Disruption

by Victoria Johns

  I slammed the window with my free hand, and she jumped, a few of the people below us looked up, puzzled, wondering whether they heard the noise over the sound of the music. Not Thorn Fucking Mottram though, he was too busy high fiving his pussy friends.

  “Tell me!”

  Bailey wrestled her head free of my grasp and for the first time since I’d forced her to look at her boyfriend, she turned her eyes to me.

  They weren’t cold, they were shining bright.

  “He has me. For years you and I existed, together but apart and we both knew where we stood. Changing that disrupted the natural order of things. Now, we can never go back to how it should be.”

  Her words cut deep.

  “And I’ll tell you what I see in him, he’s not Zane Teague.”

  No. I was wrong, those words cut deep.

  As her admission lanced like thunder and lightning inside me, I pulled out of her. Everything about this was toxic. I’d come up here to play her at her own game, fuck her and run, but she’d turned the tables on me.

  Keeping a lid on the emotions boiling and bubbling inside me, I pushed my dick back in my pants. Bailey moved around me, avoiding me, which was pointless because she’d done her damage already. I watched as she straightened and smoothed her dress and left the bedroom not even bothering to put on fresh panties.

  That bitch was going to go back to him with my cum still inside her.

  The bedroom fell silent, the atmosphere thick and toxic. I knew I had to get a grip on what I was feeling. I had to go back down and appear normal in front of her twin brother, not to mention I’d abandoned Bella.

  Calling on reserves I didn’t know I had, I left her ripped panties on the floor, hoping that cunt Thorn would find them, and then headed downstairs to my ‘date’.

  Chapter Twenty

  Storming onto the dance floor, I scanned the area for Jameson, Kerry and Bella, and it looked like poor old Jameson was having a helluva time. Kerry on one side, scowling at him, Bella on the other side shrinking into the corner wishing she was anywhere but there. This girl had done me a favor by coming to keep me under control and I’d fucked that up too, all for the fucking Roaches. My best friend, brother and business partner couldn’t even keep the poor girl amused while I made a bad situation with his sister, worse. Granted he didn’t know that, but still.

  “We’re leaving.” I grabbed Bella’s hand as I got close, glaring at Jameson before yanking her behind me.

  We only had ten foot to go before we successfully made it out of this shit show, when the music stopped abruptly and spotlights appeared just in front of the DJ’s table.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your hosts for this evening would like a few minutes of your time.”

  Jameson and Kerry appeared beside Bella and me, and I looked at my friend for some explanation as to what the fuck was going on, but he avoided my gaze. Waiters and waitresses started to circulate carrying trays of champagne flutes. I didn’t take one, but Bella, who was the ultimate in polite party etiquette, reached for one. As Thorn took a microphone from the DJ, Jameson pulled his cell from his jacket pocket, the light from the screen illuminating his face. I side eyed him as he swiped his thumb across the screen.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” He finally looked at me. “Keep your shit together.”

  Before I could ask what he meant, Thorn kicked in. “We won’t take up much of your time, I’m sure you’re all keen to get back to the party. Thanks for coming this evening.” He put an arm around Bailey’s shoulder, and she smiled back at him. Those of us that knew her would be able to tell that she was on edge. “Yesterday, I made a very nervous trip to see this beautiful woman’s father.”

  I knew what was coming and there was every chance I was going to slay every person in this fucking room.

  “Z, I mean it,” Jameson hissed. “Witnesses.”

  Thorn continued, “I asked him for his permission to make Bailey Roach my wife. He granted me that wish.” The crowd ah’d, but it was nothing compared to the roar of hateful rage that was pulsing inside my head.

  “Today, I asked her, and she said yes!” He held her hand up in the air flashing a ring, the light from a tacky glitter ball I hadn’t noticed earlier seemed to pick it out and make it sparkle. It was big, I’d say ten carats. How the fuck hadn’t I noticed the ring when I’d fucked her senseless against her bedroom window?

  Fucking cheapskate.

  “Did you know?” I ground the words through my clenched jaw.

  “Had an idea, Grandma’s been blowing up my cell all night.”

  “So…” For fuck’s sake, this torture wasn’t over yet, when would it end so I could put this hideous evening behind me. “Please join me and raise your glasses. To the future Mrs. Bailey Roach Mottram!”

  Stupid cunt was going to let her double barrel. If she was mine, she’d be mine. In every way, name included, and I certainly wouldn’t let her out of my sight for long enough to let someone else show her what a real man could do.

  Someone rushed a glass into Bailey and Thorn’s hands and the crowd cheered.

  I looked back to the stage and Bailey was smiling at me. Once again, she’d had the last laugh, while it had been my intention to drill her into despair, she’d turned the tables again and I was the one feeling despair and desperation.

  “Now we’re definitely leaving.”

  “Don’t you want to congratulate the happy couple?” Bella muttered.

  “No, I fucking don’t.”

  We’d made it to the end of the Baileys driveway, before I realized Bishop had left, he’d probably gone to break something or murder someone, such was his mood. I knew the fucking feeling well. “Fuck. I’ll call an Uber.”

  “No worries.” Bella hopped up onto a little wall and chuckled. “At least I’ve got champagne for the wait.”

  She took a sip from the glass she’d had no time to offload before I’d dragged her out of the party. My need to be as far away as possible was the only thing containing the storm inside me. Jameson had stayed inside; he could deal with the mess Bailey had got herself into this time.

  I perched on the wall next to Bella. “Well, tonight didn’t go as I’d planned.”

  “You had a plan?” She laughed.

  I felt my cell ping in my pocket and knew the uber was only a couple of miles or so away.

  “Leaving so early?” Thorn’s voice sounded behind us from the top of the drive. He moved farther down until he was stood next to his Rolls Royce Wraith, a pussy’s car, chosen by wannabee gangsters and rap stars.

  Him I could do without. I’d barely got a grip on my sanity as it was. Bailey had already fucked me off, I could do without her new fiancé fucking me over to finish the job off.

  “Early business meeting in the morning,”

  Thorn’s shoulders started to move before laughter barked from him. “Never did I think I’d beat the great Zane Teague. The big Z man, he ain’t all that. Lost out to me.”

  I felt my guts harden, like ice had soaked through my skin and taken root. “Come again?”

  “Always gets what he wants, that’s the word on the street.”

  I wanted to stay seated, but couldn’t, my intrinsic nature told me I needed to be on eye level with anyone who ever challenged me. Only when I stood up, if we were close, I’d be towering above him, so he’d need to look up at me and I’d win the first point from him. The fact that he carried on sneering at me told me he was either brave or insane.

  “Who says you have something I want?” I replied, looking him up and down.

  “You do a good job of hiding it, but I’m not stupid.” He bounced on his toes like a fighter performing to the crowd, before doing neck stretches, and instead of looking MMA he came across as low paid WWE. But it was the crowing that made me forget all of that and I wanted to end him. “Come near her again and things won’t end so pleasantly. She wants a real man not a fuck boy.”

  Definitely insane.

  I wondered whether he knew abo
ut earlier tonight, or if he was referring to the time that I finger fucked her in the bathroom when she’d first introduced him. Whichever it was, I didn’t give a fuck. Right then, he was lucky he was still breathing. I leant down, smiled at Bella and took the champagne flute from her hand. Before she could protest, I tapped it against the wall and watched it crumble, leaving me holding the jagged, sharp stem.

  I rushed Thorn who had no escape room as he was already flush up against the wing of his ride. His pupils were wide, he was high as a fucking kite and was probably the one who left the coke Bailey was about to snort earlier. Without much effort I saw the shift in his thought process.

  What am I doing?

  How do I back out of this without looking like a gutless coward?

  Is he going to hurt me?

  Under any other circumstance, he wouldn’t be left posing those intense thoughts for long, I’d be only too happy to serve up the answers for him. But not in that moment.

  I got impossibly closer, enjoying how his fear and realization kicked in, feeding my rage monster. Smiling at how proud my father would be knowing I was disrupting someone’s plans for how they thought this was gonna go.

  “You’re lucky. That pretty girl down there, she’s a nurse and used to seeing blood, although don’t think she’d appreciate it on her night off.”

  He swallowed hard and I saw it in my peripheral vision.

  “There’s also another problem…” I paused, building tension, wondering if he’d piss his pants then or when I’d finished. “Witnesses,” I whispered, causing him to jump.

  I let that sink deep in his skull.

  “But don’t worry, Thorn, your time will come.” A car beeped at the bottom of Bailey’s driveway. “Fuck, our fun is cut short by Uber.” As I raised my hand he flinched, but I reached to the side of him and scored a deep crevice in the wing of his shiny black Roll’s paint work with the stubbed broken end of the champagne flute I still had hold of. “Here, a memento of our fun together.”

  I reached for his hand, put the broken stem in his palm and squeezed, knowing it had broken his flesh, I didn’t need his hiss to confirm it. The cost of the repair wouldn’t hurt him or his daddy but explaining it to Bailey might. Looking at it every day until he got it repaired, probably being reminded about who put it there and that he was on my radar, that would definitely cut him to the quick.

  Bella was already in the back of the Uber when I climbed in, before I could give the driver both of our addresses, she took over, giving hers only. “Time for a night cap.”

  “Your brother will kill me.”

  “You gonna misbehave?”

  I smiled and she smiled. “Me? Course not.”

  “This is a cool place,” I commented, looking around at what was a simple place. Clean, in a nice neighborhood and had flashes of her personality all over it and by that I meant earth loving, eco warrior, environmentally friendly.

  “There’s a couple of chairs on the balcony, Scotch?”

  “Sure.” I opened the balcony door and the heat burst into the room fighting with the air conditioning unit. A few minutes later Bella came out bare-footed, now dressed in what I was pretty sure were tartan pajamas, holding a bottle and two glasses. The bottle unfortunately was one of the Roach popular sellers and she saw me roll my eyes at it. There was just no fucking escaping that woman.

  “In case it’s not obvious, I changed into my bed gear so you weren’t tempted to get me out of that dress.” She poured us both a healthy glass and sat down on one of the chairs on the balcony.

  “It was one helluva dress. Hot.” I raised my glass in cheers and admiration.

  She raised hers in return. “A job well done.”

  “Why don’t you live closer to your brother?”

  “Because his protection would really know no bounds.” She laughed, not affronted by my question in the slightest. “And just so we’re clear, we didn’t come back here to have sex.”

  I gasped with fake shock. “Wounded, for sure, but why?”

  “Because my brother will kill you.”

  “True.”

  “Because we’re friends and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “Appreciated.”

  “And because you’re in love with Bailey.” I opened my mouth to reply but no words came out. I could have denied it, but she’d seen and heard what had gone down with Bailey’s new fiancé. “Wanna talk about it?”

  I didn’t. I didn’t think that would help anyone, least of all me, but instead found the words tumbling from my lips before I could think it through.

  “For a minute, just a hot fucking minute, I had her. I thought we’d make it, always end up together eventually, but now she’s getting married to that moron.”

  “What happened?”

  “Bailey, Jameson, and I were thick as thieves from kids. She was always the crazy, wild one; J was always the sensible one and me, I’d go along with any plan she had just to see her smile.”

  Bella smiled, refilling an empty glass that I hadn’t realized I’d drained dry.

  “I made a stupid promise to her brother that I’d never go there, his fear was that a fucked-up romance would come between us, but then it became more. Our life, our career choice, he never really wanted that to touch her and that would be impossible if I was with her.”

  “But she loves you too.”

  “Not enough, apparently. I laid myself wide open for us and, well she just… left.” Bella pulled the blanket from the back of her chair and draped it around her shoulders. “You cold? I’ll call another Uber.”

  “No. Sit. Drink and unload, I get the impression you’ve been bottling this shit up.”

  I laughed. “What gave that away? The metal groove I left in his car with a broken glass stem?”

  “I was more thinking of the hole you were close to puncturing through his palm, stigmata style.”

  “You mean I didn’t? Fuck. Failed,” I replied on an empty laugh.

  Silence dropped around us, the only thing to be heard from the dark vista in front of us was the odd traffic horn in the distance and the cicadas in the trees close by.

  Muttering, “I’d have changed for her,” this time Bella threw back the amber liquid in her glass.

  “Why? You don’t change for the people you love. If you did you wouldn’t be the person they fell in love with in the first fucking place. She’s a fool.” I rarely heard Bella Bishop swear, but that wasn’t as shocking as the venom in her voice.

  “Sounds like you’re talking from experience.” I looked across at her, wondering who needed the listening ear the most right now.

  “I know what it’s like to love the wrong person.” This time I poured her another glass. A few more of these, after the champagne and the few cocktails she’d had at the party would see this going sideways quickly. “Or someone who you know loves you but says they can’t love you back.”

  Bella’s head fell back onto the chair and she tilted it looking in my direction, for a moment, I panicked. Had I read this wrong? Did she… love me?

  Sensing the shock and panic on my face she burst out laughing. “God, your face. Calm yourself. It’s not you.”

  “Thank fuck for that. You’re hot, I believe I’ve mentioned it once or twice tonight, but your brother would skin me alive if I went there.”

  I tapped the tattoo at my collar bone, those who mattered the most to me had those words inked on their skin and they were more than just words, and the fact that even Bailey had them proved that. Jameson jumped his way in to get his, and Bishop had earned his ten times over with his unwavering loyalty to me. Anything I did to make him question his loyalty to the Teague Business would destroy me as much as him.

  “Do I know this poor schmuck who let such a good thing go?” Bella looked at me again, sucked her lips between her teeth and raised her brows. She was trying to tell me something that seemed to be taking an age to settle. “I do?”

  “You do.”

  “I know a lot of p
eople, if you don’t want to share that’s fine.”

  “God, how dumb are you? It’s Jameson.”

  Her words blew me away. How was someone in love with the guy I was closest to and I didn’t know. “You wanna talk about it?”

  “Thought that was my line.” She laughed, although it was a hollow one. “We just kind of fell together one night. Bishop brought him round for some under the radar medical care.”

  I tried to think back to when that was, and as I racked through the rolodex of disasters Jameson had been involved in, there were less than a handful that needed medical care. “I hate that we drag you into our shit, sorry. But which time are we referring to?”

  “It was a ‘fishing injury.’” She even did that cute fake air quote thing with her fingers.

  I knew what she was referring to then because we were always astute enough to get our stories straight. We’d gone for a meeting with some Chechens that turned bad when Jameson took a dislike to how we were being talked to. It resulted in him getting sliced across his pectoral with a hunting knife that looked like something a redneck with a banjo had made. My best friend though, he was more fucked off with how it came close to catching some of his ink, not least his Teague tatt. Most people would have been worried about other important things with a knife wound, you know, the neck and heart lurking dangerously close to that pectoral. We got my brother out of there and brought him to a private doctor’s surgery we had on payroll. Problem was, it was the docs wedding anniversary, and no one was working on Jameson with alcohol in their system. At very short notice Bishop pulled his sister into action and she patched him up sufficiently. While she did, Bishop and I went back to the Chechens place and laid waste to them with a sub machine gun he’d only cleaned and oiled earlier that day. If they took us seriously, they would have cleared out as soon as Teague blood was drawn, but they didn’t, and all of them paid the price.

  We didn’t just even the score, we always went the extra mile and extended our win. Death to one of us, equaled death to all of them. We were controlled but lethal, until I blew that control with over the top disruption.