Touching her fingertips to her lips, my wife presses them to our girl’s foreheads, whispering,
“Just happy, honey. I didn’t know this kind of happy existed until I met you and we had the girls. And I didn’t know when we brought them home I could be happier until this afternoon.”
“Yeah, and why’s that, baby?” I ask confused. As far as I know, Beth’s been at the clubhouse all day helping set up for Avery’s birthday party tomorrow. But what do I know? I’m only her husband.
I’ve experienced a lot of different rivers in my lifetime. Rivers of pain. Rivers of blood. Rivers of tears. But the river of contentment that flows through me at my wife’s words, never.
“How would you feel about that free space you’ve got on your lap there being occupied in a little over six months,” she enquires gesturing to my jeans-clad thighs. Like I said, rivers of contentment. Pure unadulterated happiness.
Boss’ Playlist
Disparity By Design – Rise Against
When We Stand Together – Nickelback
Are You With Me – Lost Frequencies
Hold Back the River – James Bay
Freak Like Me – Halestorm
Iris – The Goo Goo Dolls
People Live Here – Rise Against
My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark – Fall Out Boy
Wrong Side Of Heaven – Five Finger Death Punch
Going Under – Evanescence
Live Like You Were Dying – Tim McGraw
Awake – Skillet
FURY…
A Vengeance MC Novel by ~ Natasha Thomas
Copyright © 2016 by Natasha Thomas
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
eBook Published and any subsequent printing done and developed in Australia
First Released, February 29th, 2016
Natasha Thomas
Sydney, Australia
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about this book…
One loss too many. One woman to heal his heart. But is it enough?
Tanner ‘Fury’ Scott has suffered tragedy after tragedy at the hands of many during his thirty-six years of life, and he’s had enough. Beaten, broken, and scarred, Fury is sure he can’t take anymore. But when all seems lost, a glimmer of hope by the name of, Avery shines through the darkness threatening to overtake him.
Avery Tamara Philips grew up under the watchful eye of her father and his MC knowing the dangers that lurked behind every corner. But never in her wildest dreams did she expect to be a casualty of the violence and brutality that existed just beyond the safe haven of the clubhouse walls.
Lost and alone, two souls fighting to survive through extraordinary circumstances, Fury and Avery have to decide whether they can come together to pick up the pieces of their shattered hearts, or are they just too damaged they never stood a chance.
In a world with no certainties, filled with choices that will ultimately alter the course of their lives one thing is absolute – love conquers all. And when all else fails, sometimes love is the only thing left to hold on to.
PROLOGUE
~ Tanner ‘Fury’ Scott ~
“When you feel sad, just think about how a T-rex feels trying to masturbate.”
- someecards
At one point in time I had everything, then I lost it all. Later I found a small part of that and lost it a second time. Now, I refuse to allow myself to try a third time. There’s too much pain, too many opportunities for loss if I open myself up to the possibility of having a deeper connection with someone.
I may not be happy, but it’s safer this way. This way I can protect myself. Moreover, I can protect the people around me.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m cursed because I don’t believe in that shit anyway, but the harbinger of death? Possibly.
Anyone, and everyone I’ve had a more than superficial relationship with has been lost to the wraith of the underworld. You know the one? The guy with the black cloak and scythe. The ghostly figure who visits souls close to crossing over and assists them to their final fiery resting place. I’m not him, but I may as well be his right hand.
The fate of my loved one’s can’t be purely coincidental. No one can lose that many people close to them without a darker influence being behind it. No one!
The first I knew of loss was when my parents and sister perished in a house fire when I nine years old. I was having a sleepover with a friend from school two blocks away when I heard the sirens. And I knew, I just knew something was wrong, that something horrible had happened.
By the time I got there, it was too late. The house was fully engulfed in flames, fire trucks were on the scene, three of them, but nothing could be done to save the house or my family that had been burned alive inside.
I will never forget that night, not only because I lost almost everyone who loved me, but because of the looks the firemen gave me as I stood by and watched my life burn to ashes. They looked at me with heartbreak and pity in their eyes.
London, my sister, was seven years old. My Mom and Dad were thirty-two and thirty-three consecutively. Too young to die. Much too young.
London hadn’t long since started school. She was popular, friendly, sweet, and cared about everyone and everything down to the lowliest earthworm. Life was sacred to her. She went as far as to save snails from being crushed under foot on the pavement placing them back in bushes or long grass for safety. My sister was beautiful too.
Her beauty was not merely skin deep, not even close. London was pure light and happiness. When she laughed, you would have thought a chorus of angels were singing. Her smile could brighten the darkest of rooms, so bright it was infectious. You couldn’t help but smile back at her.
Losing London was like losing a part of myself. But losing my Mom and Dad was like my heart simultaneously stopped beating when they took their last breath.
They were two-thirds of my world. They were everything to me. All three of them. They were in all of my memories, my dreams, and now my nightmares. And for the most part, I’m glad they are. Mom, Dad, and London being the center of my world and the focus of my loss was a constant reminder of what I wouldn’t allow myself to have again. Those nightmares, in particular, served their purpose. Or, at least, they did until I couldn’t fight the pull of the people that took me in when I had no one else.
My grandparents on my Mom’s side – Dad’s parents had died before I was born – lived in Oklahoma, in a town of less than a thousand. We didn’t see them often when Mom and Dad were alive because Dad often worked without taking his vacation time, and Grandpa believed airplanes are the devil’s way delivering death to many. He was crazy like that.
With no living relatives, neither Mom or Dad had siblings, the state of Utah placed me in the care of my aging grandparents.
As you can imagine, I wasn’t a pleasure to be around when I arrived on a working cattle ranch in small town Oklahoma. I was angry at the world, depressed, and craved an outlet for all the emotions that had built inside which I had no way of explaining or getting rid of. My Grandpa Joe found a way around that, though.
He woke me as soon as the sun came up and worked me until I could barely feel my arms and legs anymore. For weeks, Grandpa Joe had me shoveling shit, grooming horses, bundling hay, and re-bedding stalls. I had blisters upon blisters, a farmer’s tan that was more like a severe sunburn, and I ached in pla
ces I had no business aching in, and I felt fucking great. I felt more alive than I had in the weeks that followed my family’s death.
I worked hard at not only my chores, but keeping my heart closed to the gentleness of my Grandma Mary and the stubborn tenacity of Grandpa Joe, but in the end, I failed. I could no more keep them from becoming my new world than I could remember the love my Mom and Dad gave me. I should have tried harder, though. Much fucking harder.
The year I turned twenty-three, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Mary passed on within weeks of each other. Grandpa Joe from a massive stroke in his sleep, and Grandma Mary from what I believe was a broken heart, although the doctor’s say it was a heart attack that took her from me.
They left me the ranch and instructions to do with it what I pleased. I hated having to make the decision to sell it seeing as it was the only place I’d been able to call home in years, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I didn’t have the know how to run a ranch, herd cattle, and attend auctions. Selling was the logical choice. Moreover, it was what I did.
As soon as a reasonable offer came in, I packed my shit and got the hell out of there on a ’64 Shovelhead Grandpa Joe had lovingly helped me restore. I rode highways and back roads, stopping for gas, food, and a place to crash at night. I didn’t plan on settling, figuring I could do this for years with the healthy bank balance I now had, but it didn’t work out that way.
No. Four months into my drifting, I met a couple of guys in Wyoming, at a hole in the wall biker bar, who changed the course of my life.
Those men were, Boss and Diesel.
They’d been on a run (I had no fucking clue what that was at the time, but it wouldn’t be long before I found out), and were on their way back to their hometown of Furnace, Colorado when our paths collided. I’d just stopped at the bar for a beer and a burger, but after three hours of conversation and ten beers between us, I was following them home.
Maybe not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, carousing with bikers and joining their ranks with little to no thought, but I did it and I can’t bring myself to say I’ve ever regretted it, not until I met her that is. But that wouldn’t happen for nearly a year after I began prospecting, and by then, I wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it. I was all in – blood in, blood out.
I met her when I was twenty-four (nearly twenty-five), fifteen years after my parents and sister died, and almost two after my grandparents passed away. I had been prospecting for Vengeance MC for a little over twelve months by this stage, so it wasn’t the right time in my life to be looking at getting into a relationship. But, by the time I figured that out, it was too late. She had already burrowed under my defenses and into my heart. Rosalie Parker has already branded her name into my soul and into my heart.
At twenty-one years old, Rosalie was unlike anyone I’d ever met. She was quiet, shy, and sweet. So sweet in fact, that I struggled to taint her with my bitterness. But she wanted me, she worked for it, and eventually I gave myself to her. Not all of me, but everything I had in me to give.
Two and a half years later, we had been married for two years at this point, and the day before Rosalie had told me she was pregnant with my baby. I was ecstatic and terrified at her announcement. Knowing that I was going to be responsible for another being, a life I’d helped to create was amazing, but I couldn’t stop the hint of fear that surfaced.
Losing what I had, aware that I couldn’t go through it again made me question whether bringing a baby into the lifestyle I was working hard to be a part of was right. Things can get complicated when you’re a member of an MC. Shit goes downhill fast and collateral damage is a given. I didn’t want that for my baby or Rosalie.
When I broached my concerns with her, Rosalie held me, told me she trusted me to make her and our baby safe and went about doing whatever she’d been doing before as if I’d never spoken. I should have tried harder to explain the risks, to explain the danger she was in because of me and the club, but I didn’t. I let my wife believe she was safe, that I would make her so. I let her believe in me.
The third time I experienced loss was three days after Rosalie and I found out the sex of our baby. We were having a boy. I was having a son. Before we’d left the doctor’s office, Rosalie had named him, Deacon. Deacon Amos Scott.
At seven and a half months pregnant with our boy, Rosalie was unloading the groceries from the car at midday, in our quiet street, in our family sub-division, when she was killed in a drive-by shooting. According to the paramedics and police who attended the scene, she and my boy were killed instantly. Injuries not conducive to sustaining life I think they called it.
After that, I switched off. Completely. I drifted through days, weeks, months in a bleak haze of existence, angry at everyone, and hell bent on seeking vengeance. And it was then that I was inducted into the MC as a full member and became someone else altogether.
At twenty-six, I was a man reborn. From the ashes of my parents and sister’s death, from the blazing bullets of my wife and son’s senseless murder, I became Fury. A man who existed only as the harbinger of pain, retribution and suffering. I embraced the darkness that followed me everywhere I went, and with it, I carved out a new path for myself. One of nothingness. One that had little to no hope, light, or love.
That was until I met another woman.
This woman was nothing but a girl at the time I met her. Young, carefree, and full of life. I tried to stay away from her, really fucking tried, but it was a pointless endeavor.
Put it this way; have you ever felt like you were the moth and another person the flame? Yes? Well, that was what she was for me. I was the humble, stupid moth, and she was the flame that burned bright, casting her glow over everyone and everything.
Avery became my reason for waking up in the morning. She was the only person who could make me smile for no reason other than because she was. Later, she became my light in my otherwise dark days after Rosalie and my boy died. And much later, after I had already lost the promise of her, Avery became my biggest regret.
When I should have been doing everything I could to get closer to her, make her understand how much she meant to me and how integral a part of my life she was, I pushed her away. And in doing so, I, not anyone else, changed the course of my life again. This time, though, it wasn’t for the better, it was for the worse. Because a life without Avery is no life at all.
CHAPTER ONE
~ Fury ~
“I miss you and it makes me feel terribly, terribly vulnerable. So, I carry a chainsaw around with me and I feel a lot better about things overall.”
- Wrongcards
“She talking to anyone yet?” I ask, leaning against the wall in the hall outside Avery’s room at the clubhouse.
“Not today,” Emily sighs shaking her head sadly. “Our girl’s going to need time, Fury. We can’t rush this, sweetie, because if we do, it will only make things worse.”
I knew this, I’d heard it thousands of times over the past week and a half, but that didn’t mean it was any easier to hear now than it was last time.
Avery and Beth had been rescued over a week ago from a warehouse acting as a storage facility for Hells Riders, battered, bruised, beaten, and violated, barely alive. Beth’s best friend, Bec, however, wasn’t as lucky if that’s what you can call the state we found our women in. Devastatingly, it was too late for Bec by the time we got to her. She’d long since succumbed to her injuries, of which there were many.
The doctor who did the autopsy informed us that she would have suffered horrendously in her last hours, something we’ve kept from Beth and Avery so far. They don’t need to hear the details of how many men violated her every orifice, or the number of hits she had taken to her head before the final blow fractured her skull. No one needed to hear that shit. Fucking no one!
Needless to say, the mood in the clubhouse since we’d returned with two barely recognizable women was dangerous. As men, moreover, as bikers we don’t condone violence toward women. To us, usin
g your hands to hurt a woman is as abhorrent as if someone was to harm a child maliciously – that shit just isn’t done.
Among the men who are out for blood, Avery’s dad, Saint, her Uncles, Tank and Reaper, and her self-appointed grandfather, Sarge are by far the most vocal about the retribution they intend to meter out. Boss and I have discussed it, but our rage is contained inside the walls of his office or the ‘Meat Shack’ – that’s what I call it – at the back of Vengeance’s compound.
We took care of the initial threat, the two people who led our women into the trap that was no doubt planned out by none other than the Hells Riders. Those two were dispatched with no small amount of blood and gore, all of which was due to them for the pain they’d inflicted on innocent women. In saying that, there are still days, I’d like nothing more than to dig their asses up and make them suffer all over again after I’ve spent the night listening to Avery cry out in terror during one of her many nightmares. But I can’t.
Vengeance MC Box Set - Volume 1: Call Me...Vengeance ~ Fury ~ Jonas Page 36
