Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2)

by Susan Fanetti

  God, she smelled so good, and her hands were so soft, and she was so damn nice. She took such good care. While she studied his arm, Gunner looked down on the top of her head and fought off the need to put his nose in her hair.

  He’d gone rock hard. He shifted, trying to make that not noticeable—not that Willa was noticing. She was entirely focused on his arm. Then she lifted his hand and examined his fingers.

  “I don’t like the color here. They gave you exercises, didn’t they? Are you doing them?” She began to massage his fingers between her own, moving from the cast to his fingertips, her skin sliding over his, and Gunner groaned. Oh shit.

  She looked up and met his eyes. “Am I hurting you?”

  Fuck, he hurt so bad. But not like she meant. He shook his head. She frowned up at him, and Gunner knew he was going to kiss her. He didn’t have a choice. He was going to lean down and put his mouth on—JESUS! NO! NO NO NO NO!

  He yanked his hand away from her and stepped back. “Yeah, it hurts, blondie. I broke my fucking hand. What do you think?”

  “Don’t be a shit, Gun. I’m trying to help.”

  “Sorry. I’m in a mood.” His heart was slamming back and forth like a fucking pinball in his chest. Jesus Christ, what he’d almost done. A brother’s old lady.

  “Yeah, okay. Well, I’m serious. Get that checked today. If you get compartment syndrome, you could fuck your hand up for good.” She walked out without waiting to see if he had anything more to say.

  What would it be like to have somebody like Rad had Willa? Somebody who loved him despite his shit, but didn’t feed off it, like Evvie did. Somebody who saw him for who he was and liked what she saw. Somebody who’d take care of him and maybe who’d let him take care of her, too.

  That chick would have to be really stupid, though, if she thought he could take care of anybody.

  Gunner stared at the skewer in the sink and, for a second, had a serious contemplation about just jamming that fucker straight into his eye and being done with all this bullshit.

  ~oOo~

  Sitting at the club table, across from their SAA, Gunner felt a little swish of guilt, and maybe some fear, roll through his head. He really needed to stay very far away from Willa.

  But the meeting was underway, so he turned his attention to Delaney. There was some general business bullshit: status updates about club finances, assignments for the next gun run, some new protection gigs and security work coming up, the usual. Gunner sighed and glared at his hand. He’d gone to the doctor like Willa had insisted, and he was now in a splint brace. No compartment syndrome, and the skewer hadn’t done much damage. But he was still out of commission for a couple more weeks.

  “Irina has a little problem, and she’s asked us to help her solve it.” Delaney leaned back in his chair at the head of the Bulls table. “This is leftover from the shit with Dyson last year, so it’s in our yard.”

  Gunner wondered if this was the thing Delaney had mentioned in his office. The thing he needed to stay steady for.

  “A Dyson lieutenant just started a bid at McAlester. Lincoln Jennings. Irina says he’s linked to the Dirty Rats and is the last thread of her retaliation for Kirill.”

  Irina was the head of the Volkov bratva. The summer before, her son, Kirill, had been killed while on a job with the Bulls. They’d all been ambushed by the Lubbock charter of the Dirty Rats MC. Rad and Slick, one of their prospects, had been hurt.

  Irina had retaliated by literally annihilating the Lubbock Rats, leaving an actual crater where their clubhouse had stood.

  Dyson was a Northside Tulsa crew that had been moving heroin and cocaine for the Rats; they’d been instrumental in the ambush. But the ambush had happened almost a year ago, and the Bulls and Dyson had fought each other over it most of last fall and winter. They now had a cease-fire in place. Irina had been the one to broker it.

  “What’s she want?” Rad asked. His tone suggested that he knew exactly what she wanted. Gunner figured they all did.

  “She wants him handled. That’s where you come in, Gun.”

  He knew what that meant, and it sucked. “Prez, no way. Mav’s on short time now. We can’t ask him to take this guy out.”

  “It’s hard, I know. The risk for him is huge, and he doesn’t much know the Volkovs. But saying no to Irina is a risk, too. For the whole club. On the other side, doing this for her is goodwill in the bank.”

  “He’s got a kid he’s never even seen. He’s only got a few months left. If he gets nailed for murder inside…Fuck.”

  “We gotta vote it,” Simon asserted. “We don’t just throw Mav to the wolves because she says so.”

  “Of course we vote it,” Delaney snapped. Then he returned his intense attention to Gunner. “Gun, the risk to Mav isn’t wide open. She’ll set everything up. If it all goes right, he’ll be fine.”

  “When does shit like this ever go right?”

  “We need to do this. Telling Irina no, that complicates an important relationship, and we all know it.” He took a breath and dialed his intensity down. “If we do this, it’s gotta come from you, Gun.”

  “Why? You’re the president. I’m just a grunt.”

  But Gunner knew why. Maverick was like his big brother. He’d sponsored him for prospect, he understood his shit, and he helped him keep that shit together. Gunner visited him more than any other Bull did, by far, and had since he’d gone in.

  Delaney knew that Maverick wouldn’t tell Gunner no.

  “He’ll listen to you,” was the answer the president gave. Same thing.

  “This is so fucked up,” Gunner complained, but he knew he was yelling into the wind.

  “Let’s vote,” Delaney barked.

  ~oOo~

  McAlester, Oklahoma, home of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, was just shy of a hundred miles nearly due south of Tulsa. Gunner made the trip the day after the meeting, after he’d run one exceedingly uncomfortable errand.

  The vote hadn’t even been close. Just him against the rest of the club. Maverick would have voted like everybody else, if he’d been sitting at that table. But he hadn’t been at that table. He was sitting in the state pen, where he’d been for almost three years, doing a bid for aggravated assault, and where he was down to his final months.

  The beating that had gotten him put inside hadn’t been club business. It had been his own personal shit, but the club had been supporting him anyway, making sure he’d be whole when he came back out. He’d done a few small club jobs inside over the years, too—laying down beatings here and there, some handoffs, stuff like that. Nothing major. Nothing to earn the notice of the guards or any powers that be.

  But this was something else, something huge. Gunner didn’t know how it would stay off the radar. And if it didn’t, Maverick could end up getting real hard time added right here at the end of his sentence. It sucked.

  Gunner sat in the dreary room and struggled with his head, which had been more chaotic than usual since his blowup at the church. Sitting in the penitentiary’s visitation room was not a place where his brain would calm down. Despair grimed the surfaces of the chipped Formica tables and cracked plastic chairs. The air was still and rank. Gunner felt dirty and breathless after a visit.

  He visited Maverick often, at least once a month, but he’d never gotten used to the place. Today, though, was especially bad, since he’d already been on edge.

  He’d never done time himself, beyond a couple overnights for drunk and disorderly. But he’d done a lot of crime, and the feeling he had now was a lot like that feeling you got when a cop pulled in behind you on the highway. No matter whether you’d been speeding or not, if you were somebody who often broke the speed limit, your sphincter went tight just seeing a cop on the road.

  This was the same, times about a thousand. His balls were in his belly. His fucking hands were shaking.

  His guilt for what he had to ask his friend to do was not helping matters. The fact that the room was entirely empty, except for him
and the guard on duty, made it even freakier. Gunner worked hard to shove back the looming sense that he was being set up somehow and would find himself in a cell before he knew it.

  When the door on the inmate side finally opened, he jumped. Maverick stood there while the guard frisked him for probably the fifth time since he’d been brought from the cellblock, and then he came over.

  Gunner stood up. He didn’t offer his hand or anything; no physical contact was allowed for anybody but family members, and no matter how tight the Bulls’ brotherhood was, they didn’t count as family here. Maverick hadn’t ever had anybody visit him that he might have been able to touch.

  “Hey, brother,” he said as he sat.

  Gunner sat, too. Rather than offer a greeting, he said, “They still got you fighting? I thought they’d backed off with your time coming short.”

  Maverick’s left eye was swollen shut, and he had three butterfly bandages over a gash above that eyebrow that really should have had stitches. His chin was taped up, too.

  Before he’d been locked up, he’d been a boxer, with some regional acclaim, and then an absolute legend in the underground fighting scene. Within a few weeks of joining the residency program of the State of Oklahoma, guards who’d known of him had put him to work as one of their pet fighters. They had a whole betting ring going. The fights went until KO. No rounds, no tapouts. From the sketchy details Maverick had offered here in this guarded room during visits, it sounded bloody as hell.

  Maverick was a pretty big guy, bigger than Gunner, but he was a middleweight, not a monster. The guards liked to match him up with monsters.

  When he’d gotten badly rung and the club had wanted to find a way to get him out of that servitude, Maverick had called them off. He won more than he lost, even against the super heavyweight guys, and he needed a way to do violence and get it out of himself.

  Gunner completely understood.

  “Nah. They backed off us all during the DOC review, but they’ll have me scrappin’ for ‘em until the day they give me back my personal effects.” He shrugged it off. “It’s cool. I’m okay.”

  “How’s your eyesight?” He’d nearly gone blind in his left eye the last time it looked like it looked now.

  Maverick smiled around his bruises. “It’s cool, kid. I’m okay. How’re you doin’? You look a little rough yourself.”

  Gunner was bruise-free. Only his hand was injured, and that was healing. But that wasn’t Maverick’s meaning.

  He gave his friend’s words back to him. “It’s cool. I’m okay.”

  “Touché, my brother. Head down, shoulder to the day, right?”

  Maverick’s favorite saying. “Right.”

  “You’re here with news or something, I can tell. Something’s up. Something you need?”

  They had a code for talking business in this room, and Delaney had gone over with Gunner everything he needed to say, as well as how to say it.

  “I need some of your wisdom, yeah. But first, I have a present for you.” From his shirt pocket, he pulled the thing he’d picked up on the way, and he pushed it across the table.

  Maverick glanced at the guard, who was watching intently. Sharing documents or photos in here was within the rules, but the inmate couldn’t keep anything. Stuff like that had to be mailed and subject to search and scrutiny.

  He turned back and flipped the small white rectangle over; then he gasped and flinched.

  “Jesus. Jesus, Gun.” He looked up, and his working eye shone wetly. “This is her?”

  “Yeah. I guess they did school pictures at her preschool.”

  Maverick drew a fingertip over the photo, his touch light and his finger trembling. “Look how pretty she is. And smart—I can see it in those eyes. I bet she keeps her mama hopping.” He looked up. “How’d you get this? I know it wasn’t from Jenny.”

  “It was Jenny. I went to see her on my way here.”

  “You did? She didn’t chase you out with a shotgun? How’s she doing? Did you see Kelsey, too?”

  “I went to the bar. Kelsey was at school, I guess.” He gave Maverick a wry grin. “I wouldn’t say Jen was happy to see me, but she didn’t shoot me or even throw anything at me. And I had that”—he nodded at the little school picture—“when I left.”

  Jenny had been pregnant with Kelsey when Maverick went inside for beating Jenny’s father almost to death and giving him permanent, devastating brain damage. Although that beating had gone down in defense of Jenny and their unborn child, she’d cut Maverick out of their lives.

  It wasn’t so easy to cut a Bull out, though, not for a woman who had a member’s child.

  “Did you tell her I was almost out?”

  “She knew. She’s keeping track. Mav, I don’t…don’t get your hopes up about them. She was hateful and pissed off as ever.”

  “But she gave you this. Only other picture I have of her, she’s in her hospital bassinet, with the little pink sign that doesn’t have my name on it.” He stared down at the photo. “Kelsey Wagner. Like I don’t fuckin’ exist.”

  Gunner recognized the anger drawing lines on his friend’s face. “Mav…”

  He pushed the photo back across the table. “Thanks for bringing this. They won’t let me take it from here. Will you mail it?”

  “Today, yeah.”

  “Thanks, kid. So what wisdom do you need from me?”

  Gunner remembered his script. “For a friend back East. She needs some advice about the best way to recycle some heavy equipment that can’t be fixed. It’s been sent to a local facility, and she doesn’t want it back.”

  Maverick blinked, and Gunner knew he understood. Under his bruises, his complexion paled a little. “How heavy is this equipment?”

  “Full size. Single operator.”

  “And it has to be recycled. Totally out of commission?”

  Gunner only nodded. Irina wanted the guy killed.

  “When?”

  “She’s hit up for storage fees, so the sooner the better.”

  “Specs?”

  “I can send them to you, if you think you have advice for her.”

  Maverick stared at the photo that still lay on the table. His daughter, whom he’d never met and had only seen two photos of. “Why’d you bring this today, Gun? It makes it harder for me to think.”

  Why had he? Why had he gone to see Jenny and stood there while she’d shouted and sneered and called him and Maverick and all the Bulls every name she could think of? Why had he worked all his charm and begged her for one little token he could give Kelsey’s father?

  Because this all fucking sucked, and he wanted Maverick to think hard before he put his freedom on the line.

  Maverick’s attention had shifted; he was looking at the ink on Gunner’s arm—the dragon with the bull’s head. “D sent you specifically. He thought you’d be the one to convince me to help his friend. But you’re not making his case.” His eye came up to Gunner’s. “Everything okay for you in the clubhouse, kid?”

  This was why he missed Maverick so damn much. He didn’t even know much of his past, and he’d never pushed to know it the way Delaney had, but he got him, and he watched out for him. Not in the way the other brothers did—worried about how Gunner would fuck shit up next—but worried about him.

  It wasn’t their fault. Gunner worked hard to keep laughing and playing everything loose. But Maverick saw through that. From the first night they’d met, in some weedy parking lot, when Maverick had watched Gunner fight to lose, to take a beating as bad as he could withstand, Maverick had seen.

  He smiled. “It’s cool. I’m okay.”

  Maverick laughed. “Shit, I really need to get my ass out of here.” The humor left his face quickly, and he picked up his daughter’s photo again. Gazing sadly down at it, he said, “Tell your friend to send the specs on her equipment, and I’ll give her the advice she needs.”

  He held the photo out for Gunner to take. “And tell D he can suck my dick.”

  CHAPTER SIX<
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  Leah was nineteen years old. An adult. To the outside observer, it would probably seem silly that she sneaked out of her house when she wanted to party. But the outside observer didn’t know what her life was. The Reverend Campbell’s daughter did not, could not, do the things that Leah did in the middle of the night. The people of Grant would be scandalized, and attention on her and the things she ran off to do might open the door on the things her father stayed in to do. That could tear up her and her father’s whole world. What was left of it.