Outlaw Souls MC Box Set: Books 1-6

by Hope Stone

  The music stopped. “What kind of pie?” she said, through the closed door.

  I grinned, knowing I’d won. “Whatever kind you want. We can go to Tiny’s.”

  The door opened a crack and I saw one brown eye and a pert little nose. “Can I get a burger and fries, too?”

  “Only if you're on the bike in five minutes.”

  The door slammed closed as much as a door can slam when it’s only open three inches and I heard her banging around in her room.

  I grabbed my keys, shrugged on my jacket, got the phone out of the charger, and headed out the front door.

  Tiny’s was a diner located diagonally across the street from the Blue Dog Saloon. Because of its proximity to the biker bar, it was the best spot to grab a bite to absorb all that alcohol. Not that I drank alcohol. I’d never touched the stuff, honestly. After what that shit did to my life? No fucking way.

  Tiny Jimenez was one of the first patches in our MC. He’d run with us for years until his wife Peggy finally got him to give it up. He bought the diner, which used to be a Spires, and now he gets the best of both worlds. He gets to hang out with bikers, but also have a happy wife.

  Happy wife, happy life, isn’t that what they say?

  I was on the bike listening to the engine idle. This machine was such an extension of my body that I could tell just by its sounds whether or not it needed a tune up.

  Lily came out, grabbed her helmet, and slid behind me. She’d grown up in this exact position—on the back of my bike, holding on to the one person she could always count on.

  Tiny’s was only a couple of miles away from the apartment complex we all shared. Outlaw Souls had bought the whole building and almost everybody lived on the property. The exceptions were Yoda and Chalupa. Yoda lived in a largely Asian community downtown with his 101-year-old mother, and Chalupa lived outside of La Playa in the neighbouring city of Hacienda. We’d been offering him a place to live with us for years, but he said his mother would kill him if he left home. My guess was that she didn’t know anything about his association with us and he wanted to keep it that way.

  Lily and I didn’t try to talk over the engine, and so I gathered my thoughts about what to say to her. I had to be careful not to piss her off because then she’d shut down and not listen. But I also needed to be direct enough that she understood the danger she was putting herself in. The Las Balas were not people to fuck with.

  If she really thought that kid loved her, then she was as stupid as she was beautiful. I couldn’t just come out and tell her that he was using her, though. She’d probably just get up and walk out.

  “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” I could hear Yoda’s advice in my mind.

  As I pulled in the dirt lot next to Tiny’s, I was glad to see that no one was here. There were customers, of course. But no bikes, which meant no distractions while I was talking to Lily.

  We locked our helmets and Lily started talking like the teenager she was. “So in chemistry class this bitch Kayla decided that she was just going to copy off of my work like that. So I said, ‘Bitch, do your own fucking work.’ Like, I’m not about to get my grade lowered because she’s too dumb to actually understand chemistry.”

  Despite her stubborn streak and rebellious nature, Lily was actually a really good student—when she wanted to be. If she was interested in a subject or felt the teacher respected her, she’d work her ass off. But if she thought the subject was stupid or had a problem with the teacher, she’d just shut down and not do any work whatsoever.

  I held the door open for her and we walked back to our usual booth. I liked it because it gave me a clear view of the door and all the exits, and our backs were to a wall, not a window. In La Playa you can never be too safe, as drive-by shootings were a real thing around here. I should know. I was one of the best.

  “Hey, Ryder,” the waitress said as she came up to our booth. Nodding to Lily, she asked, “You want your same order? Cabellero Burger and curly fries, with a vanilla shake and apple pie a la mode for dessert?”

  Lily looked at me hopefully and I nodded as Julie wrote down the order. “What about you, handsome? Anything look good to you?” She winked at me.

  Lily rolled her eyes and got out her phone. It was always embarrassing when women hit on me in front of her. For both of us.

  Julie Kim was harmless, though. She’d been working here since Tiny opened the place, and I honestly figured that if I did respond to her flirtation she wouldn’t know what to do with it. She was all talk because it led to higher tips.

  “I’ll get a breakfast burrito and black coffee, please.” I folded the menu and handed it to Julie. She appeared to be the only one here today, which was odd. They usually had more than one waitress on the floor. “Where’s Rocky?” I asked, scanning the room.

  “We hired a new girl and she’s training her in the back. Why? Ya need somethin’?”

  I shook my head. “No. Just curious.” Rocky and I had hooked up a couple of times last year and I tended to avoid her now. She’d wanted more but, well, I just wasn’t feeling it.

  Julie went to put our orders in and I turned my attention to Lily. “Lil. I need to talk to you. Can you put your phone down?”

  “Uh huh,” she said, never taking her eyes off the phone. “Just a sec. I’m texting Jax.”

  “You text her day and night, Lily. This is important.” I put my hand over hers. “Please?”

  She sighed dramatically and put the phone aside. “Fine. What?”

  “I need to talk to you about Las Balas.”

  Her face started to get angry again and she said, “I don’t want to talk about this, Ryder. I know about Las Balas. Scorpion told me all about them and said that you were going to try and fill my head with all kinds of lies about them. I told him he was wrong, but I guess not.”

  “Scorpion is a prospect, Lily. Do you honestly think he knows what really goes on? He’s not even a patch yet.”

  “And you think you do?” she said, eyes flaring.

  Before I could answer, Julie came by with my coffee and Lily’s milkshake.

  “I do.” It was such a contradiction to see her sucking on a milkshake with whipped cream and a cherry on top like a child while we were talking about one of the most vicious clubs in La Playa. “I need to tell you a story.”

  Lily looked at me with those big brown eyes and took a long drink from her milkshake. I’d never wanted to tell her what I was about to say, but it was something she needed to know. I’d done my best to shield her from the realities of the life we led, but it was time for her to know the truth.

  “Remember when you were in the 6th grade, there was a girl at your school that was a year ahead of you? Annie McConnell?”

  Lily pushed the empty milkshake aside just as Julie came over with our order. The plate was barely down when she grabbed a fistful of fries and shoved them in her mouth. “Yeah. She was killed when her family went on vacation in South America. It was some kind of boating accident or something?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Except she wasn’t killed in a boating accident.”

  “She wasn’t? That’s what everybody said.”

  “I know. Principal Carlson met with the police chief and they came up with a cover story to tell the parents so that no one would freak out about what really happened. That kind of shit can destroy a community.”

  “What really happened?”

  “Annie was at McDonald’s after school one day with her friends.”

  “Yeah, we all went there after school. It’s one block away.”

  “Right. So on her way home from McDonald’s someone grabbed her from the parking lot.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. That parking lot is near a Target and a shoe store. Someone would have seen it.”

  I shook my head. “The guys who grabbed her were pros, Lily. They waited until she went around the corner of the shoe store and then grabbed her, put a bag over her head, and shoved her in the back of a van with
in thirty seconds. She didn’t even have time to scream.”

  I could see the information processing in Lily’s eyes as she continued eating.

  “Within two hours she was on a plane to South America.”

  “Why South America?”

  “Because, Lily. She was a pretty, white, twelve-year-old girl. Probably a virgin, too. The kidnappers sold her for a fuck ton of money.”

  “They sold her? To who?”

  “That’s what sex traffickers do, Lily. They sell people. They sold her to the head of a massive child prostitution ring in Colombia.”

  Lily stopped eating. “So, what happened to her then? Is she still there?”

  “No. She was there for two days and she tried to escape. They shot her in the back and left her body in the desert.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Hawk told us. He knew the guy who kidnapped her. He was bragging about it.”

  She shook her head. “That’s horrible. But I don’t understand what it has to do with me?”

  “Do you know who did it? Who kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl and sold her to be trafficked and killed? Do you know who did that, Lily?”

  “Who?”

  “El Diablo. The very guy in the Las Balas who is sponsoring your boyfriend Scorpion.”

  Lily’s face went pale.

  “And you know what’s worse? He did it as his initiation into the club. He was just a prospect when he did it.”

  She sat there for a minute. I could see the wheels turning in her mind as she processed what I’d just told her.

  I wanted to give it a minute to sink in, so I started in on my breakfast burrito. It was a little cold by now, but still damn good. Tiny’s knew how to make good food.

  Lily shook her head. “Yeah, no. I don’t think they do that shit anymore, Ryder. Maybe it was like that back in the day. But Scorpion says…”

  “Back in the day? Lily, that was five years ago!” Before I could finish the thought, though, something caught the corner of my eye that distracted me from the conversation. Not something. Someone.

  I didn’t as much see her as sense her. The energy shifted in the room as Rocky and this woman came out from the kitchen. I felt her presence fill the room. It was like a fog or a fragrance that came all the way over to our table and wrapped me up in it.

  My cock instantly sprang to life, straining to come out of my jeans. My eyes were locked on her like a target through a scope. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was stare at her. She had blond hair tied back in a braid and was wearing faded blue jeans that hugged an ass that looked like it should be on a bike. Her T-shirt clung to a tiny waist. Then she turned around and I saw her face.

  My God. Am I hallucinating? She was the most perfect woman I’d ever seen. What the fuck was she doing here in Tiny’s?

  “Hello? Earth to Ryder?” Lily was talking but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the woman.

  This was not good. Not good at all.

  Paige

  “So we keep the sauces right here, and when it’s slow, you fill up the individual cups and put them on a tray that goes here.” Rocky was pointing to a shelf stacked with trays below the counter.

  My first day was going pretty well. The woman who’d hired me, Tiny’s wife, wasn’t here today so they were having another waitress, Rocky, show me what to do. I’d mentioned that I had never waitressed before, but I didn’t think it sunk in. She was going really fast.

  Rocky was one of those women who tried too hard to look tough. Her hair was dyed overly black and she had a nose piercing. Not the pretty stud on the side like some of the girls in Verde Hills have, but a septum piercing that made her nose look like a bull’s. Her full lips were outlined in bright red lipstick and she tried to do that winged eyeliner thing, but she wasn’t very good at it yet.

  We had to wear T-shirts that said Tiny’s on them, and it was a bit ironic that her giant breasts jutted out so far that you could barely read the word “Tiny.”

  I wasn’t here to give her a makeover, though. I was here to earn enough money to get out of the shitty apartment I’d found myself in and hold me over until I could get a real job.

  But the social justice part of me felt bad for Rocky. She looked like she’d had a rough life.

  “How’s it going, Paige?” The other waitress that was here today, Julie, came up behind us and grabbed a couple of the sauces. “Rocky showing you everything okay?”

  “Yeah, thanks, Julie. I think I’m getting it.” I wasn’t sure of that at all, but I didn’t want her to know that. I needed this job.

  “Good to know. Let me know if you need anything.” She said this as she walked over to the heat lamp to grab a couple of plates that were ready.

  Just then, the window began to rattle and for a second I wondered if we were having an earthquake.

  Rocky pulled a tube of lipstick out of her jeans and slathered even more of the red stuff on her lips, pushed up her already pushed-up breasts and said, “Come on, Paige. The boys are here.”

  “The boys?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Bikers. This place is a biker hangout. There’s a bar across the street where the members of Outlaw Souls have their meetings and stuff. They come here to eat and then go there to get shitfaced.”

  I was looking out the big window that overlooked the dirt lot and saw five or six guys on motorcycles pulling in.

  “Are they trouble?” I asked.

  She laughed a raspy laugh that told me she either smoked or used to. “You can say that, honey. But not the kind of trouble you mean. They’re harmless. Just let ‘em grab your ass or brush your tits and you’ll get a nice tip.”

  Uhhh I would most definitely not be doing that, thank you.

  Before I could respond, the doors whooshed open and several large, leather-clad men darkened the doorway. “Come on, Chalupa. Get away from the fuckin’ claw machine. You have enough of those goddamn things. I’m hungry.”

  The guy they were calling Chalupa slid around the largest one holding a Sonic the Hedgehog toy.

  Rocky wiped her hands on a towel and raced to the register to greet “the boys.” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to follow her or not, so I just stood where I was.

  It was like watching some reality TV show. Rocky practically sashayed over to the men, laughing and touching their arms as she walked them back to a large table. Sure enough, the Chalupa guy grabbed her ass and instead of kneeing him in the balls like I would have, Rocky just giggled.

  “It’s pretty disgusting, isn’t it?” Julie said from behind me.

  “It’s...different.” I didn’t want to badmouth anyone on my first day.

  “Can you take this pie to table 12? Put a scoop of ice cream on it first. I have to take my fifteen.” She handed me a warm plate of apple pie.

  “Which table is that?” I asked, looking around.

  “The one with the guy who is staring at you like you’re his next meal.” She nodded to the side and, I’m not kidding, time literally stopped.

  It was like one of those movies where everything slows down. I could hear Rocky laughing and the clinking of glasses. There was the sizzle of the grill and the smell of the pie in my hand. But the entire universe narrowed down to table 12 and the guy who was staring right at me from across the room.

  It was the craziest thing, but I felt like I knew him. Not in the “don’t I know you from somewhere” kind of way. But like “knew him” on a soul level. My mom was super into past lives and shit and I’d always laughed at her for it. Looking at this guy, though, I had to wonder. Why did he seem so familiar?

  “Paige? The ice cream is over there.” Julie pointed to the freezer. “You good?”

  “What? Oh yeah.” I came back to reality and time moved back to its normal pace again. “Go ahead. Take your break.”

  “Okay. Be back in fifteen.”

  I was aware of him watching me as I scooped out the ice cream and placed it on the pie. I grabbed the can of whipped cr
eam and headed over to table 12.

  The hairs on my skin stood up as his gaze went up and down my body as I walked toward them. It was the strangest feeling—as if I were being drawn into a black hole by some magnetic force.

  I got to the table and managed to set the plate of pie down. He was still looking at me with those black eyes, and the girl he was with was looking back and forth between us with a disgusted look on her face. “Ew. Ryder. Stop looking at her like that.”

  Ryder cleared his throat and looked away. “The pie’s for her,” he said, motioning to the girl.

  “You want whipped cream?” I asked, surprised that my voice sounded normal.

  “Yeah. Lots.”

  I was looking at Ryder while spraying the whipped cream on the pie. I guess I must have been distracted by those long eyelashes or those full lips that looked like he’d been eating cherries. Or maybe it was the tiny scar under his left eye. Whatever it was, I was obviously not paying attention because the girl said, “Uhhh…that’s good?”

  I looked at her plate and burst out laughing. I’d put so much whipped cream on that you couldn’t even see the pie anymore. It was literally just a mound of whipped cream.

  “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry.” I said, embarrassed. “It’s my first day. Do you want me to get you another one?”

  Ryder spoke and his deep voice took me by surprise. I wondered if he was a singer, because that baritone sound would be incredible in a church choir. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who went to church, though.

  “There’s no such thing as too much cream.” As soon as he said that, my pussy felt like it had been zapped by an electrical shock.

  “Okay, y’all are gross.” The girl slid out of the booth. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom while you old people finish this flirting thing you’re doing and then I’m gonna come back here and eat my pie.”

  As she walked away, Rocky came up behind me. “Is everything okay here?” She spied the plate of whipped cream and leaned over to grab it. Ryder’s eyes never left me.

  “We’re fine, Rocky. Leave the pie. She is coming right back.” He practically barked the command at her, and she just sort of slunk away.