“Did he?” he asked through clenched teeth. Already pushing herself up and her dress down, Ellie shook her head frantically. “No,” she said, scrambling to her feet.

He nodded. “Go,” he said darkly. “Grab your shit and go straight to my place. Right now.”

Ellie glanced over at Daniel, who was lying on the floor across the room, holding his head and groaning.

“Go!” Dirty yelled, spurring Ellie into action. She grabbed her purse and phone and ran from the room. She ran through the empty hallways, down the stairs, and burst out the front door. She ran the entire way to Dirty’s apartment.

Then she crawled in his bed, pulled the covers up over her head, and burst into tears.

Dirty was going to kill him and as awful as that was, she honestly didn’t care. What she cared about was what was going to happen to Dirty after the fact.

• • •

“I fuckin’ hate this place,” Ripper muttered, glancing at the rundown condos at the edge of town. Dirty glanced up from the ground where Daniel lay unconscious, and looked at Ripper. “We took care of everything?”

Ripper shrugged. “I cleaned up the classroom, Anger’s choppin’ the police car as we speak, and the only other motherfucker inside that school was one of the secretaries and she didn’t even bat a fuckin’ eyelash when I told her she didn’t hear nothin’, didn’t see nothin’, and didn’t know nothin’.”

“How much did you give her?”

Ripper snorted. “Too much.”

“Blowback?”

Ripper shrugged again. “Maybe. But we ain’t ever spilled local blood before. We protect our town, they know that.”

“Thanks for doin’ this,” he said, and Ripper’s gaze shot to him.

Ripper shook his head. “Brother,” he said, “if that was my old lady that fucker tried to rape, he’d already be eatin’ dirt.”

“I’m givin’ it to him slow,” Dirty gritted out. “Least I can do.”

Ripper smiled grimly and held out his fist. “You do what you gotta do, dude. Call Cox if you need help with the body. I’m gonna swing by the club a little later and let the prez know what’s up anyway.”

Dirty’s fist met Ripper’s and he nodded.

Dirty waited until he could no longer see the taillights of Ripper’s pickup before turning back to Mooresville. Cocking his leg back, he sent his booted foot straight into the asshole’s ribs.

“Wake up, fucker!” he yelled.

Air exploded from the man’s lungs in the form of a gasping groan and Mooresville’s eyes blinked open. Coughing and sputtering, he tried to turn away from Dirty, but Dirty didn’t give him a chance and immediately sent his boot again into his ribs. The fucker bounced a few feet forward and then went still.

Crossing the small distance, Dirty stepped over him and reached down to grab his shirt collar. “Open your eyes!” he demanded and Mooresville’s eyelids fluttered before finally opening.

“You gonna die now, fucker,” Dirty growled. “But first you’re gonna lie there like a fuckin’ bitch and take everything I’m gonna give you. And fucker, I’m gonna do you dirty.”

Yanking him up by his shirt, Dirty sent his fist straight into the man’s mouth. It hurt for sure, the fucker’s teeth cut through his knuckles, but it was efficient in knocking out nearly all of Mooresville’s front teeth.

Letting him fall back to the ground, Dirty sat down hard on his injured ribs, pinning him in place.

“Please,” Mooresville rasped brokenly. “Please…”

“What’s that?” Dirty said, sneering. “I can’t fuckin’ hear you?”

“Please!” the man screamed.

“Fuck you,” Dirty spat and sent his fist flying into the side of Mooresville’s face. Over and over again, he punched him as hard as he could, beating on him until he was covered in the man’s blood, unable to see straight. Until it was no longer Mooresville he was beating on.

It was himself.

Because as much as he hated comparing himself to a dirtbag like Daniel Mooresville, he didn’t have much of a choice. He was just as big of a dirtbag. He’d never spared a female who wasn’t part of his family a second thought; he hadn’t given a fuck what kind of pain he’d caused, instead he’d rationalized it. Justified it, even.

He was the worst kind of dirtbag, thinking he had a right to inflict pain on other people just because pain had been inflicted on him.

The world didn’t owe him shit. Nobody did.

He didn’t deserve a second chance. He deserved nothing. Worse than nothing. He deserved every inch of what he had and what he was going to put this motherfucker through.

“You think you got a right to hurt people?” he yelled as he dragged the chief of police’s broken body toward the row of condominiums. “What gives you the motherfuckin’ right?”

Dropping him on his stomach, Dirty yanked down the man’s pants and boxers, then took inventory of his own possessions. Yeah, no way was he going to use his gun. Or his phone. He grabbed the next best thing. His blade. It wasn’t a sissy knife either; it was a serrated hunting blade, made especially for death.

“Open wide,” Dirty said, and shoved that motherfucker straight into Mooresville’s asshole. Hard. Over and over again, each time amping up Mooresville’s following screams of pain as they echoed throughout the wide-open empty space.

“Upsie daisy.” Dirty laughed, hooking his hands under the man’s dislocated shoulders. Once he had him positioned on the front steps to the condo, Dirty wrenched his mouth wide open and forced the corner of the concrete stair between his lips. Mooresville whimpered his protests but there wasn’t a bone in the fucker’s body Dirty hadn’t at least tried to break. The guy could barely breathe, let alone move.

“Good night, fucker,” he said.

Then, holding him in place, Dirty lifted his boot and, as hard as he could, slammed it down on the back of his skull.

Standing up and with shaking hands, Dirty lit up a cigarette and pulled out his cell phone.

Cox answered on the first ring.

“Got a problem,” he said around a cloud of smoke.

“Yeah?” Cox asked. “Whatchu need?”

“Special sauce.”

“Where you at?”

“Mama Vi’s.”

“Be there in twenty.”

Dirty shoved his phone back in his cut and looked down at his bloody boot. Lifting up his foot, he wiped the gore off onto Mooresville’s body.

“Be seein’ you in hell, fucker,” he said. Hocking up a wad of phlegm, he spit it out onto the back of the man’s broken skull. “And you best believe you’ll be gettin’ another beat-down when I do.”

• • •

Ellie’s stomach was churning, her head was pounding, and she was so high-strung her anxiety had reached volcanic levels, that when she heard the jingle of keys against the door, she fell face first onto the floor when she attempted to scramble out of bed.

“Jesus,” Dirty muttered. Hands gripped her arms and she was hauled to her feet.

Ellie choked on her surprise as she took in Dirty’s disheveled, dirt- and blood-covered clothing. Her gaze dropped to his blood-covered hands and his swollen, split knuckles.

“Michael,” she whispered. “Did you…”

Tears formed in her eyes. “Please tell me you didn’t kill him,” she finished quickly, praying to God that he hadn’t.

His eyes met hers. “I killed him,” he said without an ounce of remorse. In fact, he looked angry, like he wanted to kill the man all over again. “He ain’t never gonna be found, baby, and you don’t gotta worry anymore about him comin’ after you.”

“The whole town is going to be looking for him,” she whispered, her body filling with fear. “You’ll go to jail. They will take you away from me and you’ll go to jail and it will be all my fault. Oh my God, this is all—”

Dirty’s mouth slammed into hers with such force that she would have flown backward if he hadn’t been holding her arms.

Ellie’s surprise was short-lived. She wanted this, she wanted this badly, so when his tongue roughly thrust past her lips, she’d already forgotten entirely what she had been talking about.

“Nobody is takin’ me away from you,” he growled against her mouth.

Ellie found herself suddenly spun around and Dirty’s front pressed against her back. His hands gripped the collar of her dress. “And that motherfucker ain’t never gonna be found,” he finished, then yanked. Buttons flew through the room, pinging off the furniture and walls as her dress split wide open.

Large hands gently cupped her bra-covered breasts and she trembled through her next breath. “I have to have you, baby,” he said, pressing his erection into her backside. “I can’t take it no more, but I gotta do this my way and I need you to do exactly as I say.”

Ellie’s need for Dirty had overridden her fear of what could happen if she and Dirty were ever to become intimate awhile back. She simply didn’t care anymore. She wanted him that badly. More in fact now that she knew what he was capable of. He had just killed a man. Beaten him with his own two hands. For her. All for her.

Never in her entire life had she dreamt she would ever be in the center of such events, or turned on by them, let alone falling in love with a man…like Dirty.

Her dress was pulled from her arms and just as quickly her bra was tossed across the room. Moments later, Ellie was naked, facedown on Dirty’s bed and he was behind her, holding her hips, pressing against her, pressing into her.

She whimpered her frustration. She wanted to touch him, to kiss him again; she wanted to hold tightly to him when he slid inside of her. But she would take it. She understood. She’d seen firsthand his fragility, his fears, and she knew how desperately hard this was for him, so she would do it his way.

Except, suddenly she could no longer feel him behind her. Pushing to her knees, she turned around and found him kneeling by the edge of the bed, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“I can’t do it,” he choked out, his words frantically spoken, his eyes wide while his head shook wildly. “I can’t do it.”

Instinctively wanting to comfort him, Ellie reached for him and found herself immediately shoved backward. Startled, she glanced up at Dirty, who was towering over her and glaring. “Don’t touch me,” he bit out.

Tears burned in her eyes as she nodded. “I’m sorry,” she whispered tearfully.

Dirty’s already wild eyes flashed with an unidentifiable emotion and suddenly his fists were clenched and his nostrils flared with heavy breaths. He appeared to be warring from within and it looked to Ellie like his personal demons were winning.

“It’s okay,” she said, trying her best to mask her shaking voice with a soothing tone. “We don’t have to do anything.”

His eyes flared even wider and Ellie shrunk backward.

“I HAVE TO!” he roared, his face turning red with rage. “I FUCKIN’ HAVE TO!”

The next thing she knew, he grabbed her calves and pulled her legs apart. His hips surged forward and—

Ellie sucked in a startled breath of air as he filled her body. He wasn’t a small man, not at all, and it took more than a moment to adjust to his size.

Dirty stared down at her, looking no better than before, shaking, his eyes burning with both emotion and tears. She powered through her need to comfort him through touch and just lay beneath him, their bodies joined but neither of them touching the other, neither of them moving. Just staring.

“Fight me,” he suddenly whispered.

Ellie’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Fight me,” he repeated, his voice breaking. “Bitch, please.”

Oh God, this had been a bad idea. He wanted her to fight him. She couldn’t fight him, it was too much like what had happened between her and Daniel and she wanted…

She wanted Dirty.

“Okay,” she whispered, her voice wavering. “But I don’t know what to do.”

• • •

Fight him.

Aw shit, he was begging. Begging like he’d done as a child. Begging for love from his twisted cunt of a foster mother, begging for food and money, begging because those sick fuckers had liked it when he’d begged. Anger rose inside of him, anger and hatred and self-disgust.

And then…

He could see the unease, the panic, in Ellie’s expression, and as much as he hated being the reason for any negative emotions within her, a sense of familiarity and comfort enveloped Dirty. He was disgusting. He was motherfucking repugnant. Ugly. Unwanted. There was nothing, not one goddamn thing, appealing about him.

Inside Ellie, his dick began to throb.

“Okay,” she whispered. “But I don’t know what to do.”

Dirty closed his eyes and prayed for the strength to go forward. He was inside her, and he wanted so badly, no, he needed so badly to fuck her and yet he was frozen inside his own fear.