His to Protect: Midnight Riders MC

by April Lust

  I frowned. No, honestly, I didn’t really know that. When it came right down to it, I knew quite a bit about the Santos today—he had his dirty fingers into several construction companies, his “up to code” front companies, as well as his illegal dealings with firearms, drugs, and god knew what else—but I didn’t know much of him before. Most of my information came from Nester, and I wasn’t sure how reliable that was. Not that I thought Nester had done a lot of lying to me, but rather his impression of Santos was skewed by years of hatred. That sort of thing could warp how you viewed someone until you were saying things about them whether you knew they were true or not.

  “I didn’t,” I told him finally when it became clear he actually expected a verbal answer from me.

  He smiled at me, somewhere between a shark-like grin and a serene, angelic smile, which made it all the scarier. “No, of course not. No one does. Why? Because I’ve made myself into the kind of man I want to be, you understand?”

  I didn’t really, but that wasn’t the point. I nodded just to get him to continue, because that look in his eye and the smile on his face was unnerving me tremendously. I could feel myself sweat, my heart beating so fast and loud that I was sure it was echoing in the silent, museum-like atmosphere of the restaurant. All I wanted to do was go home. Screw the dinner and the small talk and the goodnight kiss. I just wanted to be away from Santos.

  Of course that wasn’t an option, so I tried to make it go as quickly as possible.

  Reaching for his glass, he swirled the liquid around in it for a moment before taking a careful sip. “Good,” he told me, indicating that I should try my own. I reached for it only for the sake of keeping him calm, if that was even possible now. He continued. “You know why I’m telling you this, Zelda?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer this time. “I’m telling you this because I’ve made myself into the kind of man who has a lot of friends. I’ve made myself into the kind of man who has those friends because he is a force to be reckoned with. I’m proud of that man and I want you to know that, as a prideful man, there are certain things that I simply cannot allow.”

  I was doing my best not to shake, but I wasn’t quite hacking it. The glass in my hand trembled, causing the liquid to ripple and swirl, so I put it down before I did something stupid like spill it.

  Santos’s smile widened; he’d noticed my shaking. “Do you know what I cannot allow, Zelda?”

  I shook my head, knowing that even if I had something to say, an answer, my voice would come out as a tiny squeak of a thing, trembling and terrified.

  “Another man,” he said in a low voice, the threat no longer veiled, even though his smile stayed strangely in place as though it were painted there. “I don’t share well, Zelda, and if I find out I’m sharing you, well, you may just not have to regret it.”

  I paled.

  You may just not have to regret it. It sounded almost…forgiving, but I knew better. The words were thrown together almost haphazardly, twisted strangely until they sounded almost sweet. But that wasn’t what they meant at all.

  Santos was telling me that if I ever cheated on him, then I wouldn’t regret it because I wouldn’t live long enough to.

  If I cheated on him, Santos DeArma would kill me.

  Chapter Six

  Nester

  I’d spent the last day going over planning with Jackson and some of the others. If we were going to nail Santos DeArma to the wall—which was my new mission in life—then we were going to have to be smart and well prepared. Which meant making sure that Santos wasn’t on to us and didn’t start covering his tracks. It wasn’t going to be easy, since Santos was unfortunately not a complete fucking moron, but if we were careful and diligent, I was confident he would eventually slip up.

  Just like I was confident that the construction companies that he was invested in weren’t as squeaky clean as he claimed. Sure, they were his “front” so that he could continue doing his illegal businesses—drugs and arms primarily—while remaining under the radar, but I knew Santos. He was incapable of just leaving things be. Why settle for enough when you could have ten times that? Why play it safe when you could risk it for a little more?

  On some level, I appreciated taking the risk. I was all about risk. We all were, which was why we were part of the Berserkers to begin with, but I also wasn’t stupid. I knew that there were times when you just took the safe road because it just wasn’t worth the damn risk.

  “I’ll get us in,” Bob, Jr. was saying. He was leaning against the wall near the couch, turned so that he was facing me and Jackson. Bob, Sr. was at his job, a gas station attendant the poor bastard, so he wasn’t there at the moment.

  I quirked an eyebrow at Bob, Jr. “How’s that?”

  He shrugged casually, but I could tell that he was pleased. Not because he had something over us or anything but more because he was contributing in a big way. He was savoring the moment. “I know a guy who works for the Big Works Construction, Co.,” he explained. “I helped him out with something back when and he still owes me for it. I’ve been sitting on his favor and I think it’s about time to call it in.”

  I nodded at him. “Good. Do that. I want dirt on Santos in a big way, so whatever he can find out, I want the details on.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  I turned my attention to Jackson. He’d been slightly distracted—Angel, his little girl, was staying even longer with her mom this round it seemed and I was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t something more serious going on that he hadn’t mentioned yet. He was sitting across from me in that same ratty chair that he loved so damn much, only half paying attention.

  “Jackson,” I said, snapping my fingers to bring him back to the present.

  He blinked at me, wide-eyed and a little disoriented, as though he’d been far, far away and coming back tagging along with a snapping rubber band. “Huh? What?”

  I didn’t linger on his distance, instead choosing to focus on what was going on. If Jackson wanted to tell me what was going on that had him so out of whack, that was up to him, but I wouldn’t press it. I had enough on my own plate to deal with it as it was. “Where are we with the bust?”

  “Shit, boss, sorry,” he apologized, then launched into what he’d been looking into.

  Five years ago, I’d been busted for selling drugs. Which, I had been. It was true the club dealt in distributing illegal drugs, though I told everyone in my group that if I caught them doing that shit they were out. It seemed like a strange thing, but I knew that drugs just caused more trouble than anything else. Selling them was as valid as anything else in my opinion, since it was merely providing a service. What people did with that service was on them. People were going to get high whether I supplied them with the right drugs to do it or not, and in the end, they’d come searching me out. Why not make a profit?

  Zelda and I had always disagreed on that fact, causing more than a couple of fights between us over the years, but she could never completely win and I could never completely justify it.

  “It’s shitty to take advantage of people’s problems,” she told me angrily, folding her arms beneath her ample chest, making it more noticeable.

  I never thought that was fair, seeing as how she did it mostly when we were fighting and she had to know how damn distracting I found her body. Pushing my less than noble thoughts aside, I focused on the fight at hand. “Hey, I don’t sell to kids. I don’t sell to pregnant women—well, if I know they’re pregnant. I don’t talk to first time users.” It was a code I’d set up for myself and one that I forced the rest of the group to live by, though some of them maybe thought it was a little stupid.

  Zelda rolled her eyes at me. “Oh, well, in that case you’re a saint, right?”

  I glared at her. “Don’t be stupid. Ain’t none of us saints, not even you.” I deliberately let my gaze drag over her body, insinuating that the clash of our naked bodies in fierce, passionate battle was anything but virtuous.

  She was a dirty g
irl for me and I fucking loved it.

  Her cheeks flushed a bright pink that made me want to do things for her, but she held her ground. She wouldn’t let me off the hook so easily. “And that makes it okay? So long as no one else is perfect, we’ve got no reason to even try to do the right thing?”

  I let out a sigh. I hated this damn argument. “The right thing is tricky, okay? Is it wrong to make money, even though you need money to live? And if people are coming to you with that money, is it wrong to take it just because you’re providing them something that maybe they can’t get a lot of at other places? Besides, what if I didn’t sell it? Someone else would. And they’d probably be a hell of a lot more dangerous than I am. They probably wouldn’t care about who they sold to or what they sold or anything like that.”

  “So you’re the lesser of two evils?” Zelda countered readily.

  I ran a hand through my hair. “No. I’m not an evil. I’m just making a living. And the assholes who come to me have already decided what the fuck they’re going to do. I didn’t make them that way.”

  “They’re addicts Nester! They can’t just walk away!”

  And on we went. Until we were red faced and halfway to screaming at each other. Zelda took the nursing student thing very seriously, and as a result, she learned a few things about pharmaceuticals, addiction, and how drugs affected a person. I appreciated her passion, but it annoyed the shit out of me on this particular topic because we could never quite see eye to eye. In the end, I wasn’t the devil who forced them into doing drugs. But I did supply them with those same drugs.

  But did that make a liquor store owner the devil, too? What about the bartender? Or the waiter? What about the convenience store that sells cigarettes or the smoke shops that teach you to roll your own tobacco?

  Who has the right to determine which of these damn things should be free range and which shouldn’t and how does one make you the devil and the other not?

  All of that came out over the course of the night and Zelda countered as much as she could, but in the end I had to concede that it was sort of shitty that I was taking advantage of a group of people that were so hooked they couldn’t fucking walk away, and Zelda had to admit that I was no more evil than the guy who sold booze to legal adults at the liquor store.

  By the time we reached that point, our angers had risen to a breaking point. We were too worked up to push the feelings aside—and I didn’t want to. She didn’t either based on the way she was looking at me. So when I shoved my hand down the front of her jeans, she didn’t protest. Instead, she clawed at my shirt to get it off, and by the time my finger was buried to the knuckle inside of her and her tongue was in my mouth, it was all over.

  I was hard enough to be a damn rock and Zelda’s wetness was pooling in her panties. I barely got her pants half down before I plunged inside her.

  It took everything I had and then some to tear my mind away from the memory. Our fights went like that more often than not. Anger, shouting, passion building until it culminated in a fierce fucking that was so good it was almost worth it to pick a fight with her.

  “There’s no direct link to Santos,” Jackson continued. I’d missed a couple of pieces in the middle of what he’d said, but it seemed like he’d only just gotten to the important stuff anyway. “But there is a trail of money exchanging hands, some guys being involved in a regular bust that maybe aren’t normally, and there was a tip off. An anonymous caller.”

  I pressed my lips together tightly until they formed a line so thin my lips nearly disappeared completely from my face. “Santos.”

  Jackson nodded. “I don’t have proof, but I’m working on getting a recording of the call. If I can, maybe we can recognize if it’s his voice or not.”

  It was about the best any of us could do and it was a long shot at that. I didn’t know what kind of wheels Jackson was going to have to grease to get that tape—probably the same ones Santos had greased to get me busted—but I knew that it would take a lot of time. In the end, it didn’t matter all that much to me. I was already convinced that it was Santos who had called in the tip that got me busted by the cops. What I was more interested in was the inner workings of it.

  Was it just a tip? Had that been the extent of Santos’s involvement? Or was there more? I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Santos had done a little more than that when it was all said and done.

  The drug deal had seemed a little fishy to begin with—a new seller with some pretty high grade shit, set up by a guy who knew a guy several times removed from that—but I’d been willing to take a risk. At the time, I’d expected that risk to be in the form of whether or not those assholes were going to try and kill us. That I was prepared for. I never would have imagined someone on our side of the law would tip off the cops.

  Even amongst your worst enemies, you tried not to do terrible shit like that.

  “Alright. What about the sellers?” I asked Jackson.

  He shook his head. “I know they got less time than you did,” he said, and then winced, like maybe I was going to bite his head off for saying something like that.

  Not completely beyond the realm of possibilities, but pretty unlikely. I tried to direct my fury to where it was sorely deserved, not at my own guys. Especially not the ones working hard to help me out.

  I waved off his words. “I suspected as much. Figure out who set up the deal. I want to know how deep Santos’s involvement in that bust was.”

  “On it, boss.”

  “Alright. Get to it. I want an update in a few days, let me know what’s going on.” Until then, I had other things to take care of.

  ***

  I had cleaned up and put on a white button-down shirt and a decent pair of jeans. It wasn’t that Zelda really liked the clean cut type—at least, she never had before—but she’d told me once that there was something incredibly sexy about a man with tattoos in a white button down shirt, the sleeves rolled up. Which mine were.

  Maybe it was a little shitty of me to try and work her like this, using her own feelings and impulses against her, but it was difficult to hold on to any sort of guilt over the whole thing when it was all said and done.

  She was sleeping with Santos. The guilt was on her.

  I hadn’t bothered with things like flowers or chocolates. I wanted to appeal to her baser instincts more than her romantic ones, though I was hoping they were still lingering there, too. It would make what I was about to do go much, much easier.

  The first thing I did was make sure there was no sign of Santos’s bike. I didn’t see it and I knew he had a car, too, so I checked for that next. Nothing. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be there before I even headed out that way—one of my guys said he usually did late nights going over “work” stuff, which ranged from the construction companies to testing the quality of drugs he was selling.

  Either way, he wasn’t going to be here. But it never hurt to check and make sure.

  Satisfied that it was only Zelda home, I ran a hand through my hair and straightened myself out one last time. The better I looked to her, the more she’d want me, and the more she wanted me, the more I’d get out of the deal.

  Forcing my body to be casual, calm, despite the zip of electricity that seemed to be surging and arcing across the top of my skin in quick zaps, I went to her door. I paused a second longer, letting out a quick but deep breath. Then I knocked.

  It took a few moments, but she came to the door after a bit.

  I half expected her to just swing it open and dive into my arms right then and there given the way things had gone yesterday, but instead she barely cracked it. Just enough that I could see her whole face and a sliver of her body.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Nester,” she told me immediately, before I had a chance to say anything.

  There was something in the wideness of her eyes and the tone of her voice—uncertain, nervous, even afraid—that set me on edge. She was afraid of me? Some part of me thought that she should be, but the rest of m
e wondered what the hell I’d done to deserve that.

  “That’s not what you said yesterday,” I told her, waggling my eyebrows in a way that was more cheesy than sexy. But I sensed that oozing sex this time wasn’t going to be enough. She was afraid—of me or whatever—and I’d have to break through that first if I wanted to melt the rest of her.

  “Yes, I did,” she snapped back at me, which was kind of true. Maybe not in those exact words, but pretty damn close.

  I frowned. It was unusual for her to snap at me, even when she was angry and I got the feeling that she wasn’t all that angry. No, I was right about the fear. “Zel…what’s wrong?”

  She tensed, the line of her shoulders going hard and rigid, like she was a deer and I’d just swung my headlights out across her on the road. What was going on?