My eyes almost burst out of my head. “No.”
Of course I wouldn’t tell him, not yet at least. I haven’t even made up my mind when it came to telling Rage about his son. I’m sure you’re wondering how I hid it from him for so long, but that was easy. For one, I wasn’t beginning to show very much, and secondly, he made a comment about how I was gaining a few pounds the other day. The jerk thinks I’m fat, not pregnant.
“You need to tell him, or you need to just… leave,” she whispers softly so no one around us could hear. Everyone was too busy caught up in their own business to worry about what Rage and Roman’s wives were talking about anyways. She didn’t even have to whisper. “Personally, I think you shouldn’t say a thing and should just get outta here. I’m worried about you, Rox. I’m really fucking scared for you.”
Quinn was right to be worried about me. Fuck, I was worried about me. I knew what my options were, and both were terrifying. I could try to leave and potentially get caught and die, or I could stay and potentially die. I didn’t know what to do. She has no idea what it was like to be in my shoes. No one in the club really did, and for the ones that pitied me, or felt guilty for me being in this situation – they didn’t get a right to judge any decision I make. In the end, I was doing whatever I felt was the best thing. Even if it sometimes wasn’t.
“Baby, get your ass over here.” Rage’s voice echoes through the room. I ignore him at first, thinking he was speaking to one of his club whores, but when I look up to see the anger flashing behind his eyes, I know exactly who he was speaking to – me.
I slide off the bar, careful when I walk to not show an ounce of fear. It was what he wants, and I’d be damned if I showed him that I was scared of his unpredictable behavior, even if we both already knew that I was.
He watches me closely as I make each step towards him. He was seated in a chair in the living area, surrounded by chapter Prez’s from other charters – all here to suck up to him.
“Sit your ass down.” I obey the command he growls out to me, sitting on his lap, looking out to the men surrounding us. Each of them are so different than the others. There was Leon who is built like a tank, next to him sits Richard, and Sam was on their right, and so on, and so on. They may have looked different, but they had one thing in common; their lethality. It was the only reason Rage allowed them to be charter Prez’s.
Demons of Hell MC had forty-two charters, all spread across the United States. With each day that passes, the MC was growing, and so was our territory. Rage needs to have men that he could count on to do the job right. To make the decisions that he would make. In most cases, they were men that killed first and asked questions later.
Just like my husband.
I know not to speak to any of the men sitting before me, but to listen, to pay attention to whatever was going on around me. Rage knows my strengths. He know how I listen and pick up on the slightest details surrounding us. A few weeks back our Jacksonville charter Prez mentioned he’d been out of town for two weeks on a vacation of sorts. I knew for a fact that was a lie. By the end of the day, I ended up saving the Demons of Hell over two million dollars. One greedy Prez wanting a little too much. We all know where he is now, rotting six feet under, if Rage even bothered to bury his body.
My husband doesn’t love me, or even like me for that matter, but somehow, he has some small inclination of respect for my opinion.
I think, maybe I was somehow useful to him. Maybe that is why I am still around.
I sit with Rage for over two hours listening to the charter updates. We’d acquire two new charters, one just outside of Seattle – expanding our reach to the west coast, and one outside of Raleigh, giving us a greater presence in the south.
Expansion didn’t come for free. It has to be earned or taken. In our case – we take, and what Rage doesn’t take, he steals.
“Are you getting any kickback from the Sons of Gods?” Rage asks Sam, our charter Prez who just took over an old Raiders compound in Alabama. The Raiders were a prominent MC across the South and West. Only a few short weeks ago, Rage made deals to patch over numerous small clubs. In the end, that grew our headcount from a little over twenty thousand to around thirty-two thousand members. He decided that the time to act on annihilating the Raiders was now.
He took a strong, established club in the South and turned it into almost nothing. If our intel was right, the Raiders were left with only sixteen clubs on the west coast.
I won’t lie, it seemed smart at the time. But now, I didn’t think it was. Rage though, he didn’t patch over the best of the best – he patched in lowlife scum. He patched over men who were eighty-sixed because of reasons – child molesters, rapists, and the like. To sum it up, Rage would patch over men that other Prez’s refused to patch. There are reasons that others wouldn’t, reasons that Rage turned a blind eye to.
“Zeus is making it difficult for us. If you’re asking me, I think we’re going to have a war on our hands.”
“I didn’t ask your opinion. I asked for the facts,” he snarles out at Sam. I expected it. These men should have known better than to air their personal opinion to Rage of all people.
“The fact is Zeus isn’t happy. We took away one of his biggest allies. He and the Raiders worked together on every business transaction, and now he’s left with nothing, scrambling to use only his men to make his deals. He’s weak, and he knows it. But there’s opportunity here, and a big one at that. We can cripple him with just one move.” Sam looks to Rage, waiting for approval to continue. He learned quickly from his mistake, a lot faster than some of the others have.
“Go on,” Rage tells him. He moves his arm slowly up my leg, stroking it gently. Right now, Sam was pleasing him, giving him some sort of ammunition to use against Zeus, otherwise known as public enemy number one to the Demons of Hell.
“He has a family.”
Sam looks back from Rage to me before he speaks. “Forgive me for my bluntness, but his wife and kids mean more to him than she does to you. He cares about his wife. He loves his daughters more than anything else in this world.” Sam was quiet for a moment, anticipating some sort of backlash from Rage. Even I knew he wouldn’t argue with Sam. It’s cute that Sam thought he’d get berated for saying the truth. “We take them out.”
“No!” I snap out. For a moment, I feel nothing but intense anger. I was ready to claw this man’s face off for wanting to attack this innocent woman and her children. The only crime she’d committed was falling for the wrong man. These were innocents, and Sam wanted to use them to send a message. “You can’t hurt that woman or those fucking kids!” I glare at Sam with all of my might, knowing very well not to even look at my husband.
Rage snakes his hand up around the back of my neck, into my hair, and pulls down hard so my face is right next to his own. I couldn’t move an inch, even if I tried. “Was anyone speaking to you, bitch?”
I didn’t utter a single word. Instead, I remain silent and pray that he would forget about my tiny outburst. I pray to God that he’d forget, even if I knew he wouldn’t.
Sam disregards me completely. “We take them out, we cripple him emotionally. He won’t know what to do, he’ll be so distraught, and we can just slide in and take what’s ours. The Demons of Hell will run Alabama.”
“And how exactly would this be done, Sam, since you have all the answers?” Sam’s eyes light up with excitement. He is happy to be pleasing Rage in any way that he could, and that makes me sick.
“I’ve been watching his wife and kids for the last month. I know everything they do. I know where she drops the kids off at daycare. I know everything about their life. Every move they make, I’ve seen, every security check, every prospect shift change. I’ve seen it all. I know their routine, and I have the perfect opportunity to strike. The wife takes the kids to daycare a little after eight in the morning. This is the only time the prospects don’t follow her inside. I don’t care to know the reason why. I see this for what it is, an oppor
tunity. I paid off three employees inside that daycare center, and I say we strike now, while the iron’s hot, before they change up any part of their routine.”
Rage is silent, internally debating what he is going to do. I know this side of him all too well. He is analyzing, thinking of what could go wrong, what could go right, and how to be successful. He is weighing the options and thinking about the risk. He may have been a monster, but he wasn’t a stupid one.
“Set it up and keep me updated on the progress.”
I wanted to believe that I didn’t just hear what I did. That he didn’t just order the execution of two children and their mother, but he did. He did it without shame, without a care in the world.
I’m just left sitting here wondering how I could forget that I married a monster.
Chapter 3
The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
– infj.feelings.tumblr
Roxy
Rage tells me to get the fuck away from him shortly after my difference of opinion. Given that first opportunity, I slide away from him as quickly as possible. In the back of my mind, I keep thinking that at some point, while I’m at the party, he is going to come up to me and show me exactly who is in charge – him. I even go as far as to think what he’d do to me, even the things he has done in the past. Over the years, there has been so much that was done to me that nothing truly surprises me anymore.
There are times when I think that maybe I deserved the things that he’s done. I’d told myself that for a long time, and somehow, I still believe that to be true. I know that it wasn’t, but that didn’t take away the feeling, how no matter what – it felt true. I think that in the back of your mind, when something is repeated over and over again, you eventually start to believe it. That’s what happened to me. I started to believe it, even though I knew better.
Rage had caused me so much pain. His name was a warning, and I didn’t listen. I thought I could help heal the broken man that was before me. I didn’t know back then that he was a lost cause. I learned that shortly thereafter. To sum it up, I learned that far too late.
He beat me time and time again, sometimes with his fists, one time with a log he found out behind the clubhouse. There was another time where grabbed a few of the boys, tied my wrists and ankles to where I couldn’t move an inch, and tore my clothes off me with a hunting knife, leaving me completely exposed, telling the brothers to have their fun with me. I remember the look on his face as he left me in that room to be raped over and over again. That was the first day I can truly remember hating him.
After every beating, I found a way to forgive him for his abuse. But that day, the day he destroyed my trust by putting me in a situation where I’d be hurt by others, that was the day that I found a new feeling for him – hatred.
I knew that I was hurt physically by him but allowing others to do that to me was something else. I’d learned so much that day. That my husband truly didn’t love me. That each day my time here was dwindling down to nothing. That everything would change one day soon, I just didn’t know when that would be.
I leave the party with Quinn. She offered to take me back to her and Roman’s place a few miles back, and I accept. I don’t feel like being at the party where I knew that they’d be plotting on how to kill a mother and her two small children. It made my blood boil and my stomach churn. I knew some things were necessary, but was that?
The answer was no. There is never a reason to take an innocent’s life, and certainly not those two little girls.
“What do you have running around in that windmill of yours?” Quinn asks me, bringing me back a glass of water. She sits down next to me on the couch, with Damon, her son bouncing away on her lap.
“Nothing important,” I lie as I stare into the dark chocolate eyes of the baby boy sitting on his momma’s lap. Right now, I wonder if my son would have my brown eyes, or green eyes like his father. He might inherit my dusty brown hair, or his father’s black as night locks. I didn’t know much about pregnancy, or about being a mother, but what I did know was that my son would be so loved by me. He’d be my greatest accomplishment.
Quinn catches me staring at Damon. His smile radiates through the room, and I couldn’t help but grin as I look at him. Babies are such a joy, even though they drool, vomit, and poop on everything around them. That is the part I was least looking forward to – all the gross stuff. “In a few months, you’re going to have one of your own to look after.”
“I know,” I say to Quinn, smiling and reaching my hands out to Damon. He reaches back, and Quinn helps him get settled over onto my lap. He gives me a toothless smile, drool spilling out over his lips, giggling up at me.
“You’re going to be great at it, being a mom, I mean. I know I don’t say this kind of stuff all the time. Let’s face it, I can be a heartless bitch.”
“That you can,” I agree, interrupting her.
“Hey!” Quinn tosses a throw pillow at me, making Damon squeal out in excitement and then horror as the tears crash out over his cheeks.
I bounce Damon on my lap until he startes to settle down. Quinn watches us both the entire time. “You have a way with kids, I knew that from the first day I met you. I’m a little upset though, why couldn’t this little nugget be a girl? I could see it, Damon and Kathryn.” Kathryn was the name I would have used if my nugget was a girl, but he was most definitely not.
“It would’ve been cute, that’s for sure,” I agree, smiling down to the little man on my lap and thinking of the little one inside of my belly.
“Did you decide on a name yet?”
“Aaron.” I say the name with such pride. Aaron meant a lot to me. It was my father’s name. The best man in my entire world.
He was killed right after we moved. It was an accident on the army base. No one could have seen it coming. There was no indication that the bomb would have went off. That’s what they told me. I think it was to make me feel better, but I was a sixteen-year-old girl who’d just lost her father. Whose father just came back from overseas – from serving his country. If anything was supposed to happen, it wasn’t supposed to be back here in the States. It was supposed to be on enemy grounds, in foreign territory.
I’d lost my father at such a young age, an age where I needed his advice more than anything in this world. Maybe if he wasn’t killed, things would have turned out a lot different for me. It was stupid to think about the maybes now, though.
Rage and Tex were both there for me right after my dad died. They offered me a place to stay – a roof over my head, food, clothes. They gave me everything that I needed. That was a time when Rage stood by me, for anything that I needed, from a shoulder to cry on, to money for my high school prom.
“He would’ve loved that.”
I silently agree with Quinn, trying not to let my tears fall. These pregnancy hormones are no joke.
“Who would’ve loved what?” I hear Rage’s voice right behind me, when I turn, I see him. He looks at me and then to Damon on my lap, spitting bubbles and laughing. Damon was lucky, he didn’t know the terror that was in the room with us. Quinn and I though, were a different story.
“My dad would’ve loved if I’d gone to college like he’d have wanted me. Quinn and I were just talking about him.” I shut my eyes for a moment, careful to not let my emotions get the best of me. It was no matter, a tear slid down my face, and I was reminded of how much I missed him. He was the closest family I had. I had two half-brothers who I hadn’t seen in years. Lloyd and George always made it a point that if I needed them they’d be right there. I was their baby sister, their pride and joy, they always made sure that I knew that. I just hadn’t needed them enough yet, I guessed.
“Your pops is dead, it doesn’t really fucking matter what he wanted for you. I wasn’t gonna pay thousands of dollars for you to go to school when you needed to be at home. What were you gonna do anyway, be a damn school teacher?”
No. A nurse. I wanted to snap my answer back out t
o him. I wanted to help people, to make a difference in someone’s life. The anger boils up inside me, I was so close to bursting, but the motherly instinct inside of me told me to stay quiet, to not do anything that would anger him any further than I already did tonight, and I listened. I shut my mouth, knowing very well that I was already treading on thin ice.
“Get up and put that little shit down. We’ve gotta go.” I hand Damon off to Quinn who holds Damon close to her as she stares at Rage. He begins to walk to Quinn and Roman’s front door, and I follow closely behind him, down their front porch until we are both on the stone path that leads to their gravel driveway. Rage didn’t mutter a sound, and neither did I. Both of us were walking in silence until we reached his Harley. He positions himself over the seat and waits for me to sit behind him. I wrap my arms snugly around his waist as he turns the ignition on, barely allowing the engine to start before we were on the way back to the club.
The drive was short, and bumpy, but in no time, we were back. Rage and I had a house that wasn’t too far from there. I was wondering why he even drove us back. We could be staying at his room in the club tonight, it wouldn’t shock me if we did – we do this every once in a while, especially when visitors are in town.
“Get off and stand by the fucking door.” Rage points to the club. I use his shoulders to help steady myself as I walk towards the door of the clubhouse. I didn’t have to know that something was wrong to know that I was in deep shit. Like that nervous feeling you get right before something bad is about to happen, you just know. And I knew that something very bad was about to happen.
I hear his footsteps before I see him. When I turn to face Rage, my face collided with something cold and hard. I crash to the ground below me, my body hitting it like dead weight. I feel everything, yet I feel nothing. I was in some sort of limbo, maybe even an out of body experience. My hands push against the cement below me, trying to pull myself up. I flex my hands, opening and closing, as I watch them, I notice how slow they were moving, even as my mind was telling them to move faster.
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