Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7)

by Susan Fanetti

  His grandfather laughed. “Come on, son. Wash the road dust off you. I’ll get you a beer.”

  ~oOo~

  Kelly’s roommate opened the door and rolled her eyes. “You’re such a shit, Caleb. You could at least call first. I’m surprised you don’t come to the door with your dick already out.”

  “Gena, back off,” Kelly said from within. “Hey, Caleb.”

  He looked over Gena’s head and into the room. Kelly was sitting on the sofa, still in her work smock. The television flickered blue over her face. “Hey, Kell.” He held up the flat box burning his hand. “I brought pizza.” He raised the six pack in his other hand. “And beer. Want to hang out?”

  Kelly must have nodded or otherwise indicated assent, because Gena heaved a gale-force sigh, shoved the door open, and stepped clear. “There better be enough pizza for me, too.”

  “Extra large. Plenty even for your wide ass.”

  She kicked at the back of his knee and nearly sent him headlong. “Asshole.”

  He stumbled but kept his feet and turned to her with a grin. “Bitch.”

  They’d all grown up together, were all Osage kids, and had been friends their whole lives. He’d never dated either of them—or anybody, really, until after high school—but a year or so ago, right around the time he got his top rocker, he and Kelly had started up this semi-regular thing, and Gena had always been weird about it. Not jealous, but hostile. Caleb didn’t have to guess why; she said it outright every chance she got. She wanted more for Kelly than a booty call. But it wasn’t like he was keeping her from having a relationship, or even getting laid by other guys. He saw her once a week, at the most. She’d been spending her nights sitting on her sofa watching television before they’d started their thing.

  Kelly got up from the sofa and dragged over to their Formica table as he opened the box and pulled three beers from the pack. Her hair was up the way she wore it for work, pulled hard back from her face and all knotted up on the top of her head. First thing when they got back to her room, he was going to pull that down. Then he’d get that sad smock off of her. And then he’d see if he couldn’t put a smile on her.

  ~oOo~

  “Yeah! Oh God, oh shit! Shit! Harder!”

  Caleb clutched Kelly’s hips and shifted his position, bringing his left leg up and planting his foot on her mattress so he could get better leverage and give her what she wanted. With his next thrust, she squealed—the sound had a weird metallic undertone, and it wasn’t until his phone rang again that he understood what it was.

  Fuck. His fucking club burner. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He thrust a couple more times, trying to ignore it, but he couldn’t let it go. They had two teams out on runs.

  “Caleb, please!”

  He’d stopped moving, and she was close. The phone rang again. “I have to get that.” When he pulled out, she shrieked in frustration.

  “You’re shitting me,” she gasped as he stood.

  The phone was still ringing when he dug it out of his kutte pocket. “Yeah!”

  A female voice he almost recognized, thought he should know, asked, “Mav?”

  “No, wrong number, sorry.” Apollo did some weird shit with the burner phones, collecting them every now and then and wiping them clean. They weren’t supposed to give anybody the numbers but club members, but everybody did it all the time, so he shuffled the phones around to make it harder to use them as personals. It hadn’t worked. By now, all the old ladies had all the numbers, and they just—wait. This wasn’t Jenny, Maverick’s old lady, and it sure as hell wasn’t his little girl, Kelsey. It wasn’t any old lady, he didn’t think. So who the fuck had Mav given this number to? A sweetbutt? No way. “Who’s this?”

  “Who’s this?” The voice was so damn familiar. Maybe it was an old lady? The words were badly slurred; even those two syllables had taken a twisty path out of the speaker’s mouth.

  “I asked you first.”

  “I need Mav. It’s an em—emer—emercy. I needim. Sposed…callim.”

  Jesus hell, he knew who this was. His heart did a weird shifty thing that he hated. “Cecily?”

  Cecily was the oldest daughter of Dane, the first Bulls VP. He’d died on the clubhouse floor, at the hands of another Bull, and Cecily had been on some kind of collision course ever since—and doing her damnedest to pull as many people as she could along with her. Including Caleb.

  “Mav? Need you.”

  “Mav’s in Texas, Ciss. This is Caleb.”

  “Need Mav. Hurry.” She’d started to whisper now, and Caleb heard other voices in the background. A lot of them.

  “Where are you?”

  “Dunno. Bad place. Needmav.” The phone went dead.

  “CECILY!”

  Behind him, Kelly had sat up. “What’s wrong?”

  He ignored her and dialed the incoming number. When he didn’t get an answer, he called Apollo, who picked up on the first ring.

  “Yeah.” Apollo whispered, and Caleb could hear him getting out of bed. Jacinda was pregnant, and they’d had some trouble getting and staying that way. Caleb pictured her sleeping and Apollo tiptoeing out of the room so he wouldn’t disturb her.

  “It’s Caleb. There’s a problem with Cecily. Can you trace her phone?”

  “She doesn’t have a club phone. I don’t know her number. What kind of problem?”

  “I have it. She just called me. I don’t know the problem, but she sounds like she’s in trouble. She was looking for Mav, says she needs him. She said she was in a ‘bad place’.”

  “Shit. Shit. I can’t—I don’t have the tech to trace any number I want to. Just ours. But give me the number and I’ll see if I can call in a favor at this time of night. You at your granddad’s?”

  Close enough. “Yeah. I can come in, though.”

  “You better. If she’s in real trouble, it’s gonna take more than one of us to get her. What’s her number? I’ll call a friend and see if I can get a trace. Meet me at the clubhouse.”

  Caleb gave Apollo the number. They ended the call, and he pulled the condom off his deflated dick. “Sorry, Kell. I got to go.”

  Kelly had the sheet tucked up across her chest. “I heard. She’s somebody important to you, this Cecily?”

  “She’s the daughter of a friend.”

  That answer was close enough to the truth. Caleb had been only a prospect at the time of Dane’s death, and he’d mostly been intimidated by the club officers. He hadn’t known the man well. But he’d gotten to know his daughter since his death. A bit too much, if you asked some. Not as much as he’d have liked to.

  “Are you coming back?”

  He buttoned up his jeans and grabbed his t-shirt. “I doubt it, not tonight. I’m really sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” she sighed. “I hope she’s okay.”

  “Thanks, sugar.” Caleb kissed Kelly on the cheek, grabbed his kutte, and split.

  ~oOo~

  Apollo was waiting for him when Caleb got there, but otherwise, the clubhouse was deserted. Most of the club was still out on the southern and western runs, and the others were, he supposed, home in bed. Apollo apparently hadn’t called them. Not even Becker, their new VP.

  It was hard to get used to the idea that Becker was their VP. Just a couple months ago, he’d been a grunt like the rest of them and not obviously a standout at the table. But with Ox retiring and going off to Mexico to wait for his cancer to kill him, and Rad not wanting the VP flash, Caleb guessed there wasn’t a better candidate.

  Honestly, he would have thought Maverick the best fit. He was smart and definitely a standout at the table. But for reasons above Caleb’s pay grade, that hadn’t happened.

  “I got her 20,” Apollo said as he met Caleb at the door. “She’s east of downtown, off of 11th Street.”

  “11th?” That was all hookers and pushers. “What the fuck?”

  “If I’m right, she’s in more trouble than just tonight. But we can’t go thundering in there, or we’ll start some kind of sh
it. That’s too close to Hounds turf.”

  It was still Bulls ground, but that close to Greenwood, in the northern part of the area that used to be neutral before the Bulls won a war against the Street Hounds and claimed that turf in the truce, the boundary was porous. The Hounds had permission to sell there and cut the Bulls in.

  The Bulls drew a strange and, from Caleb’s perspective, arbitrary line around drugs. Delaney wouldn’t hear of selling it or running it, he had some kind of moral superiority about it, but every damn thing they did was connected to drugs in some way. The guns they moved went to drug cartels and their dealers. And they took a cut from the Hounds’ drug trade in Tulsa. Caleb thought it was damn hypocritical to get all high and mighty about staying clear of drugs, when most of their income came from a Russian bratva up to its ushanka in every kind of drug there was. But he was at the bottom of the heap, so nobody much cared what he thought.

  He got what Apollo was saying—Cecily was in some kind of drug den, almost definitely run by the Hounds, and if they went in hot, they could start more than a brawl. But they had to get Dane’s daughter out of there. “What’s the plan, then?”

  “You and me. Just us, no colors. We’ll take the van and see if we can get her out quietly.”

  “Should we carry?”

  “Oh, yeah. Let’s not be stupid. But if we can avoid starting a new war, let’s do.”

  ~oOo~

  The location was a rundown apartment building, just four townhouses in a row, most of the windows covered with sheets or blankets. The windows of the unit on the far end were covered with black plastic, like trash bags. The light glowed oddly and barely through the plastic.

  “That one,” Apollo said and dismounted. Caleb followed him. Apollo was a big guy—a couple inches taller than Caleb’s five-ten, but almost another whole man wider, and pure muscle. With Ox’s mountainous body in Mexico, Apollo was easily the biggest Bull. Not the tallest, that was Fitz, but the biggest. He had the kind of physique they put on the covers of weightlifting magazines. Caleb was fit and decently cut, but he felt like a shrimp walking in Apollo’s shadow.

  Apollo didn’t bother to knock; he tried the door, it opened, he went through. As Caleb followed him in, he saw that no one would have thought to answer a knock anyway. People drooped over the scant furniture and lay like breathing corpses on the floor. The place had a gross smell, smoke, burning rubber, and something else, like a hospital smell gone to rot. And body odor. God, so much reek.

  They went from room to room and no one did more than blink stupidly at them, but they didn’t find Cecily.

  “Maybe she left?” Caleb asked, though she’d been so fucked up he doubted she could have gone anywhere on her own legs.

  “I’d get a call if her phone moved,” Apollo said and shouldered open a nearly closed door. His force pushed a body out of the way; a halfhearted complaint rose from the general direction of the body’s head.

  And there was Cecily, spread out on a broken-down velvet sofa, passed entirely out. A rubber tube sagged around her arm, the knot still loosely tied. And some stringy-haired shithead was sloppily fucking her.

  “No fucking way!” Caleb charged forward, but Apollo pushed him back. The bigger man grabbed the shithead by his lank, filthy mop and threw him across the room.

  Caleb went to Cecily and yanked her dress over her hips, covering her. He knew this dress, tight and black. She’d gotten up to trouble in it before. He pulled the tube from her arm and slid his arm under her back. “Ciss, wake up. Hey, sugar, hey.” He slapped her cheeks lightly.

  “What’re you doing, man?” Apollo’s voice was gruff and furious. “Let her stay under. She doesn’t want to wake up to this. Let’s go.”

  He was right. Caleb gave up trying to wake her to this awful place and instead picked her up, cradling her across his arms. He’d never picked up a woman before and wasn’t expecting her to be so heavy. She didn’t look like she’d be heavy. When he turned around, the shithead was propped against the wall, his mouth and nose bleeding freely, his face already swelling, and his dick shriveling.

  No condom on that dick. Shit.

  Apollo flexed his bloody fist and gave Caleb a once-over. “You want me to carry her?”

  “No, I got her.”

  As they stepped out of the room, a large, shirtless black man with Street Hounds ink across his chest was right there. For a few seconds, there was a standoff in the smelly hallway. Then Apollo held out his arm and showed his Bulls ink. The Hound’s eyebrows went up, and he took a half-step back, more in readiness than in fear.

  “She’s ours. We’re taking her home.”

  The Hound nodded and got out of their way.

  ~oOo~

  Cecily needed a doctor, but they didn’t want to make a huge case out of it unless they had no other choice. How much Cecily was a victim, and how much she was stupid and self-destructive, were questions to answer. If there was justice to mete out, they knew Delaney would want control over that, and a hospital meant cops, and paperwork, and complications. So they decided to take Cecily back to Ox and Maddie’s place, where she was staying, and call Willa for help.

  With Willa there, Apollo went home to his pregnant wife and left strict instructions for Caleb and Willa to call him first if there were any problems. Caleb felt uneasy about that—Apollo wasn’t the ranking officer in town—but he held rank over Caleb, so he agreed.

  While Willa was with Cecily in her bedroom, Caleb wandered around Ox and Maddie’s house. It was a nice place—really nice. He’d only been in it a couple of times, and had never gotten very far. Carrying Cecily into the first-floor bedroom, he’d seen more than ever before of the house. Ox liked his privacy. That made sense—he wasn’t the kind of guy who overshared. Or just regular shared. He kept himself to himself, and Ox and Maddie had kept this place like a secret palace or something.

  Which was why Caleb was shocked at the condition it was in now. It was a fucking mess. The kitchen was overwhelmed with dirty dishes, and several lines of black ants paraded across the countertops. The table was buried in takeout boxes. Clothes were strewn over all the chairs, shoes and boots scattered over the floor. Musty towels made a small mountain near the back door, which led to the pool and hot tub outside. It was only April, so she must have been using the hot tub. Dying plants sat in a cluster beside the door.

  There didn’t seem to be actual damage to the house, but Cecily was treating the place like a flophouse, and Caleb thought that was supremely shitty. Ox was dying; he was still doing okay, as far as Caleb knew, but he could go at any time. Maddie meant to come home to this house, their house, after he passed, and Cecily was going to let this mess greet her? They’d trusted her with their private space, and she’d shat all over it.

  Fucking bitch. He didn’t care what kind of pain was driving her down this spiral, fuck her for taking people who cared about her along for the ride. She didn’t get to hurt other people to make her own shit bearable. Everybody had pain. Everybody had to deal with it.

  Anger made him restless, so he started cleaning. He went to the pantry and found a box of trash bags. Fluffing one open, he shoved old pizza boxes and Chinese food cartons in. He grabbed a stack of lined notebook paper in his fist, but stopped when a word in Cecily’s handwriting—in pink pen—caught his eye. Nowhere, it said. He shifted the page in his grip. Nowhere Girl.

  It was a poem.

  Caleb stood with the trash in one hand and read the poem. Then he set the trash bag down, cleared a space at the table, and read the others. All those sheets of lined paper were poems. Some were drafts of the same poem, including five earlier versions of ‘Nowhere Girl,’ and others were incomplete. But a few were polished and elegant and made his chest ache. They were lyrical. Musical. Angry. And sad as hell.

  He wasn’t mad anymore. Now he just hurt.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fuck, her head hurt.

  Cecily threw her arm out and reached for a pillow to shield it from the weight of the world a
round her. Her arm hurt, too, and she didn’t find a pillow. Scraping the lid off the Saharan expanse of her eyeball, she tried to see, but every molecule of air was like a tiny switchblade wielded by a crazed witch doll. Like that old TV movie, the one where the doll chased the lady around her apartment.

  That had turned up pretty often in the Saturday-night creature feature, and her dad had always let her stay up and watch with him. It never failed to freak her out, but Dad had held her while she buried her face against his chest.

  Her dad. Daddy.

  Fuck, why’d her brain go and dredge up that old shit? Well, her eyes weren’t dry anymore, at least. She blinked and sat up—fuck! Everything hurt. But she was in her room. Not her room, exactly, but the one Aunt Mad had said she could use while she housesat. Why did she hurt so much? What had she done?