Saving Glory (Hells Saints Motorcycle Club Book 4)

by Paula Marinaro

  Out of the corner of her eye, Glory saw Jules lift his chin in a silent command. Hal moved in front of the doorway barring her way. “Sit down, little sister.”

  Glory turned to look at Jules, who stood stalwart with his big arms crossed in front of his chest. He nodded to the seat at the table.

  No help there.

  “I need a minute with my sister,” Hal said. It was not a request.

  Prosper hesitated only slightly. “You’re gonna stick around here after you’re done.”

  Then with one last long look at Glory, Prosper motioned to his wife and led her to the door. Pinky turned before leaving the room and, when she met Glory’s eyes, she lifted her head slightly—chin up. That small gesture made Glory feel just a little bit better.

  Armed with that tiny bit of renewed confidence, she twisted her head around to look again at Jules as he leaned against the back wall.

  Glory shot him a pleading look.

  Which he totally ignored?

  The panicked glad to see you are alive look had left his face and was replaced with something wary and a little too hard for her liking.

  So he was mad, too.

  But at least he wasn’t going to leave her to face her brother’s wrath alone.

  Or maybe after the initial relief of seeing that she hadn’t gotten herself killed, Jules was just waiting his turn to chew her out too.

  “Whatever you got to say to her, I’m gonna want to hear it,” Jules said in no uncertain terms. He looked at Glory. “Then your sister and I are gonna have a talk of our own.”

  Hal answered Jules with just a slight nod of his head, as if he didn’t trust himself to speak.

  Glory sat very still in her seat, while her brother paced back in forth in front of her. His fist clenched and unclenched at his side. He seemed to be trying to get himself under control. As had become a habit when Hal was distressed or angry, he began to rub a hard hand over the damaged side of his face in what Glory could only imagine was an excruciatingly painful gesture.

  A gesture of self-punishment.

  Then in a sudden motion, he stopped his pacing and whirled towards her.

  “Glory—what the fuck did you think you were doing messing around with that asshole Santino? Haven’t you learned your lesson?” Her brother shouted out at her from a mouth that was contorted in rage. “And my gun? Are you fucking kidding me? Really? You tossed my room? What are you? Twelve? Kids do the shit that you did today.”

  Glory paled as she looked at her brother. She saw the anger that radiated out of his war-torn face. She heard the insulting and accusatory tone of his voice. She felt the heat of his fury as his eyes met hers in disgusted disbelief.

  And that’s when it happened.

  All the stress and the fear and the giving and giving and giving of herself, only to end up again and again in a place of being doubted and blamed by this self-serving idiotic older brother of hers.

  Enough.

  Looking at Hal now, Glory came to an angry realization. If he could say those things to her, accuse her of acting like a stupid kid, when all she had been doing—all she had ever done—was to act in his best interest, then he didn’t deserve her and her sisterly love.

  Humph.

  Glory shot out of her chair, leaned over the table and closed the space that separated herself from her brother.

  Angry eye met angry eye.

  “Did you kill Vincenzo, Hal?” Glory pounced.

  Glory watched her brother’s face close down.

  Oh no, you don’t.

  Glory stabbed a finger at him. “After you came out to visit me at the lake house that first time, did you go to Vegas?”

  Hal stood still in front of her. Not a blink, not a breath, not a muscle moved. Hal’s eyes locked into hers.

  “Hal, did you tell me you were going to back to base and go to Vegas instead to kill Vincenzo Abiatti?” Glory enunciated each word loudly. As if she were talking to a very small child.

  A muscle jumped in Hal’s clenched jaw but he stayed resolutely silent.

  “Well?” she asked with ferocious persistence.

  Hal glared and puffed out his chest but still did not answer her.

  “Perfect. Just damn perfect,” Glory shouted at him, frustrated by his stoic stubbornness. “And this is exactly the reason why I am always, always stuck cleaning up your messes.”

  And then, suddenly Hal was silent no more.

  “The only reason you get stuck cleaning up my messes is because from the time you were a goddamn kid you couldn’t keep your snotty nose out of my business!” Hal roared out in fury. “Always following me around like some lost puppy! Did I ever once—ever once—ask you to stick your nose in my personal? That shit in Vegas—that’s on you. I had that settled. Fucking settled! If you had minded your own business, you never would have been pulled into it.”

  Glory looked back at him, stunned. Her eyes went wide and she felt a pain shoot somewhere near her heart as she stammered out,

  “He told me—”

  “I know what he fucking told you. He played you, you goddamn idiot.” Hal pounded a clenched hand hard on the table. “And just for that alone Vincenzo deserved to die! The minute those fucking words came out of his mouth he signed his own death warrant. That’s on you little sister, for not telling him to fuck off. For believing him instead of having some goddamn faith in your own blood—in your own brother. You wanna know if I killed Vincenzo? Yeah, I fucking killed him!” Hal raged on at an ear-splitting decibel, “AND THAT’S ON YOU!”

  “Oh my God.” Glory paled and swallowed down the acid bile that churned up from her stomach. She raised a trembling hand to shield herself from his words.

  “Jesus.” Jules’s attention swiveled back to Glory when he heard her cry out. Then he pushed himself between the two quarreling siblings. He pinned Hal with a glare and let out a warning rumble, “That’s enough, brother.”

  But even in her distraught state, Glory could see that her brother was too far gone in his anger to listen. As he continued to rage, his every word ripped another hole through her heart. “And you playing goddamn nursemaid by my bed in Germany? I didn’t ask them to send for you, they just did. I wanted to die, do you hear me? I should have died when my men did, but you wouldn’t fucking let me. Why the hell didn’t you just stay where you fucking were and let me die?”

  Glory gasped as images of the hours and days and weeks and months she had spent waiting and worrying and praying by her brother’s side flashed through her tired mind.

  He has finally gone too far Glory thought as an overwhelming sense of outrage and betrayal filled her. So she did what she always did when she felt cornered, Glory came out swinging.

  “You self-serving sonofabitch,” she screamed back at him at the top of her lungs. “You wanted to die? Really? You wanted to die? Then why didn’t you?”

  Before Hal could open his mouth in furious retort, Jules stepped in.

  “Both of you need to calm the fuck down!” he bellowed out recognizing that Hal and Glory were locked in the age old battle that brothers and sisters have fought since the dawn of time. Each trying to outdo the other with painful words and outrageous accusations that they did not mean and would live to regret. Until the next time.

  “How could I die when you were yakking in my ear twenty-four seven?” Hal shouted back at her. “You never stopped being a pain in the ass long enough for me to die!”

  Glory let out a startled cry and reeled back as if she had been struck.

  Jules moved fast. He shoved her behind him and turned to Hal with a look of barely suppressed rage.

  “I said that is e-fucking-nough!” Jules bellowed. He slammed his fist so hard on the wooden table that he splintered a foot long crack through the center of it. “Hal, I am warning you. One more word and I am going to knock you out just to shut you the fuck up!”

  A shocked silence filled the air.

  For maybe a second and a half.

  Then

&nb
sp; “I’m a pain in the ass? I’m a pain in the ass?” Glory’s shout of outrage could have woken the dead. And she fully intended to continue her rant if Jules’s actions hadn’t knocked the wind right out of her sails. Because in the midst of her bellowing, Jules swung around and grabbed his woman around the waist. Then he cave-manned her up over his shoulder and carried her out the door.

  Chapter 26

  Jules dumped Glory on the floor of his room. Then he crossed his arms and stood with his back against the closed door.

  And he waited.

  Jules waited until Glory got her breathing under control and calmed herself down. After what seemed like forever she finally settled herself. Jules fought to keep his expression stalwart as he watched on as Glory made little hiccup noises and wiped her nose with the hem of her shirt.

  "I know what you’re thinking and I know you’re angry, Jules,” she sniffled. “I know everyone is really furious about what happened, about what we—what I did. And I know that just now I shouldn’t have risen to Hal’s bait. But he just makes me so mad! And if he actually did kill Vincenzo—I don’t know how I’m going to live with that.”

  Then Glory rose to her full height and said with purpose. “I know you probably have a million questions, but Prosper’s been grilling us for hours. I really don’t want to discuss this anymore. I agree I could have handled things differently. But I am done talking about it.”

  At that, Jules shifted on his feet and a surge of righteous anger cracked through the thin veneer of patience that he had left for bullshit. "Glory, if you think for a minute that you are going to get out of this one that easily, then not only have you got some crazy death wish, but you are delusional.”

  He threw her a look as he circled the room with the pent up violence of a caged animal. He opened his mouth to speak but closed it again as violent images of what could have happened to Glory filled his mind and just about stopped his heart from beating.

  Jules and his brothers had still been hours away from home when Diego’s call came in. And despite D’s assurances that Glory and Claire were safe, he wouldn’t go into detail over the cell. It had been a long ass ride home to say the least. Now to find that Glory had been in dangerous shit up to her ears and had kept it from him?

  Yeah, it was going to take a minute before he trusted himself to speak again.

  In the end, what softened Jules’s anger was the honest look of deep apology on Glory’s face and the return of the exhausted slump of her shoulders. He watched as a thousand emotions seemed to flash over her—anger, fear, frustration, stubborn pride—then defeat.

  “I’m just so tired.” Glory sagged in abject misery. “I know I should have told someone—told you. And I wanted to, but I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” Jules fought to keep his tone even. “I’m trying to understand, Glory. I really am. But what the hell could have been scarier to you than meeting that lunatic all by yourself—what could have been scarier than trying to handle this alone?”

  When Glory looked up at him with a quivering lip and eyes bright with unshed tears, Jules forced himself to unclench his fist. Muttering a few choice words underneath his breath, he walked over to the small fridge he kept in his room. He grabbed himself a beer and brought one over to Glory. When he untwisted the top and handed it to her, he felt gratified to see that she had stopped wringing her hands long enough to take it. While she took a long pull on the frosty bottle, Jules dragged a chair over and sat opposite her. He leaned in close with his knees touching hers and his big palms warming her trembling thighs.

  At her uncertain pause, his voice gentled. “Glory, talk to me.”

  Jules waited as Glory took another gulp of Dutch courage. Then he took the beer from her, placed it on the table and covered her small cold hands with his large warm ones. Jules waited for her to speak as if there was nothing else in the world he would rather do. In turn, Glory surprised him when she reached out and stroked his cheek, hesitantly, as though she were afraid he would disappear.

  “My connection with the Abiatti family goes way back. It’s a part of my life that I would give anything to forget, and it’s something that I try not to think about, because when I do—it makes me sick—I make myself sick.”

  “Glory—” Jules began to reassure her.

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you, Jules,” she interrupted him in a halting breath, “I wanted to wait as long as I could before tearing open that wound again. As much as it hurts me to admit it, my brother’s right. The Abiatti family used me in the worst way possible, and because they think—they know how easily I can be fooled—they thought they could use me again. And I just wanted to prove them wrong. To show them I am not a dumb doll to be taken off a shelf and played with when it suits them. So I guess I just wanted to stand on my own against Santino, even for a little while. I thought it would make me feel strong, but instead it just made me feel stupid.”

  “I get what you’re saying, baby,” Jules said with understanding. “Everybody’s got shit in their past they would rather not talk about, or think about. But in all that time we spent together—I just wish you would have told me.”

  Glory cast her eyes down for a long moment, then looked up at Jules from behind wet lashes. “How could I tell you? I was ashamed. And to be honest, I figured that you probably knew most of it anyway. After what happened at Raine’s grandmother’s house—that whole awful thing with Gino—you remember that?” Glory entreated him with eyes bright with tears.

  Jules reached out to smooth her hair. “I remember.”

  She looked at him mournfully and continued, “I know what it means to be Sergeant at Arms, the one who’s responsible to keep the club safe. And I can’t imagine—no matter what Claire and Raine wanted or said—that you would have let a stranger, not even a little old thing like me—” Here she gave him a tremulous smile “—anywhere near this clubhouse without looking into who I was and where I came from. Especially considering the circumstances that brought me here.”

  Jules nodded in agreement. “Yeah. None of us saw that whole Gino Abiatti shit-show coming. When Reno put that call in, the boys went balls to the walls trying to find out anything they could. Looking into you was a big part of that. I found out about your affiliation with the Abiatti family, and I knew you had danced in a mob owned club in Vegas. But that was about it. No drug use, no big money in the bank, nothing that I could see that tied you to any of their criminal activity. Lots of women dance, I didn’t think too much beyond that. But I gotta tell you, after getting to know you better? That shit didn’t add up.”

  “You never asked me about it.” Glory’s voice was barely above a whisper.

  Jules shook his head. “Only mattered to me, if it mattered to you. You not talking about your past was something I understand. I figured you wanted to move beyond it. I was good with that.”

  Glory looked down at Jules’s large hands still encompassing hers.

  He hadn’t let go.

  He hadn’t let go.

  “Have you ever heard of Derek Thomas?” Glory’s voice was strained.

  “Name sounds familiar.” Jules paused for a moment, then remembered. “Wasn’t he some Hollywood big shot? Yeah, that’s right. The pictures were plastered all over the news a few years ago. Caught my attention, because his woman was a knock-out—long blond hair, blue eyes, legs that went on forever. A Scandinavian actress or maybe a model? Didn’t the whole family die in a freak car crash? Decapitated or some shit?”

  “It was a helicopter crash.” Glory swallowed around the lump in her throat. “They were in Utah. On a ski trip. It was one of those stupid heli-skiing trips. You know the kind where you get on a helicopter and the pilot takes you to some mountain top and drops you off. Then the chopper comes back later and picks you up again. Who skis down a one hundred thousand foot ridge? And why?” Glory’s hand trembled beneath his.

  “Did you know them? The family that died?” Jules asked in surprise.

  “The whole
family didn’t die.” Glory’s eyes clouded with memories. “Just the parents. Derek and Asta Thomas. My—our—parents.”

  “Wow. No shit?” Jules shook his head incredulously.

  “No shit,” Glory whispered as her eyes clouded with pain. “My dad was in the entertainment business. He owned a small film company that produced a sleeper hit. It won a couple of Academy Awards in the early eighties. He went on after that to produce a few more films, but none of them did too well. What they say about show business is true. It’s a win-big or lose-big kind of business. And my dad was a guy who loved to take chances. Sometimes they paid off—sometimes they didn’t. My mom was Swedish. She was only eighteen years old when they met and my dad launched her modeling career. They fell in love and got married. I guess it was kind of a Svengali thing they had going, but they made it work, for the most part anyway. Like I said, my dad was a risk taker, a gambler. He gambled with his business. He gambled with his marriage—fidelity was never real high on his list. And in the end he gambled with his life by taking that stupid trip. By the time the accident happened, my dad owed money to just about everybody, and my mom was in a huge state of denial for a very long time. When she finally realized what was happening to this perfect life she had created—that they had created together—she started to drink.

  “Sounds rough,” Jules offered.

  “It wasn’t easy. I can’t tell you how many times Hal and I would escape to the gardens just to get away from all the yelling and fighting. That ski trip was a last ditch effort to pitch a television series to some Hollywood executives and save our family from financial ruin. They all died on that trip. The two executives, the pilot and my parents. The Hollywood guys and the pilot were killed on impact, but my mom and dad were flung from the chopper and—well—what the papers said about how they died—that was true.”

  “I’m sorry, baby. That sucks.” Jules squeezed her hands gently.

  Glory set her shoulders against a tremor of grief, and continued. “I had just turned eighteen and Hal was just a year older. After the lawyers were done settling all the debts, the money left over from the estate was enough to buy us a small car and rent a furnished apartment. That’s when things started to get real. My brother and I had no idea how to navigate a working class life. So we both decided to capitalize on what we did best. I thought that I could use our family connections to break into the modeling industry. And I did. I got in the door, but honestly I was no good at it. All that posing and smiling for the camera—that just wasn’t me. In the end I settled for a hostess job at a nice restaurant just off the Vegas strip. And Hal—” Glory paused and bit her bottom lip.