by Ali Parker
Johnny glanced at me. I held my tongue.
“No plan. Not yet,” Johnny said sternly, fixing Jax with a hard stare. “Tell the others to keep their cocks in their pants for the time being. Our first priority is rebuilding.”
“Rebuilding will take months,” I said.
Johnny shot me a look that shut me up. He was in no mood to be questioned. I crammed my hands into my pockets and waited as Johnny dismissed Jax to go tell the others to keep their heads down.
A female voice caught my attention.
“Axel?”
I looked to where the bay doors used to be. Ellie was approaching. She was wearing a pair of denim overalls. She had cut the legs off, and the hem sat at the top of her muscular thighs. The edges were frayed, and strands of it hung over her tanned skin as she stepped over debris. Her hair was slicked back in a long ponytail and looped through the hole in the back of her black baseball cap. She was makeup free, as per usual, and freckles speckled her nose and cheekbones. When she got close, she drew up short and looked between me and Johnny.
“Was anyone hurt?”
I shook my head.
She deflated like a balloon and pressed a hand to her chest. “Thank God. I was so worried. What the hell happened? Did someone fuck up while they were working or—”
“Black Hearts,” Johnny said.
Ellie looked at me. There were words tumbling around in her mouth, and I could see she was sorting through the best way to say them. Johnny had a temper, that much was true, but he would never direct his fury at her.
“What is it, Ellie?” I tried to encourage her to speak. There was tension in her shoulders now. She was worried. Perhaps she was more than worried.
“What does this mean?” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with, Ellie.” Johnny stepped over the bumper I had kicked off the front of the Chevy. “You can take a few days off now.”
“I don’t want time off,” Ellie said defensively.
“Well, you have it. We aren’t gonna pay you to fix shitboxes when we have no shop.”
Ellie bit her bottom lip and crossed her arms over her chest. The stance made her breasts swell over her arms, and her cleavage whispered sweet nothings at me at the neckline of her white T-shirt. I imagined ripping the straps of her denim overalls from her shoulders and bending her over the charred remains of the Chevy. I wanted to feel her breasts in my hands as I fucked her from behind, staining her shirt in soot and ash as I blew my load in her pussy.
This wasn’t the first time I had thought such things of Ellie. I shook my head to chase away the vision of her ass in the air and turned to Johnny. “A word?”
Johnny followed me out the back—or out through where the back wall used to be—and I took advantage of the time alone with him without the other guys around.
“I know you said you want to lay low,” I started, “but that feels like a mistake to me. These bastards burned our place to the ground. We can’t let them off the hook thinking there aren’t consequences for making a move like that against us. We’ll look like a bunch of pussies.”
Johnny arched an eyebrow and looked past me and back at the rubble of the shop. Ellie was crouched down sifting through the debris, and some of the other guys had stepped in to help. If there was something to be salvaged, they would find it. This place was important to all of us.
“I want it to be controlled.”
“What?” I looked back at Johnny. “Controlled?”
“You and me. No one else.”
“When?”
“Now. Let’s not give those pricks any extra time laughing at our misfortune.”
“I have everything we need in the trunk of my car,” I said.
Johnny was already moving forward. I followed him back out through the shop. We drew stares, but no one spoke a word. They knew better. Johnny Moretti was not the kind of man you fucked with. None of us were. He’d been through hell and back and was still recovering from a stab wound to the heart, but he was formidable as ever. I would have his back tonight, no matter what.
The eyes of the other members of the MC were on us as we passed Ellie and the Impala. She looked up, her ponytail swishing across her back. “Where are you two going?”
“Out,” Johnny said.
She stood and narrowed her eyes at me. “I thought we were lying low.”
“We?” I asked, turning to face her. I took a step closer, taking up some of her space. She retreated a step. Then, her eyes hardened, and she never looked away from me. “What ‘we’?”
She lifted her chin. The muscles of her jaw flexed.
I didn’t want to hear whatever it was she was about to say.
I held up my hand and shook my head. “Forget it. You have work to do here. Salvage what you can. We’re going to need it.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but I was already turning away from her. Her fingers caught the sleeve of my shirt, and she hurried around in front of me, looking up at me with those sharp blue eyes of hers. “Johnny shouldn’t be doing anything … physical,” she said after finding the right word. “He was stabbed just two weeks ago. You need to be careful. I don’t think you guys should—”
“I don’t care what you think we should or shouldn’t do. You have a job to do here. Focus your energy on that, not on me and Johnny. Got it?”
The anger in her eyes had me thinking she might fight me on this one. But she didn’t. She looked at her feet, blew out an exasperated breath, and then turned back to the Impala. “Just be careful, okay?”
I ignored her request and followed Johnny out to my car. Careful wasn’t a word that properly applied to what Johnny and I were about to do.
We pulled up in front of the dilapidated, single-story house around the time families would be tucking children into their beds. The front porch was bare of furniture but full of discarded beer cans. The lawn was mostly dirt with patches of brown grass. The house itself used to be yellow but had turned brown with moss and mold and years of disregard.
This was a Black Hearts clubhouse.
I parked the car across the street and tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “How many of those fuckers do you think are in there?”
“Hopefully, enough to make it a party,” Johnny grated beside me.
I felt my cheeks stretch into a grin I couldn’t control. “You ready, bitch?”
“Of course, I am,” Johnny Moretti said.
We both got out of the car and walked to the trunk. I popped it open, reached inside, and tossed a baseball bat to Johnny. His knuckles turned white as he gripped it tightly in his right hand. I grabbed one for myself and then reached for two black ski masks. I left the trunk open—we wouldn’t be gone long. Then, we marched across the street while pulling the masks down over our faces. Subtlety was for bitches.
We crossed the front yard, hopped up the four steps to the porch, and then exchanged a look. Johnny and I had been doing this shit for ages. He and I worked well together. Each of us always knew where the other would be, and when we lost complete control and gave into the rage, we could count on one another to reel it back in.
We were brothers.
I let out a furious shout and kicked the door in.
Johnny rushed in ahead of me with the baseball bat high over his shoulder. He was knocking shit off tables before I even made it inside.
The first room was the living room. It smelled of tobacco, booze, and weed, and there were white lines of powder on a piece of plywood resting across two milk crates—a classy coffee table. The couches were dark brown from years of use, and they hosted three men who were fucked out of their minds.
They were so out of it, they hadn’t even gotten to their feet by the time I made it into the house behind Johnny.
When they realized what was happening, they all let out furious yells and charged us.
Fighting men who were drunk and high was never a good time. They never felt a thing when you hit them, so
you had to make sure you hit them hard enough to knock them out or at least knock them down.
Which was never usually a problem for Johnny and me.
The biggest man in the room went for Johnny. I resisted the urge to help my friend and trusted he could handle himself as another one of the Black Hearts launched himself over the back of the sofa and charged me.
The man was tall, taller than me by a good couple inches, and I wasn’t considered short at my height of six foot three. He was bellowing with rage and screaming a stream of profanities at me as he dropped his head to come in low and take out my center of gravity.
It would have been a smart move if I didn’t have a baseball bat.
I slammed my weapon over his back, and the man fell in a heap at my feet. He groaned in agony and writhed around as I stepped over him, ignoring his fingers as he grabbed at my pant legs.
I was moving in on guy number two, who was trying to get to Johnny as my friend used his elbows and fists on the guy in front of him. Johnny had always preferred to feel the toll of a fight with his own body. The baseball bat would be used only if completely necessary.
I, however, saw it for what it was, a tool to inflict more pain than my body could.
My baseball bat swung into the side of the third man’s knee. He howled in pain and dropped to all fours. I used my knee to his jaw to knock him out cold.
At the same time, Johnny took down his man with a furious blow to the side of the head with his fist. Johnny turned back to me, shaking out his hand, and looked at the two I had brought down.
The one still conscious was still rolling around on his back while spitting curses at us.
“You fucking goofs,” he slurred, high as a kite. “You don’t know what you’ve just gone and did. We’re Black Hearts, you fucks. Black Hearts!” His voice rose in pitch as he screamed those last words at us.
I dropped to a crouch in front of him and extended the baseball bat out to rest it under his chin. I forced his head up so that he was looking down the length of the bat and into my eyes. “We know exactly who you are, you piece of shit.”
The man swallowed, and the bat rolled against his Adam’s apple. I grabbed the edge of my mask under my jaw and pulled it off. The Black Hearts member’s eyes widened.
“You tell your boss that Axel Cooper is coming for him.”
The man nodded furiously.
Johnny shifted behind me. “He doesn’t get off that easy, Coop.”
I grinned. “You bet your ass he doesn’t.”
The man tried to shuffle backward. Fear passed over his face as I got to my feet and wound back with the bat. Anger roiled in my gut, and Johnny egged me on. These bastards had burned down my shop. My home. My livelihood.
Time to send a message of our own.
Chapter Two
Ellie
I had managed to find most of Axel’s tools amongst the rubble. I had piled it all in the place where his toolbox used to be on top of a tarp Jax had fetched from his car. Together, we sifted through everything, and after a couple hours, we were both grimy and smelled like smoke.
I wiped sweat from my forehead, and Jax chuckled.
“You look like Simba,” he said.
“What?”
“Never mind,” he shook his head and stooped to pull a deformed license plate from beneath what used to be a workbench. He shook ash and charred remains of something off it before tossing it over his shoulder with an irritated grunt. “Where’d Axel run off to? I thought he’d be insisting on being the only one to go through this mess.”
I put my back to Jax so he couldn’t see my face. I was a poor liar, but I wasn’t about to sell out Axel and Johnny. They had been clear that no one was to know what they were up to. “Not sure. But his name was on the title, so I imagine there are some things he has to see to.”
“Fuck,” Jax breathed, kicking his way through the junk. “What happens now? You worked here too. What are we going to do without a shop?”
I shrugged and turned back to him, sensing that the moment to lie had passed, and better yet, I’d gotten away with it. “I don’t know. Axel and Johnny will think of something. They’re reliable like that. Once the smoke clears, they’ll put their heads together and figure it out. They know how much we all need this place.” I especially needed this place, or I’d be evicted from my apartment. With no family around, I’d be forced to crash on a friend’s sofa until I could find a new place to live.
“You weren’t here when shit hit the fan, were you?”
I looked up at Jax. His eyebrows were drawn together in an expression of concern that I had seen on his face many times before. We had known each other for a long time, and we cared for one another the way a brother and sister might. He was the closest thing I had to family besides my pit bull, Cade, and I cherished him for it. “I wasn’t here. Don’t worry.”
“Good,” Jax said, the concern slipping away from the tightness in his jaw. “If you were, Ryder would have had to chain me up to stop me from going after those fuckers.”
“I don’t need you to protect me,” I said, planting my fists on my hips.
“Yeah, I know. You’re a tough chick,” Jax said with a small smile and deep chuckle. “I wouldn’t pick a fight with you. But this is different, Ellie. This is war. Those Black Hearts aren’t the kind of guys you want to get caught up with. You would get the hell out of here if they ever showed up, right?”
His question threw me off a bit. I’d been working at this shop for Axel for a while now, and I knew each and every MC member well. I respected them, and they respected me. I was probably as close as I would ever get to being one of them, which in my opinion, wasn’t quite close enough. I ached to be part of their club. I had brought it up with Axel and Johnny before, and both had shot me down before I finished asking the question. The MC was no place for a woman.
“I’m under no delusion that I could hold my own against a Black Heart,” I admitted. “I wouldn’t hang around if they showed up again, Jax. You don’t have to give it another second’s thought.”
Jax nodded more to himself than to me. “Happy to hear that.”
We continued going through the remnants of the shop for the next couple of hours until, eventually, my body ached and my eyelids grew heavy. Jax offered to drive me home, and I accepted, sliding into the passenger side of his Challenger. He drove much more carefully than I knew he would have if I wasn’t in the car. I hated that they all treated me like I was delicate. They thought I would break at the first hint of danger.
I liked going fast. I liked adventure.
Jax parked at the curb outside of my apartment and turned the engine off. He glanced over at me and smirked. “Make sure you shower before you get into bed.”
“Pardon me?”
“You’ll thank me later. You’re a mess.”
I scowled at him as I got out of the car and slammed the door behind me. He rolled down the window as I walked down the path to the front door of the apartment building. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ellie. You’re welcome by the way!”
I stopped and looked over my shoulder at him.
“For the ride!” He called, before turning the car on and peeling away in a scream of screeching tires and a toxic black plume of smoke.
I rolled my eyes and climbed the stairs to the front door. After buzzing myself in, I walked down the hall to the back of the building where my door was. I liked having a ground level unit. It made things like grocery shopping easier. I let myself in and was greeted by the chaotic sound of dog claws on the vinyl floors as Cade came barreling around the kitchen corner to greet me.
I dropped to my knees as he rushed around my legs. I cupped his dopey face in my hands and kissed his snout and then rubbed him behind the ears—his favorite.
“Aren’t you a good boy?” I cooed, kissing him on his wet nose again.
Cade’s tongue rolled out of his mouth in a happy response, and he licked the side of my face. I laughed, wiped his slobber away, and st
ood to make my way to the bathroom.
I saw what Jax had been talking about when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
I was a soot-covered mess. I understood what Jax had meant by the Simba comment he made back at the shop. I had smeared a straight black line across my forehead of ash. My white T-shirt was now gray, and my overalls were covered in splotches of dark, greasy, ashy stains. I groaned and wondered if they would all come out. I loved my overalls.
I had caught Axel checking me out each and every time I wore them.
I sighed and slipped out of them while Cade still trotted happily around my legs. When he finally settled down and sat in front of my bathtub, I gave him a longing look. “It must be so easy being a dog. You don’t have to worry about things like your place of work being burned to the ground by a group of criminals. Must be nice.”
I pulled my T-shirt off over my head and threw it out into the hallway. I wasn’t even going to try to save that lost cause. It was destined for the trash bin. Then, I filled the bathroom sink with hot, soapy water and plunged my overalls into it. I began furiously scrubbing.
It took almost twenty minutes, but I was able to get most of the stains out. Once I was satisfied I had done as much as I could, I threw them in with a load of laundry and then went to the patio doors to let Cade out. I shielded my mostly naked body by leaving the door half closed as Cade did his business.
When he came back inside, I hopped in the shower and scrubbed myself as vigorously as I had scrubbed my overalls.
Afterward, wearing a tank top and booty shorts and smelling like lavender and eucalyptus, I made myself a late-night snack of vanilla ice cream, chocolate drizzle, and crushed peanuts. It had been a long day, and I had earned myself a reward of some sort. I put food in Cade’s bowl as well but knew he wouldn’t touch it with the temptation of my human food so close by. He would probably eat once I had fallen asleep and he realized there would be no more tasty morsels coming his way.
I sat down on the couch, put my heels up on the coffee table, and placed the bowl of ice cream on a pillow on my lap to protect my bare legs from the cold. Cade hopped up on the sofa beside me and rested his chin on the corner of the pillow. His big blue eyes followed my spoon from the bowl to my mouth.
