The Tempted Series: Collectors Edition

by Janine Infante Bosco

  I wanted to spit in that motherfuckers face.

  I wanted it more than my next breath.

  “You know they’re going to be riding our asses now,” I informed Jack as I stared at the posse of assholes standing around doing nothing.

  “Fuck ‘em,” Jack hissed, blowing out a heavy sigh.

  “Gladly,” I ground out, spitting the toothpick onto the ground before lifting my eyes back to Jack’s. “We putting this club on lockdown?”

  “No, not yet,” Jack said, surprisingly. “For now round up the prospects, put them on Reina, Lacey, and Lauren,” he ordered, turning his eyes to Riggs. “That going to be a problem?”

  I realized the club needed all hands on deck and I would have to pull Bones off Lacey and saddle her with a prospect. That didn’t rest with me, knowing no one would ever value her life more than me. I reminded myself we had eager prospects, young guys that would do nearly anything to earn their colors.

  But would any of them stand in front of a gun aimed at her?

  They better or I’d be the one pointing the gun at them.

  I diverted my eyes to Riggs and watched as he fought for control over his emotions, his eyes conveying all the fear a man has after he’s found the life that’s worth more than his.

  Riggs was scared of losing his heart.

  I felt every ounce of his pain.

  “It’s a precaution, Riggs,” Jack assured. “We need to bide our time and keep our heads. We can’t keep our heads if we’re worried about our women. You feel me?”

  A third fact.

  I paid close attention to the pep talk Jack was giving Riggs, pretending I was the one on the receiving end of it.

  “Then trust me when I say we will get these motherfuckers,” he declared. “We always win, even when it looks like it’s impossible. You know why? Because I’ve lost too much to let anyone else ever take a goddamn thing from me and mine.”

  He was talking about his son.

  And I was picturing his daughter.

  “Get that look out of your eyes, Riggs,” he ordered. “Looks like you found your heart, kid. Now, you have to hang on to it.”

  A final fact we all needed to keep in mind.

  Heart.

  It wasn’t only the thing that kept you from being reckless it was what gave men like us purpose in this world.

  I walked toward my bike, glanced back at Brantley just as my phone chimed, signaling I had a text message.

  I tore my eyes away from the bastard, pulled out my sunglasses and covered my eyes before I straddled my bike. I reached into my jacket and looked down at my phone. The screen showed a message from a foreign number. I swiped my thumb across the screen, opened the message and a photo of Lacey appeared on the screen. She was carrying books, making it clear the photo was taken while she was at school. Another text came through from the same number, containing a message.

  I haven’t forgotten about her.

  Heart.

  The one thing we’re all afraid to lose.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I left Pops and headed straight for the Dog Pound, my phone burning a hole in my pocket, the picture of Lacey plastered to my mind. I opened the door, found the prospects playing a game of pool and stalked toward the table, grabbing the white ball from the felt top and threw it against the wall.

  “Games over,” I sneered. “Time for the three of you to stop playing with your dicks and earn your fucking patches.”

  I pointed to Toke, the youngest of the three, and the one who has been sitting around the longest. “You get on your bike and ride to Dee’s Diner. From this point forward, you are Reina’s shadow. She needs to take a piss you hold the fucking stall closed. Do not let her out of your sight,” I ground out.

  “Yeah, you got it,” Toke said, grabbing his leather vest off the back of a chair.

  “Go,” I bellowed, turning my eyes on Bosco. “Get your ass to Riggs’ apartment and keep his woman and that baby she’s got on the way breathing. I don’t give a fuck if she pulls a bat out on you and takes a swing or if her mother shows up wielding a frying pan—you do whatever the fuck it takes to make sure no one touches her or that kid she’s about to bring into this world. You hear me?”

  “Loud and clear,” he assured, dropping his pool stick and moving quickly toward the door.

  “That leaves you,” I said, cracking my knuckles as I stepped closer to Mack. He stared back at me with hungry eyes, clenching his fists as he rolled his neck.

  Yeah, he’s the one.

  “Kingsborough College,” I stated. “You find Lacey and you stick to her like glue.”

  I took a step closer, reached behind him and cupped the back of his neck.

  “Anyone so much as blinks at her wrong you take them fucking down. Don’t think, just do. Do you understand?” I questioned digging my nails into the nape of his neck as I clenched my jaw. “One fucking hair on her head gets harmed, I’ll cut you and bury you deep in the earth.”

  “I got you,” he said.

  “No, you got her. You got her life in your fucking hands,” I corrected. “A life that means more than yours, remember that,” I hissed, releasing his neck. “Now get on,” I ordered.

  I watched him straighten his jacket before he walked out the door and off to guard my girl. My phone rang again inside my pocket, dread filled my body as I reached for it and saw it was Lacey calling.

  My fingers hovered over the screen, itching to answer and hear her sweet voice one more time. I pictured her pretty face, that smile, those eyes that bore into my soul and knew there was only one choice.

  My love or her life.

  Her life.

  I declined the call, turned the ringer off and went to shove the phone back into my pocket but stopped myself. I pulled up my contact list and debated on whether to make the call.

  One phone call and a twenty-minute drive to the projects is all it would take to forget.

  And I wanted to forget so badly.

  I wanted to forget how she made me feel and how she made me want to be better.

  But I didn’t want to forget her.

  That alone was enough to stop me from making the call.

  I took off on my Harley in search of a place where Lacey was still mine and wound up home, standing in the middle of my aqua kitchen.

  Every wall, every new fixture, even the doorbell she had me install reminded me of her. I’d never be able to step into this house after tonight. I lifted the folding chair in the kitchen and, swung it against the freshly painted walls.

  Jack kept the holes in his walls to remember a time when he was too proud to get help. If he ever doubted his choice to get well and do the right thing all he had to do was remove one of the many pictures and stare at the offensive reminder.

  I dropped the chair, letting the metal clang against the wooden floor before I kicked it across the room and stalked through the house. I stepped outside, slamming the door to a life I wasn’t meant to have.

  A dream that was never mine.

  I needed to remind myself of my destiny and reiterate why I was about to give away the only thing worth a damn in my life.

  It was time for a wake-up call, something to bring me down from the high of being happy and drag me back to the reality I deserved.

  Back then, I thought it was ironic the house I bought was only mere minutes from the home of one of the families I destroyed.

  Then I thought it was the devil fucking with me.

  Now, I know it was fate.

  I turned down the street I used to sit on for hours and stared at the two-story home with black shutters. I parked my bike across the street from the house and killed my engine. I could still see the newspaper headlines so vividly as if they were in front of me for the first time. I remember seeing the photos of the two boys that overdosed in the obituaries.

  Both boys were waked at Scarpaci Funeral Home on Hylan Boulevard, on the same night and buried in Resurrection Cemetery on the same day.

  I
never told a soul, but I went to each of those boys wakes.

  I sat in the back of the chapel and watched their mothers cry over their bodies as a priest ask God to forgive them and welcome both children into the gates of heaven.

  Heavenly Father, please protect Alex Rossi.

  Dear God, watch over Peter Corona.

  I’ll never forget the names of the boys whose lives I robbed.

  I’ll never forget their mothers.

  And when I start to, I come here and wait for Mrs. Rossi to come home from work. I look at her, years later, and see how she never healed from the loss of her son.

  Then, I drive to Resurrection Cemetery and pay my respects to Peter Corona, and the grave next to his where his mother was laid to rest a week after she buried her boy.

  She committed suicide, left a note behind saying, she needed to be with her son.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone as I glanced into the side-view mirror of my bike and saw Mrs. Rossi’s car turn onto the street.

  I’m sorry.

  So, fucking sorry.

  I made the call.

  A half hour later I was driving away from the projects.

  I turned into a real pussy, shocking the hell out of my dealer when I passed up the heroin and opted for the eight ball of coke.

  But as much as I wanted to bring myself to hell.

  I couldn’t bring myself to forget her.

  And if shooting up risked that, risked robbing me of the memory of her pretty face I wouldn’t mark my arms.

  Only to save the memory of Lace.

  Look at that, even in the end she wound up being the one who saved me.

  When I got back to the clubhouse I went straight for the bathroom, lined up two lines of coke and snorted them with a rolled up twenty-dollar bill.

  I lifted my head as I braced my hands on the counter and peered at the devil in the mirror.

  My name is Blackie and I am an addict.

  That was my destiny.

  I felt the burn of the powder in my nostrils and sniffled until it passed before I wiped the counter clean. I knotted the tip of the bag and shoved the remaining coke into my pocket before leaving the bathroom and headed straight for the bar.

  I pulled the half-empty bottle of Johnny Walker off the shelf and took a seat at the bar.

  It was the wrong move because the minute I sat down the door opened and for a minute I imagined Lacey walking through it, just as she did that first night.

  I knocked back a shot, blinked and saw Riggs.

  I turned around, hoping he wouldn’t cut me any slack, but he didn’t even seem to notice I was clutching the bottle like it was my salvation and poured myself a refill.

  He was too wrapped up in his own hell to notice I was reliving mine.

  “Tell me I did the right thing,” Riggs demanded, as he filled his glass again.

  “I don’t even know what you did,” I muttered, watching as he placed the bottle down and stared at his glass.

  “It don’t matter, just tell me what I need to hear,” he said, downing another shot.

  “You did the right thing,” I muttered, not giving two fucks about this kid’s problems—drowning in a sea of my own.

  Still, he’s been the only man in my corner with this shit with Lacey. He’s had my back and hers when no one else would’ve given me that respect.

  I owed him the same.

  Not to mention it wasn’t that long ago that he saved my life by shooting me with the Naloxone trying to reverse everything Jimmy Gold did to me.

  He saved my life.

  He gave me a chance to be with Lace.

  Yeah, Riggs deserved my respect.

  “You looking to forget? That shit won’t do it,” I told him, swapping the bottle of tequila he was nursing with the bottle of Black.

  “I’m sorry,” he grunted as I took a swig of his tequila.

  “You have a fight with your ol’ lady?” I questioned.

  “I don’t have one of those,” he replied.

  I let him believe the lie because every now and then we needed to escape reality.

  “Right, the baby mama then,” I corrected.

  Riggs liked herb, and I had just swiped some when I grabbed the coke. I pulled it from my pocket and broke up the pot on top of the bar.

  I leaned over the bar and grabbed the rolling papers from behind it before I sat back down and rolled a perfectly tight joint.

  “What was that shit with the cops earlier?” he asked.

  If Riggs needed a distraction, talking about what a scumbag Brantley was, would be the way to go.

  “Ah, me and officer Brantley go way back,” I slurred, bringing the end of the paper to my lips to lick and seal it. “I don’t know who gave that piece of shit more of a hard-on me or Christine,” I added, passing him the joint as I met his curious eyes.

  He paused for a minute, composing himself and lit the joint.

  “Never heard you talk much about your wife,” he said, inhaling sharply.

  Yeah, I kept that shit under lock and key. Only the people who were around for it truly knew the whole story.

  “So, this rat, the cop, he’s been itching to put you away for a while? And Christine? He wanted to arrest her too?”

  I laughed.

  “Nah he didn’t want to arrest her,” I said before taking a toke. “Christine wasn’t some low-life junkie, Riggs,” I explained, angrily.

  People often had the misconception that Christine was using but she never took a drug in her life. I often think that she didn’t mean to kill herself and like me she was simply trying to forget the mess our life together had become.

  She didn’t know she was shooting enough heroin to put down a horse.

  She didn’t know.

  “I didn’t say she was,” he said solemnly, pouring us both a shot.

  To hell with sobriety.

  “It’s what you think because it’s all anyone in this fucking place ever talks about. You’ve got this image of Christine, a woman you never met, lying face down in a bathtub with a fucking needle in her arm but that’s not the woman I married. Everyone in this club assumes I drink because I feel guilty she overdosed with the shit we were selling, but they’re wrong, so fucking wrong.”

  “So why do you do it?”

  “Sure, it’s got something to do with it. If I wasn’t dealing heroin she wouldn’t have been able to get her hands on it. But, Christine would’ve found some other way to end the nightmare she was living,” I told him the truth and not the fairytale I liked to believe.

  “I was a shitty husband,” I admitted. “I put this club before her. I put the drugs, the money, the goddamn patch before the sweet girl I fell in love with when I was fifteen years old. See, she knew me before the club, before the corruption and the mayhem and she had to watch me morph into a Knight. It was all good when I was just a prospect, still had time for my girl and the crazy shit we used to do.”

  I smiled faintly, thinking back to all the things we used to do like the time we got caught skinny dipping in her parent’s pool.

  “I don’t know Lauren all that well, ran into her a few times since you two started up, but she seems spunky. Christine used to be spunky. She used to love life, and more than life, she loved me. She loved me hard, felt that shit down in my bones.”

  And when her parents caught us she defended me to them.

  She chose me over them.

  She chose us.

  I cleared my throat and continued.

  “After I patched in, Cain pushed me to the front lines. I was eager to earn, eager to prove I would do anything for the club,” I angled my head to the side and studied his profile.

  “Sort of like you,” I pointed out. “In our time of need you stepped up and became a front runner. That isn’t lost to the club, Riggs, and you don’t have to keep proving your worthy of your patch,” I added.

  “I’m not,” he argued. “I’m just doing my job.”

  “I thought the s
ame thing and kept doing my job. I ran drugs, guns, women…whatever made the most profit and never looked back. I forgot about the love I had at home and what it felt like to go home to a warm body. I pushed the thoughts of how fucking good it felt to crawl into bed and have the sweetest woman wrap her legs around me. She didn’t know what I did, and if she did, she didn’t care. I could’ve killed a man, sometimes did, and she still welcomed me home, into our bed, night after night.”

  “So how did it all change?”

  “I started pushing her away. Cain made a deal with the G-Man and we moved more drugs, became the biggest operation on the east coast.”

  “The G-Man is the guy Jimmy Gold was working with to push Pastore out, right?”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed, taking another shot. “Anyway, there is only so much bad shit you can do before it catches up to you and changes who you are. It didn’t bother me at first, I had shoeboxes full of money and in my head, I was doing it for a good reason. I would buy Christine her dream house, make sure my woman had everything she wanted, the best of everything. I told myself I was doing it for her, making up for the douche bag I was on a daily basis. I didn’t have a conscience I only had a goal, but I didn’t plan on being the reason two seventeen-year-old kids died,” I confessed.

  A house I was just starting to make a home.

  Rest in peace Alex Rossi and Peter Corona.

  Rest in peace my love, Christine.

  “It changes you,” I repeated, hoarsely. “Knowing that two kids, who had their whole lives ahead of them died, so you could make a quick buck—it fucking wrecks you, man. That was the beginning of the end for me and Christine. I stopped going home, started staying here every night. I couldn’t look at her; I couldn’t let myself have something as good as her when all I ever did was take the good from other people.”

  I sighed, pushing back the bottle.

  “She thought I was cheating on her and that’s when Brantley came around. He was a rookie then, looking to make a name for himself and thought he’d start by taking down the Satan’s Knights. He’s smart, I’ll give the son of a bitch that. He looked for the weakest link, found it was me, and used my wife as bait.”

  Here I was all these years later, still the weakest link only there was a different innocent woman being used as bait.