Knox

by Lane Hart

  Now that Ivan has taken over not one, but two mafias, I get the feeling that I’m going to have to choose between Ivan, the only family that I’ve ever had, and Jade and the baby, the family I’ve always wanted.

  There’s no way I can abandon Ivan to run things on his own without getting hurt or killed, but helping him will only push Jade farther away.

  My phone starts buzzing in my pocket, the only sound this early in the neighborhood this morning, other than a few birds chirping.

  I pull it out and flip it open, recognizing the number right away. Speak of the devil…

  “Hey,” I say with as much enthusiasm as I can muster for my best friend.

  “Hey, man, it’s time to take a break and come home,” Ivan says. “You need to eat and sleep…”

  “I can’t leave. Not yet,” I reply.

  “She took a week of vacation,” he says.

  “How the fuck do you know?” I ask in surprise.

  “One of the advantages of being the King of Gingers and Italians. I ask a question, and apparently people jump to find the answer,” he explains. “Jade put in a request for a week of vacation, which means you’ve got a few more days before she comes back.”

  “Fuck,” I mutter.

  “Sorry, man,” Ivan says.

  “That sucks, but thanks for finding out and letting me know,” I tell him.

  “No problem,” he replies.

  “So how’s everything going?” I ask as I get to my feet.

  “I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing being in charge, but I guess there’s no choice but for me to figure it out.”

  “And you will,” I assure him as I climb in the van and crank it, casting one last glance at the empty house. “Think of it all as a new chapter in your life, one that you finally get to write however the hell you want.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Knox,” Ivan replies.

  I don’t know how things are gonna turn out for either of us, but no matter what, I’ll keep fighting, for my friends, for the woman of my dreams, and for my son or daughter.

  Losing is just not a fucking option.

  …

  Jade

  “Thanks for letting me come stay with you on such short notice, Kennedy. My mom can be a little overwhelming after a few hours,” I tell my step-sister-in-law when I show up at her house in Emerald Isle the same day the doctor released me. I had to stay at the Women’s Hospital an extra day and night for monitoring, but finally the contractions stopped. Now I just have to take it easy and make sure I don’t overdo it and have them start again. Which means I can’t keep running around worrying about keeping Knox’s ass out of prison.

  “Girl, you know you’re welcome here anytime!” Kennedy says as she hugs me, or at least tries too. Not only does my bump get in the way, but so does hers, and it’s even bigger, like a gigantic inflatable beach ball protruding from her petite frame.

  “When are you due?” I ask after we both laugh at our predicament.

  “June second. Just a few more weeks, thank goodness. You?”

  “August fourteenth,” I reply, a little less excited about my bundle of joy as I was just a few days ago when I thought I would have a partner in raising her. How could I have ever thought Knox would be dependable? “Is Torin excited about being a father or terrified?” I ask Kennedy.

  “Oh my God, yes, he’s excited! He’s already painted the room blue and put motorcycle pictures on the wall. Today, he’s having the crew come over and put all the furniture together. I swear I think he bought everything in stock at the baby store.”

  “Aww, that’s sweet,” I tell her, feeling only a small stab of jealousy for what I’m missing but what my stepbrother and his wife clearly have together. “I never thought Torin would settle down, much less be happy to be a father.”

  “He’s grown up a lot the last few years,” Kennedy says seriously as she pushes her long, blonde hair behind her ear. “Leading the MC into bigger and better things required less drinking and partying and a lot of effort to keep the peace.”

  “And what about Chase? Is my little stepbrother as wild as ever?”

  “Don’t you know it,” she replies with a laugh. “One of these days he’ll have to finish sowing his wild oats and find a nice girl to settle down with.”

  “You think so?”

  “I guess anything’s possible,” she jokes with a smile as she leads me into the step-down living room of their massive, modern home that makes me think the MC is doing pretty damn good in either legitimate or illegal business. “So what about you? How are things with the baby’s father?”

  Taking a seat on their sofa with a hand over my belly, I tell her, “Not good. He’s, well, he’s young and not really someone I should have gotten involved with.”

  “Did you always know that about him?”

  “Yes.”

  Blinking her big, brown eyes at me, Kennedy asks, “Then why the heck did you sleep with him, sweetie?” Yep, she’s just as blunt as I remember.

  “Just a stupid mistake,” I explain.

  Lifting one of her blonde eyebrows, she questions me further. “And how many times did you make that particular mistake?”

  “A few times. Like seven or so. I lost count the other night.”

  “Then, honey, that’s not a mistake. A mistake is something you do once and learn from, not something you keep repeating. Sounds like you’ve got a bad habit going on.”

  “Fine, then, he’s a bad habit I’m trying to break,” I concede on a sigh.

  “And why is that?” she prods, leaning back on the other end of the sofa and mimicking my posture. I swear it must be a pregnant woman requirement to rest your hands on top of the extra cushion. And, jeez, why can’t Kennedy let this topic go? I know I could decline to answer any more of her probing questions, but I have to admit to myself that it’s nice to actually have someone to talk about Knox with. It’s not like I have any girl friends back home to talk to.

  “Knox is all wrong for me, and he keeps ending up in trouble, like serious prison time trouble. I just know he’ll end up letting our daughter down.”

  “You’re worried that he’ll let her down or that he’ll let you down?”

  “Both,” I answer honestly. “And he’s already let me down. I gave him a chance to show me that he can stay on the right side of the law, and he blew it, like, one day later!”

  “Did you ask him why and let him explain himself?”

  “Oh, I know why,” I huff. “It was an idiotic mess involving his friend, and Knox wasn’t thinking when he agreed to help him. Now he’s looking at a life prison sentence for something that wasn’t his fault! At least not entirely. He was only an accomplice…”

  “It sounds like you’re really worried about him.”

  Shaking my head, I say, “No, he’s made his own bed.”

  “And you wish you were still in it or that he was in yours?”

  “No,” I answer with a smile. “It was great sex, just nothing more. That doesn’t make him right for me…”

  “Great sex is a good start. In my experience it’s not great unless you feel something deeper for the person you’re with.”

  “I can’t keep sleeping with a man, a criminal, because he’s the best sex I’ve ever had.”

  “You love your crazy stepbrothers, who are also criminals. Why can’t you love this guy?”

  “True, but Torin and Chase try to do the right thing, at least most of the time.”

  “I think you should give this guy a chance to see if maybe he’s trying to do the right thing too. That change doesn’t always happen overnight. Besides, what do you have to lose?”

  “Let’s see,” I say as I start ticking items off one at a time on my fingers. “I could lose my job, not to mention my entire career in law enforcement, my sanity, oh, and my heart.”

  “Sounds like you’ve already lost that last one or you wouldn’t be sitting here, looking so freaking sad when you talk about him that it’s pathetic.”

/>   “No, I wasn’t that serious about Knox. It’s just, he’s the father of this baby,” I say as I frame my stomach with both hands. “I wanted him to be around for her sake, you know? She deserves to have a father in her life. A good one. Not some guy she can’t depend on or may never see because he’s locked up.”

  “It’s too late to change the fact that this Knox guy is her father and always will be, for better or for worse. You may not be able to change him, but you will have to deal with him being around in her life. Keeping them apart, even if you think it’s what’s best for her, isn’t fair to the two of them. That’s a relationship that they’ll have to figure out on their own, although it may be tough to sit back and watch sometimes. Who knows, though? Maybe he’ll surprise you. He can’t be worse than Torin was when we first met, sleeping with a different woman every night, getting high all the time, waking up so drunk he didn’t know where he was. And don’t get me started on how many times the sheriff threw his ass in jail for getting into fights and destroying property.”

  “He was that bad, huh? I had no idea,” I tell her since, by the time Torin came out of the Army and joined the MC, I had left for school.

  “He was worse.”

  “And yet you stuck around?”

  “I did, because I knew deep down that he loved me and wanted to be better. I just had to be patient and let him figure out how to do that on his own. I couldn’t change him. He had to make the decision each day to stop the bad behavior or it wouldn’t last. And slowly but surely, he did it. It took about three years for him to prove to me that he was ready to settle down. That’s when I finally agreed to marry him.”

  “But I don’t have three years to wait! The baby will be here in a few months,” I explain.

  “Maybe all Knox needs is a few weeks or months. Who knows? He can’t be as bad as Torin. No one was as far off the deep end as Torin when he came home from the Army. He had demons, ones that I still don’t fully understand because he doesn’t talk about them. I just know that they haunt him, but he makes the effort to overcome them with me each day.”

  Speak of the devil.

  The front door opens as if on cue, and then I hear my stepbrother shout, “Babe? Whose car’s in the drive?” before he swaggers into view, just as giant and intimidating as I remember in his leather jacket and worn jeans, only with his dirty blond hair kept shorter. Three other big, buff guys that look like they escaped from prison, trail in behind him, looking out of place in the cozy home, all wearing the same leather cut as my stepbrother. Torin’s scuffed black boots stop abruptly when he sees me sitting on his sofa. “Oh, hell no! Do you have a warrant to be in here?” he questions before his face splits into a grin and he strolls over to hug me. “Long time, no see, Jade.”

  “Yeah, it’s been awhile,” I say. When I get to my feet and hug him back his eyes lower to my stomach.

  “So you’re knocked up too? I can’t believe there’s actually a man alive who let you bully him into your bed.”

  “Torin!” Kennedy admonishes as she comes up and socks him in the shoulder with her tiny fist. He grabs his arm and pretends it hurts, like he was socked by a linebacker instead.

  "It’s fine. After having to endure living in the same house as his big mouth for four years, I’m used to ignoring pretty much everything he says,” I tell Kennedy. Besides, his remark is pretty much spot on for how Knox and I actually ended up together.

  “She knows I’m just giving her shit,” Torin says with a grin. “Jade, meet my MC brothers, Miles, Warren, and Cooper.”

  “Nice to meet you all,” I say cordially in greeting even though they’re setting all sorts of alarms off for my cop’s intuition.

  “Don’t get too close, men,” Torin warns. “She may look pregnant and harmless, but I’m certain she’s hiding a badge somewhere on her body. And no one, not even her own brothers, gets a free pass,” he warns them.

  “Especially not you since you gave me the most shit growing up,” I tell him with a poke of my finger to his chest.

  “Nowadays I don’t step a toe over that black line,” Torin replies.

  “Because you’ve got guys to do all of your dirty deeds for you, right, Mr. MC President?” I ask, nodding to the men behind him who look at him with so much respect in their eyes that I bet they would gladly follow him into hell.

  “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” Torin says with a grin. “Now get to work, grunts!” he orders the men, who roll their eyes but smirk and disappear down the hallway. “They’re gonna help me put together the crib and shit for the baby, and I’m gonna take pics of them doing it to blackmail them.”

  “That’s nice of them and evil of you,” I say.

  “And how is my boy?” Torin asks as he goes over and squats down to kiss Kennedy’s belly. With his back turned towards me, I finally see the patches on the back of his jacket — a bearded skull wearing a gold crown, along with the words, “Savage Kings”, which I assume is the name of their MC.

  “This boy is as rambunctious as his father,” Kennedy tells Torin, grabbing a handful of his hair to pull him up to her mouth for a passionate kiss.

  “Speaking of rambunctious, where’s your brother?” I ask Torin when the two separate.

  “Who the hell knows?” he replies. “My guess is Chase is either on a woman or on his bike somewhere. He doesn’t stay around town much unless I make him for MC business.”

  “Well, hopefully I get to see him before I leave. Thanks for letting me stay with you, by the way. Mom and Wyatt’s place can get a little too intense.”

  “Don’t thank me. Thank Kennedy. I said not to let you inside the front door on the chance you find all of our smack, but she assured me she could hide it –”

  “Smack? Like heroin?” I exclaim with my jaw dropping to the floor.

  “Kidding!” Torin replies with a deep chuckle. “Stay as long as you want, just don’t arrest any of my men while you’re in town.”

  “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “I couldn’t even if I wanted. It’s not my jurisdiction,” I joke.

  “That’s right,” he replies. “You’re in my jurisdiction now, sis.”

  “And what do you think the sheriff’s department would say about that?” I ask him with my hands on my hips.

  “That I pay them a helluva lot better than the county ever did,” he answers with a coy smile that tells me he’s not being sarcastic. Torin really is moving up in the world, and not in a good way if he controls the law enforcement in the rural costal town.

  “Are the new hotels, restaurants, and clubs on the strip yours too?” I ask curiously since the place has really developed over the last few years.

  “Damn right. And we’ve got the lowest crime rate in the whole fucking state.”

  “Let me guess. Because you’ve taken it upon yourself to be the judge, jury, and executioner?”

  “Hey, it works for us,” he says with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Four years ago, this place was a hellhole with the poorest citizens, highest unemployment rate, and no sign of that changing anytime soon. We did, though. The MC invested in the place, brought in tourists, and now the people around here are back to work with extra money in their pockets thanks to us.”

  “And you did all that legally?” I ask.

  “Of course not. It took blood, sweat, and a few tears, but what’s done is done. Sacrifices had to be made before things could change.”

  “You’re just a regular old savior on a Harley, aren’t you?” I tease him.

  “Hey, if the halo fits.”

  That makes me laugh because my stepbrother is the furthest thing from a saint as you can get.

  “Well, I better get to work,” Torin says to us with one last kiss to Kennedy’s cheek.

  “Yeah, and keep trying to track down Chase to tell him to come say hello…” I tell him.

  “He doesn’t need to come over here,” Torin snaps. “If you want to see him, do it at my dad’s, yeah?”

  “Torin, what’s you
r problem?” Kennedy asks with her forehead creased in concern.

  “Nothing,” he mutters before he stomps off down the hallway.

  “Guess they had a falling out?” she offers in explanation. “Neither of them are the easiest men to get along with.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I agree with a smile, even though I’m a little concerned about my stepbrothers being on the outs. They were as thick as, well, thieves growing up, and sometimes even literally. But I have enough on my plate to worry about. I’m supposed to be here at the beach on vacation, avoiding stress, which is why I’m not staying with my mom but plan to go see her and Wyatt tomorrow. Torin and Chase are big boys who can hopefully work things out on their own. I get the feeling that they won’t have a choice with Kennedy around.

  Chapter Twenty

  Knox

  If my life was empty before, now it’s a living hell.

  In case you’re unfamiliar with hell, it’s this dark, shitty place where you’re offered everything you’ve ever dreamed of for a brief time, long enough to think you’re the luckiest son of a bitch alive, and then it’s all snatched away, leaving you bitter, angry, and completely fucking miserable.

  At least that’s what the last week has felt like for me ever since Jade’s phone was disconnected and she disappeared on “vacation.” I’ve had nothing but a few pints of liquor to keep me warm after I returned to sit on the top step of her porch waiting for her to return.

  With each day that the sun rises and sets without her returning, it’s like she’s growing further away from me. After all this time, I worry that she’s so far gone I’ll never be able to reach her again.

  One perfect night was all we had. Then, I went and fucked it up beyond all repair.

  At least shit seems to be going great for Ivan. I don’t regret helping him what little that I did when he needed me to have his back. To know that he loved me enough that he was ready and willing to turn himself in for Russo’s murder to save me, like I would do for him, is humbling since I’ve never had anyone willing to sacrifice so much for me. Not that I would have let him go through with it.