Biker Daddy (A Rogue Tide Motorcycle Club Romance)

by Nikki Wild

  "I might not get away with it," he said. I studied him for another moment.

  "Prove it to me," I said. "Prove I can trust you."

  He sighed. Then he turned around and made some sort of hand gesture. I stiffened, and immediately brought the gun up, ready to shoot at whoever the fuck he was signaling. The back door of a car parked across the street opened.

  "Who the fuck..."

  "I really didn't want to do this," Daniil was saying, eyes still pinned at the car. "But she insisted."

  I was all fucking ready to shoot when I realized who I was about to shoot. Jesus. This one looked even more like Lucy. Alyona. Aly. I remembered hearing about her. The pride and joy of the Maximovich clan. She looked about 14 years old, in my eyes at least. Even looked both ways before crossing the street and striding up to me, chin pointed out all defiant even as her eyes glowed with fear.

  "This is Alyona," Daniil said, turning to face me again.

  "My brother is telling the truth," she said, interrupting him, eyes meeting mine - brave, even through all that fear. Maybe because of that fear. "And if he's not, you can kill me."

  She shoved her hands out, wrists together, a red velvet band in her open palms.

  "Tie me up, take me inside, and shoot me if it turns out he's lying," she said. "I want my sister back."

  "Jesus Christ," I murmured, amazed by her. Now that she was closer, I could tell she was in her 20's. The spitting fucking image of Lucy. I glanced at Daniil, who had that same stoicism in his eyes, though the clenching of his jaw told a different story. "Alright. You better come inside."

  Chapter 33

  Sinner

  Four hours after Daniil Maximovich stepped into enemy territory and offered his youngest sister as tribute for his cause, I was sitting on my bike less than two blocks from the Bratva's small but heavily-armed neighborhood.

  My Indian rumbled between my legs, agitating the wound on my side, but fuck if I was going to ride up to this fight in a goddamn cage. We were the Rogue Tide Motorcycle Club, not the Rogue Tide Chevy Avalanche Club. Spit and Tusk had implored me not to come at all, but this was my fight now. They thought I was looking for vengeance for the bullet in my side. And maybe I was, but mostly I was there for Lucy.

  Fool me once, fool me twice, right? I was a moron for thinking - hoping - that I'd been wrong about her. Whether or not her brother was telling the truth about this whole kill-my-uncle-and-we'll-play-nice shit, he could still be lying about her.

  But fuck. If he wasn't, then I was well prepared to be that knight in shining armor. If chivalry was dead, I was about to re-animate its corpse. Call me Don Quixote, and all this shit was windmills.

  We had time to bring the boys up from Connecticut after all, since they were only about two hours away. They were gonna be our front guard. Can't exactly go roaring into a residential neighborhood on a gang of motorcycles and expect to have the element of surprise. The first wave would get their attention, start some mayhem, and we'd come in to start the slaughter.

  Daniil looked pretty fucking unsteady on his bike, one of the spares we kept around. Waiting next to Train, he clearly didn't know a Harley from a Mazda. But he did know how to approach the Bratva's main hub in a way that wouldn't lead to us being picked off by snipers as soon as we burst through the door.

  My skin crawled as Train raised his arm, listening to the little walkie that connected him to Ace, the leader of our Connecticut chapter. When he rotated his wrist in a circle, it was game on.

  All at once, the air filled with the sound of engines and squealing tires as we rode into the heart of the Bratva. I could see what we had to look forward to as we turned a corner; over the sound of our approaching army, you could hear bullets fired from the houses on each side of the street, matching shot for shot by the guys from Connecticut, who were either still riding or ducking behind their bikes or trees, returning fire.

  Men were running down the block, and Daniil motioned his arm, forcing his bike to wobble violently. He'd told us how to cut through a driveway and a gravel backyard to get to the house's back entrance, and that's what we did, the rest of us overtaking him as he held on for dear fucking life over the rough terrain.

  The big, brick monster was obvious as soon as it came into view. Even had a big marble fountain in the back with fish and mermaids spitting and all that shit. Hoff let out a holler as his bike took him past the fountain and he shot off one of the mermaids' faces. While the Bratva men streamed into the house's front entrance, to protect their upper ranks, we took the back, bursting in with a blaze of gunfire and curses.

  It was fucking chaos.

  The only well to tell the Bratva from my own men was our leathers; it was like a deadly game of shirts versus skins, with anyone in short sleeves targeted for shooting. I ran down the same hallways as my men, our footsteps making a stampede, breaking shit as we went along and shooting on sight. But they were all looking for one thing, and I was looking for another.

  I needed Daniil to help me find her.

  Stopping short, I turned around, knowing he would have lagged behind. But “behind” was a vague mist of dust and smoke and splintering wood, and heavy male bodies pushing their way further into the bowels of the big mansion.

  "Forward," someone screamed at me. "Nothin' back there!"

  Maybe, maybe not. We'd passed plenty of doors; was she behind any of them? I let my brothers stream past me, looking for Daniil, frozen in my need to find her - now. Right fucking now. Someone screamed up ahead, and it sounded like a woman; I didn't see Daniil yet, but that scream had me running.

  The hallway we were in ended in a foyer that had become a veritable mosh pit. Too close for gunfire, the risk of shooting yourself or your brother too high, it had been reduced to a giant fistfight. I could see two rooms at either end of the foyer, from which more sounds of fighting and shooting reached me. Who the fuck had been screaming? Where the fuck was she?

  A shot nearly took out my ear from the big stairs that led down to the foyer, and I ducked, hitting my wounded side on a marble bust. I aimed to shoot, but someone beat me to it. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and since my gun was already out I turned it on whoever it was. Daniil's stoic face looked down at me.

  "She's over here," he said, pulling me up onto my feet and hurriedly leading me through one door, then another. What we saw made Daniil's face shake, betraying a fear I hadn't seen in him before, even when I had him at gunpoint. And that was terrifying.

  The door he'd dragged me towards was open. The lock was blown out. The sheets on the bed were rumpled, but the room was empty.

  "Where is she?" I roared, turning to Daniil, ready to beat him beyond recognition for lying to me, stringing me along.

  "I don't..."

  What stopped Daniil from speaking wasn't a noise, an intervening voice, a gunshot striking one of us down.

  It was silence.

  A sudden and awful silence.

  "Please..."

  Her voice came from somewhere near.

  "Alexei! I got your fucking girl here!"

  His voice was louder. Daniil stormed past me, down another random door, through a tiny hallway - was this place designed by fucking M.C. Escher? The disorientating layout was breaking me down more than the awful fear in my gut. That was Army yelling. That was Lucy pleading. Daniil burst through a door into a big plush sitting room; you could see the packed foyer through the far door. I didn't give it a second glance. It didn't matter where we were anymore. All that mattered was Army, holding Lucy in a headlock, a gun to her temple.

  Chapter 34

  Lucya

  Boots on the floor. Bullets hitting wood. I stood in the middle of the room, my breath coming short and shallow, my eyes on the doorknob. Someone was in the house. Multiple someones; a herd of someones; enough someones to shake the foundation and rattle the windows.

  It had to be them. The Rogue Tide. Coming to destroy us for what we did. No, for what he did. They were on our block, in our house, they were
destroying all there was to be destroyed.

  I didn't know who to root for. Until I thought of Daniil. And Alyona.

  "No," I moaned under my breath, and then launched myself at the door. All logic would say I should hide, cowering in the corner. I had no weapon; I barely even had clothes on. But they were out there; my family was out there. Little Alyona, Deda with his arthritis, my brother who was strong, but not stronger than a bullet.

  My mind filled with images of them, slaughtered, bleeding onto the antique rugs and the trappings of our illustrious ancestry. Our bloodline couldn't help us now. I wailed, pounding on the door, feeling its hard wood bouncing back on my fists, unyielding, ungiving. The door didn't understand that I needed to be out there, I needed to know that they would be alright, I needed...

  My wail turned into a high-pitched screech as that stubborn door suddenly gave. In the wrong direction. The blast of its opening swept me back, off my feet, landing hard on my tailbone. A leathered man stood in the doorway; the sound of struggle and fighting and shooting only got louder as he walked towards me, face breaking into a smile.

  "I don't know who the fuck you are," he said. I crawled back, crabbing my way towards the wall, realizing that my days of helping my family were over. My days of doing anything were over. I was going to die. In my pajamas.

  "But I'll bet money someone cares about whether or not you live," he finished, reaching down for me, taking my arms in his big, calloused hands. He smelled like gunpowder and cigarettes, his hair a short buzz cut. I screamed, kicking out as he carried me through the door, down the hall. Towards the noise.

  Seeing it - the battleground in the family manse - was different than hearing it. Even with my immediate concerns being my own life, my heart cringed at the damage already done. They were just things; the vases, the busts, the paintings, the china. But they were our things. They were old things. They were Maximovich things.

  And seeing them broken and rammed into dust renewed my will to fight. I screeched, arching my back and trying to slip down between his clenched arms; he had my arms squeezed tight, but my feet were free to kick at his shins. I tried for his knees.

  "Fuckin'..." he grunted, his breath shifting over my hair, hot and wet. I wanted to bite him. I wanted to take a chunk out of his stupid, meaty forearm.

  "Biker trash!" I screamed. We passed a gut shot boyevik, and a biker who'd probably live the rest of his life with one eye. The next door would lead us into the big, warm, purple-laden sitting room. Here, the fight was the loudest.

  A gunshot nearly deafened me, a blur of a man stumbling into my captor and knocking him slightly off balance. I could see, in the foyer, where the men were an indistinguishable mass of fists and fire. The living room was ringed with destruction, and even as I watched a man was sent backwards into a china cabinet, destroying thousands of dollars and hundreds of years of Russian fine bone porcelain.

  "Hey! Hey! Anyone give a shit about this bitch!" His voice spewed above my head like vomit. I realized I was crying, my efforts to escape getting weaker by the second as his heavy embrace crushed the air from my lungs. When he finally moved one arm, giving me the slightest relief, I felt the telltale press of something circular, cold, and metal against my head. And an even more telltale click. I went limp.

  "Looks like the other one," said another man who lay on the ground, his calf looking split in half. "His niece."

  Wow, he was very lucid for the amount of blood pooling underneath him, and the general mayhem going on around him, and the fact that his prone position on the floor made him a likely target for another bullet.

  "Alexei! I got your fucking girl here!" My captor hollered. Alright. So this was it. This was where I died. Where, like the china and the oil paintings and the velour curtains, another bit of Maximovich heritage would meet its demise.

  I deserved it. Somewhere deep inside me, I felt that I deserved it. Because it was my life that took Sinner's, it only made sense that I would die here, now, killed by one of his men. It was kind of beautiful, really. One of mine kills him, one of his kills me.

  I bore no illusions of us meeting up in some beautiful, sacred heaven. Mafia families don't get into heaven, and probably neither did bikers whose tattoos boasted kill counts. If we were lucky, we might see each other in passing in hell. Maybe while I was being dunked headfirst into a river of molten lava, he'd be passing by on a roller coaster made of rusty nails.

  Or maybe we'd just lie in our separate graves in separate graveyards forever, and no one would ever know that we'd loved each other, and more or less died for each other.

  I didn't realize I'd closed my eyes until I had to open them again. I also hadn't realized that the room had gone quiet. Eyes were turned to me. Shit. I hadn't had this much attention since I not-so-accidentally flashed half the gym in senior year. Sinner loved that story. It made him laugh, then it made him kiss me. And that made it my favorite story...

  "Army. What the fuck. Are you doing."

  I couldn't turn my head, because of the gun pressed to my temple. But I didn't need to. My limp body turned stiff. My heart gave out, growing too big before collapsing. I would know that voice underwater.

  "Sinner," I whimpered, trying desperately to force my eyes to see what they couldn't. He wasn't dead. I should have fucking known Alexei would lie - but I didn't dare get my hopes up. But he was alive. Fresh tears spilled from my cheeks as I let that sink in. The beautiful irony of it. I'd probably still end up bleeding out on the floor, but at least it would be less poetic. And fuck poetry. Who needs it?

  I squeaked as my captor turned, jerkily, towards Sinner's voice. Finally, I saw him, and it was like knowing you were looking at the last beautiful thing you would ever look at. His face was set in something between rage and fear. He dragged his eyes from my captor to me, something breaking in their gray stillness when our eyes met. His lips twitched downward, his jaw clenching so hard his neck veins bulged.

  "What the fuck does it look like? I found her locked away in some bedroom. She's gotta be somebody."

  "Put her down," Sinner said, lifting an arm, a gun in his hand. Daniil stood behind him, looking at me, nodding as though that would calm me down.

  "Sinner, what the fuck are you..."

  "Put her down," he barked again. He was aiming that gun right at my captor's head. His own brother. "She's not a part of this."

  "Sinner!" Another voice barked out. At the same time, I sensed movement in the room, on my other side. Daniil stepped forward, striding in front of Sinner.

  "Shoot her."

  The gang's all here, I thought as the guy holding me spun away from Daniil, towards Alexei's voice. Alexei looked behind him.

  "What are you all waiting for?" he called to the boyeviks. "She doesn't matter. These men are..."

  "Stop," Daniil barked. "Alexei, stop this."

  "Alexei? You're the motherfucker we want. Drop the gun, or..."

  "Shoot..."

  "Don't..."

  Voices overlapped. The Bratva men stood uncertainly. Alexei told them I didn't matter; but they knew me. They knew who I was, they knew that their sworn job, more than anything else, was to protect me and the rest of my family. No matter what Alexei said, putting me in danger raged against their every instinct. Alexei stared at me, and I stared right back.

  "What the shit? Who cares? Shoot her, Army, let's fucking..."

  "Don't you fucking dare," Sinner's voice cut through. Army, if that was his name, spun just enough to face Sinner again.

  "You serious? You serious, you fucking traitor?"

  "What the hell are you waiting for, men? They're..."

  "Don't move, motherfucker."

  I craned my neck, watching as one of the leather-clad men tried to get to Alexei, only to be cut back by fist to his throat. But I saw something else, too. My lungs ached. Deda was moving through the crowd, a gray-haired ghost. The boyeviks parted for him, while the bikers barely noticed him. A man of his age was not important.

  Alexei's
eyes flitted towards Daniil, who was approaching, gun out. Now, the boyeviks began to react. Slowly, unsure, but steadily. If it came to Daniil or Alexei, it was Alexei they would protect.

  "Sinner, you better fucking explain yourself," someone was barking.

  "Army, if you shoot that girl, I'm going to blow your fucking head off."

  "Daniil," I whimpered, seeing my brother set in a boyevik's sights, Alexei shaking his head slowly, grinning even, not even bothering to draw his gun against my brother. Deda was getting close. I prayed he would be the voice of reason. He would be the one to end all of this.

  "Listen to me, we can end this, right now, without killing her," Sinner's desperate voice sounded out.

  "What the fuck is going on?!" I heard Ivan, one of our brigadiers, shouting in Russian, clearly done with this million-way standoff. Deda was behind Alexei now. He would grab his son, he would hold up his hands, he would convince everyone to drop their arms so we could work this out...

  A single gunshot broke through the mingled, anguished voices.

  "Fuck! Who the fuck!" Army barked, and in the shock of the moment, he loosened his grip, and I spun out and away. "No, you bitch, you don't..."

  I saw Alexei crumple to the ground, something red and black standing out in his forehead. A hole, bleeding down the bridge of his nose. He went to his knees first, then his face met the floor. Deda's gun smoked from the barrel.

  "What the fuck just..."

  Another gunshot had me spinning to see who was dead now. Not Sinner, not Sinner, not Deda, not Daniil, not Sinner...

  Oh. Good. It was none of them. I looked down at my legs. It was me.

  Chapter 35

  Sinner

  Tusk ripped the gun from my hand just as Lucy's body hit the ground. Everyone was shouting in fucking Russian. Army looked down at the girl he'd just shot. He didn't know who she was. He didn't know she was mine. But that didn't make it alright. I wanted his blood in my mouth as I bit his neck open.