by Krane, Kasey
“No, no helping,” Butcher said mildly, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Knight’s boots move backwards, out of range. I wiggled up onto my knees and then back onto my haunches and then up from there, swaying from the pounding blood in my head.
Oh God, there’s a gun in his hand. No wonder Knight backed away.
Of course there’d be a gun in his hand. He wasn’t going to greet Knight with a bouquet of roses.
That blow to my head was seriously screwing with my ability to think straight.
I stared at Knight, trying to figure out what the game plan was. Because surely Knight had a plan. He wouldn’t just come in here without a plan, right?
He didn’t have a bulletproof vest on, though, so whatever his plan was, I hoped to God that it included a way of dodging bullets.
“She’s standing. Now you can take the ropes off her.” Knight’s voice was terrifyingly quiet in the electric atmosphere.
Butcher cocked an eyebrow at him.
“You seem to think that you’re the one in charge here, half breed. Leia is tied up and I’m pointing a gun straight at you. So I suggest you tell me when the next Dead Legion meeting is going to be, and hand over your keys. Front gate and the clubhouse.”
“Next Thursday at 7 pm,” Bishop said, walking into the room, pointing his gun at Butcher. “I’d welcome you to attend, brother, but I seem to recall that you made a promise to stay the fuck out of Deming.”
“I personally would plant your pipe bombs under the awnings around back next to the diesel tanks,” Judge said, his long, lanky body barreling through the door. “It’ll make a bigger explosion that way. Blowing up a chain-link fence is so…underwhelming, don’t you think?”
Knight began to edge towards me but Butcher’s eyes, wide with panic, swung towards me and then he lunged, wrapping his arm around me shoulders, pulling me against his chest.
“The next person to make a move earns this bitch a hole in the head,” he snarled, pressing the barrel to my temple. I couldn’t help it - I whimpered as I felt the cold metal ring jab into my skull.
“I never liked you much,” Bishop drawled, “but even for you, Butcher, to use a girl as a shield? Such a baby.”
An Outlaws snuck up behind Bishop and I squeaked in panic. I felt the barrel of the gun jam harder into my head as the Outlaws’s arm snuck around Bishop’s neck, pressing the barrel of his gun against Bishop’s head. Bishop stiffened and the terror in my chest only grew.
“Such a fucking pussy,” Bishop said, his brown eyes glowing with disgust. “Do you always encourage your men to sneak around instead of fighting like men?”
With a roar, Butcher pulled his gun away from my temple to shoot Bishop, and I took advantage of his distraction to dive to the left, slamming into the floor again on my left arm, crying from the pain of it reverberating through my body but not even caring because I just had to get out of the way - had to stop letting the sperm donor use me against the Dead Legion. Then shots were being fired and drywall was exploding and glass was shattering and men were crying out in pain and curses and oh fuck, where was Knight?
I have to find Knight.
It became my mantra, pounding in my head, again and again.
I have to.
I have to.
I have to find Knight.
I began wiggling along the floor like some sort of demented centipede, trying to find him in all of the chaos and then I did see him - blood and bone sticking out of the hole in his shoulder and blood pouring out of his head and he wasn’t moving and he was dead, I just knew he was and I crawled my way across the room, across broken glass and I fucking didn’t even care - I just had to get to Knight. I had to tell him I was sorry and I had to tell him that I loved him and finally, oh God fucking finally, I got close enough to him to talk.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” I repeated, my eyes swimming with tears. I couldn’t even see his face, between the blood and my tears and the world falling apart and fuck it all, which just wasn’t fair! I rubbed my face on the filthy floor, trying to clear my eyes, and then I realized that it’d gone quiet. The bullets had stopped.
“Knight, can you hear me?” I whispered in the deafening silence.
Nothing.
I felt something tugging at the ropes around my wrists, and I looked up to see Bishop’s face, splattered with blood, leaning over me with a pocketknife. He made it through the ropes around my wrists and then as he was working on my feet, I ripped my shirt off - I could worry about being topless later, when Knight was alive and everything was okay - and shoved it into the hole in Knight’s shoulder.
That got a groan out of him.
“Oh thank God you’re alive!” I cried, pushing the shirt into him harder.
“I won’t be if you keep that up,” he muttered and then rolled his head drunkenly to look up at me.
“Oh good, it’s you. I would’ve hated to wake up to Bishop - he’s an ugly bastard.”
“Not as ugly as you are,” Bishop said mildly and then finally got through the rope, freeing my feet. I got up onto my knees so I could place more pressure on his shoulder wound. The blood coming out of it was making me woozy but I steadfastly ignored it. I had to keep him from bleeding out.
His eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he was gone again.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one feeling woozy.
“Stay here and stay down,” Bishop said quietly as sirens began wailing in the distance. He stood, gun at the ready, nudging people lying in heaps on the floor.
“Hey son of a bitch, so glad you made it,” I heard Bishop snarl and then a shot was fired. “Whoops, was that your kneecap? Betcha won’t be riding many motorcycles after that. It’s hard to catch a ride while in prison anyway.”
The cops busted through the door from the lobby to the main clubhouse. Bishop stuffed his gun - small cannon, really - into the waistband at the small of his back.
“Bishop, what the hell is going on here?” the sheriff hollered. “Is this retaliation for the pipe bombs this morning?”
Bishop smiled innocently.
“Nope. They kidnapped my Sgt. at Arm’s girlfriend and were holding her hostage. This was a rescue.”
“And you didn’t think to call me first?” the sheriff retorted, obviously not mollified by Bishop’s response.
“The son of a bitch gave us 12 minutes to get here before he would start gang raping the girl.”
“But it takes 15 minutes to get here from Deming.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh.”
I had had enough waiting for them to discuss the particulars before I interrupted them. I could be polite some other day.
I stood up and hollered, “I have a hurt guy here who needs a paramedic!”
The cops all swarmed towards me just as the world started to go hazy around the edges, and then totally dark.
29
Knight
I awoke to the steady beep, beep, beep of the machines.
What the hell is making that noise? Is that my alarm clock? My alarm clock doesn’t sound like that.
I fought through to the surface, finally forcing my eyes open.
“Knight?” Leia said, and then grabbed my hand and squeezed. “Knight, you’re awake!” She was wearing a hospital gown, smeared in blood, and I wondered where her shirt had gone. There was something about her shirt that I needed to remember, but I couldn’t bring it to the surface.
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “What happened?” I wanted to tell her that I felt like shit, that I felt like someone had beat me all over with a baseball bat or had run me over with a semi, but those words all seemed so complicated to say. I would say them later. Later, my mouth would work.
“Well,” she said, and then paused. “How much do you remember?”
I scrunched up my eyes, trying to get my brain to work. Everything was so hazy. I had been so mad at Leia; I had slammed out of the house and gone for a bike ride, and then stopped at the clubhou
se afterwards, hoping to drink it all away. I had barely started into my first beer, though, when my phone rang.
Butcher.
Butcher had called me and told me he had Leia. While I was on the phone with him, stalling him as much as possible, I had written on a bar napkin, “Pist has F in LS.” Luckily, Bishop could read bar napkin scribbles because he rounded up all of the Dead Legion and got them ready to go while I kept Butcher on the phone.
Which really, was just about the most godawful assignment ever, because it involved talking on the phone with a man I hated, which brought out the worst in my stutter, but I pushed through anyway because I had to.
Because Leia needed me.
And even though I wanted to strangle her almost as much as I wanted to hug her, none of that mattered. I had to keep her safe.
I had to save her from that bastard of a father.
There was no fucking time for bulletproof vests, of course - mine was back at the house, in the opposite direction of Playas. A stop for it might mean Butcher allowed his men to put their hands on her body. He’d given us an impossibly short time to get to the Outlaws’s clubhouse because he’d wanted me to fail.
Hell no.
But after that…things got a little fuzzy.
I blinked up at Leia stupidly. “Shooting?” I said, more of a question than a statement.
“Yeah, a lot of shooting,” she said drily. “Unfortunately, you weren’t the only one with a gun. You took a bullet through the shoulder and another one grazed your temple. Bishop says you can be twinsies with Carmen now.”
I grinned at that. “I one-upped her,” I said weakly.
“Yeah, I’m sure she’ll be sad to know that she missed the opportunity to be shot twice instead of just once,” Leia said, rolling her eyes and laughing. But then she grew serious.
“Knight…goddammit, seeing you lying on that floor, I thought you were dead and I thought I’d never have a chance to say it and that tore me apart. I thought I was going to die right along with you.”
I felt two feet thick. “Say what?” I asked. It seemed like I had missed something but hell if I knew what.
“I wanted to say - I love you, Knight.” She reached out and stroked my forehead and cheeks. “With all of my heart and soul, I love you. And I’m so goddamn sorry I didn’t listen to you when you tried to warn me about Butcher. My mother was always trying to warn me away from people - control who I spent time with or saw or whatever. And I love my mom and I know why she did it, but Knight, it fucked with my head. I just thought you were trying to control me, just like my mom did. I thought you were trying to take away the only family I have left.
“But it turns out, I didn’t want him anyway.”
I stared up into her gorgeous brown eyes, flecked with green - or were they green eyes flecked with brown? I blinked, trying to focus. There was something much more important than eye color going on here. Leia had said something - something I had to respond to.
Oh. Right. Bastard of a father and how I handled it.
“I’m sorry,” I got out and goddamn, I hated saying those words out loud. All the times that my stepdad had beaten me until I had apologized, twisted my arm until it left bruises, forcing me to apologize for shit I didn’t even do…I had learned to hate those three words. I am sorry…I would rather face down a hundred Sangre than say those words.
But…Leia deserved to hear them. Because they were true.
“You told me that I never said what was wrong with Butcher - why you shouldn’t t-t-trust him.” The stutter caught me by surprise - it’d happened so rarely with Leia, I had almost forgotten it could happen with my magical talisman around. The stress of saying I was sorry was fucking with my head.
I plowed on - I could deal with my stuttering later. “You’re right. I didn’t. Who wants to hear shit about their dad? Protecting you. But then expected you to just see everything my way, without telling you why I didn’t trust him. No…not fair.”
I was fading. I was getting so tired - there were two Leias now, hovering over me. I whispered, “Love you, Leia. Always…”
And then the darkness overtook me and I welcomed its embrace.
Epilogue
Knight
“Seriously, she cannot build new shelves in her clubhouse today,” Jules said sternly, fixing her glare on Maggie before looking back at me. “I don’t care how much she begs and pleads; I’m not going to have my flower girl covered in sawdust and dirt.”
She hurried away with the florist before Maggie could renew her begging, so of course, she turned to me instead, an oversized smile pinned to her face.
“Please, Knight? I will be very careful. I won’t hit my thumb even once with the Wolf.” She fluttered her eyelashes at me and I couldn’t help the laugh bubbling up inside of me.
If I had a kid half as cute as Maggie, I would count myself lucky. If Leia agreed that was a project I would heartily endorse pursuing. The making of said child was at least half the fun.
“Why don’t you show it to me?” I said, careful not to agree to actual building projects. You don’t fuck with a woman on her wedding day, no matter how cute your niece is.
“Yay!” Maggie hollered and went running towards the back of Judge’s property, her purple ribbons from her flower girl’s dress streaming out behind her as she ran.
I followed a little slower, which meant that Turbo and I were side by side as we hurried after her. I swore I could hear Turbo’s bones creaking as he went but then again, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t hearing my own. Even now, a month after the shootout with the Sangre and the Outlaws, I was struggling with the simplest of tasks. A hole in your dominant shoulder will do that to you.
Thank God for Leia or I really would’ve been up shit creek. Sure, another Dead Legion could’ve helped me pull my dick out of my pants so I could take a piss, but I liked to ignore that thought. Leia was a hell of a lot more fun.
Maggie was standing in front of her clubhouse, a giant grin on her face. “Look Knight - look at what Leia made for me.”
She pushed the door open to reveal a watercolor painting hanging on the far wall of the clubhouse - a picture-perfect 1961 Duo Glide Harley.
“I wanted a bike painting and Leia said that she knew your bike best, so she painted yours.”
“Wow,” I said, grinning as I studied it. The details were perfect.
“I’ll paint a second one on your living room wall,” Leia said behind me and I spun around in surprise. She was wearing a dark purple halter-neck dress that plunged in the front, showing off all her curves. I frowned for a moment at the neckline - those were my tits to play with, dammit. I didn’t want just any ol’ guy drooling over them.
She caught my look and winked. “Not lookin’ so bad yourself,” she said lightly but her eyes told me a different story. A much hotter story.
For a moment, I tried to come up with a plausible reason for Maggie to leave her own clubhouse so I could…make use of the space but finally dismissed it as fantasy. There was no way Maggie was leaving without us. Hell, there was a half a chance she wasn’t going to leave with us.
Carmen had just been complaining yesterday about how hard it was to get Maggie to go to bed, or more specifically, leave the clubhouse so she could go to bed. Even after the adoption had gone through last week, making Maggie officially Carmen and Judge’s daughter, she was still struggling with ownership. Judge said that she didn’t seem to consider her room “hers” as much as she did the clubhouse. It was going to be a long road and a lot of therapy before she fully accepted her life in America.
She was lucky to have a family who cared enough to give her all of that.
“Hey darlin’,” Leia said, crouching carefully in front of Maggie, balancing on her high heels, “Aunt Jules wants us all in the kitchen so we can be lined up for the walk down the aisle. I think she wants you there especially early so you can help put the flower collar on Turbo.”
Maggie’s eyes lit up and she took off like a shot down the
path towards the mansion, Turbo following in her wake.
Fucking miracle worker.
I couldn’t help it - I held out my hand to help her stand up and then continued tugging her until she was snuggled up against me, until I could see straight down her dress and spot the front clasp of a new bra I hadn’t seen before.
“New bra?” I asked, nibbling on her neck. We could probably have a little more fun before anyone noticed we were gone.
“And matching panties, both gifts from Jules,” Leia said, tilting her neck with a happy sigh to give me better access. “Even if this wedding was rushed so she could fit into a wedding dress, she still did it in style. Between Jules and Carmen, there’s a lot to live up to.”
I felt my heart start to do double-time. It was almost as if…
Almost as if Leia was hinting at our wedding. As in, me marrying her.
Surely she couldn’t know what was in my pocket. She was good but she wasn’t that good, right?
After Butcher had been hauled off on a stretcher in handcuffs and the Sangre had been hauled off in body bags, the few remaining Outlaws who’d survived had scattered to the four winds. There was an arrest warrant out for them and a few had already been caught but it remained to be seen if the rest would ever reappear.
Sometimes, it was damn handy to have the local police in your back pocket, as Bishop demonstrated. Not a single Dead Legion had been arrested or even hauled in for questioning. The sheriff had congratulated Bishop on a job well done, and then sent them all to the hospital to be checked out for injuries.
It was rare that the good guy won in the end, but I had to admit that in this instance, it really had happened that way. Especially for me.
Somehow, by some fucking miracle I couldn’t begin to understand, Leia had chosen me. The most gorgeous woman I had ever laid eyes on wanted me, despite my past, despite my stutter, despite the mangled shoulder that would never heal quite right.
