His to Protect: Midnight Riders MC

by April Lust

  Emerging onto the other side, the dawn breaking through the clouds greeted us. The police were long gone.

  “Jesus Christ, man,” Luca said, chuckling to himself. “You drove like a bat outta hell.”

  “Just doing my job,” I replied coldly.

  “That’s one fucking hell of a job.”

  We scooted to a junkyard a few more blocks away. I pulled behind a teetering mountain of garbage and scrapped electronics, then killed the engine. I sat quietly for a moment as the car settled into place. Luca breathed heavily next to me.

  “Here,” he said after a moment, tossing something heavy onto my lap. I looked down. It was a bejeweled wallet, expensive calfskin leather decked out in gold filigree spelling out initials I didn’t recognize.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “The pimp’s. Give it to Fists. Let him know the dude is gone.” Luca opened the door and huffed his way out, groaning as he took to his feet and stretched. The morning air seeping in through the open door was chilly and dewy.

  “Where are you going?”

  Luca peeked his head back into the car. “Gonna get a drink, then I’ve got a pretty little bitch coming over to suck my dick. Tell the prez I say hello.” He gave me a mocking salute, then sauntered away, lighting a cigarette as he left. He disappeared around another massive mound of broken, rejected goods that the people of the city had abandoned.

  His stench lingered behind him. It was a mix of body odor, cig smoke, and something underneath that was just a bit nastier and more unfamiliar. I didn’t want to sit around and try to figure it out.

  Sighing, I got out of the car and went around to the trunk. Popping open the lid, I reached in to withdraw a large red can. The liquid within sloshed to and fro as I walked around the car pouring gasoline in through the open windows. The sharp chemical tang quickly overpowered whatever smell Luca had had clinging to him.

  Burning the car was standard protocol. One use only, that was the rule. Didn’t make sense to keep driving around a vehicle that some random passerby might be able to identify as being involved with a crime.

  It was a shame sometimes to lose a car this pretty, though. One of the new kids had picked it up outside of the opera hall a couple weeks ago. A fresh coat of paint, some fake tags, and it had been ready to go for whatever mission Fists, The Punishers’ president, deemed necessary. But when her time was up, that’s just the way things were. No point in arguing. The rule was in place for a reason.

  I emptied the last of the can into the rear window. Tossing the can aside and stepping back, I plucked a cheap gas station lighter from my pocket, spun the wheel, and lowered the dancing flame to the fabric of the backseat. It caught immediately. Cat-tongue fire licked along the cloth trim, spreading quickly to engulf the interior with heat and smoke.

  I crossed my arms and watched for a while as the car burned. The smoke carried away our fingerprints, our hair, our skin particles. It took away everything that ever said we were inside it.

  That was how things should be. In, out, and gone without a trace.

  I turned and left the junkyard.

  # # #

  Which was how I ended up in the bathroom of a pizza parlor, stripping off my gloves and staring at myself in the mirror. I tucked the leather gloves into my back pocket.

  “You gonna be in there all day, or what?” a pissed off voice demanded.

  “One second,” I said back. I splashed some water on my face from the rusty tap. The cold felt good. After wiping an arm across my face to dry it, I unlatched the door and stepped out.

  “Jesus, what the hell were you doin’ in there, son?” the grumpy old man who ran the place said.

  I grunted and moved aside to let him through as he slipped past me into the single occupancy restroom and yanked the door closed behind him.

  The place was dimly lit, dull neon signs flickering from the walls proclaiming that this was the best pizza in the neighborhood, the city, and the world. None of that was true. The pizza here was shit. But I was hungry, and a slice would do just fine for the time being.

  I walked up to the counter. “Pepperoni,” I growled to the teenage girl working the register. She gulped as she drank me in. Her face swam with the same mixture of emotions I always inspired in women. There was the fear. I was, after all, a big motherfucker, standing nearly six feet five with shoulders that every now and then required me to push through slim doorways turned sideways.

  Inevitably, after the fear came the thirst. They saw my blue eyes and my teeth, which were somehow straight and white despite the years of hard living and shitty nutrition I’d had while growing up.

  And after the thirst was the awe. That was when it all came together. It only took a word or two for them to see that I was the kind of man who did not take no for an answer. I was a force of nature. It didn’t take a genius to see that right off the bat.

  The girl hadn’t moved since I’d first spoken. I raised an eyebrow. “The pizza?” I said questioningly.

  “Oh, right.” She blushed, turning as red as a stoplight. “I’m so sorry. I’ll get that for you right away.” She scurried off to the side to scoop a piece from the trays sitting under the hot lamps behind the glass. Hustling back over, she slid the paper plate over the counter in my direction. “That’ll be a dollar fifty, please,” she murmured. She didn’t lift her eyes from the register keyboard.

  I gave her a twenty and walked away without waiting to see what she’d say.

  Outside, the morning was sneaking across the sky. It had started to warm up a little bit, but the air was still nippy. I raised the pizza to my mouth and took a bite. I almost spat it out again right away. The thing was somehow disgustingly greasy and stale as hell at the same. Honestly, I was a little impressed with the new depths they’d reached. I guessed that was what I should have expected from the only pizza place to be open this early in the morning.

  I scanned around the sidewalk, looking for a trashcan, when something else caught my eye. A little kid was peering out at me from around the corner of a nearby alleyway. His clothes were tattered and filthy, he was hardly more than skin and bones, but there was something in his eyes that made me look twice.

  He had that survivor’s glare, an expression that said, “I may look small and weak, but you just wait. One day, I’ll make it.” I recognized that glare. It was the same one I’d had when I first ran away.

  “Hey, kid,” I said. I gave a short whistle. He panicked for a moment, then steeled himself and took two steps towards me.

  “What do you want?” he said defiantly. I saw he was barefoot.

  “You want the rest of this?” I asked, offering the pizza in his direction.

  He hesitated for the briefest of moments before pouncing towards me and snatching it out of my hands. He devoured the food hungrily, barely waiting to chew before swallowing it down into his aching belly. I knew that feeling. Hunger was a motherfucker. A bite of hot food could make all the difference in the world.

  He had finished sucking down the pizza and was licking the grease from his fingers when another thought occurred to me. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the pimp’s wallet. The gold stitching glimmered in the light that had just started to peek over the tops of the buildings. I took out the ID card and tossed the rest of it towards the kid. He caught it in two hands against his chest. When he opened it up and saw the hundreds of dollars tucked inside the billfold, his jaw dropped.

  “Go buy yourself some shoes,” I told him.

  “Thanks…thank you, mister,” the kid finally managed to splutter.

  “Don’t mention it,” I told him. “I know what it’s like to be out here hungry and alone.”

  I checked my watch. An hour had passed since we’d ditched the car. I figured it was safe now to go retrieve my motorcycle and head to the clubhouse to report to Fists. He’d be wondering how things had gone.

  Chapter 8

  Natalia

  I stood outside of the double French doors,
balancing a tea tray on my knee. I raised one hand and knocked twice on the wooden frame.

  “Come in,” warbled a weak voice from the other side.

  I twisted the handle and pushed my way within.

  The cutlery on the tray clinked as I set it down on the bedside table. Marco looked at me from his bed and gave me a warm smile. He opened his mouth to say something, but a coughing fit interrupted. His thin chest wheezed with the strain. He doubled over, hacking into a handkerchief pressed against his mouth. When he pulled it away, I saw spots of blood staining the white fabric.

  I rushed to his side and bent over to rest my hand gently on his back until the attack subsided. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” I asked quietly.

  Marco patted my hand where it lay on the covers. “Don’t worry about me, Natalia. I’m an old man. This body ain’t the lean, mean fighting machine that it used to be.” He smiled again. His eyes, hazel and wise, were starting to cloud with age.

  I tried to smile back, but part of my heart was too sad to make much of an effort. It killed me to see Marco suffering like this. He’d been bedridden for weeks now, under the doctor’s orders, trying desperately to stave off a cancer that wouldn’t take no for an answer. No matter what we did, though, the coughing grew worse, his strength faded, and bit by bit, his mind started to fail him. It was heart wrenching to witness.

  In theory, I should have been glad he was dying. Marco Esposito was the reason I’d ended up in this life. This was his crime family keeping me prisoner, reducing me to little more than a servant in their home. I slaved day in and day out to make their food, clean their clothes, tidy the furniture, and on and on, endless chores that stripped the skin from my knees and the joy from my soul. Twelve years of this had taken its toll on me.

  But Marco was also the one bright spot in my long, gray days of cleaning and shuffling quietly out of sight whenever someone entered a room in the mansion. I wasn’t supposed to be seen or noticed at all. As if the house just got cleaned by magic. Marco, though, wanted to see me. Every day that I walked into his room to bring him his pills and the medicinal tea he drank throughout the morning and afternoons, he gave me the same sunny smile and said the same words.

  “You are such a beauty, Natalia.” His liver-spotted hand enclosed mine. There was frighteningly little strength in his fingers. The velvety skin was paper-thin, like tissue wrapped around a twig. I worried often I’d make one wrong move and snap something of his. I couldn’t afford to do that. He was in enough pain already.

  My response to him was always the same. “You’re a charmer, Marco.”

  He winked back. “Pretty girls like you bring out the best in me.”

  It was the same routine every day. A moment of sunshine in an otherwise cloud-dense life.

  I never would have thought a mob boss would be the one who treated me best of all. After all, Marco Esposito was a name that struck terror into the hearts of just about everyone this side of Chicago. Police officers, lawyers, business owners, and petty thieves all feared and respected Marco and the powerful organization he had built. From what I could tell, it was a far-reaching business, with tentacles that stretched not just across the city but across the country to even the globe. There were always some out-of-towners staying at the mansion, waiting their turn to have an audience with Marco to discuss some business venture or racket or scheme. They came from far and wide to beg for the chance to work with him.

  I still struggled to reconcile that image with the man who was laying in the bed next to me. Surely a man this powerful couldn’t succumb to a mere disease. That seemed almost ridiculous. Everything else in his life he solved with a snap of his fingers. How could this be any different?

  But it was different. Hordes of doctors tramped in and out of his chambers all day long, but nothing they did was working. The cancer kept moving, taking over, invading, not unlike what Marco himself had done to the city.

  “Here are your pills, Marco,” I said, offering a palm full of colorful capsules to him.

  He groaned. “Oh no, didn’t I just take my pills?”

  “Those were your early morning pills. These are the mid-morning ones.”

  “Early morning, mid-morning, late morning—it never ends!” He swished a hand back and forth through the air with each syllable, twisting his face into an exaggerated scowl. “All right, all right, let’s have ’em,” he said. He reached forward to take them from my hands. I watched for a moment as his trembling fingertips combed and combed through the air. He couldn’t force them to cooperate. His body was failing him right before his eyes.

  After a few long, agonizing seconds of Marco clumsily struggling to pluck the pills from my outstretched hand, I pushed him gently back against the pillows. He sighed and let me. “Here, let me help,” I said quietly. “Open up.”

  He opened his mouth obediently and let me feed the pills to him one at a time, interspersed with sips of water from the glass on the table by his bed. He massaged his throat when he had swallowed the last of them.

  “There we go, not so bad, right?” I said, smiling sweetly.

  “I feel like a child,” he replied crossly.

  I reminded him, “Children don’t own mansions.” Or slaves, said a sinister voice in the back of my head. I tried not to focus on it.

  Marco chuckled. “No, I suppose they don’t.” He rolled onto his side, trying to grab for the newspaper on the tray I’d brought in, but it was too far out of reach. The effort set off a heart rate alarm that stood next to his bed.

  “Sit back,” I reprimanded, slapping him playfully on the arm.

  He laughed and leaned back once more against the pillows. I handed him the paper. “What’s on my docket today?” he asked as he started to leaf through the news.

  “Cosimo and Alessandra should be back from their trip early this afternoon,” I said quietly. My voice was somber. I kept my eyes fixed on the floor.

  “The prodigal son returns home, girlfriend in tow,” he mused. His eyes flashed with something akin to anger. Cosimo, Marco’s thirty-five-year-old son, was constantly falling in and out of his father’s graces. He was being groomed to take over the family once Marco was no longer up to the task, but it was almost impossible to fill his father’s shoes to the man’s satisfaction. There was only one Marco Esposito, and try as he might, Cosimo was not him. His latest endeavor, a trip to Boston to negotiate an arms shipment with some contacts Marco had made there years ago, had gone horribly awry. Marco had spent all night on the phone, ironing out the messy wrinkles that Cosimo had managed to inject into the situation. It left him in a foul mood wherever his son was involved.

  Alessandra, Cosimo’s long-time girlfriend, had taken to whispering in Cosimo’s ear about all the things he’d be free to do once Marco kicked the bucket. I’d heard them talking late at night a dozen times or more, Alessandra curled up next to Cosimo and stroking his hair while murmuring that Marco was old, Marco was senile, Cosimo was so much smarter and more ruthless. The rift growing between father and son was becoming scarier by the minute.

  Even worse for my sake, Alessandra had taken an intense dislike to me. I couldn’t figure out the reason why. Maybe it was because of how Marco complimented my looks so often. Every time he did, I could see her lip curl into a sneer if she were anywhere within hearing distance. As long as Marco was nearby, though, I was safe. But the second I stepped out of his sight, she pounced, flinging more chores and harsh accusations in my face without warning.

  If something in the house was broken, it was my fault. If a staircase was dusty or a picture frame crooked, I was the one getting the dressing down. She’d positioned herself as the mistress in charge of the house, like some twisted mob version of an evil stepmother, and I was the one on the receiving end of her venom. Her absence the last few days had been an immense relief. I was less than thrilled that she’d be coming back today.

  “Won’t you be glad to see Cosimo again?” I asked.

  “Hmph,” Marco snorted. “Aft
er he muffed the deal in Boston? Not thrilled, my dear, no.” His words were fatherly, if irascible, but his tone was something different. He didn’t sound like the good-natured, television-ready dad that he perhaps intended to portray himself as. No, there was too much blood and violence in Marco’s past for that. When Marco was disappointed, people died.

  It scared me. I had yet to understand how a man could have two completely contrasting sides to him. My daddy had been the same way, though, until he died. For the vast majority of my life, he’d been a bitter, broken old man with spittle flying from his mouth as he went off the handle at me. But every once in a while, he’d come into my room and sit on my bed to read stories to me until I fell asleep. I remembered thinking that his face seemed so soft when he did that. Like he was a whole different man. It didn’t make sense to me then, either.