No one initially came to mind. I’ve worked hard to keep the wolves at bay since becoming president. I thought I’d done an okay job. For the first time in years, there is peace in this town, in this whole damn county.
Do I think it will last? Hell, no. There's always some motherfucker out there who thinks they have the right to invade our territory. Drug pushing, pimping, even human fuckin’ trafficking. Not in my town. I’m many things, but I don’t push any of that shit.
Guns and ammo? Of course, I’m not a fuckin’ saint. The club has to make money somehow.
I’ve been to all the fucks who’ve once wanted to take on my MC. I’ve probably caused a war with a couple of ‘em. They can come for me; I don’t care, I just want Lynette back safe and sound.
However, the more I search, the more the thoughts of never finding her fill my head. What will I tell the kids? That their mom is never coming back? That she’s dead? Oh God, I can’t even entertain that thought. If I lost her like that, it would fuckin’ kill me, and I do mean literally.
Lynette is the other half of me. Without her, there is no me. I love my kids; God knows I do. I would do anything for them, but without Lynette there to guide me, I am so lost.
Jett called me a little while ago to tell me every man in the MC is out looking for my wife. Lynette is a much loved First Lady, and everybody wants her home safe. Then he told me to get my ass to Lovers Creek. Jett said there was something I needed to see. He sounded scared if I'm honest. So here I am, pulling up beside a dozen bikes next to a silver Volkswagen, all but one door open at the back.
I get off my bike and make my way over to Jett, Tank, and Hammer. Red, Ace, Stryker, and couple more guys stop talking and look at me. Something is up. Something ain’t right here.
“What’s goin' on, Jett?”
“Dad, there’s something you should see.” His face is ashen, and I’ve got a ball in my stomach, churning away. Something awful lurks, waiting to pounce and ruin everything I ever knew.
There’s too much pity flowing off my men. Every one of them is watching me with a look of sadness, and something tells me nothing I see here will be good. Nothing I see will ease my weary mind.
Right now, I’m not ashamed to say how fuckin’ terrified I am that my son is leading me towards my wife’s body. You have no idea of the images flitting in and out of my mind. Images of Lynette’s naked, abused, dead body lying by the lake. Images of her beaten, mangled, and with limbs missing. I feel a sickness inside of me that I have never felt before.
I’ve killed, I’ve maimed. I’ve destroyed lives both because I wanted to and because I had no other choice. I never really thought about the families of those men, nor how they’d feel when they found out their loved ones were dead. Still, I imagine it felt something like this. A pain so deep and dark that its like drowning. Being pulled under, being held there, your lungs fighting for air, your body’s natural instinct to stay alive, but the more you fight, the quicker you die.
“There,” Jett points to something on the ground beside the car, near the back door on the right side. There’s something – material, I think – on the dusty ground. I know what it is, in my heart I do, but I don’t want to acknowledge it.
At least it’s not her body, Shepard. Be thankful for that.
“Do you recognize them, Prez?” I don’t look at Roman. I can’t tear my eyes away from what I know are my wife’s panties, torn up and thrown to the ground like paper. I bought her that pair. Red lace, French knicker style. I love her in red. They were a present for her birthday. She was wearing them today with the lace balcony bra that matched.
“Prez?”
“Yeah, I recognize them.”
He raped her. Whomever, the guy, was who took Lynette, raped her. The scene before me is evidence of that. He brought her to Lovers Creek to rape and kill her. I know it in my heart without anyone having to tell me anything.
Why and who would do this to her? Lynette doesn’t have a bad or mean bone her beautiful body. She’s everyone’s friend, and she’s there for anyone who needs her, no matter what. How could someone do this to her?
The only thing I can think is that some pervert saw Lynette outside BlackJack’s with Max and took a fancy to her. Why they were out front when everyone else was out back, I’ll never know. I should have known because I know if Lynette had been out in the backyard, she would have stopped me going off on Stryker the way I did.
Lynette is the most beautiful woman I ever set eyes on. My beautiful wife who possessed the kind of beauty Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn did. Those green eyes of hers would penetrate me the way no one else's eyes ever could. She saw right through me. She knew my heart and soul. She knew them because they belonged to her, and she took such good care of them.
Did I take good enough care of hers? She gave them to me so willingly. Always has she been there for me and my boy, even Nova when she was here. Willow and Lynette are best friends, and she’s perfect with VJ and Max. She’s our rock.
What will I do without her?
Why the hell am I even entertaining the thought that I won’t see her alive again? My Lynette is a fighter. Hell, she’s so strong that she’s put me on my ass a couple of times when training in the gym with me. We did that a lot together through training. I have to keep myself in peak physical condition being who I am, and Lynette often joined me, training her perfect body as a weapon just in case.
I just hope all that training didn’t leave her mind when she was at her most afraid. I hope she fought the sonofabitch with all her mite. I hope she caused the piece of scum some real fuckin’ damage. The same way I will when I catch the cunt because I will catch him, and when I do? I’ll tear him the fuck apart!
His car is still here, that means he’s still here, either burying her body or hiding in the woods somewhere until we give up and leave. I’m not leaving until I find my wife, dead or alive!
“Search the woods, and don’t one of you give the fuck up until you find her!”
“Half the brothers are already in there searching for her, Prez.”
“Good,” I nod at Ace. “The rest of you get in there. Two of you stay by the car in case the cunt who took her comes back. I want every damn inch of those woods searched! She has to be here somewhere! You see that bastard, you shoot him, but not to kill. I want that motherfucker for myself.”
“You got it, Prez.” I get a collective set of nods of agreement before they take off in different directions, everyone but Jett.
“We’re gonna find her, Dad. She’ll be just fine.”
“I hope you’re right.” Because if you’re not, I don’t know what I’ll do.
It’s getting darker. The further I walk into these woods the darker it gets. Pretty soon, it will be too damn dark to see anything. I need a little more time. I know in my heart there’s something in these woods that will help me find her. Don't ask me how I know, I just do.
I can hear my men all around me yelling my wife’s name, Jett yelling, Mom into the night. My heart is pounding in my chest so hard I can feel the pain of it radiating down my arm. I clutch my right arm and wince. I have to shake it off. I’m not going out the way my old man did. I need to find my girl.
A gurgling sound pulls my attention to the left of me. A smirk creeps across my face. “Well, well, what do we have here?” I step closer to the lump slumped against a tall tree, its root's showing. It’s not as light as it was, the night owls are out, I can hear them all around me as I walk towards the lump.
It’s too dark to make him out from where I am right now, and it is a him, I can hear him groaning in pain. I get down on my haunches in front of him. His arm is wrapped around his middle in pain. Smells like he's pissed his jeans. I don’t know what’s worse, the smell of piss or the smell of sweat.
“You just gonna sit there lookin’ at me, or you gonna help me?” Help him? I should, but I won’t, not until he’s told me what I want to know. Somehow, I know he knows.
“Where is she?”
“I should’ve known it was you,” There it is, admittance. He took my wife! “Bitch told me she’d married a filthy biker. You always did want her, from the day you fuckin’ met her. It was too damn obvious!”
I grab his fucked up face in my hand and squeeze. “Who the fuck are you? What have you done with Lynette?!”
“You know who I am, asshole, just as much as I know who you are.”
“Is that so?” I have no fuckin’ clue who this dickhead is! “Where is she?!”
“All she had to do was let me see my daughter, and I’d have left her alone.”
Jose. Fuck! Since the day he walked away from Lynette and Willow no one has seen or heard from him. He made it damn clear that Willow was not his child. Therefore, he has no business coming back here. That little girl is mine!
“Willow will never know the filth of you. I am her father. The only one she’s ever known.”
I hear footfalls behind me, many of them. I don’t need to turn around because I know who’s behind me, my brothers, my son. They’ll stand there and watch with respect while I deal with this piece of shit, but not before he tells me what I want to know.
I slip my knife from my ankle holster and bring it up to his face. His eyes widen for only a second before he starts laughing. What the fuck does he, have to laugh about?
I remember this smug prick and the way he was, twenty-four years old with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend. Lynette moved in with Celia and me for a while because she had nowhere to go, and Celia basically wanted a babysitter for Tate. This piece of crap? Fuck no. I wouldn’t have this cunt in my house.
I watched him treat Lynette like shit for over two fuckin’ years. I wanted to kill the motherfucker, but Celia told me to stay out of it. Wasn’t ’til he slapped Lynette in front of me that I lost it. I beat the shit out of him, and I warned him what I’d do if he touched her again. Motherfucker upped and left not long after. He left an eighteen-year-old woman raising her two-year-old daughter all alone.
That’s why I was there for her, why I always have been. She needed me, and Willow needed me. Maybe that’s what pushed Celia away, what made her run from me with my little girl. She knew I had feelings for Lynette, even though I tried to hide them. Never did I speak about it, but Celia did nothing but go on about it.
I’ll never really know the truth of why Celia left me, it could have been many things with her. However, I have a feeling it was because I cared for Lynette, for the fact I treated Willow like my own. Celia stole my baby girl as punishment for loving Willow.
Never will I blame what I felt for Lynette or the fact I loved Willow like my own on why Celia took off with Nova. It could be true, seems more logical than the fact she just wanted to leave. Celia was a fucked up bitch and hurt me in the worst way. If I ever see that bitch again, I’ll kill her.
This bloated motherfucker? My god, what the fuck was Lynette thinking? If it weren’t for the fact she got Willow out of being with him, I’d think she was insane. I don’t know if Lynette thought she loved him or not back then, but he put about that he loved her, even though it was very obvious to anyone with eyes that he didn’t. My dad told me enough. He also wanted to kill Jose and bury his body somewhere in the woods or feed him to the pigs. However, my mother had a point, he was Willow’s father, and she deserved to have her dad in her life. It didn’t work out that way though, but things rarely do.
Lynette couldn’t see back then the way Jose treated her. She wasn’t living with her parents when I first met her, and I’ve never known her to see them in all the years, I have known her. Whenever anyone mentioned her parents or family, Lynette would make up some excuse about not having any, which didn’t make sense to me.
Dad always commented on how she must have been a runaway because at sixteen she’d be in foster care or group home until she was eighteen. We even brought it up with Jose once. He just shrugged and told us that Lynette had a hard home life, that she lied to him about her age, making him think she was eighteen when he met her. Then Jose told us that he’d taken her from her home and brought her to Bardsville where her family wouldn’t find her in order to keep her safe from them.
Dad wanted to call the authorities and have her taken into the system because, to him, Jose was a child molester, and he wanted to kill him.
Mom forced us to talk to Lynette and make sure Jose hadn’t forced her to be with him. Lynette cried to my mother, sobbed her heart out. None of us were in the room because mom thought Lynette would find it easier to talk to a woman about what was going on in her life.
When mom came out of the room, red-eyed from crying, she told us Lynette was asleep on the couch, and we were never to bring up her past again. She wanted us to drop the whole thing and leave Lynette and Jose alone. I didn’t understand it, but Apollo told me if mom wanted us to leave it, then we were to leave it.
I know she told him everything after I’d gone home, but he never said anything to me about it. He did make sure we dropped the subject of Lynette’s past and calling the authorities though. However, he never stopped keeping an eye on Jose until the day he took off.
Lynette was such a happy, strong girl, even then. I watched her belly grow with the child she loved before it was even born. Lynette had more love for that baby than most women twice her age. I think, deep down, it was clear to us all the reason she loved her baby so much. Lynette had no one, and no one had ever given a damn about her. Her baby was hers, one person who would never let her down. The one person she could make proud and be proud of.
This cunt in front of me, stinkin’ of sweat and piss was no kind of man. He worked, sure, but he gave Lynette hardly any money to take care of her child. How was she supposed to keep a house running on no income? Sixteen years old, pregnant, and working two jobs to keep a roof over her head. How is that even normal?
I wouldn’t allow Lynette to pay for anything while she was living with Celia and me. I even tried to talk her out of working two jobs. I told her that she could go back to school to get her degree, a degree in anything she wanted, maybe work at the weekend. Lynette refused. She said she needed to save as much money as she could for her own place.
I never wanted Lynette to move out, to be honest, but I knew she had to. That’s why I bought the house next door and handed her the keys. I made sure she knew I didn’t want rent, all she needed to do was pay the bills and buy food. She worked so hard to make that place a home. Okay, the MC filled the house with any and all furniture she’d need. We even decorated the smaller bedroom for the baby, the baby who would want for nothing thanks to my parents and the women of the MC.
As I said, when Willow came along, I was the one there for her. I was the first man to hold that little girl. The first man to kiss her little head, the first man to tell her he loved her. I was the one who celebrated her first word, first steps, first birthday, first lost tooth.
Hell, I was the man who taught her to ride a bike, the man she ran to as a little girl when she’d hurt herself, or when she had a bad dream. I’m the man she calls Daddy. Ain’t nobody taking her away from me. I am her father, and I would die for her, not this piece of shit in front of me. The piece of shit who would slap her mother around whenever she so much as asked him something he didn't like.
The cunt even beat Lynette for asking why he wouldn’t want to be named on his own daughter’s birth certificate. Neither Celia or I saw Lynette for weeks. She kept herself locked inside her house with her daughter. She didn’t want anyone to see what Jose had done to her.
It wasn't ’til he took off that I found out what he’d really been putting her through the whole time they were together. Celia knew, she fuckin’ knew the whole damn time and kept it to herself. If I hadn’t beat the motherfucker before he left, I would have killed the bastard for the things he’d done!
It doesn’t matter now, though, Celia is gone, and any minute now, so will this cunt be.
“Tell me where she is!” I press the tip of the knife into his throat. Everyo
ne is silent all around me, but my ears are open to every sound of the woods, every breath my men take.
“I don’t know where she is. Stupid bitch stabbed me!” That’s my girl. “With a fuckin’ piece of wood! I hope she’s fuckin’ bleeding out as we speak!”
“What the fuck did you do to her!”
“Calm down, Jett.” He has every right to be pissed; he loves his mother. But this is my moment; no one’s taking this from me. I’ll show everyone what happens to those who touch what’s mine.
“Keep your dog on a leash!”
I push the tip of my knife into his eye socket. He screams as I dig out his fuckin’ eyeball. Blood and gunk gush from the socket. Ain’t no one ever said this was clean. Like I told you before, this shit is nothing like you see in the movies.
“Oh, god,”
I get a sick sense of satisfaction hearing his cries and pleas. I wonder if my Lynette cried and pleaded with him to stop whatever he was doing to her. There’s a rage inside of me that is burning and boiling like a goddamn volcano about to erupt!
“You have three seconds to tell me what the fuck you did to my wife, or I’ll tear you limb from limb. I’ll keep you alive long enough to feel every damn slice of your skin, every break in your bones, every damn thing I’ll do to you.”
“You fuckin’ stupid cunt! I don’t know where the bitch is. She took off after she stabbed me.” He’s lying, I can see it in his eye!
Fucker!
“I ain’t in the mood for your bullshit, Jose!”
“I may have... cut the bitch before she ran.”
Ever felt true anger? Real hate? That’s what I feel right now. All the men I have killed in my life couldn’t amount to the hatred I have for this man.
There’s a gurgling, gasping, clicking sound. I can hear it all around me. It's a ghostly, tormented sound, the sound of some poor creature slowly dying. There’s a warmth on my face like water. It’s on my hands and my throat. It’s only when I feel a hand on my shoulder do I realize its blood that’s all over me. Blood from Jose’s now mangled, misshapen, dead body.
The President's Wife: Prequel (Snakes Henchmen MC) Page 12
