“I’ve been tracking news and law enforcement traffic as much as I can in Mexico and farther south. It’s spotty, and I need Terry to translate, so it’s slow. Nothing’s come up on American channels yet, but I’m seeing a lot more activity than usual in cartel hotbeds. It’s always bloody as fuck in those places, nonstop turf wars, and law in Mexico has the cartels so far up their asses it’s hard to make a clear picture of exactly what that’s going on is unusual and what’s just regular daily fuckery, but my guess is Irina is making her move.” Apollo turned to Maverick. “To give you some kind of answer to your question, Mav, I think the Panhandle was Irina making a statement. Remember back in the day, how she cratered the Dirty Rats charter in Lubbock and got her fist around their whole club, nationwide? She’s not stupid. When she makes a big splash, it’s a message. This time, she showed everybody from New England to Colombia she had Abrego 13 to heel, and reminded everybody she can simply erase an MC in seconds. She can pick and choose who lives and dies, and she can do it all under the noses of the U.S. Feds. Now, her allies down south are armed to the teeth and ready to take control.”
“So your read is that she put us in that fire for no better reason than to flex her arm?” Maverick growled. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Becker lifted his hand and flexed his fingers, like he was waving Maverick’s gripe aside, but subtly. “I don’t know Irina’s thinking any better than you do, Mav, but I don’t think she does anything without thinking it through. There was more to it than that.” He turned his attention to Rad, the only one at the table who’d spent any significant time around Irina during sensitive talks.
Rad’s forehead creased with thoughtfulness. “Beck’s right. She’s always careful. Even when the Rats killed her son, she didn’t just lash out. She made a strong move, but she did it cool. The Panhandle wasn’t just for show. She got the Wolves’ meth operation and tightened her own pipeline. That’s Abregos in Galveston and Amarillo—both her Texas junctions. She’s cutting out extraneous partners. She did it flashy to make a point, but endng the Wolves was her real goal.” He shrugged. “That’s my look, anyway.”
“I agree,” Becker said.
“So why’d she put us at risk?” Caleb asked. Rad’s explanation made sense, but the Bulls were longstanding allies—more to the point, Delaney was Irina’s longstanding ally—and he’d nearly died.
“To remind us we’re expendable,” Maverick said with a grunt of contempt. “D doesn’t like drug business, and she’s expanding hers. Maybe she was making a point to him, too. It’s all about her big plans down south.”
“Do we even fucking know who her allies down south are? I mean, besides the Abrego fuckheads?” Gunner threw himself back in his seat. “This is so fucked.”
Becker stared at the gavel before him. “D’s always said we don’t need to know. We just move her product. The destination is not our concern.”
“I think”—Rad sighed heavily, like a man who really didn’t want to say what he was about to say—“I think we need to know now. What happened in the Panhandle changed the game. This is more than movin’ product. We’ve been doin’ more than movin’ her product for years.”
“I agree,” Maverick said. “Those Russian bastards are using us like pawns. Apollo, can you figure it out?”
“I can try. I don’t speak Spanish, so it means bringing Terry in deep. Even deeper.”
Caleb laughed. “He’s already in all the way, man. He was in that goddamn garage with us.”
“Anybody have a problem with Apollo digging into this and bringing Terry with him?” Becker asked.
“Terry’s only been prospecting a few months.” Wally pointed out. “It’s a risk. D might not like it.”
“No more risk than bringing him to the Panhandle with us.” Rad, Terry’s sponsor, seemed in support of the idea. “And D wanted him in on that. We can trust the kid. If he’s still steady now, and he is, then he’s solid straight through.”
“We should vote, I think,” Becker said, still uneasy leading the table. “You want a vote?”
“Just do it, Beck,” Mav pushed. “Call the vote.”
Becker cleared his throat again. “All in favor of Apollo and Terry digging into the Volkov business south of the border?” He didn’t immediately vote himself, so Rad made the first one.
“Aye. I’ve got D’s proxy, and I vote ‘Aye’ for him, too.”
By the time the vote got back to Becker, he said, “I guess it’s unanimous. Apollo, you know what to do.”
Their technology officer nodded. “I’ll get right on it.”
“When’s your little goddess getting sprung, man?” Fitz asked.
At the mention of his daughter, Apollo’s expression shifted at once to something practically angelic. “Not for a while yet, but she’s doin’ good. She’s just got to finish doing the growing she was supposed to do on the inside. She’s getting hair on her head now—it’s dark like her mom’s.”
Grinning, Rad said, “That’s good. We need good news around here. How about your little dude, Si?”
Simon gave Apollo a sheepish look. Where Apollo’s little girl was having a rough entry into the world, Simon’s baby boy had slid out in record time, replete with health and strength. “He’s good. Sleeping through the night now.”
“There are a lot of little kids in this club,” Fitz observed with a grin. “Shit, we should start a daycare or something.”
Mav replied without picking up Fitz’s humor. “It’s a damn good reason for us to keep things quiet. Outlaw work is one thing, but we can’t get in the middle of Irina’s drug war. We are surrounded by women and children who trust us to protect them, and we can’t do that if she’s turned the fucking Abregos loose.”
Rad nodded. “You’re not wrong, Mav. But outlaw work comes with this kind of risk. Everybody at this table knows what it means to be a Bull.”
“I know what it meant to be a Bull, when I first put this leather on. We need to remember that and be true to it. I feel the club changing. It’s different from before I went inside, it’s even different from when I first got out, and I lay that all on the Russian work. We can’t let greed come before family. Nobody at this table is struggling. We don’t need more than we have.”
“Speak for yourself, Mav,” Wally muttered.
Maverick wheeled on him. “Don’t you throw down with me, kid. I know where your money goes.”
Wally looked ready to throw down anyway, but Becker put up his hands. “Brothers, come on, let’s not get derailed by philosophy. We still need to talk about Slick’s arrangements. I don’t think anybody here has a problem with doing what we can to keep our people safe, and nobody relishes burying another brother. We’ll get the information, and when D gets back, then we’ll talk seriously about our work. For now, let’s talk about how we put our brother to rest.”
~oOo~
Slick had family in Oklahoma, family that hadn’t been thrilled with the Bull on his back. They were his next of kin, of course, and emphatically unwilling to wait for Delaney to be home and strong enough to see him put to rest. They’d been hostile to the idea of the Bulls being involved at all, but Becker and Simon had worked out a compromise with them that resulted in two separate memorial services, for his two families, and a funeral Mass at the Catholic Church of Saint Mary, in Tulsa, to which the Bulls had grudgingly been invited. Only the Bulls, however; none of their many friends who traveled to Tulsa for the Bulls’ memorial were invited to church. But they would ride in the procession after it.
Caleb had had no idea that Slick was Catholic. He’d never been inside a Catholic church before, or seen a Mass outside what they showed in movies. It struck him as not remarkably different from the tribal rites of his people. Sure, no one would ever confuse the two, but at their heart, the rituals were the same. Costumed holy men, props and chanting, call and response. Sacred words, sacred acts, sacred objects, all designed to herald someone’s passage to the world beyond this one.
He
sat beside Cecily, their hands interlaced, and bore witness to Slick’s family’s grief as he felt his own.
Andrew. They’d named him Andrew. Caleb had known that, somewhere deep in a forgotten drawer of his memory, but it hadn’t been knowledge he’d have easily found. Andrew George Zabek. Such a normal name for a man who’d died with a chest full of lead.
He’d been twenty-nine years old.
~oOo~
Cecily kicked off her black heels and unclipped her hair. Caleb watched it fall and swing across her back. Even in a plain black funeral dress, she was beautiful, and that hair carried the sun with it everywhere she went. He set one hand on her hip, hooking his fingers and thumb around the scoop of her waist; with the other hand, he lifted her hair and brought it to his face, to feel the cool silk and breathe in the soft spice of her shampoo.
She looked over her shoulder and gave him a sweet smile. “Are you hungry? I could order in.”
His appetite had been shit since the Panhandle. Getting your guts shot and carved on had a way of making food less than appealing. A month after the shooting, he was cleared for light activity—not his bike yet, dammit—and most food, but he just wasn’t into it. “I’m okay. Get something if you want, though.”
“You want to just go to bed?”
“It’s not even ten o’clock.”
She turned and took his hands in hers. “So? It was a long, shitty day. I’m tired. Aren’t you?”
No, he wasn’t tired. He was sore, and his mind was weary, but the last thing he wanted to do was sleep. A chance to feel good. A chance to quiet his mind and forget for a while the pain and loss and confusion of the past month. That was what he wanted.
Cecily. The heart of everything he wanted, the thing that brought all his worlds, all his selves, together. His swinging bridge.
He pulled her up against him and looped his arms around her waist. “I’m not tired, baby. I’m worn down. But I’m not tired. I miss you.”
“I’m right here.” She draped her arms over his shoulders. Times like this, when she was sweet and quiet and loving, it was hard to imagine that she was also the wild, frantic, heartsick woman who’d given him the scar on his cheek just six months earlier. But she was both those women and everything between.
“You know what I mean.” In case she needed a hint, he leaned in and covered her mouth with his, finding it soft and pliant. She took his tongue in, and they stood at the entrance to Ox and Maddie’s kitchen and made out, holding each other, tasting each other.
He went hard right away. As the surge of blood went through his cock, a bolt of electric energy shot through the rest of him, and he grabbed her and pushed her to the wall. “I miss you so fucking much,” he muttered against her lips. It had been more than a month since he’d been inside her. Since the morning of his birthday.
Her fingers were tangled in his hair, holding him close, and she pushed her hips forward to grind on him. But her gasping words were, “Caleb, we can’t. No strenuous activity for two more weeks.”
“Then you fuck me,” he groaned and dropped his head to suck on her neck. She wore a cologne that smelled a lot like her shampoo, earthy and spicy, like she meant to be fire from her head to her feet. He sucked in a long, fragrant breath as his tongue traced her pulse.
“You want me to fuck you?” Her hand slid down his back and into his jeans, and clawed into a hunk of his ass.
“God, yes. I need to be inside you.”
“You need to be still and let me do what I want. You can’t take over.” She let go of his ass and eased her hand around his hip, to the front of his jeans, and found his cock. Her tickling fingers over his balls, across his tip, had his knees shaking.
“Fuck me, iňloňka. Fuck me.”
Her chuckle was positively devilish. Her hand came out of his jeans, and she pushed him away. Taking him by the arm, she drew him toward the bedroom. He followed like a puppy. She could do anything she wanted, as long as she was with him, as long as she gave him some peace.
In the bedroom, they left the lights off, so only the dim beams making their way down the hallway from the kitchen made the shadows shape themselves into furniture. Cecily led him to the bed and slid the kutte from his shoulders. She eased it down his arms, then folded it neatly and laid it over the back of the shadow that was the armchair.
Caleb stood and watched the dim shape of her as she unbuttoned his white dress shirt, one button at a time, taking her time, her fingers weaving faint traces over the skin of his chest. She pushed the open shirt off his shoulders and let that fall to the floor.
With each piece of clothing she took from him, Caleb felt lighter. A little bit of the world came off with each layer of leather, of cotton, with each gentle brush of her fingertips over his skin.
Now that she had him bare-chested, she smoothed her hands over his shoulders, down his arms, back up. “I love your body,” she whispered, leaning in to kiss his shoulder. “I love the feel of your skin.”
“I love the feel of yours on it,” he murmured and tried to catch her mouth.
She ducked away in the dark. “Shhh. No strenuous activity for you, remember?”
“Sorry.” With a little smirk to himself, he relaxed and let his hands fall again to his sides.
She walked behind him, and he felt her hands smooth across his shoulders, down his back, over the still-swollen welt of his scar. It was long and sloping, from his spine to his side. He had the bullet they’d taken from him; Rad had asked the doctors to keep it, and now it was in a little glass jar. Rad kept all the bullets that had been taken from his body; he said it reminded him that his days were numbered, or something like that. Caleb wasn’t sure he needed more reminder than the scar he’d always carry. But sometimes, he took that little jar out and studied the stunted bit of metal inside it. So small, so insignificant, something to lose in the back of a drawer. Yet it could change everything. It could end the world.
As Cecily’s fingertips ran along the path of that scar, Caleb closed his eyes and tried to let her feel it. To him, the skin was still numb, the nerves that had been severed still uncommunicative, but he could tell what she was doing, and it made him uneasy. He was glad when she made her way before him again and fed her fingers into his hair.
“I love you,” she whispered and kissed his chin, and his cheek. “I love you.”
He wished he could see her red hair and her blue eyes, her sweet lips and her pert nose. Before he could take hold of her, she turned and gave him a gentle push, and he sat on the bed. Her shadow dropped between his legs, and she lifted his foot to pull off his boot.
When his boots and socks were off, she took hold of his belt, but now he grabbed her hands. She was still fully dressed. “I want you naked, too, Ciss.”
“You’re supposed to be quiet and let me do what I want.”
“But I want to feel you.”
Without a word, she wriggled her hands from his hold and stood. Still between his legs, she undressed so he could feel her dress leaving, and her black stockings with the lacy bands across her thighs, and her bra and underwear, a matching set of black lace. He’d seen it all as she’d dressed that morning, and he could imagine it on her, coming off of her fair, fair skin, so pale he could track the path of her blood traveling beneath. He could render with his mind’s eye, almost as vivid as if the room had been bathed in bright light, her tits easing from the bonds of her bra, her amazing, always erect nipples reaching out to him. He groaned under the sensual burden of all that imagining.
She responded with a laugh thick with pleasure and desire, and she knelt between his legs again. This time, he let her open his jeans, and he lifted up, using his arms more than his core, so she could pull the last of his clothes away and leave them both naked in the dark.
She tossed his jeans and underwear away, and he heard them land somewhere on the carpet with a soft pluff. Her hands wrapped around his cock, and her mouth sucked him in. Caleb let his arms go loose, and he eased back to the bed and closed
his eyes.
Taking slow, deep breaths, deep enough to catch the weakened muscles in his back, Caleb stayed calm and let Cecily do what she wanted. She took her time, moved slowly, tasted all of him. Her hands and mouth, her tongue and fingertips, moved from his balls, over and around his shaft, to his tip, giving each part of him her entire attention. Her hair brushed back and forth across his thighs. He felt the flex of her muscles and skin as her body moved. The kiss of her breath, the caress of her thighs.
Forever. He could lie here forever, cocooned from the world, and let Cecily love him, and he would be sated.
Eventually, the peace of her attention and its pleasure became something more demanding, and Caleb could no longer be still. But as soon he moved his hips, urging her along, she backed off and left him bereft.
Stand (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 7) Page 28
