Riding in his position at the end of the columns, Brute played nursemaid for the day. Tailgunner for the run, his job to ensure no one was left behind. Wrench-wreck breakdowns, fuel fools, bladder busters—they were all his responsibility on this ride, and he took the charge seriously. So seriously he didn’t heed the corners taking them out of their way, bringing a cloud of fuel and grease and noise to the sweet and quiet street that ran in front of a cottage he knew well. Turns long memorized flew past in a flash as he followed his brothers.
The last twist of the throttle, pushing left and then cocking back, feet to his highway bars as he rode straight towards her house in broad daylight. Let it be my lucky day, he prayed, knowing from the sun on his skin it would not be. Knowing from the strolling sentinels stalking the sidewalks that his girl would be perched on her plot, contemplating the entities surrounding her. She’d be wedged on her box, watching the ebb and flow of humanity walking past her door.
From half a block away, he saw her. How could he not? She was that brilliant, a precious gem flashing in the sunshine. Frozen in place, hand on the door, she had turned to face the noise of the bikes, and he angled his eyes to drink her in. Hip-hugging shorts, barely covering the enticing swell of her ass, longer than long legs tucked into short socks, the curves in between beauty incarnate. Breasts filling out the front of her short-sleeved tee, V-neck dipping low, promised treasures he had seen and chastely touched, never tasted. Wanted to taste. God, wanted so much more.
Flashing past, he imagined her head turned to look at him, tracking him down the street. Recognizing him. Dreamed in broad daylight that she knew him. Wanted him. A delayed look in his mirror proved that false, her escape into the cottage complete, leaving him exactly where he had always been. Outside looking in through the careful barrier that held their worlds separate. His view distorted like the night in the bar, beveled edges of the peephole bending light. I’ll hold onto my dreams for a while longer, he thought, lifting his gaze to the row after row of bikes in front of him. My girl, my dream.
For now, he put all thoughts of Bexley aside. Even dialed back the rolling anger at his brother, because luck hadn’t been with him.
Attention focused on the men in front of him, Brute reacted instinctively when the palm down signal traveled the column well before the crimson glow of brake lights flashed from the tails of the two dozen bikes. A left turn was indicated, and he slowed, slipping easily onto the end of the dragon’s mechanical tail whipping one bike wide as they flowed through the corner and onto the main street.
Five minutes later, they merged into traffic on the highway and headed south, rolling downstate for a meet with another club, hoping to come to an understanding of boundaries. Today should help them draw unfuzzied lines to sharply demark where passage was allowed, and where forbidden.
Brute settled into his position in the rear, sliding effortlessly from side to side as needed so he could keep watch on his brothers. Nearer to the city, his job became more hectic, pulling into play dangerous skills hard learned. Swinging wide to force a car away, brushing close to a bumper to push back a cage threatening to cut the column.
Other tailgunners might use more permanent or showy methods of crowd control in traffic, leaving fear ricocheting like the sonic boom of their get-back whip sounding against a citizen’s windshield. They might enjoy the satisfaction of seeing a steam-spewing cage limp to the shoulder, radiator plugged with nuts or bearings, no longer swarming the bikers rolling on their merry way. Brute’s weapon of choice: his face. The mask besting every comer, lead-footed drivers instinctively giving terrified way to the hideous monster on the motorcycle.
Later on the run, his job changed again, as the column rolled deep in the city, down surface streets past rotting warehouses, empty of everything except squalid human remains. Decaying from the inside as they stared blankly at broken walls, submerged in the paralyzing amnesia of their choices. Here he was sentry against blind ambush. Watching. Gaze in perpetual motion, scanning and cataloging their surroundings, plotting differing lines of escape with every block deeper they rode into enemy territory.
Ahead lay the rival’s clubhouse and false safety. Gate opened wide an innocent invitation, small pools of available parking inconveniently split, requiring their men to halt on either side of the structure. A vast expanse of openness between their forces was a potential killing field of black asphalt. Doorway approach was blocked by bikes; kickstands propped with front wheels angled, pegs down; they impeded escape from the building like wire-wrapped crosses on a beach.
Brute dismounted from his bike, swinging his leg in a smooth movement off and over to stand motionless but for his eyes. As Gunny approached, the remembered anger of betrayal swarmed him, climbing his insides in blistering stripes of rage. One of few able to read Brute’s scarred and impassive mien, Gunny halted his advance, leaving a buffer of fifteen feet. Just enough. Barely enough.
“Good call, brother.” Brute finally acknowledged his own anger, rising pressure in his jaw where the posts of implants were buried deep in the bone. He knew the muscles in his jaw and neck would be twisting the ridges of his skin. “Stopping out of reach.” He paused and drew breath through his nose, blowing it out through barely parted lips. The movement caused memories to stir of wearing a mask in truth. Some days it had seemed the tiny, round holes in the rigid plastic barely allowed room for air. “Not the time or the place, but I will say this…” Shaking his head, he selected his words with care. “Of everyone… you know. Know what she means to me. You just didn’t fucking care, did you?”
“Brother.” Gunny’s dismay was real, ringing true through his voice, his pained eyes. Heart-felt consternation at the weeping wounds and devastation his actions wrought. “I didn’t think.”
“No, you just did.” Brute sucked in another breath, trying frantically to keep a grip on the control slipping through his fingers like ice in a red-hot skillet, wildly hurtling towards ruin. He gave an inch to his need for this man to understand, someone he called friend in addition to brother, and inclined forward, leather cut moving on his shoulders with the bunching of muscles. “She saw me.”
Brute stood upright, dragging the reins of his anger with him, readying himself to lay it down for now. The club required it.
Slate was striding towards them; their president’s face a different kind of mask. Brute had learned each member held their own privately splintered expressions. One their own, the person they showed family and friends. And one for the club.
The club sustained Brute, made him a man again. Worthy and good, the club needed differences set aside in moments like these. On the enemy's ground, his focus had to be the advantage of the whole, not an avoidable altercation. To do otherwise was a betrayal of its own, something he could never tolerate.
“We got business, brother.” He crossed to Gunny, pacing out the five strides that separated them on this lot. The look on Gunny’s face said it all; he was steeling himself for pain that wasn’t mental. Steeling himself to take with honor the answer his actions had earned. And he would, without complaint. He would stomach what Brute felt was needed to even the tottering balance held guaranteed by the patch riding their backs.
Seeing the willingness of his brother to accept whatever Brute needed to get past this moment gave him pause. Not deliberate then, a true miscalculation. Lifting a hand, he clasped Gunny’s shoulder, stress sliding out of his brother at the firm hold, relief rushing in to fill the void. Brute asked, “We good?” He would leave acceptance of the fix in his brother’s hands, maintaining friendships took effort from both sides. Maintaining brotherhood requiring more.
“We’re good.” Gunny’s breath gusted out, and he grunted as Slate’s footsteps reached them, drawing them both back to action.
Brute
He backed into his space, not a garage. They weren’t available at his apartment complex, but he paid for an awning space. Since he rode year-round, he felt it worth the cost. He paid for privacy, too. Living beh
ind a gate might bother some of his brothers, but for Brute, it gave him a peace of mind needed to breathe easy. A guard post against infiltrators. Visitors were required to check in, and even the simple sign-in sheet logging meant most things could be known if needed. The routine had become so comfortable over the past year, he sometimes didn’t even look at the spaces up front, wouldn’t know if there were new tenants until he saw them in passing.
Sometimes Brute wondered if the apartment manager warned new renters about him. “Oh, yeah. Almost forgot to mention it. About the guy in building twenty-one, apartment C. Just steer clear and you won’t have anything to worry about. He’s fine, not a danger, don’t worry about that. It’s just…the war. He was in the war, you know.” That way when the new folks caught sight of him, they wouldn’t warp as far sideways as they might otherwise, his face still a shock but buffered. The words would be an investment on the apartment complex’s part, ensuring full disclosure. Reminiscent in a way of how realtors had to do if there was a murder in a house. This time, the death had only been a man’s dreams. A face, but not a life.
It was nearly a month after they had ridden to Indy. Almost a month of Gunny working to repair a brotherhood that Brute had already decided wasn’t damaged. The bastard was bending over backwards to work it out, though, and that shit was fun to see. He’d cut his brother some slack soon, rub him wrong in a way that let Gunny know Brute was so far past the event it didn’t shade his rearview.
The previous weeks had seen some oddities, but between work and the club, Slate and the Rebels had kept him so busy he hadn’t found time to focus on his girl as much as he liked. Since he’d walked out of her house, she’d kept her head down for the most part, working and then heading home alone, or going to her brother’s to hang. The two times she had gone out had been back to the bar in New Haven, which was fucked up, because there were a lot of places closer to hand that held a better clientele, people more in her social circles. But, she returned to the dive.
Brute had been busy both times. Out on a run, he’d only been alerted when the dishwasher at the bar texted to let him know she’d showed. That was their deal—the boy texted, Brute paid. And he was happy to pay the kid. Glad he’d thought to set the arrangement up, especially when his instincts were right, and she wouldn’t let what happened put her off the place.
One of his brothers dispatched to the bar because Brute deemed the mission too critical for prospect assignment, that brother asked to find a place close but not too close. Told to keep her safe. A careful distance requiring mature and focused judgment. Chafed at him, sending someone out like that, because it was “My job,” he muttered, lifting his leg and swinging it off the bike.
Bending to the saddlebags, he pulled out the few groceries he had stowed. The shelves in his small pantry were nearly empty, which meant he really needed to take his truck to the store soon, stock up so he didn’t have to fuck around with bare handfuls of shit at a time. Each time he braved the store was a chance for someone’s reaction to start eating at him, so his preference was to reduce the opportunities for that public exposure. Fuck, if the store delivered, he’d keep them in business singlehandedly.
He buckled and locked the bag, then straightened, turning to walk under the stairs to his door. There was a shadowy figure standing there. Locking down his first instinct to rush in and confront or subdue whoever it was, he stood still, waiting. If the person, woman by the shape and size, would only take a step into the light, he would know friend or foe. Movement, at first hesitant and slow, disclosed curves instead of angles. Definitely a woman.
“Ricky?” Such a soft voice, unsure of her welcome, but at least one he knew.
He broke free from the caution holding him in place, anger rushing to fill the void caused by adrenaline, followed quickly by a drowning fear. “Natalie? What the fuck, Natty?” Daughter of his best friend from childhood, his goddaughter, that honor granted before his first deployment. Overseas, heat and exhaustion and hunger in the field had been cut through with each delivery of emailed snapshots and vids. Him a distant witness to her first step, first word, first grade, first date.
Back before the war took everything else from him.
When recovery was assured, but his condition was not, mired in impotent anger and depression he had contacted Dylan from the hospital, tried to beg off. He’d told him to find someone more suited to a girl who at that time was barely a teen and into boys, her beauty calling for things from him that he couldn’t find within himself to give.
Dylan had rocked his world, telling him what Natty had needed wasn’t something the blast stripped from him. In his injury, Dylan said that he could give her a lesson few learned. She didn’t need to be shown that imperfect things could be cast aside, but that they became more precious in their imperfection. Brute hadn’t spoken in response, unable to, silent throat closed so tightly that even swallowing had become impossible. Choked breathing the only sound, their call had ended in quiet, broken finally by Dylan’s solemn promise, “We’ll see you soon, brother.”
Once back on US soil, a resolved Brute had appeared on their front porch. No warning, not wanting to ease into it, he provided no previsit explanation of what had happened to him. And his friend had demonstrated the truth of what Brute had known since they were seven and pledged themselves as blood brothers, that oath costing him five stitches when the dull blade had slipped, slicing his finger all to hell and back. Clenching hands slippery with blood, the promise had soaked into his soul much like the crimson liquid soaked into the dirt floor of the barn.
Blindly trusting his gut, Brute had arrived on the doorstep of a man who held beautiful in his hands every day. A man who stood in his shoes without ever having known anything other than goodness and light in his life. Dylan’s wife and daughter were so gorgeous a man would cross the street for a chance to walk in their shadow. And, proving that long ago pain worth the bearing, that man hadn’t reacted beyond the first involuntary flinch, and even at the moment, Brute knew Dylan’s recoil was pain for what Brute had suffered, not because his friend’s stomach was rolling with nausea at what he saw.
Then Dylan’s wife had shown beyond a doubt she was worth every minute of the man’s care and love of her. She had she met Brute with the same, reaching up to press her hand flat against the hard plastic mask he wore in those days, letting the heat seep into his face through the barrier against touch. Her only question proof that she could stand firm in whatever storm might come her way, “Beer or whiskey?”
Before Brute could answer, Natalie had surged headlong down the stairs at her father’s call of, “Natty, Pappa Ricky’s here.” Fabric-covered feet soundless on the steps, the swell of her voice his radar track pointing to her advancement through the house. Excited and already jabbering a mile a minute when she turned the corner from the hallway into the kitchen, she hadn’t even hesitated in her headlong approach before throwing herself into his embrace.
Wrapping her thin girl’s arms around his chest, she held on tightly, mouth still going, chattering about everything of importance that had crossed her mind since they’d last spoken. Safe in his arms, cheek pressed against his chest. When she finally tipped her head up, words turning to a question at his lack of response, looking into his face for the first time sent her silent.
He had stood, waiting for the horror to hit as her intense gaze tracked across his features. Waited for the wails and wet-tracked cheeks, waited for the shoulder shove to escape revulsion’s embrace. Motionless, shuddering in anticipation, he waited, knowing what she saw and already not blaming her.
His lashless eyes staring, bulging at her from a raw and ruined face, looking too large for their sockets from the way the scars and grafts pulled at his skin. Lips red and puffy, pushing through the hole in the mask, the flesh all around compressed, held in place. Scars and angry mottled skin grafts visible through the hard plastic, color ranging from maroon to pale gray. One ear burned down to nothing, a stub where it used to be.
“Hey,” she’d told him softly, giving him a squeeze. “God, I love your eyes. My Pappa Ricky.”
And, just as easy as that, the new him, the damaged thing left behind in the wake of the blast, found a way to fit into their lives. Not the same, but different in a manner that suited the present. And now, Natty was here, a thousand miles away from where she was supposed to be, looking anxious and afraid.
“What’s wrong, Natty?” He called the question but was already on the move, crossing the space between them, bending down to look into her face as he transferred things to one hand. He stared as he pulled the keys from his pocket. She’d been crying, recently and a lot, if the swollen lids told the truth. “What’s wrong?” His repeated question garnered no response. It looked like she was so lost in her head he wasn’t even sure if she was hearing him.
She stood there, gazing up at him and he watched while the weight of what she was carrying broke her, her face shifting from only just holding it together to totally lost, capsizing in the space of a single breath. The corners of her mouth turned down, and her chin was quivering as it had when she was seven, and her cat escaped their house, but couldn’t outrun the traffic on a nearby street. Brute had been there that evening, had gone out with a shovel and bag to bring the remains home. Had stood in the backyard as Natty sat crumpled on the grass beside a shoebox-sized patch of bare dirt, sobbing. Had crouched next to her, gathering the girl she was then into his lap, settling them on the ground while she showed him the burden of grief and loss she’d felt.
Standing in front of him now, she squeezed her eyes shut, turning her head away, neck twisting to pull her chin to her shoulder. Bracing for a blow, she expected whatever this was to upset him, and feared his reaction. Keys in hand, he reached out, tugging her close, taking the hit as she buried her face in his chest. That was when the tears started, and he turned them together towards his door, needing to get the wailing child out of the apartments’ shared breezeway.
A Kiss to Keep You (Rebel Wayfarers MC Book 14) Page 4
