“Fuck,” I hissed out as the security door slowly slid open for us.
“Jay?” Anna questioned in her soft way.
“Shh,” I hummed into her dark brown locks as I kissed the top of her head. “I’m going to get you to your family, Anna. Then we’ll find out what’s going on, okay? I don’t know any more than you do.”
“Okay,” she managed through her tiny little sobs. Jesus, this could not be happening right now. Not to my best friend. He was just about to start his life with his woman and a kid on the way. I wondered, briefly, where Gretchen was and if she was all right, but then the double doors opened fully, and my mother was standing there as if she’d been waiting on us all along.
“Come on,” she told me as she started to usher us into a small waiting room where Crow and a few of the other guys were already gathered. The rest of the Brothers clan was missing from the room, so I assumed they were with Toby, or getting an update. Before we managed to get inside, raised voices caught our attention and I moved back out toward the room just two down from where we were. We stepped into the space and listened as Gretchen told a cop what had happened with that fucking whore, Seneca. She had been the one to take T-Bone down.
I couldn’t believe the shit I was hearing. Not only had the bitch caused him to dump his bike while his pregnant woman was on it, she took advantage of the fact that his leg was somehow trapped, and she stuck a fucking pipe through his gut. Jesus fucking Christ. This could not be happening. It didn’t even sound real, and yet, I heard the anguish, and the truth in Gretchen’s words. My father turned to see that Anna was there with me, jaw nearly to the floor after hearing that, and he scooted to her side, tucking the girl into his body as if to shield her from the truth. I didn’t think anything could shield her any longer though.
Lucy and Double-D gave one another a look as the staff informed them that they’d get an update as soon as they moved everyone to the other room that had been prepared. I didn’t like that look at all. The knots in my stomach that had failed to loosen all day grew tighter. After hearing Gretchen’s story, I had very little doubt that T-Bone would have survived the wreck. I also had very little faith that we were going to get good news about him being impaled by a fucking filthy pipe that bitch had found lying about.
It didn’t take long, once we were all in the room, for all hell to break loose. The doctor stayed outside the door to speak to the detective, leaving us to wonder a bit longer. Lucy glanced at the door, then Double-D, before her legs gave out and she took both herself and Double-D to the floor. Gut-wrenching sobs burst from her on a strangled cry of raw emotion. She knew. They didn’t have to tell her. D knew too. They grieved there on the floor of the waiting room while everyone looked on in shock at first, before the doctor came back into the room and nodded as he saw the parents of his patient already knew what he had to tell them.
“I’m so sorry,” the doctor started to say. Somewhere, in the background, I heard Anna screech out, “Daddy?” The words the doctor was saying hit me in a warped way as if they were coming to me from under water. “We tried everything, but the damage was too severe, and…” that was all I managed to hear before the ringing in my ears grew too loud. This couldn’t be right. He had been there only hours earlier, talking to me. He’d reluctantly told me his good news. Reluctantly, because we hadn’t yet patched our shit up. We were supposed to have time to do that. I was supposed to go away and come back to a fresh start, to be an uncle to that kid of his. The kid he was going to be an amazing father for – better than either of ours ever was.
I glanced around the room again, taking in all the bodies, but not really seeing them. T-Bone’s family was there, crumpled together in a heap on the floor, their pain washing over the room in waves as sobs echoed back at them. The knots in my gut unfurled only to be replaced with an empty darkness that settled inside of me. I had caused this. If the rift in T-Bone’s family hadn’t been there, they would have already known about Gretchen, something would have been done about Seneca sooner. Hell, I hadn’t even known the whore had been that much of a problem. I’d seen her eyeing him a few times, but just figured she wanted what she couldn’t have.
I knew the feeling in an oddly different way. I’d been eyeing him too whenever he was around, because I missed our easy friendship we’d once had. I missed him before he was gone, and it was all my fault. Now, we would never have that relationship again. There was no time left to make things right with the man who had been a brother to me pretty much my whole life. T-Bone had been the voice in my heart that always tugged me the right way and kept me on track. That was before I screwed up. Now he was just gone. There was no redemption possible. A delicate little thing inside of me cracked, and that pain washed over me in violent waves. My brother was gone. My best friend, no longer here.
Everyone in the room had someone to lean on, and then there was me, cracked right down the middle and not a damn person noticed. Maybe they just all felt what I’d known all along. I was tainted, wrong, the poison in the well. This was all down to me. Toby had been wise to get far from me. His problem was that he hadn’t done it sooner.
CHRISTINA
The note stayed crumpled in my hand as I sat on the hard, wooden floor of my bedroom. I had been with Steven going on five years now, and I never thought it would end like this. Granted, I was weary of what was going on with him lately. He hadn’t been mean to me so much as he had seemed almost resentful whenever we were together. It had been breaking my heart, but I didn’t know why he would possibly feel that way. I was standing by his career decision while I finished up school. We had been living together for a little more than two years now and, at first, that had seemed great. It had actually bolstered our relationship again for a short time. Then he went back to being a bit distant and being gone for work more and more.
The crinkled ruin of paper in my palm was a reminder of how wrong I had been about us. Never once had I suspected him of cheating. I held the damn proof in my hands though. Words, written in his imperfect scrawl across the page, the last ones I would ever get from him. Now, I could see it, and it made me wonder. It had been after I moved into the dorms on campus that things began to change a bit for us. I figured it was just down to being more involved in school and him in work and school. His note though, it made me wonder if that wasn’t where it all began. How could I have been so blind?
Christina,
I met her that first year we were in college. There was something instantly there that had always been missing with us. Chemistry, maybe. She wouldn’t let me leave you though. There were other things to worry about, and it almost broke us. We took a break for a while. That was when I moved in with you. I tried to get back on track with you the way things should have been all along if I’d never met her, but I couldn’t get her out of my heart.
There’s so much I can’t say to you because I promised I wouldn’t. But I can’t do this any longer. It’s too much. It’s hurting you. I’m miserable, and now… now… she’s going to have my baby. I should be excited about that, right? The love of my life is giving me the child I always dreamed of having. Only, she still refuses to let me tell you, to walk away from you. I don’t understand. Nothing is okay anymore. I lost my job yesterday because I took off again to be with her. To find out this news. To hear her tell me that my family had to remain a secret.
I’m sorry, Christina, for all the pain I’ve caused you. I thought I loved this woman, but had she felt the same, she wouldn’t be doing this. I feel I let the chemistry control me, and in the process, I’ve probably lost you both, the chance to be a father, a family, and now my livelihood as well. All for a woman who didn’t care enough to be mine. I know it seems unfair of me to tell you this about another woman, but I think you’ll truly understand because you’ve always had such a good heart. You were truly my best friend for all these years we’ve known one another. Please, don’t think that you didn’t hold a special place in my heart, because you always did. I’m so damn confused
and torn all the time. Between our friendship and that passionate love with her. It’s had my guts twisted for years and I can’t do it any longer.
I’m leaving everything to you, but I hope in your heart, when she comes to you with the truth that you will help her and my child out. You’re a good woman, so I know you will. I did love you too. It was just a different love.
Yours,
Steven
Tears dropped steadily down my face as I soaked in the sentiment. Yours. Had I ever really been his? Had he ever really cared about me? He’d been with another woman for most of our relationship according to this. We had two years without her. That was it, and that had been during high school. Then I had been sharing him with someone for the past three. I felt sick again. I scrambled to get up off the floor and just barely made it to the toilet in time to hurl up all the sadness and anger that was twisting up my insides. How could he have done this to me? To us? To her? Jesus, somewhere out there was a woman who was pregnant with his baby and she was about to get this news too. He had killed himself. Rather than deal with the fallout of his decisions like a grown man, he had taken himself out of the equation and left me to clean up the mess.
He left me like this knowing my past. I had become an orphan, put into the system when I was thirteen because I had no one. My mother had finally given up on her life after losing my dad to another woman when I was ten. He refused to come back. When he refused to see me too, refused to acknowledge that I was his in front of his new woman, she took her own life, but not before taking his too. I lost both of my parents to a situation involving another woman. Now, I’d just lost my husband in a similar way. He knew. He had to know what this would do to me.
My heart ached. My soul was shattered. Everyone I ever tried to love in life ended up leaving me. I hadn’t been good enough for my father. My mother wasn’t strong enough to stay for me either. Now, my own husband had taken himself out of the equation after admitting to me that I hadn’t been enough for him either. There was a taint on my soul. There had to be. I drove people to madness and death. For the briefest of moments, I thought maybe I should join them all. If my being gone saved lives, then maybe that was how it should be.
“Fuck that!” I shouted into the bathroom, my own voice echoing back at me angrily as it bounced off the walls around me. “Fuck them!” I screamed into the emptiness surrounding me. Fuck everyone in my life who thought I wasn’t good enough to hang on for. That was on them, not me! I would keep telling myself that over and over again until I believed it. I had to, otherwise I’d end up just like them.
Chapter 1
First Look
J-Bird (Age 23)
The first time I saw her, she was nothing, but a body splayed out atop a grave, her tears spilling into the grass that looked as even and grown over as what was around T-Bone’s grave. Her grief wasn’t new, but her sobs were so heartrending I felt her grief as if it were my own. Hell, I carried my own to the cemetery that day. I was visiting my best friend, and the fact that I was actually owning up to the knowledge that he was now dead and gone was a first. I still didn’t know what to do about it, how to let out the turmoil I held inside that threatened to drown me. She made my grief palpable in that moment, as if she was bleeding out all the things I was feeling with T-Bone’s loss. I wanted to go to the little slip of a woman with pink streaks running through her otherwise brown hair, to wrap my arms around her, and offer a comfort that she seemed to desperately need.
Maybe that was just my own wounded heart speaking though. Letting myself dig that deeply into my own feelings would have left me too raw and instead I had tried to tamp it down and keep it all from spilling over. I was supposed to be this tough, untouchable, unflappable man. I wore the jacket, I bore the ink, I breathed the rough riding life that I was born into. I was an Aces High brother through and through, but lately, since T-Bone, I’d been wondering if it was enough. Being honest with myself would mean acknowledging that I had been feeling that way before T-Bone died too. Watching this tiny little fairy of a woman drowning in her sorrow on the cool ground as her heart tried to dig down to whomever she’d buried there, I knew without a doubt that the club wasn’t enough anymore. Something was missing from my life, and it took seeing this woman’s grief to realize it. She had unknowingly released me from the binds that were keeping me tied to the people who only reminded me of my own failings and a loss I still couldn’t process, let alone shake.
Rain began pouring free of the overburdened clouds above our heads causing the angel in the grass to finally look up. It was the first time I’d seen her face, so pale and full of pain, yet otherworldly beautiful. The raindrops danced along her porcelain skin, blending with her tears and washing something away right before my eyes. The light inside this woman that had been evident moments before, even in her grief, dimmed as the droplets from heaven washed that special part of her away along with her grief. I knew that feeling and, more than anything, I wanted to take it from her and ease that burden. I took a step towards her, to do just that, when Deck made his presence known.
“You coming?” My brother’s voice called out over the incessant drops, and I turned to watch as he scooted my sister-n-law, T-Bone’s sister, toward the truck we had all arrived in. We had known the weather was going to turn bad even as we came to pay our respects to our fallen brother.
“Yeah,” I answered above the din, and when I turned back to go see if the woman in the grass was okay, she had vanished, leaving only the limp grass where her body had lain so long as evidence that she had ever been there. “Damn,” I muttered to myself. I had hoped to make sure she got out of this cemetery okay before the storm really picked up. My curiosity would not be quelled though. Moving with a purpose, I glanced down at the tombstone the girl had been laid out in front of and shuddered at what I saw. The name became a complete blank to me, because it didn’t matter. The date was what struck. It happened to be the same date that was etched on T-Bone’s grave. The little fairy woman had lost someone she loved the same day I lost my best friend. I turned quickly, not knowing what to do with that, and continued on to the truck. The whole way there I found myself wishing that Ever and Deck hadn’t talked me into riding with them. I could use the punishing rain on my body to wake me from this miserable existence I’d been dwelling in.
The nameless woman had managed to wake me up though. She made me feel something again besides the numbness, and I didn’t think the result was going to be tolerable. That made seeing Phoenix at the clubhouse look like the perfect plan. This place, the people in it, and the memories were choking me. I couldn’t stay.
“When are you heading out?” I asked Phoenix as soon as I made my way to him. He had been sitting at the bar scoping out his surroundings.
“As soon as possible,” he muttered. “This place is depressing lately,” he admitted and then cringed considering who he was saying that to.
I shrugged my shoulders. “You’re not wrong. You’re also not getting any pussy here, if that’s what you keep hoping for. Women inside the clubhouse are locked down now to include only those who are brought in and the men feel up to babysitting.”
“Kind of understandable considering,” he offered. I knew he understood why it was being done. Still, it made for a shitty visit to our club for brothers who were used to having the free pussy here to service them when they came off the road.
“There’s always the strip clubs. Plenty of willing pussy at any of them.” He wrinkled his nose up at that.
“Guess I’ve been in the Dakotas too long before heading here. They have a policy about mixing business and pleasure up there. Not that you’d know that by the way some of the guys carry on, but the dancers are usually off limits.”
“I can understand that. Never went there with the dancers here, myself. Figured it wasn’t worth the drama with me working there all the time.” I glanced around to make sure no one else would hear me before I asked the question that had burning me up from the inside. Phoenix was a nomad
who did security work on the concert circuit. I wasn’t sure how he fell into the gig, but it kept him traveling, and that was exactly what I wanted to be doing.
“You feel up to a tag-a-long?”
He turned and narrowed his eyes, taking me in. “You sure that’s what you want?”
I shook my head in the negative. It wasn’t about what I wanted, really. “I’m positive it’s what I need right now.”
“Then I have room. I’m headed to go sub in for a band I used to play with though. You up for the wild concert life for a few weeks?”
“Sounds like the perfect escape,” I told him. The fact that he was actually going to play with one of the bands suddenly brought a little clarity to the question as to how he got into the security business on concert gigs. It didn’t matter what his working capacity on this trip was though. I just needed the fucking escape.
The thing about perfect escapes is that you can run for a while, but the shit you’re running from always catches up to you in the end. While it’s catching up life doesn’t sit idly by waiting for you either. I glanced over at the woman who used to be one of my best friends and was now my sister-in-law. I knew that better than anyone. I thought I had time to fuck around, live it up, and then claim her for myself. I fucked that shit up so royally, she still barely spoke to me now and the woman I thought was going to be my old lady one day is now my brother’s wife and his old lady. Running from the fear I had of not getting enough life experience cost me. It cost me huge, and every time I saw my brother gazing happily at his woman, I felt the decisions I’d made stab me in the gut all over again. Seeing her also reminded me that things were not put to rest between me and my other best friend, T-Bone, before he died. He never had the chance to forgive me for costing him precious time with his sister, and the way we left things haunted me. I was a blight on their family. Getting away was the only balm I could offer them or myself now. Damn if I wasn’t going to take it.
The Killing Ride Page 2
