“Yep, aren’t I lucky?” was the bright and breezy reply.
“I wouldn’t call it lucky. Tied to three men?” Kenzie scoffed. “Being with one is trouble enough.”
“Then you’ve never met the right men,” Ama retorted.
“Listen to you. Jesus. Selling the next American dream, huh? Happily ever after. They’ll do what Hex did to me. Start fucking around when you get too sore. Or God help you if you get morning sickness, then you won’t see them for dust.”
“You know he got arrested, right?”
I couldn’t stop myself from getting to my feet and peering in through the sliver of the open door. Kenzie was tense but settled back into the sofa, while Ama was on an armchair, her feet curled up underneath her with her notepad on her knees. She didn’t look like she was involved in a verbal war on words, but Kenzie’s tension told me she was in full on defensive mode.
“When?” my sister asked, her tone sullen.
“When do you think? On the run that he left on.” Ama peered over her sketchpad. “My granddaddy wasn’t happy to lose so many good men.”
Kenzie gulped.
She fucking gulped.
“Oh?” she said warily.
“Yeah. Oh. He was pissed. Thinks there’s a rat in his nest. Gone back to scour the MC out for the dirty snitch.”
Kenzie’s face morphed from bright pink to white at Ama’s declaration, but when she thought Lucifer had returned to find the rat at the club there? She looked relieved.
A gulp and a few facial expressions weren’t exactly a signed confession, but I knew my fucking sister. Maybe not well, not like some people, but well enough to register fear—I’d seen it on her face when Mama had died.
She cleared her throat when Ama’s attention averted to her pad once more. “Is that what they think I’ve done? That I was the snitch?”
“Don’t think you’d still be sitting here if that were the case, do you?” Ama replied sweetly.
“Even if I was the rat,” she hedged. “They’d never hurt me because I’m pregnant!”
“Momma said she saw your belly so I guess you must be.”
Kenzie’s mouth gaped wide open and pulsed a few times like a goldfish’s. “That’s what that was about? She was checking to see if I was pregnant?”
“Could have just been a mountain of foundation on your belly… you know, like it was on your face.”
Kenzie’s teeth ground down. “I can’t fucking believe this. I came home to—”
“To, what? Seems like you don’t really want to be here. Seems to me like you’ve never wanted to be here, so what’s your game?”
“I haven’t exactly been extended a welcoming hand, have I? Pretty much soon after I arrived I was on house arrest!”
“And now you know why. Especially after we were raided the same day you arrived. Two busts on one day and with you transferring from one clubhouse to the other?” Ama snorted. “You have to admit, it looks suspicious.”
Kenzie surged upright in an explosive movement. I tensed, waiting for her to attack Ama, but she didn’t. They were in a seating area—a sofa with two armchairs, a coffee table, and two end tables on either side of the sofa with a lamp. She headed out of that seating area and began to pace around it.
Around and around, like she was trying to think, trying to clear her mind to come up with her next plan of action.
The look on her face?
One of desperation.
She knew she’d been cornered.
She knew it and she kept flickering her gaze over to Ama who, for all intents and purposes, was entirely disinterested in what my sister was doing. Her focus was on her sketchpad, and call me stupid, but I could see Kenzie trying to figure out the odds.
Odds about what, I wasn’t entirely sure, because if she hurt Ama, she’d have two MCs riding her ass from here to Canada if she thought she could go on the run after that.
“Ama?”
I stiffened, waiting on my sister’s next words.
“Yeah?”
“Will you help me?”
Ama switched focus, and pinning Kenzie with her stare, asked, “Help you do what?”
“Get out of here.”
“And why would you want to do that when you’re home and a ‘girl needs to be home when she’s about to give birth?’” Ama mocked, her eyes harder than I’d ever seen.
“Because I’m in danger. L-Look, I know we’ve never gotten on well. But I’m Keys’ sister. You know it will hurt him if anything happens to me. And my daddy. I know you love him as well,” she wheedled. “It would kill them both if anything happened to me.”
“And exactly why would anything happen to you if you’ve done nothing wrong?” I inserted, striding into the room, unable to take this bullshit any longer. I wasn’t about to let Ama be manipulated. Not when there was so much at stake here.
Kenzie, upon seeing me, froze. She raised her hands into the air like I was a cop, and whispered, “Please, Keys. Just let me go.”
“Like Ama said, you worked so hard to get here, Kenz. Why the fuck do you feel the need to leave now?”
Her words were strangled when she whispered, “I had no choice.”
Everything inside me froze. “No choice to do what?”
“Help them. They needed an in.”
“Who did?”
She released a shaky breath. “W-When I left here, things didn’t go so well. I hung around at the Knights’ compound for a while, but shit didn’t work out there. I’m not made out to be a clubwhore.”
“Fuck no, you’re not. You’re a councilor’s daughter,” I growled, my hands balling into fists at my sides.
She gulped. “Well, it didn’t take me long to pick myself up and get the hell out of there. But in El Paso, things were harder.”
“Why? Because you actually had to work?” Ama sneered, but the pad was still resting on her knees, her pencil moving as she worked.
“Like you’re one to talk. You’re away with the fucking fairies most of the time, Ama,” Kenzie snarled back.
“Until this summer, I’ve been at school, you idiot. I only just fucking graduated. With a 3.9 GPA. I’m not a lazy bitch like some people. I don’t need to pay my bills on my back.”
Kenzie flinched at that but snapped, “I tried to make a go of it in El Paso, I really did. But I ended up with some bad people. Got myself into some shit, and ended up in jail with a possession charge.”
“You were dealing drugs?” I choked out.
“Yeah.” She raised her hands and covered her face. “I’m not proud of it, and I’m not proud of what I did next.”
“What?”
“They were going to throw me behind bars for eight years, Jamie. Eight. I couldn’t—” She shook her head. “I couldn’t do it. I agreed to help them.”
“You cut a deal,” I snarled.
“They wanted me to go back to the Knights, so I did. And when I told them what they were running, and with whom, then they got interested in the Rebels’ operation.”
“So you brought them here? Ain’t you heard of never shitting in your own backyard?”
She flinched at my yell. “I didn’t have a choice!”
“We always have a choice.” I scrubbed a hand over my face before I turned away from her, trying to process what the fuck was happening. “This is bad shit, Kenzie. I don’t think we can help you. If you weren’t pregnant, you’d be in The Pit for this shit.”
Kenzie gulped. “I know. That’s why I have to get out of here.”
“We can’t help you,” Ama said softly. “Not without implicating ourselves in your BS. We can’t even let you get away, not without getting blamed too. I’m not about to take any heat for the mess you’ve fallen into, Kenzie. Don’t care if you’re Jamie’s sister or Rodeo’s kid. You’re not worth it. You don’t deserve either of them. And you sure as fuck don’t deserve any help from us—”
“Well said, Ama.”
Kenzie hissed and her eyes rounded in fear as L
ucie strode into the room. It felt like the space around her throbbed with chaotic energy. I knew her well enough to recognize that look—that bitter, gnarly look was what had overcome her when they’d dragged Jodie-May, kicking and screaming, into the clubhouse for her punishment.
A punishment that Lucie had no problem meting out.
Kenzie backed off, but there was nowhere to go. She flattened herself to the wall and rasped, “Please, Lucie. Please. Just let me go. I won’t be no more bother.”
“No, you sure as shit won’t,” Lucie growled, as she strode toward my sister, but Ama wasn’t wrong—she wasn’t worthy of us. Didn’t deserve us as family.
She was no fucking sister of mine.
When Lucie stepped toward her, Kenzie looked like she was going to piss herself, then, Lucie froze and bit off, “What the fuck have you done?”
Unsure what she meant, I stared where she looked, Ama, finally getting to her feet, did too.
“Oh my God,” Ama whispered at the surge of cop cars that rammed the road to the compound. “What the fuck did you tell them?”
Kenzie released a shaky breath, one that was loaded with a sense of relief that made me hate her even more. With a cockiness that made me wish she was a man so I could beat the shit out of her, she murmured, “You’ll find out soon enough.”
Lucie surged forward at that and with all her force, raised her hand and slapped Kenzie. “Be grateful you’re pregnant. If you weren’t, I’d have done more.” She spat at Kenzie who was holding her cheek, then spat again. The globule of spit landed on my sister’s forehead. “If you do anything to hurt my family again, I will find you and I’ll make you pay.”
“I never wanted to hurt you in the first place.”
Lucie sneered. “Scurry along to your pig friends, bitch. Oink, oink.” She grabbed her arm and hurled her away. Kenzie caught herself but did as bid, scurried off like the rat she was.
“Ama, you’re about to hear some stuff and see some stuff that might frighten you. But please, baby,” Lucie urged her, grabbing hold of her hands and squeezing them tightly. “Don’t worry. Just keep your mouth shut. Say you don’t know anything, and keep it on repeat. This will all be over by tomorrow.”
Ama gulped, but kissed her momma’s cheek. “Will everyone be safe?”
Lucie stared her in the eye and nodded, and I released a relieved breath because that meant, no matter how hard they tried, the cops were about to have a wasted journey.
Lucie wouldn’t lie to Ama.
I knew that like I knew my face in the mirror.
10
Ink
Funny how lying flat on your stomach for a couple hours could really start to hurt. Fuck. My face was buried in the grass, which wouldn’t have been a problem except for the goddamn ants, which were making a meal out of me, and my elbows and wrists were killing me from being cuffed behind my back.
But there was no point in bitching. Every single one of my brothers was in this position. Anyone with a cut was down on the ground, face in the dirt, while pig fuckers went searching around our compound, trying to sniff out our secrets.
I’d seen Ama and Lucie being huddled away with the rest of the women. They’d been ‘stored’ in one of the outbuildings, and it wouldn’t have pissed me off if it weren’t for the fact it was goddamn boiling hot in there. They had to be suffering from heat exhaustion by now.
“Ink?”
I twisted my head to the side. “Yeah?”
“They’re letting the women out,” Flame rasped.
“Thank fuck for that. Means this shit’s almost over,” I grumbled with relief, not questioning how he knew that. Flame had better goddamn ears than a dog.
“Hopefully.” Flame tipped his chin up so he could look around the compound from our position on the lawn at the front of the building.
“What warrant did they show to get in?”
“They’re looking for contraband.”
I snorted. “That’s a nice loose term for a warrant. Swear to fuck, they’re handing those out like candy.”
“You saw Kenzie being hustled into a cop car. They had a lead, so that made shit easier.”
I gritted my teeth at that. It was going to kill Rodeo to know his daughter had jeopardized the club. Fuck, I just hoped this didn’t send him into a tailspin.
My nose was itching like fuck, but in this position, the only place I could scratch it was in the dirt—like that was about to happen.
“They can’t have found anything. They’d have come and shoved it in Wolfe’s face if they had,” I heard a brother a few rows down from me whisper into the silence.
“Shut your mouth,” I hissed, just loud enough for the idiot to hear.
A scraping sound ricocheted around the compound, one I recognized from the outbuilding the women had been stored in. The door rubbing against the corrugated iron was followed by the nervous chatter of the women as they were finally released, and when a gasp rang out, followed by startled cries, I jerked my chin upright to see what the fuck was going down.
My instincts told me it was Ama.
I wasn’t sure why.
Ama wasn’t physically weak. Nor was she mentally. I figured for her to go through what she did on a nightly basis was actually the opposite of weak, but still, I expected the gasp to be about her and I felt kind of shitty when I saw it was Bubbles. Looked like she’d dropped to her knees pretty much as soon as she’d left the outbuilding.
The women gathered around her, pecking at her like hens as they tried to help her to her feet, but it was Jinx who hollered, “You bastards. She’s fucking pregnant. You can’t put her in a fucking oven for goddamn how many hours and not expect her to get sick.”
Flame muttered, “Think we know who the daddy is?”
I grunted. “Either that or a brother who wishes he was.” I cut him a look. “Takes you off the hot seat.”
He shrugged. “What Lucie wants, she gets.”
“Spoiled,” I muttered wryly.
“And Ama won’t be?” He cocked a brow at me. “You get one chance with women like them. You and I both know it. Fucked around, the both of us, touched so many cunts in my life I can’t even count, but the one woman who ain’t just a walking pussy, the one who means more to me than just sex? Yeah, that means she’s special.
“When you think about a woman more than just about getting off, when you think about how she is, where she is, and if she’s safe… you spoil the fuck outta that woman because she’s become your reason for fucking living—”
“You’re preaching to the converted,” I said dryly. “Don’t wanna say I’m pussy-whipped—”
“Only fuckers who don’t get as much pussy as us say that we’re whipped,” Flame retorted, using more words than I’d heard from him in around a year. “And if being whipped means having a woman who’d never cheat on you, who gives a fuck where you are at night, and who wants you safe and healthy?”
I nodded, but something about his words had me frowning at him. “Healthy? Something wrong, Flame?”
His mouth tightened. “Been healthier.”
“Yeah? Anything I can do?”
“You a doctor?” He snorted. “Nothing too bad. High blood pressure. Caught it just in time. On meds.”
“You telling me this because I’m a brother, a councilor, or your son-in-law?”
“Ain’t my son-in-law until you wife her, but yeah, more because of Ama than anything else.”
I stared over at Bubbles who was splayed flat out on the ground. Jinx was swearing and cussing up a storm, wriggling around like a dying rat that’d been poisoned.
Wolfe, at his left, hissed, “You’re gonna get your ass thrown in jail, dumb fuck. Calm down. You’ll get to your bitch later.” Then, he muttered, “We’ll be having a conversation about her too.”
Seemed like Jinx heard because he calmed down, but he kept his eyes trained on Bubbles like his life depended on it.
Jinx wasn’t the prettiest brother, nor was he the cleverest. But
he was a solid man, reliable. I had to wonder if Bubbles had trapped him like she’d tried to trap Saint and Wolfe, or if she’d just been lying all along because Jinx didn’t have the prospects Saint did or the position Wolfe possessed.
Fuck knew how bitches like her worked, but still, I was sorry she was down. Only God knew what that kind of temperature would do to a baby.
“I think we underestimate Ama,” I told Flame softly.
“How?”
“Didn’t you think she was the one who’d fainted?”
Flame frowned, then grunted. “Yeah.”
“But look at her.” I shook my head, even though it was awkward as hell. “She’s helping Bubbles. Even though she tried to mess up her momma’s marriage and tried to trap one of the men she loves.”
“Pretty much always underestimated her,” Flame admitted sadly. “Not her fault. Just…”
“Over-protecting her, I guess.”
“Yeah. She’s a better shot than me, did you know that?”
My brow puckered. “No. I didn’t. Not seen her with a gun since middle school.” And I’d stopped watching because seeing Ama armed and shooting had made Playboy look boring for my teen hormones.
Flame smirked. “Hell, you’re in for a show. Ask her sometime. You’ll get a kick out of it. She don’t like doing it, but she will if you ask nicely.”
Intrigued, I was about to pump him for more information when one of the main pigs, a dude who strutted around like John Wayne—even had fucking spurs on his goddamn cowboy boots, because that made him a real man—headed over to Wolfe, crouched down, and said, “You’re free to go. This time.”
Though I could feel the cheer we all wanted to holler, none of us said shit. We kept things quiet and waited until we were all released from our cuffs.
When Flame and I were free, we headed over to where Wolfe was, and I overheard, “This sounds like entrapment to me, sir,” Wolfe snarled, his eyes shifting first to Lucie and Ama who were both safe and were still waiting on an ambulance—if they could even get out here with all the goddamn cars taking up the road—and then over to us, his council, as we circled him.
John Wayne spat on the ground and said softly, too softly for the colleagues still freeing my brothers to hear, “This can become a regular thing or it can be wiped away… your choice. You got my number. I’ll be waiting on your call.”
Their Saint: Hell’s Rebel’s MC Part II Page 21
