by Sky Winters
Walker stepped back, apparently satisfied. “You should be happy Pete wants to take you off my hands. I mean, what good are you anyway? You’re not getting many modeling jobs lately and you’re wasting time at that damn school you spend all your money going to. If you were really smart you’d be a lawyer, and stop mooning over making clothes for those rich fuckers that already have people to buy shit from. We could use a lawyer in the family.”
Julia knew better than to speak just then. How could she say anything? Any answer would be met with an escalating degree of violence.
Walker was her half-brother but she feared him far more than anyone else in his crew and with good reason.
She nodded dumbly. Her mouth formed a yes but her heart screamed no. No to Pete. No to leaving the design school she had clawed her way into. No to him, no to living the hellish life she’d been thrust into when her mother died.
Walker stepped back. “I’m expecting you to have your ass here by seven and no later. If you got something else planned you cancel it. Don’t make me come looking for you.”
Julia swallowed back the salty lump in her throat. “Seven. I’ll be here.”
She fled, running out of the house and toward the bus that would deposit her at her new job while thoughts flew around her head.
She had to do something about Walker and fast. To start with she needed to get the hell out of Queens and out of his grasp. It was too expensive in Williamsburg, especially on a student’s budget. The jobs she worked barely touched the very large amount of debt hanging over her.
Walker wanted her to quit school and he wanted her to get with one of his boys. Pete was someone that Walker needed to take on the larger dealers in Manhattan, and to ride over the crews out in the outer boroughs, but he was the last thing she needed. Pete had a habit of hitting his girlfriends and hitting the bag too, not the punching bag—the bags the dope came in.
Walker was pissed at Julia and she knew it. He had no issue with trying to bring his MC into a higher status by using his sister’s bodies. He’d forced Naomi into becoming his first in command’s old lady, a term that meant that guy never had to wed Naomi and never had to do more than claim her and the kids they had together. Walker said it was loyalty, that Naomi was loyal and so was her husband, Charlie. So, apparently was their other sister Carla, who was a brassy haired mess and strung out on the same dope she handed off to her ‘girls’, the hookers she ran for the MC. Carla and Naomi were loyal, but if loyalty meant having to live under Walker’s brutal thumb, then Julia was happy not being loyal.
The problem was if she didn’t get out of Queens soon, and very soon, and as far from Walker as she could get, she was going to get in that mess he called a family whether she wanted to be or not.
She, Walker, Naomi, and Carla had different mothers, which explained the nearly decade long gap between Julia and Carla, the youngest of that woman’s children. Julia knew her mother had regretted dating Walker’s father, and hard, and had not wanted her daughter anywhere around that crew but when she had died from cancer when Julia was just fourteen that was just where Julia had ended up.
Now she was nineteen, and she wanted out. The only problem was Walker, who was forty and the undisputed leader of the crew now that his father was dead, had no intention of letting her go. He did not give a damn about her desires. What he cared about was what her youth and beauty could buy him, and what it would buy was Pete and his connections.
The store finally came into view and she left the bus she had boarded and hurried inside. Corinne, one of the other salesgirls, eyed her warily. “What happened to you?”
“There’s some crazy guy near my place. He clocked me good.”
Corinne’s eyes widened. “Oh, my God. I hope you called the cops!”
“Of course, I did but I had to leave to get to work. I hope they still do something about him.”
She hung her coat on a hook inside a small cupboard and asked, “How’s it going today?”
Corrine grimaced, “We’ve had a few customers. Lots of the hipsters stopped in earlier but there’s been some real shoppers.”
Julia managed to laugh. “Oh, you mean the hipsters that come in to ironically try on our clothes so they can make fun of the fashion and the cost later over their expensive craft drinks and appetizers?
Corinne grinned back. “Yeah. Well, I’m out. Have fun.”
Corinne grabbed her stuff and left, leaving Julia alone in the store.
Julia blew out an agitated breath as she looked around the empty store. The shop paid on a commission basis, and she needed cash fast. She had been short on modeling work lately, and she knew that was her own fault. She didn’t have the time to run down gigs now that she was in college full time, and the constant commute between Manhattan for school and her home in Queens took hours out of her days.
The door opened again and she looked up with a smile that died immediately as she saw Ace strutting through the door.
Her shoulders went rigid with tension. Working in Brooklyn meant chancing running into him or one of his crew, but so did working anywhere in the sprawling NYC area. Crews were everywhere, and in Manhattan she had to face down the Knights, the Wicked ran the Bronx, and Staten Island had the Furies. None of them would have been able to guess who she was at first glance since she looked nothing like Walker and because she had always managed to put distance between herself and the club in some way or another. He knew what she looked like though because Ace’s cousin Margo had been a regular around the neighborhood and the club after Ace had demanded everyone on his crew cut her off.
One night, back when Julia had first been packed up by the social worker and dropped into Walker’s lap, Margo had been overdosed on some pure heroin someone had tossed her. They were not being generous. They had given it to her to find out just how much it needed to be cut. The joke was that if it could kill Margo it needed a boot heel in it.
It had been Julia who had found Ace’s number in Margo’s jeans, and called him after she had found the comatose woman in the middle of the floor of the otherwise empty multi-family house the crew used for their drug running and to which Julia had been sent to retrieve a package for Walker. She had not known, at the time, that Ace was in a different crew or that Margo’s near-death would ignite an already inflammatory situation.
Then when Margo had died later that day he had come alone, riding hard, in the middle of the night, determined to blow the whole goddamn borough up around their ears. He would have, if one of his crew hadn’t shown up and dragged him off before any real damage could be done.
He had not burned them down that night, and he had never told Walker how he had found his cousin that night either. Julia had never forgotten his face staring at her as he sat on his bike, the unconscious Margo dangling limply in front of him.
He’d said, “You never saw me kid.”
She had shaken her head, suddenly understanding just what she had done. Ace had given her a hard smile. “Who are you anyway?”
“I’m Julia.”
“I mean to Walker. You’re too young to be his old lady. Last I heard he wasn’t running kids. If I find out he is I will torch the joint too. There’s a line nobody gets to cross.’
She had not even known what that meant and it must have shown on her face because he kicked the bike to life. She blurted out, “Walker’s my half-brother. I don’t know him well. My mom just died and I had to come live with him.”
“Tough luck, kid,” Ace had said and then driven off into the night. She had not seen him since and the truth was she had hoped she never would either.
He eyed her carefully. Her face heated. Did he recognize her? It would be hard not to recognize him. His face was all lean angles and blazing blue eyes, tanned skin, cruel lips and stubborn chin. He was trim and toned and very muscular. The jeans he wore fit him like a glove. He moved like a man in his twenties, which he damn sure wasn’t. He was closer to Walker’s age, nearly forty, but there was not a trace of silver or gra
y anywhere in his black hair. He had taken his jacket off, which was odd. Unless he didn’t want to be recognized.
She asked, “are you looking for something in particular sir?’
She moved toward him, her heart hammering in her chest as she walked across the narrow confines of the shop’s floor.
Ace’s eyes slid over her face, probing at hers. She didn’t drop her eyes and she fixed a wide and pleasant smile on her face. He lifted a brow, quirking it upward just a bit. One corner of his mouth came up but he didn’t look any less hardened and dangerous even with that tiny half smile on his lips.
“I might be.”
He didn’t recognize her! Relived at that Julia took a few more steps toward him. “Oh? We have an excellent men’s section. Are you looking for a suit perhaps? Or a shirt?”
“I don’t know.” His smile got wider and she paused. Her heart kicked into a higher gear, the palms of her hands breaking out into a little sweat. A flutter began in her belly. There was something very powerful and magnetic about him, and the tug she felt in her center told her she should back away and none too slowly. She was in the wrong borough to be checking him out, even if those jeans did sculpt his body perfectly. Looking up was no help at all. All she could see was his wide and deep chest and broad shoulders, the way his shirt lay flat at his taut midriff.
He said, “So, what do you recommend?”
“Um, maybe a royal blue shirt and a silk tie.”
The words made her want to laugh. No way did he belong in a dress shirt and tie. Leather yes, a suit? Never.
Ace nodded. “Yeah, no. Not today, anyway. Maybe another day. See you later.”
She gazed after him, her eyes clinging to the high and firm slopes of his ass. Danger was everywhere. She could not afford to have him recognize her, and yet she wanted to call after him, give him her name and see if he remembered it. How could he have, really? She had been a skinny awkward kid with frizzy hair and eyes hidden behind thick glassed at fourteen.
She had gotten her first print ad because an agent saw her and decided she would be perfect to portray the nerdy gamer girls that the product he was scouting out models for was hoping to target. It hadn’t taken her long to understand that she had something she could use, something that might give her a way out. Clothes were there and she had not been above taking some for herself at a shoot and she knew she could have been fired for that from any number of jobs but Walker could have cared less what she wore, or if she wore anything at all.
Julia had had to grow up fast in that house. She had learned how to defend herself against drunk guys who forgot whose sister she was, and to fend for herself with money too. She got a job at sixteen and eked out a minor amount of money working as a model, and a little more working at pizza joints and coffee shops. The modeling opened her eyes to what she really wanted to do. She not only wanted to wear beautiful clothes, she wanted to create them.
She would never do anything if she didn’t get away from Walker. She had to do it before he forced her into Pete’s bed.
Chapter 3
Ace was amused by the encounter. He doubted Julia knew who he was. He had kept a close eye on her over the years though. A very close eye. He owed her for calling him that night back when she had just been a kid and he never forgot when he owed someone something.
He owed Walker a lot of pain, and he was damn sure not forgetting that.
He had watched Julia occasionally over the years. She was an anomaly. She had class, plenty of it, and she was so much younger than her half siblings. It had been obvious that first night that he had met her that she had zero street smarts, and even less of an idea of just what she was doing by calling him.
He had made sure nobody had ever found out that it had been her who had called him to come get Margo, because he had never told anyone. As far as anyone knew Margo had somehow stumbled back to Brooklyn before calling him and he wanted it to stay that way.
Julia had been the only person to see him after Margo died too. The clubhouse had been empty, save for her, the rest of the crew gone down to Florida for a big run. He would have recalled that if he had not been in so much pain. The only reason he hadn’t torched the place was because he had seen her standing at a window, looking down at the street and him with an expression of sheer and total terror on her face.
She’d been all elbows and knees back then, a frizzy headed kid with thick glasses and a wilted demeanor. Now she was a gorgeous creature, and a full-grown woman. A woman he not only intended to seduce but one he wanted to seduce.
He had heard that Walker was pushing her to get with that low life scum dog Pete, the slimy asshole who had a massive connection that Walker needed to get his dope business out of the boroughs and way beyond.
Ace was no fool. He knew how much that connection was worth and it was somewhere around the tens of millions of dollars as long as the cops held off and the dope held out. Walker had a few cops in his pocket, enough to keep the ones in his borough off his case, but with the kind of money that connection could bring in he could buy as many dirty cops as he wanted.
There was the other issue in a nutshell too. With that kind of money behind him, and with cartel influence that ran all along the upper reaches of Manhattan behind him, Walker could and would declare outright war on the other crews in the NYC area. He would try to run them all to ground and then ride right over them.
Ace, if he had been so inclined and didn’t despise the drug trade so much, would have done the very same thing. Riding his own territory was not always enough, even for him. His crew was content where they were and they always fought off any rivals that tried to horn in on their turf. The last time a crew had tried there’d been mayhem for weeks. That crew, a shady bunch of dudes from right near the border between Brooklyn and Queens, had been doomed to failure from the outset. They were too close to Walker’s territory and too close to Ace’s not to piss them off. Ace had known arrests would follow if things got too dirty so he had called a meeting and they had come up with a plan that had involved pushing that crew further into Queens, just over the clearly drawn lines. Walker’s prospects had gone too far one night and some of that crew had wound up dead. The prospects that Walker had ordered to deal with the dudes had gone to jail, and more than one of them had sung their hearts out to the cops. The good cops had gone after Walker, but the dirty ones had minimized the damage as they always did. In the end Walker lost two dudes that had been riding with him for years because those guys took the fall for Walker. Of course, they had, he always took care of his own and right now those dudes’ families were enjoying a nice hunk of money every month and their very nice and mortgage free apartments to boot.
Fucking with Julia would mean open warfare. No doubt about it. Walker was touting that virginity of hers as a reward to Pete. Pete wanted the girl badly and he was holding out on the connection’s name and so forth. Walker might have tried to press, but he would not have gotten far. Pete was not a crew guy. He was a mercenary predator who liked to ride but didn’t tie his loyalty anywhere unless there was something in it for him.
Walker couldn’t just kill Pete after he found out who the connection was and how to get to him either. Pete had some serious blood ties to the connection, and that made Pete untouchable and gave him a bargaining chip the size of a delivery truck.
Ace paused in that thought. His high forehead wrinkled in thought. Was it a good idea to mess with Julia?
Hell no.
That was risky beyond risky.
But he was going to do it anyway because one she was the hottest thing he had ever seen and he wanted her, badly. Two, he owed Walker a major loss and he had been waiting for years to deliver it.
Now he had the perfect way to do it, and there was no way that he was backing down from that plan that had formed in his mind. No way in hell. Once he made up his mind about something he did it, no matter the consequences.
He pulled into the garage that was attached to the multi- family home he lived in.
A garage was incredible, and the towering five story house, a former townhouse for very wealthy people who had died a hundred years or more before, was just one more sign of his success. Like Walker’s outfit most of the crew lived there, in one of the seven apartments that had been carved into the house. That his crew could afford a building, a whole building, spoke volumes about how well they did business.
The building had been in the club’s possession for many years so Ace could not lay claim to that success but the sparkling fresh limestone façade, the new heating and air conditioning units on the roof, and the purchase of that attached garage had all been his doing. Deep down Ace was an accountant, albeit a dangerous one. He had been able to take a mess of unorganized books and carelessly used cash and turn it into clean money by setting up legit businesses, something he had been doing during the time he had been in the crew. That had been what had helped him to climb the ranks so fast and now, under his guidance, the crew had several very legit and profitable businesses in the borough and they used those businesses to wash the dirty money clean before putting it into fund accounts and the like.
That he was good with money was only one of his talents. He was equally good with a gun—or the business end of a baseball bat. His enemies were wary of him for those things and he knew it, and he also knew they had good reason to be.
Jack, his second in command, a grizzled dude with a shock of red hair and pale green eyes, met him at the door. “We got a little trouble brewing with Walker.”
Ace’s teeth flashed in between his thin lips. “When don’t we have trouble brewing with Walker?”
Jack said, “Fair enough. He hit one of our stands last night.”
Ace’s blood boiled. “Oh yeah?”
The stands were little pop up places around the borough. The Chinese set up their bootlegged bags and wallets and clothes and he and his crew provided protection from rival sellers of the same goods and kept the cops off their backs. In return they got a hefty cut of the profits and the sellers also stored a lot of other illegal goods in their little hidey holes around the borough for the crew. “Which one?”
