by Ivy Black
I waited for some of the patrons to calm a little bit, and then I stood up and made my way behind the bar, through the kitchen, and into the warehouse. If a fight had taken place, it was over already, and Stag was already gone. My dad was nowhere to be seen, but Taylor was sitting at the meeting table, perfectly calm and looking as if nothing had gone wrong. A few of the non-officer members were floating around, but I wasn’t sure what they were up to. It made more sense to ignore that in favor of calming Taylor down before he did something outrageous, so I walked over and sat across from him at the table.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
Taylor shrugged. “Dunno. He left.”
“What about Stag?”
Taylor’s gaze crawled up to me, empty, a void where emotions should be. “What about him?”
“I’m fine, so don’t do anything dumb.” As I looked around, Taylor quietly chuckled. “What’s so funny? Where is he?”
Taylor cracked his knuckles. “Parts of him are in a car on their way to Phoenix.” My heart sank, and he grinned. “The rest of him is on the way to Rumble.”
“Taylor.” Rage boiled inside of me. I never wanted to be responsible for someone’s death again. “That was an overreaction.”
“You know the rules,” Taylor hissed. “No one touches what belongs to me and gets away with it.” His eyes narrowed. “No one.” The last two words were laced with a warning.
The chair I was in sent a screaming screech across the floor as I backed it out. “I’m not your property.”
Taylor didn’t respond, not that it would have stopped me from bolting out the back door and rushing toward my bike if he had. He’d already taken care of Stag, which meant, without a doubt, that Colin was next.
Chapter Thirteen
Phantom
Blaming myself for the way I acted in the bar didn’t do me any good, but I couldn’t help it. Never before in my life had I acted so impulsively, but seeing that man put his hands on Tess sent an unknown rage coursing through my blood. My anxiety was already heightened after seeing the Raging Vipers in the desert—more of a chance that I could be recognized—but when Adley reached out and grabbed Tess’ hair, I turned into someone I didn’t recognize. It was a good thing that I didn’t have a gun on me at the time because I might have put a bullet through his skull. Tess could take care of herself, and I knew that, but it didn’t stop me from wanting to jump to her aid when certain threats arose. I just wanted her to be safe.
My leather jacket was the first thing to go when I was safely behind the door of Tess’ guest bedroom, and I damn near ripped the black long-sleeved shirt off. It had the musty smell of the desert clinging to it, and it was covered in sweat from handling the glacier of a man that was Adley. The stack of clean shirts on the desk was calling out to me, but a cold shower would help me calm down. Tess wasn’t back yet, which was good. I owed her an apology for playing knight again, but I’d rather do it while I was clean.
As I was unloading my pockets, the door of the guest bedroom burst open. My back was to the door, and I froze in place. I hadn’t heard Tess’ bike approaching, but Lockjaw’s lack of barking was concerning. Whoever opened the door wasn’t speaking, and I was debating whether or not to grab my gun before turning around.
“The burns.”
Relief and anger battled for domination in my mind. I flipped around and saw Tess standing in the doorway, staring at my bare torso. My hand flew to the desk to grab a clean shirt, but Tess reached out and snatched it from my grip.
“Tess,” I growled, “give me the shirt.”
Her stare finally left my arm and came up to meet my eyes. “Is this why you’ve been so weird?” She clung the shirt tighter when I attempted to grab it back, and when I turned to try and grab a different one, she shifted toward the desk to stand between me and it. “Answer me. You’ve been hiding this from me? Why? Do you think I’m that shallow?” The discoloration on my left arm, my left pec, and left half of my stomach were screaming. The overexposure was difficult to deal with, and I was beating back my fight or flight response with a mental stick. “Colin. Answer me.”
“No,” I responded finally. “I know you’re not. It’s me.”
She lost some of the stiffness in her body. “Well…” She scoffed. “There’s nothing wrong.” She stepped up to me and stuck out a hand, dropping the shirt on the floor and leaving it behind. Her fingertips grazed across the permanent scarring, and I rigidified. “Does it hurt?”
“No.” Not physically, at least.
Her hand settled a little more against my arm and started to smooth its way down. Tess’ hands felt on my skin burned in a different kind of way. It was a welcome heat, unlike anything I’d experienced before. I stood still and watched as she methodically trailed her hand over all of the discoloration. For a brief minute, her hand slipped up toward the only bandages I still had on, those covering my Unchained Dogs tattoo. My heart and mind both started to race as I imagined what I might say if she pulled off the bandages and saw it, but eventually, her hands slid away and continued down my pec.
As her hands grazed over my stomach, her lips pursed into a hard line. “I hope they never come for you,” she said before looking up at me. “Cops or not, I’m gonna struggle not to kill them for hurting you like this.”
My heart was pounding in my chest, and I looked directly into Tess’ eyes. “I hope they never come.”
Tess swallowed hard, and her hands started to shake. “Well, if this is what was holding you back, I’ve seen it now.” The hope in her eyes was almost too much to bear. “Do we have to wait any longer?”
The blood coursing through my veins was a loud, rhythmic thrum in my ears. Wanting to hide had been a reason, and not wanting to get attached had been a reason. Those things were gone now, so what was I waiting for?
“No. We don’t.”
Tess’ shoulders lifted, and she leaned toward me. I brought my hand to her face and cupped it. Excitement rocketed through my body that felt like I’d finally let a wild animal out of a cage that had been too small to contain it. I leaned in to set my lips on hers, and it was at that exact moment that the doorbell rang.
“I swear to fucking God, Colin, if that’s my dad, I’m gonna chop his head off.”
I gritted my teeth. “I’ll hold him down.”
Tess turned around and tossed the door to the bedroom back so hard that it left a crack in the wall. As much as I hated to do it, I reached down and grabbed the long-sleeved t-shirt that Tess had dropped to the floor and pulled it over my body. I spent a few extra minutes in the room, letting my visible excitement die down, then I walked out into the living room where Tess was sitting on the couch next to—who else but—Nick, who was quickly becoming known for his supernatural ability to show up at the worst possible time.
Tess shook her head and rolled her eyes at me, and I smirked. “Nick, hello.”
“Hey, sorry to drop by so late,” Nick replied. “I assume Val told you what happened?”
I locked eyes with Tess. “Uh.”
“We hadn’t gotten that far. I rushed home to make sure the trouble hadn’t moved this way,” Tess said.
My heart thudded in my chest. “What trouble?”
“Taylor killed Adley after his little display today.” Nick sighed, running a hand through his hair. “I can’t fucking deal with this right now. I’m gonna need to pull from the prospects now. The week of MiD. God, this is a cluster fuck.”
“He killed him?” Lockjaw hopped out of the armchair as I walked toward it, and I sank down into it. “Why would the trouble move this way?”
Tess looked over at me. “He said to me, and I quote, ‘No one touches what belongs to me and gets away with it.’ He made sure to emphasize, ‘No one’.”
My mind traveled back to when I kissed Tess in the parking lot at Hoppa’s, and I remembered Taylor riding in to see us at that exact moment. That was an oversight on my part. “I’m not worried about him.”
Nick snickered. �
��You’re not easily spooked, are ya, CJ? You’re like a fucking phantom.” The racing in my heart doubled. I’d been called that nickname before—it was my moniker back when I was still with the Unchained Dogs. It could have just been a coincidence, but it was a little too close to home for comfort. “That’s good if you can keep your head on straight around him, but it doesn’t change the fact that we have a murder on our hands now. He’s got a goddamn wife and kids. We can’t deal with this shit right now.”
“Well, we have to. It’s way too close to MiD for rumors to start flying around. For now, we need to just treat him as a missing person,” Tess said. “So just relax, and let’s think this through.”
“I don’t want to overstep,” I started, “but can I make a comment?”
Nick’s eyes were weary when he looked up at me. “Please.”
“If it comes down to it, just pin it on me.”
Both Nick and Tess’ jaws dropped. “What?” Nick barked.
“Everyone saw me slam him in the bar today. If rumors start floating around that he’s been killed, the natural conclusion will be that I did it. Just let them go with that.”
“What if the police come for you?” Tess asked, and it was clear that she was concerned about the version of my story that I’d told her.
“You said you have plants there, right?” I asked. “As long as they can give me a heads up, I can be gone before they even know I was here. You guys just pretend not to know me, and let it roll off your backs.”
“You…” Nick’s words died in his mouth.
Tess put a hand on her dad’s back and the other one on my knee. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We can cross that bridge if we come to it. For now, none of us know what happened to Stag. He was a useless drunk, and it’d be easy enough for someone to believe that he wandered into the desert and got eaten by a coyote or something.”
“They’ll eventually find a body, Tess,” Nick said.
Tess’ expression darkened significantly. She looked directly at the floor, and her eyes glazed over. “No… they won’t.”
Silence filled the room as we all pondered this notion individually and what it meant.
“Daddy, where did you go when you went back behind the bar?” Tess asked. “I assumed you knew.”
Nick’s bottom lip poked out as he shook his head. “Nope. He told me that Texas took Adley out to the desert to kick his ass. I rode about twenty minutes out of town looking for ’em when it finally hit me that he’d given me the run around.” He drove another hand through his hair, this time stopping at his skull to scratch a bit. “The bar’s being flipped and cleaned right now, but fuck. We’ve never had to deal with shit like this before. I didn’t think he’d take it that far. It was one thing when he beat your ex to death. It was just an accident, and I could cover it up.”
“It wasn’t an accident, Dad.”
“It…” Nick shook his head. “I never thought he’d get this bad.”
Both Tess and Nick had warned me that Taylor was off his rocker, but I hadn’t realized that it was that bad. What a terrifying human being. Why would Nick keep him around if he was that bad? Just because Taylor was his kid? That was a kind of parental love that I had never once experienced in my life.
“He’s been getting worse by the day,” Tess responded. “He may be beyond our influence now.”
Nick didn’t respond. There was a little glisten in his eyes. It had to be difficult to realize that one of your children was outside of your reach. Parents, good ones, anyway, hang onto any hope that their children won’t travel down a bad path, even after the parents themselves are long gone. There was nothing in Taylor’s future except prison or death. I watched as that thought occurred to Nick, blended with the conversation that he and I had about Tess having hit a glass ceiling. He was probably feeling like he was terribly out of options.
“What’s next?” I asked. “MiD is at the end of the week. You need to pull prospects?”
Tess tossed me a warm grin before looking back at her dad. “We can do that first thing in the morning. We could take ’em all, really, and stack the deck. The guys aren’t gonna mind.”
“They aren’t trained,” Nick said.
“So, I’ll train ’em,” Tess replied.
“No. I need you and CJ in the desert. I’ll put Bucky and Bullseye on it. We’ll call it a fast-track to membership if they put in a few long days to get ready for MiD.”
“That’s good,” Tess said. “I’ll keep my mouth shut so that it’ll blow over without a problem.”
Nick nodded. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. We don’t have time for that now.”
“You’re right. The Dogs could show up anytime. We have to be ready.”
It was as if there was a fifteen-car pileup in my body. My heart screeched to a halt, and my head started to swirl. “Is… is there a threat of them coming?”
“They’ve been quiet for a little too long for me. Whenever they get quiet like this, it’s always right before they strike.”
There was truth to his words, and I knew it because I’d been there. Luther always got the calmest right before he flipped. That was exactly why I didn’t suspect that he’d figured out that I was the one who lifted the fifty grand. It was why I was lying in bed as if nothing was wrong when my house went up in flames. I tried my hardest to mask my fear, but inside, I was boiling. If Luther was coming and if he found me here in the process, he wouldn’t leave until every house in Hoppa was in ashes. He would leave no one standing.
“We’ve got it under control,” Tess said. “We’re gonna talk to the Blazing Rebels and the Raging Vipers at MiD and make sure they’re in if things go wrong, and in the meantime, we’ve got an entire fucking music festival to worry about.” Tess rubbed her hand up and down her dad’s back. “He thrives when we get bent out of shape, Dad. We have to just go about it business as usual. He can’t see us sweating. We’ve got this.”
Nick nodded. “Yeah.” He looked at Tess. “We do.” He stood up. “All right. Thanks, both of you. I’m gonna go check in with everyone and make sure the cleanup is coming along.”
“I don’t know who Taylor got to… dispose, of Adley, but he said part of him was on the way to Phoenix and the rest was on the way to Rumble.”
Nick nodded. “Fucking great. Night, kids.”
Tess stood up and walked her dad over to the door, gave him a big hug, and then saw him out. When she came back, she closed the door and leaned back against it. “That probably ruined the mood, huh?” I glanced up at her, and she nodded. “Yeah.”
“Just a little more time?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I’ve waited this long.” She didn’t come back into the living room, but instead, she turned and started off down the hallway. She stopped to tap her leg, and Lockjaw hopped up from his living room dog bed, and with one more quick, warm glance back in my direction, she continued down the hallway and out of sight with her pit bull right behind her.
My head fell to my hands as the fear that Luther was coming consumed me. It took all the willpower in my body to get me off the couch and into the guest bedroom. I fell down on my back on the bed and closed my eyes as if I was going to sleep, even though I knew good and well that I wouldn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
Tess
Seeing my dad in such a state of anguish made it very difficult to want to kill him for interrupting Colin and me yet again. Whether it was the impending threat of facing off against the Unchained Dogs or that Taylor had scared Colin more than he was letting on, Colin seemed genuinely freaked out by our conversation. He was good at hiding his true emotions, but I’d known Colin for a long time, and the past month had only brought us closer together. As much as he tried to put on a brave face, I could see his hyper-logical brain calculating all of the ways out, and regardless of whether the conversation was a mood killer on its own, I knew after seeing my dad out that Colin and I wouldn’t be going at it.
Again.
After that night, things kicked into high gear as we got ready for MiD. My dad stationed Colin in the desert permanently until the event. Though I was hoping that my dad would send me, too, he was still so freaked out by what had happened with Taylor that he kept me in Hoppa with him to help him clean up Taylor’s mess and help finish the minutiae for MiD. It’d been four long days since I last saw Colin, but tonight was MiD, and I’d get to see him again. If I was lucky, we would finally take things where they needed to go.
My dad left for the desert early that morning while I stayed back to make sure that the new members were taken care of and prepared to take care of the Taphouse in the event that someone showed up there instead of the festival.
One of the new members, former prospect Aaron Rell, kicked a chair in frustration. “I don’t get why we have to miss all the fun.”
“Keep your mouth shut. Didn’t you hear what happened to Adley?” another prospect-come-member, Vil Simmons, hissed.
“Both of you keep your mouths shut,” I barked. “Don’t bring up Adley, and don’t complain. This is a job that new members do every year. You got to go last year when you were barely a speck in our eyes, and you’ll get to go next year once you’ve earned your keep.”
Seth Hardy, the last of the new members, stepped toward me, and Lockjaw snapped at him. He backed up with a string of swear words hissed under his breath. “I was just going to say thank you.”
“Sure you were.” I grabbed my dad’s small black lockbox from behind the bar, twisted it open with the key that he left with me, and opened the lid. “Keys.”
Whenever my dad had to leave someone in charge of the bar, he had a relatively fool-proof system to make sure that those left in charge didn’t screw us over.
He took their keys.
I’d bring the lockbox with me to the desert and would bring it back tomorrow when the festival was over. The most important thing to any self-respecting member of a motorcycle club was their bike, and part of the contract that they all signed when they became members was an agreement to this particular practice. My dad was very aware of the fact that most people have multiple copies of their keys, which is why he requested all copies of the keys. He made sure to mention that since he had a copy of their keys, if they stabbed us in the back, he’d use his copy of the keys to steal their bike if he ever saw them again, and when they came to get their bike back, they’d have to face him.
