge, even when there’s nothing to be mad over to begin with.

The grudge Warren holds over me, I earned. That night on the riverbank when Tessa’s heart was raw, I saw his shadow slinking over the bank and I struck, quenching my thirst for pain by drawing his anguish to me. It splintered its way across the ground as I pleasured Tessa right in front of him. All it took was one rough hand pressed gently to her cheek, my calloused thumb running underneath her eye. I can make you feel better for a little while. Let me. She took only one breath before consenting and I took only one taste of her mouth before I laid her down. I had her hips exposed and resting on my kutte before Warren was smart enough to look away. Satisfaction pulsed through me in thick waves when Tessa’s pleasure ripped from her lips. I guarantee that boy never made her scream the way I did that night. And I don’t care how far he went or how fast he ran, he heard her scream, and I guarantee he’s never forgotten the sound.

I pull up to the steps in front of her house. Matt’s car is in the driveway. Tessa slides off my bike and I don’t bother killing the engine. Two minutes. I give the order and she nods, though the hard line of defiance is never far from her eyes. But today is not the day to test me and she knows it. She runs up the steps and disappears inside the house. I light a cigarette and take a drag while I wait. She’ll be back out soon because her presence in this house won’t cure what’s ailing Matt. Just like her presence in my life hasn’t cured the darkness living inside me. This rot is what keeps me from permanently staking claim to her and driving away from Hinton. I don’t kill because I’m Leidolf. I kill because I enjoy it.

Gary doesn’t have my loyalty only because he’s the leader of my charter. He has my fealty because he’s the only person who has ever stared my beast in the face and not flinched. It was him who named it for me and gave my passion a purpose. From Gary’s acceptance, my wolf emerged strong and emboldened, and that gift is why I wouldn’t have acted on my desire for Tessa had it not been for Warren’s mistake. Gary holds her as a daughter instead of a cousin, and he may love and accept me for exactly what I am, but no father, not even Gary, wants something like me with their daughter.

I glance at the house. If I’d met someone who makes me feel the way Tessa does before I answered the call of the wolf, my life would be no different than it is now. Because even with sand under my feet and a woman I love in my arms, I’d never be free of the desires I feel inside of me. From my earliest memories, I always knew killing would be gratifying. I just didn’t realize how much until I picked up my stepfather’s gun. He never saw me aim it. When his body crumpled to the floor, blood oozing from his temple, I smiled for the first time in my life. I was nine and had never so much as grinned before.

Tessa screams, the shrillness shredding through the soft purr of my bike. I kill my engine and storm toward the house, tossing the cigarette aside. Her wail rips at my eardrum and I throw the door open, moving straight ahead, down to the end of the hall where her bedroom is. I smell the blood before seeing it. It’s old, not alive with that coppery rich aroma that comes from freshly spilled blood, so I don’t bother checking her for wounds. I pull her away from the bed she’s clawing at, forcing her to turn loose of the bloody sheets.

Matt! she screams.

Shh, I order, listening for movement in the house and keeping her back to my front so I don’t get the stench of the blood she’s covered in all over me.

Let go! she shouts, struggling against my grip and sprawling her legs to get back to the bed. Matt!

I clamp a hand over her mouth, pressing her lips against her teeth hard enough to keep her from biting. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to control a hysterical woman and Tessa is as wild as they come. He’s not here. Be quiet.

She bucks, thrashing against me, puffing through her nose in a panic that’s set into her too deeply for me to break its hold without doing what I don’t relish doing. It guts me every time I’m forced to hurt a female. Doing so reminds me of my stepfather. The way he made my mother scream out in pain, never pleasure. The way he used her for a punching bag and then cried about how sorry he was. The way she always took him back. When the police arrived and asked me what happened on the day he died, I told them outright that I shot him. They mistook that to mean I’d picked up an unattended gun and it accidentally went off. I didn’t feel the need to correct them. They asked what happened and I told them, so my conscience was clear. The man deserved to die for what he did to my mother.

I drag Tessa’s kicking body from the bedroom, careful not to let her disturb anything more in the house as I shove her forward. I push her out the front door, letting go of her so she can breathe. She spins, coming straight back at me. I clamp my hands around her arms hard enough to bruise and jerk her to a stop, meeting her fiery eyes with a blaze in my own. Don’t.

Matt! she screams over my shoulder. Matt!

He’s not going to answer you, I growl, releasing one of her arms and jerking her around, pressing her back to my front and clamping my bruising grip around her waist. I hold her bucking body in place and fish the phone from my pocket. Warren answers my call on the second ring. Tessa’s house. Now. I hang up and shove the phone back into my pocket. He heard all he needs to hear. Marcie’s tears and a thousand dead sisters won’t keep him from racing to Tessa, and not only because he loves her. He knows that I care about her too and that I’ll defend her with my life. He also knows that if I have to, I will hurt her.

After he spent time at my side, Gary ordering the two of us to hunt down and assassinate fifteen members of a would-be sex trafficking ring, Warren learned why I’m most feared among all Leidolf. Unlike Gary, Warren balked at my viscousness. But he showed his own on the night when it came time to assassinate the men he originally heard plotting with Montrose’s charter to set up the whole trafficking operation. Every man Warren killed, he did so by putting a bullet in the back of their head. Except one. The wolf who said Tessa’s name, marking her as a target because her capture would be a way to control Gary and his men. Warren slit that wolf’s throat and stood over my former brother as the man bled out. That’s when I learned that Warren would slit the Pope’s throat if he thought the man was a threat to Tessa.

Things shifted between Warren and me that night. He became a brother even though he won’t so much as claim to be the prospect we’ve treated him as for years. I became both his ally and a threat, an elevation from the simple girlfriend snatcher he’d had me pegged as before.

Tessa slams her heel into my shin and I shove her off the edge of the porch. She trips and lands face-first in the patchy grass. I jump down beside her, twisting an arm behind her back and pressing her down firmly enough that if she wants to scream again, she’ll have to eat grass to do it. "I’m not going to abide your hysterics and you’re not going back into the middle of that crime scene, so stop making this harder for both of us. Stop fighting me."

~2~

Warren

My cheek stings. Marcie’s mom has good enough aim that her palm landed right on the top of my jawbone. Marcie yelled at the woman for hitting me, but I imagine she wasn’t far from slugging me herself. Teresa’s body is practically still warm, the police coming and going without anyone able to make a bit of sense out of the fourteen-year-old’s murder, so Marcie and her mom are deep inside a well of grief, and all I have to offer them is a few nights in my unfinished house.

There’s not a drop of information pointing to a suspect in Teresa’s murder. We don’t even know if her death is related to the other murders or if the person who slit her throat is a different evil. Chief wants to believe the manner of death doesn’t fit with the others simply because Teresa wasn’t beaten or mutilated. I begged him to differ on that opinion because I think there is more than one murderer, but they’re working together, and killing Teresa twenty yards away from where I slept was a message for me. One that had to be left quickly because I’m a light sleeper, especially when I’m next to someone other than Tessa. A struggle surely would have woken me and whoever killed Teresa knew that.

As it is, I didn’t wake up and the girl died because of it. So what little comfort Marcie and her mom have gotten from having a place to sleep that’s away from the scene of the crime is dulled by my being the man who didn’t protect their family. A truth made worse by my not having to say a word for both of them to know I’m abandoning them now because of Tessa. Little else would make me do such a thing, and nothing else would make me do it as fast as I am. Tessa is hurting, I heard the agony in her scream, and her pain trumps everyone else’s. Even my own.

I slam the visor down on my helmet and kick my bike to life. A car won’t do. I need speed, a way to straighten out the road and get to Tessa as fast as the crow flies. The dirt bike slings gravel and grass as I tear out of my drive and cut down a game trail, not bothering to glance back at the house where I know Marcie and her mom are staring after me. I’m not proud of how I react in all matters concerning Tessa, but I can’t keep myself from overreacting every time I get the chance. It doesn’t matter that I tell myself I don’t want to make amends and that one day I’ll go ahead and marry Marcie or someone else who isn’t Tessa. I can say it, and I might even mean it, but whether Tessa knows she needs me or not, there’s not a day of my life when I won’t be there for her. And if she’s screaming because Chopper did something to her, I’m going to do what I should have done last year when I saw for myself what he was. That wolf is rabid. He may be valuable as Gary’s best killer and I have no doubt about his honor, but he still needs to be put down.

I push my bike harder, willing it to go faster while I run through scenarios of what could be happening to Tessa right now, and what I’ll do about it when I reach her. I’ve played nice with the club and followed their lead, partly because Tessa let them lay claim to her even before she labeled me as guilty and condemned me to not having my own truth. I don’t even rightly know what started her anger rolling downhill but at the time when it did, I didn’t need to know. She was hurting and that was enough to make me not cower from Gary when he came knocking. I figured lying to Tessa about going fishing with Jessop instead of telling her we were robbing a liquor store was enough of a reason to take a beating from the Leidolf, even though it wasn’t a real robbery. It was a scam cooked up between the store owner and Tessa’s dad. I didn’t know her dad was involved until after the fact or I would never have agreed to be part of the scheme. There’s nothing that man touches that doesn’t blow up in someone else’s face.

After Gary found me and I took my beating, I stayed away from Tessa so she wouldn’t see my marred face or broken arm. I wrongly believed