sanctuary

  TERRI ANNE BROWNING

  Copyright © Terri Anne Browning/Anna Henson 2023

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Terri Anne Browning, except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976.

  Sanctuary

  Angel’s Halo MC Next Gen

  Written by Terri Anne Browning

  All Rights Reserved ©Terri Anne Browning 2023

  Cover Design Haney Hayes www.haneyhayespr.com

  Edited by Lisa Hollett of Silently Correcting Your Grammar

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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

  No part of this book can be reproduced in any form by electronic or mechanical means, including storage or retrieval systems, without the express permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Created with Vellum

  contents

  I’m the Quiet One.

  Prologue

  1. Jack

  2. Jack

  3. Nishia

  4. Nishia

  5. Jack

  6. Nova

  7. Nishia

  8. Jack

  9. Nishia

  10. Jack

  11. Nishia

  12. Jack

  13. Nishia

  14. Jack

  15. Nishia

  16. Jack

  17. Nishia

  18. Nishia

  19. Jack

  20. Nishia

  21. Jack

  22. Nishia

  23. Jack

  24. Jack

  25. Nishia

  26. Jack

  27. Nishia

  28. Jack

  29. Raven

  30. Nishia

  31. Nishia

  32. Jack

  33. Nishia

  34. Nishia

  35. Jack

  36. Nishia

  37. Jack

  38. Nishia

  39. Jack

  Epilogue

  Want More?

  i’m the quiet one.

  I’m the quiet one.

  The one everyone respects…but secretly fears.

  They should.

  I’ve seen the darkness in the world—and it has slowly bled into me until not even a glimmer of light remains.

  The women who come to Sanctuary are in need of someone to rescue them.

  It’s my job to protect them.

  To send the monsters who terrorize them back into the abyss they slithered out of.

  Everyone thinks Max is the crazy MC brother.

  But they haven’t seen what I’m capable of when it comes to protecting those too weak to protect themselves.

  Then she was dropped at Sanctuary’s doorstep.

  Broken. Bleeding. Alone.

  When she looked up at me with fear in her pretty eyes, I knew the darkness hadn’t completely taken hold of me. I still had a little bit of humanity left.

  And it was all hers.

  prologue

  JACK

  Gathering my hair at the back of my head in one hand, I pulled the hair tie from between my teeth and made sure the bun was tight before I pushed my shirt sleeves up my arms. The dark ink that took up both forearms told a story I couldn’t give voice to, but they never failed to inject a little more fear into the men who were the true monsters of the world.

  Like the one lying on the floor in front of me. Blood dripped down his face from where my first punch had busted his nose and knocked him on his ass. Stupid fuck had opened the door without even checking to see who it was. He hadn’t even glanced up from the phone in his hand to greet me.

  All I’d gotten was a muttered, “Yeah?” before I’d swung at him. But he sure as fuck was looking at me now as he tried to crab walk backward when I took a step forward.

  “Wh-what do you want?” he stuttered. “I-I ain’t got no money.”

  “I’m not here for money,” I assured him as I closed the door and flipped the lock and dead bolt while the guy looked like he was about to piss himself at the sound of my voice.

  I rarely used it, so it always came out raspy. Talking wasn’t my thing. I watched. Listened. What good were words when they never made anything better? My mother would argue with me. Words could go a long way, in her opinion. But she was a lawyer; words were her bread and butter.

  I hadn’t had any desire to follow in her footsteps, so she was going to have to find someone else to take over her law firm when she decided to hang it up. Whenever the fuck that might be. She loved her work. Not just the thrill of fighting a case in court, but her nonprofit that she’d started in honor of her own mother, who had died at the hands of an abusive husband.

  Much like the piece of shit who was looking up at me with terror in his bloodshot eyes. He was sober for once, but it was obvious he hadn’t gotten much sleep. His clothes were wrinkled, and there was a stain on his untucked, button-down white shirt. Without his wife to take care of him, the man probably didn’t even know what day it was.

  I knew all about their married life from listening to the wife sobbing to some of the volunteers at Sanctuary. No way she would tell me herself. All the residents at the shelter were too scared to do more than shoot me terror-filled glances whenever I was in the room with them. They didn’t know that I would be their vengeance. That I was there to protect them from the monsters from their past and present so they could have a better future.

  For most of their married life, the woman had been more like a maid who had to be on call for his every need, twenty-four seven. Then he’d gotten her pregnant, and she’d had to split her attention between him and their kid. He hadn’t liked that much. The verbal beatdowns he’d occasionally given her had started turning into physical abuse. And as happened with most of the domestic violence victims I’d seen all my life, he’d already had her thinking she was useless and had nowhere to go.

  It wasn’t until their kid was older, and he’d turned his abuse in the little girl’s direction, that his wife had finally gotten brave and decided to leave him. Before she could get out, though, the bastard had discovered her plans and beaten her to within an inch of her life. Luckily, their daughter had gotten her mom’s phone and hidden in a closet. The 9-1-1 dispatcher had listened along with the little girl while her mom begged for mercy.

  The cops got to their house just as the sack of shit had finished up with his wife and then had started to go after the little girl in the closet. Even though they lived several counties away, Sanctuary was well known to social services, and both mother and daughter were brought to us once the mom had been released from the hospital. They were in one of the apartments at the main house, still under a doctor’s care by the medical staff Sanctuary employed. The mom would need to heal physically as well as mentally, and the little girl was still so traumatized that she hadn’t spoken more than a few words since their arrival the week before.

  It was seeing the fear in those eyes that had me here now.

  The only thing the little girl said to anyone was to beg us not to let her father find them. Her daddy wasn’t going to get the chance to find her or her mother.

  I might not have spoken the words aloud, but I’d made a vow to her the moment she’d crawled under the table in the social room of Sanctuary. Seeing little Molly clutch the ragged bear to her chest and glance around as if there was danger all around her had haunted me. I hadn’t slept much since, and I knew from past experience that I wouldn’t get a good night’s rest until I took care of what that little girl was most afraid of.

  “Then what do ya want?”

  I popped my neck left and right, getting the tension out of my shoulders before the fun started. Instead of answering, I gave the bastard a grin and pulled the blade from the sheath strapped to my leg.

  With a scared whimper, he pissed himself, and a dark laugh bubbled up inside me. Ah, fuck yeah. I loved when they couldn’t control their bodily functions because they were too afraid. I imagined their spouses had felt similar fear.

  By the time I was done, the fucker would feel every ounce of fear his wife and child still suffered.

  And it would be the last thing he experienced before I sent him straight to hell where he belonged.

  “P-please,” he cried, scuttling backward out of the puddle of piss he’d left behind. “I-I have a-a family, a-a daughter.”

  “Don’t worry, motherfucker. Molly won’t miss a piece-of-shit father like you. She’s going to have a good life now.” I bent and stabbed the blade through his shoe so hard it got embedded in the hardwood floor beneath. His scream of pain echoed off the walls, but the nearest neighbor was several acres away.

  That was why no one had ever heard Molly’s mother screaming or crying each time he beat her.

  Realization dawned in his glazed eyes, and that was when the real fun began.

  CHAPTER ONE

  jack

  Walking up the stairs, I scrubbed my hands over my scruff. I was tired after my usual Saturday shift at Hannigans’. Thursdays were church at the bar, but Fridays and Saturdays, we were open to the public, and we required all hands on deck to keep things from getting crazy.

  My cousin, uncles, and Dad were a
ll there to help out, but we still had trouble keeping up. Between the locals, college kids, and travelers who came from all over the country to get ink from Lyric Thornton, we never knew what each weekend would bring.

  I’d gotten back to my apartment just before three, and after showering, I wanted nothing more than to face-plant in my bed to sleep for the next twenty-four hours. But that would have to wait. I needed to grab a sandwich and then double-check that everything was locked up before I could relax enough to sleep.

  Upstairs, I threw together a ham and cheese sandwich and devoured it in four bites before cleaning up the mess I’d made. It was a communal kitchen, and I didn’t want any of the residents in the apartments on the second and third floors to have to clean up behind me. They had enough on their own plates to have to wait on me too.

  Grabbing a bottle of water, I chugged it down, then tossed the empty container in the recycling bin. I checked all the doors and was about to go back downstairs to my apartment in the basement when I got an alert on my phone that there was movement at the gate.

  Opening the security app, I hit rewind on the recording and watched as an unmarked van dropped off what looked like a bag of trash right in front of the gate. Whoever it was must have been aware of the cameras because they wore ski masks over their faces and gloves on their hands as they tossed the bag on the ground. I had no way of knowing who they were or even their ethnicity from the footage, even though the spotlights had been triggered and glared down on them and their late-model white van. Annoyed, but too tired to deal with illegal trash dumping, I was about to close the app when I saw the bag wiggle.

  “Fuck,” I muttered and took off running.

  Leaving the door wide open would set off the alarm, which would wake up and most likely trigger some of the residents, but I couldn’t worry about that when I needed to get to whoever had just been dropped at the gate.

  The main house was five hundred yards from the gate, and I ran barefoot down the paved driveway. All the security lights were set off as I rushed across the property to the only entrance. I had to punch in the code to get the gates open, and as I waited for enough room to get out, I tried to get a better look at the wiggling bag.

  A muffled whine hit my ears that were already pounding with the blood rushing through my veins. It wasn’t a plastic trash bag, as I’d assumed from the video, but more like a huge duffel-style sack. The moment I had enough room to squeeze through, I was pulling my knife from the sheath strapped to my leg to cut the zip ties that kept the zippers locked together.

  As soon as I got the bag open, I saw matted dark hair and a naked back that was covered in bruises and slashes. Hands were tied with the same zip ties, as were her feet. Her hair reached all the way down her back to the top of her unclothed ass, and I made quick work of getting her untied before carefully turning her over.

  If she was someone from town, there was no way of knowing because her face was beaten so badly, she was unrecognizable. Cursing, I dialed 9-1-1 with bloody fingers. Just as the dispatcher answered, her eyes snapped open, and I saw terror in their light-blue depths. I didn’t know if it was the stark fear in her eyes as she looked at me or something else, but when our gazes locked, I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.

  Ignoring the sensation, I focused on helping her.

  “Shh, easy. I’ve got you, sweetheart.” I tried to soothe her, but my voice must have scared her because she began to tremble. “Fuck. I need an ambulance,” I informed the dispatcher before giving them the address. “And Sheriff Ben Davis. Now!”

  Hanging up before they could ask more questions, I dropped my phone and then carefully placed the woman—girl?—back on the ground so I could pull my shirt over my head. Using it to cover her nakedness, I then started examining her for injuries. Her shallow breathing suggested lung distress, possibly broken ribs. I saw bruises on her stomach, one of which looked like a bootprint in the harsh glare from the security spotlights on the gate. Her jaw was so swollen I couldn’t tell if it was broken or not, but when I touched it, she flinched and gasped with pain.

  “Can you hear me?” I asked, pulling the shirt down over her hips before checking her legs. Maybe a broken ankle. There were also slashes on her thighs like on her back, and blood shone from between her legs and on her dark curls. My hands began to shake with rage just looking at that sign of abuse, and I felt her trembling harder.

  Knowing I needed to rein it in so I didn’t put her into shock from fright, I tried to keep my voice low. “What’s your name?”

  “N-N-Nishia,” she said from between clenched teeth. My hand went back to her jaw, and I realized it was most likely broken after all. That was going to require surgery.

  “Nishia, I’m Jack,” I told her. “I’m going to take care of you, okay? You’re safe now, sweetheart. I’ll keep you safe.”

  “Promise?” she whispered, gasping, and I heard a wheezing sound from her chest. Blood dripped from the corner of her mouth, but I didn’t know if it was from her lips, or internal bleeding. I had no way to determine just how badly she was injured, and I gave a silent “thank you” when I heard the sirens in the distance.

  “I swear.”

  Her eyes rolled back into her head, and she began to seize.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I muttered, holding her head still as foam bubbled from her mouth. Carefully, I rolled her broken body to her side. “Nishia, stay with me.”

  Please.

  By the time Ben arrived, the EMTs had Nishia loaded into the back of the ambulance. She wasn’t stable, but there was no way of getting her that way with what few supplies they possessed.

  “What do we have, Jack?” my cousin by marriage asked as he jogged over to me.

  “No time to give you a detailed report,” I barked. “She’s fucking dying. Make sure everything is locked up here, call my mother, and then meet us at the hospital.”

  The sheriff didn’t question my giving him orders. One look at the fragile body in the back of the emergency vehicle, and he was raising dust as he got shit done, while I climbed into the back with Nelson, the chief EMT. Between the two of us, there wasn’t much room to maneuver around, but I was able to help him, given all the first aid training I had.

  “Her veins keep collapsing,” he griped as he stuck a needle in her arm. “I’m having to shoot this shit straight into her veins without an IV. Poor kid. She’s already been through hell.”

  Creswell Springs was a small town, yet it felt like it took forever to get to the hospital. It wasn’t until the driver braked hard in front of the ER bay and I jumped out to help Nelson pull the gurney out that I realized I was still barefoot and shirtless. Ignoring any discomfort to my feet, I helped push Nishia inside, where Nelson gave a report on her condition.

  “Let’s get a CT, X-rays, and start a central line to get fluids in her,” the doctor ordered the nurses. “Hannigan, is she one of yours?”

  “She is now. Don’t worry about the cost. Sanctuary has her covered.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  jack

  The doctor shot me a scathing look from behind her glasses. Dr. Sandoval was fifty and gave zero fucks about anything but her patients. I respected the hell out of her because she wasn’t scared to tell anyone in this town what she thought, including my aunt Raven, whom even I avoided pissing off. “Did I ask about cost, asshole? What can you tell me about her?”