by Madison Faye
We panted for air as I slowed, rolling us over and pulling her into my arms — her legs still wrapped around me and my hard cock still buried to the hilt inside of her, where I wanted it to always be.
“Love,” I whispered, bringing my lips to hers and kissing her until I lost all track of the world.
The next day, I was going to find the pieces of shit who’d tried to take me and mine out. But that night, I was going to love her with everything I had.
13
Addison
I woke up to him gone. I sighed, stretching out, still naked in his bed, though missing the feel of him next to me. I sank into his pillows, smelling him on them and feeling this fluttery feeling tingle through me. And then of course, I thought of the night before, and the way he’d touched me, and kissed me and made my whole body melt for him. And that fluttery feeling turned into something much hungrier.
I took a deep breath, clearing my head as I slid from the sheets and reached for my clothes. I had a dim, sleepy memory of him asking me before he’d left that morning if I could help Kyrie with breakfast and get her over to Mrs. Weston’s for the morning before I headed to the garage.
I yanked my clothes on and ran a hand through my hair, giving myself a once-over for incriminating things like hickeys that an eight-year-old definitely did not need to see before I slipped out of the bedroom.
“Hey, Kyrie?”
I stuck my head into her bedroom to find it empty — the bed neatly made. I grinned. Ryker was lucky he’d gotten such a great, amazing kid and not a hell-raiser like he’d apparently been when he was younger.
There were noises from down in the kitchen, and I followed them down the stairs.
“Kyrie? Are you—”
“Hi Addison!”
I startled, my lips pulling into a smile at the sight that greeted me in the kitchen. Kyrie was sitting at the kitchen table, in in front of her, lined up in perfect order, were all the ingredients for pancakes.
“Dad says I can’t use the stove, but I got it all ready for you.” She beamed at me. “Can you make me pancakes?”
“Definitely.” I grinned as I stepped into the kitchen and over to her. “Pancakes sound awesome right now.”
“Yeah, pancakes are always awesome,” she said with an easy shrug, like this was common knowledge. “My dad made coffee, by the way.”
“Wonderful,” I sighed as I stepped past her, ruffling her hair as I did. “You want anything in the pancakes? Blueberries? Strawberries?”
“Both!” she crowed, making me smile as I poured the coffee from the pot into a mug.
“Addison?”
“Yeah, honey?”
There was a pause behind me as I brought the coffee to my lips.
“Did you sleep over last night?”
Shit.
My mouth twisted as I tried to backpedal, before I turned and smiled at her. “I— You know what? The stairs up to the apartment can be little tricky when you’re sleepy, and I was so tired that your dad let me stay over.”
Kyrie grinned. “I’m glad.” She looked down for a second before she glanced back at me. “Can you stay over again?”
I smiled. “We’ll see, kiddo.”
“I think you should.”
I laughed. “Okay, how about those pancakes?”
“I think my dad likes you, you know.”
“Well, I like your dad too, Kyrie.”
“No,” she giggled. “I think he looooves you.” She made smoochy “kissy” faces as I blushed furiously and turned to start the stove up.
“Ooookay, pancakes?”
“Yes please!”
After we stuffed ourselves, I brought Kyrie over the very sweet Mrs. Weston’s house down the street. After that, I headed down to the garage to get some stuff done. I was pretty close to catching up to where Larkin had left off, but there was still a ton of paperwork to go through to make sure everything was in order.
Axe and Ryker had closed the garage for the day, and the place was eerily pin-drop silent as I made my way through to the office. I sank into the chair, my head and my heart still reeling from the night before with him, my face blushing at the memory of it. I cranked some music on to cover how weirdly quiet it was without Ryker and Axe and the customers there, and started in on the work.
I made it about half an hour before I hit a snag that I remembered noticing a few days before, and sure enough, there was a note I’d left myself to check in with Larkin about it.
I pulled my phone out of my jeans and started to scroll down to her number.
“Well, well, well.”
I almost screamed, jumping out of my chair and whirling at the sound of his voice.
“What—” I shook my head, my eyes narrowing. “What the fuck are you doing here, Michael?”
My mother’s prick of a boyfriend smiled thinly at me, his lips curling but his eyes still staying those sneering little slits they always were.
I’d gotten a bad vibe from Michael the second my mother had me meet him. He was too smiley. Too friendly, in this really off-putting way. And there was this creepy element to him that I’d never been able to place — that is, until he started hitting on me.
At first, I thought maybe I was just misconstruing what he was saying. Or that he was just trying to be nice to his girlfriend’s daughter, and just wasn’t that great at knowing what to say as a compliment. Like, he’d tell me that the new pair of jeans looked great on me and that he bet I was “driving all the boys wild with the way they fit so tightly.”
…I mean, I rationalized it away. I told myself that I knew what he meant to say, it’s just that it’d come out weird. Right?
But, it kept going. He’d tell me that I had “kissable” lips, and when I’d come back panting from a run and step into the house, it’d seemed like he’d been waiting for me, with another weird little thing to say like “I’ve been wondering what you sound like when you’re out of breath.”
It started weird, and it just got creepier from there. I’d tried to say something to my mother, but then, she never listened to anything I said, and she wasn’t about to start with criticisms of her new beau.
The creepy words turned into creepier actions. A pair of underwear I knew I’d put through the wash just magically disappeared. My clothes drawers — closed when I left for the day — were sometimes slightly ajar when I came home. The bathroom door opened suddenly while I was showering one time, my screech of shock met with a chuckle and a “Oops, didn’t know you were in here!”
He’d tried to walk in on me changing more than once, but it was that last time, when he’d barged in, making me yank my own bedsheets up around me as I whirled to scream at him to get out, that tipped the scales.
“C’mon, Addison,” he’d sneered. “We’ve been tiptoeing around this for months.”
“Get out, Michael!”
“Your mom’s not home, you know,” he’d crooned out, like he was some sort of heartthrob and not this total creep.
“She doesn’t have to know.”
“Get the fuck out!” I’d screamed.
“C’mon, Addison, you know you want some of this. Quit being a prude and just show me what I wanna see. You wanna see my cock? That it? You wanna get a little taste?”
It was when I’d stormed over, sheets around me, grabbed up the fire poker from the fireplace across the room, and brandished it at Michael that he’d finally left. I’d cried after, and it was that night that I’d gone to my mother.
It was that night when I realized he’d gotten to her first and flipped the story around.
She’d screamed at me, and called me a slut, and a bitch, and ungrateful, and told me to go “find some other home to ruin.” I’d stayed at a friend’s that night and called my cousin Katrina, and the rest, as they say, was history.
And now there he was — the fucking asshole himself, standing in the doorway to my little office in the mechanic’s shop up on Blackthorn Mountain.
“What the fuck are you
doing here, Michael?” I hissed, my blood boiling like fire.
“Oh, you know, just checkin’ in on you, Addison.”
“How did you find me?”
He smiled, his eyes narrowing at me. “I’ll always find you, sexy.”
A cold shiver trembled through me. My eyes darted down to the phone in my hand, my thumb hovering over Larkin’s number. I pushed it, sliding the phone behind me on the desk.
“You need to leave, Michael.”
“Addison? Hey! Addison?” I could faintly here Larkin’s voice on phone behind me, and I prayed the man in front of me couldn’t. God, and I prayed she didn’t hang up.
“You’re scaring me, Michael,” I said, loudly.
“Aww, I’m not here to hurt you, baby!” he crooned out, moving into the office. I tensed, backing up against the desk.
“I just missed you.”
“Leave.”
He chuckled as he glanced around the tiny office. “Well, working in a dirty mechanic’s garage are you?”
“You— you shouldn’t be here,” I spat.
His eyes narrowed angry. “No, you shouldn’t be here!” he hissed back. “Addison, this place is disgusting. Plus, I heard around town that you were living with some…. mechanic?” His face soured, like it was a dirty word.
“His name is Ryker,” I said quietly
Michael’s lip curled angrily. “Jesus fuck, Addison!” he bellowed. “You’re of better blood than that!”
“Get out!”
He shook his head. “Nah.”
Suddenly, he kicked the door shut behind him, and my body tightened.
“Don’t you fucking come near me,” I hissed at him. My eyes darted around the room, looking for something to maybe hit him with. Something to hurt him with.
“Addison, Addison, Addison,” he sighed, smiling evilly at me as he started to cross the room.
“What the fuck do you want, Michael!?”
He stopped, and his eyes narrowed at me as that grin slid over his whole face.
“What do I want? Oh, Addison,” he sighed, shrugging his jacket off, his eyes locked on me. “I want what I should have taken for myself a long time ago.”
The scream tore from my lips as he suddenly rushed for me.
14
Ryker
“You’re sure.”
Vlad nodded. Man, the Russian had some nice fucking toys. Leaving the Russian mafia — the Bratva — might have almost killed him, but Vlad had made out with a lot of cash. And the man had gadgets like James fucking Bond. Gadgets like access to a satellite feed though an old friend of his in the Russian space program.
“And this is through a friend of yours, huh?”
“I was supposed to kill him and his entire family and I didn’t.” Vlad shrugged, his tone neutral like it always was. “I’m not sure if that makes us friends.”
I had to grin. Man, these men of Blackthorn. I liked them, and I was pretty fucking particular about who I liked, especially then. But, these guys clicked with me — hell, even the two jocks, Austin and Dallas. These were my kind of people. Strong, fierce, protective of what was theirs. In an alternate universe, I could see us all being in an MC together. For now though, I think “friends” would work.
I nodded at the satellite feed on Vlad’s screen. “So that’s where they went.”
The feed was locked on an old barn on the far side of Blackthorn, near Highway 7. I half knew the location, since I rode out that way sometimes. This was the spot where the two ghosts from our past were hiding. Vlad had used imaging software and his connections with the Russian space agency to track to the bikes after the shooting. They’d veered fucking all over the place, and one had even dropped back and gone its own way for a little bit, but eventually, it’d also shown up at the barn.
This is where those fuckers were hiding out. And this is where I was gonna put them in the ground.
Next to me, Axe growled. “Let’s go.”
“No ‘us,’ just me, man,” I growled.
His face darkened. “Fuck that noise. I’m coming.”
“No, you’re not.”
“The hell I’m—”
“You’ve got two kids on the way.”
“And you have a kid!”
I shot him a hard look, and he snarled right back at me.
“I’m fucking coming.”
“As your president—”
“You’re a president?” I glanced at Vlad as he asked, furrowing his brow at me.
“Of our club.”
“Which no longer exists,” Axe muttered.
Vlad half grinned and looked away, shaking his head.
“I’m fucking comin’ man,” Axe growled lowly, his look as unflinching as I knew his mind was.
“Fine,” I sighed, my jaw tightening.
“You two packing?”
I glanced back at Vlad. “At the shop, in the safe.”
“You don’t have time. Here.”
The Russian stood and walked across the big office of his mountain house. He flipped down a keypad on the wall and punched in a code and suddenly, one of the bookshelves slid back.
Axe and I blinked.
“Holy shit, dude…”
Vlad had enough of an armory tucked behind that bookshelf to arm a third world revolution.”
“Whatever you need, it’s yours,” he growled.
I glanced at Axe. He glanced at me.
“You ready to finish this shit?”
I nodded. “Let’s do this.”
We killed our engines around the bend and out of sight from the barn, and moved in on foot, guns out. It was quiet as we got closer. Fuck, it was too quiet, and we both knew it. These two we were after weren’t fucking ninjas or special forces or any shit like that. These were too wild-ass biker types. There should have been Lynyrd Skynyrd blaring from a radio and a drunken argument going on. But it was silent.
We crept up to the side door, a shotgun across each of our backs and pistols ready in our hands. Axe glanced at me and nodded. I nodded back and held up three fingers.
Two.
One.
We rolled from the wall, feet kicking the door down as we smashed through — roaring, guns brandished, and fire in our eyes.
“What the fuck…”
We spotted Jesse in an instant, and it took me about half a second to realize he was already dead. The piece of shit was tied to a chair in the middle of the place, gagged and lifeless, bloodstains all over him.
I spat at him. Fuck him. The dead were dead, but there’d be no sympathy from Axe or me towards this asshole. This was a man who’d helped murder our entire club. He could rot in hell for all I cared.
“The fuck happened here,” Axe said quietly. His eyes darted around the barn, the gun clenched in his hands. “And where the fuck is—”
The footstep behind us was quiet, but not quiet enough for me. I whirled, my gun up at pointed at Stone’s face — his pointed right at mine.
Stone hadn’t changed much. Still rough looking, still with those piercing eyes and that haunted look to them. The man was still built like a brick house, his t-shirt stretched tight across his huge, muscled frame. He had some new ink that I could see on those arms though, that’s for sure.
“Fuck, Ryk,” he swore, shaking his head. “How the fuck are you—”
“Drop it!” I roared.
“Ryker, listen to—”
“Fuck you,” I hissed, storming right over to him and yanking the gun out of his hand, tossing it to Axe. “You shut the fuck up!”
“Ryker—!”
“You tried to murder my family,” I roared into his face, pressing the gun to his jaw. “You piece of fucking—”
“I was trying to stop them from being murdered!”
I tensed, my trigger finger freezing.
“Ryker, Axe! You know me, guys!”
“We knew you,” Axe snarled, moving closer with his gun trained on Stone.
“Goddamnit, listen to me—”
Stone growled at me.
“Those bullets all over your house- - that look like my fucking work? You ever known me to miss?” His piercing eyes narrowed, that chiseled jaw of his clenching. “Fuck, you ever known me to use anything but a fuckin’ shotgun anyways?”
“You set the fucking garage on fire, you shit,” Axe hissed.
“I set your dumpster on fire, you dick.”
“For?”
“To get your asses up and alert!” Stone roared. “I’ve been tailing this shitbag—” he nodded his chin at Jesse “—for a month now. When I followed him here, and spotted you two?” He blew air out through his lips, shaking his head. “Fuck I didn’t know how the hell you two were alive, but there you were. I wanted to warn you without giving up my cover. I didn’t know if Jesse had other men watching his back, and I’d worked too fucking hard to trail him to get busted this close to clipping him.”
“So you set a fire?” I grumbled.
“He was never exactly the subtle type,” Axe muttered under his breath.
“I heard that,” Stone growled back.
Axe tensed. “Fuck you. You’re supposed to be dead.”
“I think we’re all supposed to be dead, brother.”
Stone lowered his hand to the hem of his shirt. I tensed, but he moved slowly, pulling his shirt up.
“Fuck, man,” Axe muttered under his breath.
There, among the ink and muscles covering his torso, was something else new on Stone — some mean-looking, vicious scars.
“Shit, Stone,” I said quietly.
“They put a full clip through me that night at the clubhouse, Ryk. But they couldn’t keep me down. I pulled myself out of there, fucking fading out on my feet, and dragged my ass to that truck stop that was out on Route 8. I paid a long-haul guy to get my ass back up-country, to my gramps’ place. Gramps patched me up and I laid low until I could heal up.”
I whistled lowly. “Fucking hell, man.”
Stone shook his head, giving each of us a hard look. “Shit, boys, I thought I was the only one who made it out until I saw you two the other day.”
