So long as I could swallow my pride, bite my tongue, and just... deal with whatever else Repo and the others might throw at me.
Twenty minutes later, deciding I had wasted enough time of a good party on a bad mood, I made my way back out to the yard where a few of the men had congregated around the grill. The smell of hamburgers and hotdogs filled the air, making my stomach groan in protest of its emptiness.
"Sugar, honey, darlin'..." a smooth voice called from behind me, immediately making me stiffen.
"What?" I growled as I turned, brow raised, ready to take more sexism crap from whoever it was and knowing there wasn't much I could do about it.
And there was a guy. Really, it was hard to describe him. He almost had a greaser look with his thin face, slicked back hair, tight black pants, and white tee. But that wasn't exactly right either because he was literally covered in tattoos up to his neckline and had an eyebrow and tongue piercing. His deep green eyes didn't so much as drift below my neck and his smile seemed open and friendly.
"You belong to someone here?"
"I don't belong to anyone," I bristled.
"Shoot, this is Maze. She's a probate," Cash said, walking up, slamming a hand on Shoot's shoulder and holding out beer bottles for us to take.
"No shit?" Shoot asked me, smile getting wider. "'Bout fucking time you jackasses got progressive," he remarked, giving me a wink as he sipped his beer.
"Says the lone gunman," Cash laughed, shaking his head.
"Hey you find me a skirt who can shoot fifty yards in a dense fog and hit their target, I will happily take them on. I could use some vacation time. Thinking 'bout taking Amelia down to Al'bama in the shit part of winter here."
It started to click then. I'd heard of Shoot, better known as Shooter. He was a hitman for lack of a better term. Amelia must have been his woman. Legend was, he was the most charming man in fifty miles in any direction. Somehow, I believed that. There was obviously just something wrong with me that he had no effect on my mood.
I again blamed Repo.
I chanced a look over to where he was talking to Janie by the picnic tables. Janie looked angry, Repo kind of dead-eyed.
"Maze," Cash called, drawing my attention.
"Yeah?"
"I know you're having a shit time of it here and I'm not gonna disrespect your intelligence by saying it hasn't been planned that way, but I have to say... you're bearing it like no one else would."
"I'm just as deserving as the rest of them," I said, lifting my chin a little.
"I'm not saying I don't agree with you, sweetheart," he said, giving me an almost sad smile. "But I'm not going to be giving you any false hope either. The odds aren't in your favor and you were really close to fucking it up for yourself out front. Not because of that shit with Moose. The fucker had it coming. But if Reign didn't cut you off, I'm pretty sure you would have crossed a line with Repo."
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked, shrugging my shoulders.
"Because if I don't, Lo is going to tie me to the headboard and chop off my balls for not warning you. Now," he said, his smile going a little wicked, "I'm okay with some kinky rope fun, but I'm pretty attached to my balls. I'd like to keep it that way."
At that, I felt my lips curve up slightly. "I didn't really need the warning. I've known how it was from day one," I said, my eye automatically catching the movement of Repo from the picnic tables to the far end of the yard where his cars were situated. Why my eyes always sought him out despite my strong aversion to him lately, I had no idea. They apparently had a mind of their own.
"Oh, pumpkin," Shoot said, bringing my attention back to him and making me realize that Cash had walked away without my noticing.
"What?" I asked, feigning innocence.
"Oh fuck off," he laughed, shaking his head at me. "You want on your boss-man."
"Don't be ridiculous," I said, rolling my eyes for good measure.
"What's the problem?" he asked, ignoring my objection because he saw right through my bullshit. "Take him for a ride. It'll certainly help."
"Help what?" I asked, smiling a little.
"Well, this borderline psychotic attraction you are feeling toward me right now," he said with such a straight face that I felt a laugh get caught in my throat then burst out, making me throw my head back and laugh. "Really helping my ego here, darlin'," he said, smiling.
"Oh, I think your ego can withstand a few knocks, Shoot."
"His ego could withstand a category nine earthquake," a woman's voice said as she walked up, giving Shooter a warm smile. She was short and curvy with long dark hair and deep brown eyes. As soon as she was within arm's length, he hauled her up against his side and gave her cheek a wet, smacking kiss. "I'm Amelia," she supplied unnecessarily.
"Maze," I said, giving her a smile.
"I heard all about you from Janie, Lo, and Summer. Welcome to the girls club. Have you met Alex yet?" she asked, waving a hand across the lawn to where a tall, leggy, brunette with delicate bone structure was standing beside a blond giant with a beard and piercing light blue eyes.
"No," I said, shaking my head. "She's in this... club too?"
"We have to stick together. All these boys around," she said, lowering her eyes at Shooter who leaned over and bit into her earlobe, making her laugh.
"Speaking of," Shoot said, nodding at Wolf. "We have to go make a round. Think about what I said, darlin'."
"Or completely ignore him depending on how ridiculous what he said was," Amelia called over her shoulder as he led her away, one of his hands slipping into her back pocket as she frantically tried to swat it away. To no avail.
I made my rounds too, talking to Lo and Janie, meeting Alex, sharing a picnic table with a still too-silent Renny. As the night went on, things got rowdier and louder, making me feel like a buzzkill for not being in a partying mood. Seeing no one across the field, I made my way toward the back and found my tree. I climbed up, watching the party rage on as I enjoyed my solitude, feeling a calmness settle down on me for the first time in weeks.
At least that was until I heard rustling and looked down to see Repo move around the tree to stand under me.
"Fuck honey," he said, shaking his head, his eyes sad. "Don't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you fucking hate me," he said, jumping up and grabbing the limb I was sitting on and hauling himself up, moving to straddle it and lean back against the trunk as I swung my legs like a kid on a swing.
"I don't hate you," I said, looking off at the party, wondering if they could all see us or if we were lost in the night. Either option terrified me in their own unique ways. "That's the problem," I whispered.
Eight
Repo
Tell you what, you keep your fucking hands off me and we won't have a problem.
That was what she said to me perched up in her tree like a sullen nine-year old.
And, well, I couldn't even be mad about it. She was right; I needed to keep my hands off of her. But to be perfectly honest, the only way to pull that off was to get her the fuck out of the MC once and for all. If she was hanging around, I was going to want to put my hands on her. So she needed to go. To make that happen, I had to stop trying to be fair, trying to keep the guys from riding her. I had to be on her all day and night. I needed to encourage her exclusion and hazing. So I did that, with a lump the size of a boulder in my gut the whole fucking time.
Fact of the matter was, I didn't have it in me to be a fucking asshole all the God damn time. That wasn't me. It especially went against pretty much everything I had learned and believed in life about treating women. And every time her face fell when I called her or lectured her or excluded her, I felt like the worst kind of scum.
That thing in the truck with Moose and Fox and Janie and Maze? That was seriously fucked. There was no way I should have been giving her a hard time, but I had my orders and Reign was standing right the fuck there.
But her jerking away from me, hissing at me, then getting lectured by Janie as I watched Shoot and Cash try to cheer Maze up, yeah, none of that sat right with me.
Most especially because I wanted to be the one to make her throw her head back and laugh like she did at something Shooter said.
Don't ask me why, but that was where my mind went.
So when I walked underneath her and she looked down at me with a mix of anger, resentment, sadness, and hurt... I just couldn't fucking keep up the act anymore.
"I don't hate you," she said, avoiding looking at me. I didn't blame her. I made her not want to look at me if she didn't absolutely have to. "That's the problem," she added, her voice barely above a whisper.
"You should."
"Yeah," she agreed, not bothering to spare my feelings.
"Then why don't you?"
"You know why," she said, ducking her head, watching her feet swing.
"Honey..." I said and I watched her profile as her eyes closed for a second before she turned her head to look at me.
"What?"
"It's my job."
"What's your job?"
"Making your life miserable. It's my job. I don't want to do it."
"Then don't."
"That's not an option."
"Bullshit," she said, shaking her head at me. "There is always a choice."
"Not for me."
"Why not?"
Little did she know, that was a loaded fucking question...
I grew up in a violent shithole.
Was there really any other way to describe Detroit? All there was was abandoned buildings, job scarcity, corrupted law enforcement, and crime. That was it. There was really no chance of turning out a good, upstanding citizen unless you got the fuck out of there before one of the gangs sucked you in.
I was not one of the lucky few who had parents always searching for a way to make their lives better for their kids. My dad was an irregular child-support check and my mother smoked crack. Had child protective services not been completely overwhelmed with actual physical and sexual abuse cases, my ass would have been hauled out of that roach-infested apartment in a heartbeat. But fact of the matter was, my mom was always too high to smack me around and I never got molested. So I was left where I was with empty cabinets and a mother who disappeared for days on end, sometimes coming home beat to shit, sometimes bringing men with her that I wasn't stupid enough to even try to pretend they were anything other than Johns.
When I was twelve and my mother got pulled into the hospital for an OD, there was a knock on the apartment door. I ignored it, turning up the TV, fighting the swirling uncertainty in my belly I always felt when someone was at the door. In my experience, the only people who showed up at the door were cops and bill collectors. Neither were people I wanted to see.
"Rye, open the fuck up, kid," a deep, masculine voice called, making me start.
As far as I knew, bill collectors didn't know my name and the cops didn't curse at innocent kids.
I made my way toward the door. "Who is it?" I asked, reaching for the bat in the umbrella stand.
There was a pause and a sigh. "Ain't got no one to blame but myself that you don't know your own fucking uncle, huh?" he asked through the door, leaving me to pause for a moment before I reached for the chain.
I pulled open the door to reveal a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed man in a blue tee and jeans stained dark in places. If my mother wasn't thin to the point of starvation and her hair wasn't perpetually greasy from her forgetting to wash it, you might have been able to see the similarity between the two. Hell, he actually looked a lot like I imagined I would when I grew up.
I didn't know much about my mother's family. Her parents were dead and no one else was close. I did know from one of her manic moods that she did, in fact, have a brother. His name was Seth and they had been estranged since teenagers when he moved out.
"Christ," he said, shaking his head at me. "When the fuck was the last time you ate anything?"
"Mom has been in the hospital two days," I said, shrugging.
"Was there food before she went in?" he asked as if he somehow knew how screwed up she was.
"Not usually."
"Alright," he said, looking into the apartment with distaste. "Go pack your shit."
"Pack my shit?" I parroted, not even tripping over the curse. No one lifted a brow to a kid cursing where I was from.
"Yeah, pack your shit. Can't imagine you got much. What you do, throw it in a bag. You're coming with me."
"Until Mom gets back?" I asked, not moving out of the doorway.
"Until your mother gets her fucking shit together," he said, pushing inside, making me move out of his way. So then, with what seemed like very little choice, I went and collected my shit. Of which there really wasn't much, just a couple outfits, a skateboard I found abandoned in a park, and a couple books the library was selling for nickles one afternoon. That was all I had.
"Jesus fucking Christ," my uncle said as he stood in the kitchen, holding open one of the kitchen cabinets where I knew from experience that we had an impressive infestation of roaches. He turned back, hearing my footsteps. His eyes fell to the bag in my hand. "You overly attached to any of that crap?"
I looked down at the bag and shrugged. "Guess not."
"Leave it the fuck here. We'll get you new shit."
With that, I left my childhood apartment.
I never went back.
And I got a boatload of new shit.
Because he made a fair amount of money.
My Uncle Seth was a lot of things: a strong, alpha masculine personality, a moderate drinker, a vintage muscle car enthusiast, a fucking phenomenal shot, and a drug dealer. Not the illegal stuff, the heroin or meth, the crack my mother smoked. No, my uncle, better known as Doc Seth, peddled prescription drugs. You needed some Benzos or Percs, he was who you saw. Reds, yellows, blues, Poor Mans PCP, Schoolboys. You fucking name it, he fucking sold it.
"Just not that Special K or Mexican Valium shit," he told me one night as we put pills into baggies at his dining room table, referencing Ketamine and Rohypnol. "I might be a real son of a bitch, but I ain't selling shit some pussy-ass mother fuckers are going to use to rape little girls with."
My Uncle Seth, the drug dealer with a conscience.
For the next five years, he stepped up to the plate. He taught me how to avoid the good cops, pay off the crooked ones, know when a deal was going to go south before it did, how to pick men for their particular brands of skills to add to the 'team'. He showed me how to rebuild an engine, paint a car like a God-damn pro, drive a stick, appreciate good music, charm a woman, take a hit, then throw a devastating one back. And, last but certainly not least, he taught me how to shoot. Well. He made me into a man. And, granted, I wasn't a good man just as he wasn't a good man. But I was strong, smart, capable, skilled.
By fifteen, I was helping him deal alongside all his other men.
By sixteen, I was a part of his team just as any of the others. Not because of nepotism, but because I fucking earned my place.
Two days after I turned seventeen, I walked into our apartment to see him lying in a pile of his own blood on the living room floor. He wasn't dead, his chest rising and falling in a weird, unnatural strobe-like motion. His eyes went to me as I froze, and he tried to lift his hand to indicate something to my side. I missed the meaning though and the next thing I knew, I felt a knife slice through the skin of my cheek from my eye to my jaw.
Then there was pain.
A lot of it.
Until there was none because I passed out.
I woke up to a cop kneeling over me checking my pulse.
I didn't have to ask. I just read the grim reality in his face. My uncle was dead.
Me, I was taken to the hospital to treat my face with thirteen stitches, my busted ribs, my concussion. I was released the next day and had to go back to Uncle Seth's apartment and c
lean up his blood and plan his funeral and try to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to do from that point on. He was all I had in the world. He was the only person who ever gave a good God damn about me.
And he was gone.
He had a lavish funeral four days later, all of his men showing up. My mother, not surprisingly, never showed. I hadn't expected her to. Hell, I had never actually seen her again after she showed up fresh from the hospital looking for me. Seth had given her an earful, a wad of cash, and pushed her out the door.
It wasn't long before the shit hit the fan with his men. Everyone was vying for his position, trying to lead the others, trying to control the trade.
But, fuck them, that was my fucking legacy.
"You really slithered into his role," Wayne, my Uncle's second, said, nodding his head at me. Wayne was Seth's oldest friend and, in a way, became another uncle to me over the years. He taught me to play pool and tie a tie as my uncle was a staunch advocate for never wearing anything other than jeans and tees. He was big and reasonably fit with a taste for bourbon and dime store cigars, black hair, and eyes to match. I nodded at his comment, shrugging away what I thought was a compliment. "Like a snake," he added, drawing my attention from the pills I was sorting.
"A snake?"
"Yeah. And you know what they say about snakes and snitches," he went on and I felt myself stiffen as the unmistakable click of a pocket knife filled the quiet room. I knew. Oh, I knew. It was his fucking favorite phrase. I'd heard it hundreds of times over the years. "They get it where they slither."
"You mother fucker," I shouted, pushing away from the table so hard that I pinned it, and therefore him, against the wall.
"Clueless little shit you always were. Never meant for fucking leadership. All loyalty, no fucking brains of your own," he seethed, pushing the table away and making his way toward me, knife still in his hand as his words landed hard, settling somewhere on my soul.
"Here's the thing about loyalty," I said, taking a step back, letting him think I was scared, like I was scarred from being worked over the night of my uncle's death.
Repo (The Henchmen MC Book 4) Page 8
