by Sophia Reed
Only Jesse was there. His bike was inside. He found me, didn't bother with anything like Told you to stay put over here or Keep down or any other stupidity. Jesse's a man of very few words.
He grabbed my wrist, pulled me. I stumbled after him. In the racket of shooting and screaming, engines and rotors, no one was going to hear us.
He pulled me after him, turned his bike, and I got on behind him. Everything and everyone was up at the front of the warehouse, far as we could tell. He made a two-pronged finger jabbing motion at his eyes and mine – What do you see?
I made a fist, then pointed west. I thought everybody was there, too.
On the bike behind him, I put on my helmet. Meant to keep roads from breaking heads and cops from stopping bikers. I didn't know what it would do for automatic weapon fire. We were wearing vests. We were all wearing vests. That at least was a comfort.
Jesse put his fingers between his teeth and gave a shrill whistle, enough to cut through the noise. His men instantly started backing up, still firing. I saw we'd lost Carl and maybe someone else, and that the Asians, confused, or pretending to be, were mostly firing at the groups outside the structure.
They watched us and then those who weren't already in cars ran for their Eclipses. Still firing. The longer we all kept firing, the less anybody would expect us to head out of the warehouse.
He waited until the very last soldier threw his leg over his bike and then Jesse gunned the motor. The tires squealed on the concrete. With the rest of the still-living men behind us, we roared out of the warehouse.
2
Jesse pounded into me. Rage sex. He was taking out his frustrations over a buy gone bad and a lot of money gone down the drain.
There wasn't a lot of privacy in the clubhouse but I'd gotten used to that. Since I could still hear the men outside playing cards, tuning up their bikes, which were, after all, in the kitchen, and watching porn or even lower forms of entertainment like Ridiculousness, I figured they could hear us, too.
His cock was hard as steel, long and thick and brutal. He wielded the thing like a club and I tried never to acknowledge, at least to myself, how in thrall of it I was.
When I first found my way to him, the story of being the girlfriend in a connected gang, Rodrigo's Lily, I'd winced every time he laid a hand on me. Rodrigo was dead and the real Lily was in solitary for the run of this operation, and as far as everybody at her prison knew, she had been paroled. So now I was her.
And back in our apartment in Portland, my fiancé, Mark Tomlin, had no idea what I was doing in my undercover assignment, only that I was going to be gone for several months and there'd only be the rarest of contacts, that he shouldn't worry.
That he shouldn't wait. But I hadn't quite the courage, or the cruelty, to say that to him. Mark was an intern at a Portland Hospital, finishing up his med school years, getting ready to do some course of specialization. He kept telling me it was fine, just fine for me to be a regular patrol officer, even to ride a desk because that was safer and he saw what happened to police officers because he was one of the guys who patched them up during his rotations in emergency. We could live on my patrol salary and he could graduate and –
And there were all his student loans, I'd remind him, it wasn't like he'd been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Or a trust fund. Or anything he could trade in to pay for all that schooling.
Besides, I was born to a father who had the blue uniform in his blood. I was raised by a policeman and I had been bound and determined to become one myself, even as all my sisters went off and got married. All three of them, the three who formed their own little dolly and tea party cliques and left me out because I just didn't fit and they just didn't understand.
I looked like them – small, with black curls and olive skin and big boobs over slim hips, wiry muscles and washboard abs in my case – but only on the outside. On the inside we were different species.
We all looked younger than our ages, too. I looked like a teenager but I was twenty-four. I was a cop. I'd already shot a man in the line of duty.
My sisters didn't understand me.
My fiancé thought I was looking for a way out of what I did for a living, that of course I'd want to stay home, even though he himself loved his chosen profession.
And Jesse? Yeah, I wasn't going to think about that.
Because maybe the man pounding into me with the finesse of a pile driver, the man who had slugged the mattress beside my head, and whose eyes burned with fury at the cosmic fuck up of a buy gone bad – maybe he understood me better than anybody else in my life.
Did that just suck? Or was it terrifying, too? Did the very terror of it make my heart beat faster and make me wetter for him?
"Wrap your legs around me," Jesse growled in my ear.
I didn't hesitate. He'd hit me, once, when I didn't move when he told me to because I was so close to crashing over the edge into orgasm. Hauled off and hit me so hard I saw stars and had to eat on the other side of my mouth for a week.
Now he grabbed my wrists and pulled my arms high over my head, pinning them down so hard my hands went instantly to sleep. I couldn't have freed myself if I'd tried. I didn't. I cocked my hips at an angle, letting his cock plunge farther and farther in between my legs, and locked my ankles onto the small of his back.
No objection. The friction changed on my clit and I could feel all the better the orgasm building low in my belly, like an itch, a tingle, a tightening of muscles all over my body as blood rushed down there. I bit my lip, let my head fall back the way he liked, and felt his teeth graze my neck like he was some kind of fucking vampire.
He rocked into me, rhythmic but with no particular grace. His cock started to throb, pulsing as he got ready to come deep inside me.
It's all it took to send me over the edge, even as his fist pounded the pillow again, close enough to stir my hair. Both of his hands came away from my arms. Even with my partial freedom, all I did was tighten my grip on him with my legs.
"Jesse!" Everything pulsed inside me, a heartbeat speeding, circling around and around as the pleasure surged through me. My nails clawed at his back and that was the last straw for him. He came hard, shooting deep into me, his head thrown back, his back arched. He said, "Fuck," long and drawn out, the word only dying away when his head dropped forward.
His eyes met mine. No way it was love, but there was acceptance there. I wasn't some nameless motorcycle bitch, not some whore he'd paid. Jesse saw me and somewhere, without realizing it, he understood that something in us marched to the same unusual drummer.
Undercover cops and motorcycle bitches both have mothers and fathers. Mark didn't have my cell number but lots of dubious contacts did. All the people who called me had numbers that traced back just to them. I wasn't going to get killed over some administrative snafu. But my parents? My name wasn't really Lily, it was Annie. But if someone answered my phone, the fact that it was my parents calling and really was...? I thought that was all right and my dad's health had been so shaky for the last few years, taking a phone that went to the fictional version of Lily and letting them have that number was all right.
Dad was a cop. Retired now, but he understood. He rode my mother hard about the phone number. He didn't know I was undercover, not the whole story – not only because no one did, but because I didn't think he could handle everything that went with this assignment. But his knowing meant mom could have the number at the same time none of my sisters did.
At the same time no one asked about Mark not having it. Mark didn't have a way to get hold of me short of calling my father and asking him to get a message to me. I didn't think he'd go to that extent unless it was a pretty serious emergency.
I also didn't think too hard about not giving my fiancé a way to contact me directly. Or the fact that I didn't trust him to use it responsibly. Mark had an underlying core of romance that meant he just might underestimate the danger he'd put me in if he decided he just had to talk to you, Annie and that
was the emergency.
So when my mother called, I knew it was bad.
"Annie?"
Shit. But Jesse was pumping iron in the living room and the others didn't mess much with me. That was a good thing about being Jesse's. There were other women around, some of them just girls, but they were usually stoned and there for the drugs. Emily, who I'd actually liked, had been a criminal justice major before she dropped out of college and had OD'd a couple weeks back. Her old man dumped her at a hospital in the suburbs and that was that. The word ‘relationship’ took a beating around here. Besides that, this was the kind of place where people used different names and nobody asked why Annie became Lily, especially when there really was a Lily and the person asking for Annie was a parent.
"Mom? What's wrong?" I went from the kitchen onto the back porch. Rain slanted past the overhang onto the dead grass of the backyard.
There were tears in her voice but she wasn't actively crying. Crap. I'd hoped when dad went I wouldn't be on this assignment any longer.
"Your father had a heart attack last night." Translation: You should already be here, all your sisters are.
"What hospital is he at?" Translation: Don't you dare tell me he's already gone.
Miraculously, she flat out told me where he was, and without hysterics or histrionics. I'd have to put up with Sarah, Melanie and Gina and whichever of their children they couldn't leave behind, but I hadn't seen my sisters in forever. Maybe it would be all right.
I went in and found Jesse and told him I had to go. I lied about where my father was and didn't bother calling once I was out the door to set up a cover, someone in the hospital somewhere else who would answer to another name to keep my cover secure. No real need. If Jesse let me go, he wasn't going to check up on me that way.
3
"Pumpkin? You didn't have to come."
"Yes, I did." I had my dad to myself briefly, my sisters off in the cafeteria talking about whatever they talked about when they got together. They were scattered around the west, in Sacramento, in Reno, in Portland. Portland meant Sarah was only three hours away from me and I still didn't see her. She didn't even know I worked narcs or that I was undercover at all, and still I didn't fit into her white picket fence daydreams.
Dad looked tired more than anything else. He's fifty-nine and a retired police officer, a detective who raised four girls. Maybe he has a right to look tired.
Our conversation was stilted. How could it be anything else? There were doctors coming in and going out because he was in cardiac ICU still and there was my mother coming in three times during the fifteen minutes I was given and dad sending her away. There were nurses. There was the hushed murmur because there were other patients.
There was my own fear that I was drowning. Just being out of the clubhouse, I was already itching to get info on yesterday's fucked up buy, both needing to know and dreading the info on the deaths.
"How bad is it?" I asked and saw his face relax.
"You're the only one who asks me that." He reached up and smoothed my hair back.
I snorted. "Of course I am." Didn't have to say anything more than that. He knew mom was a throwback somehow to a fifties wife and my sisters were – not that bad. They just weren't us. Him and me. He was the reason I kept going when the job required being so deep cover I was fucking the gang leader. He'd had to do some dodgy things in his career too. He wouldn't understand that aspect where I was concerned – I was still his daughter – but he understood more than anyone else.
"They're doing a bypass." He let go of my hair. "Fifty-fifty I make it through, if I read their reluctance to tell me jackshit. If I do, though, full recovery. Enough about me. You being safe?"
"Sure, dad. That's why I work narcotics."
His eyelids were starting to lower but he grinned at that obvious lie. "That's my girl."
I wasn't out of cover but there were protocols in place so I could check in with Dave Samuels. y handler, the closest thing to a contact, and the guy who's supposed to pull me out if the whole operation goes south, but I think we all know that would never happen. When it all goes bad there's never enough time.
"Do you need out?" he asked. After the previous day's fuck up, it was logical that was his first question.
There are protocols for everything, safe words, so to speak. Not that I couldn't walk away if I had to. Nobody gets to determine my life to that extent.
"No." I was twitchy. In a Starbucks in a different city. It didn't feel like Jesse would have me watched, but I knew a lot about his business. There's more to the motorcycle gangs than leather vests and beards and boots. His business was organized, lucrative, and totally illegal. ATF, DEA and Seattle PD narcs – everybody wanted to take down the Brotherhood. They had ties with the Bandidos and the Mongols, and the Brotherhood was growing exponentially and putting more and more China white on the street.
I wasn't ready to pull the plug. It was too confusing, trying to figure out how I'd go work as a uniformed cop and go home every night or every morning to have coffee with Mark and sex that didn't involve a fist hitting the pillow beside my head. Or anything else possibly hitting anything else.
The advantage of looking underage was working in the schools. The Brotherhood was dealing to younger and younger buyers and China white wasn't just heroin anymore. In this context it was fentanyl, a whole hell of a lot more dangerous, more potent, more addictive, more deadly. I'd gotten involved with a high school sting, going back to school and making friends and making contacts and making buys. Until there was enough information and then I didn't go back in to PD, I moved to another location, stayed under, and found my way to Jesse.
Because during the time I was in the school system, I got to know some of the kids who were using, including Lorelei.
I went to her funeral.
"Not ready to come in. Just checking in." My eyes couldn't stop going from customer to customer in the shop, making sure I didn't see any faces I recognized. No one from Jesse's world watching me.
On the other end of the phone, Dave hesitated. "You saw your dad?"
"Yeah. There wasn't a cover break for that."
"Listen, you're going to hear this anyway because it's going to probably hit the news. There's an internal investigation, looking at a handful of cases your dad worked on."
I closed my eyes. "What?"
"It's not just him. It's everyone who worked those cases."
It wasn't starting with him - that's what Dave could have said. But it would come down to my dad. Because not everything he'd done was above board. I knew that. There are great cops out there who never violate a single rule and who get the job done. There are dirty cops, of course.
Then there are those who push the line a little. Not everything they do is true blue. My dad fit in that category. He'd never told me, never let slip the smallest detail. But I knew.
But he was proud of his career, proud of what he'd done, proud of the crap and the dealers he'd helped take off the street. Now he was sick, trying to get through open-heart surgery. If I stayed undercover, I couldn't even testify on his behalf.
If I didn't, more girls like Lorelei would die.
Mark wasn't at the apartment when I got there. He didn't know I was coming back and maybe I did that on purpose. It kept him safer, for one thing. Contacting him when I did was tortuous. And for another? I think somewhere in the back of my mind I thought if I surprised him and he wasn't alone, I'd finally have an excuse to walk away.
He was alone. Alone and delighted.
"Babe?"
I'd just stepped out of the shower. Hearing his voice, there was a flash of desire, of heat, and intense pleasure.
"I'm in here!" I called and wrapped my robe around me, letting my dark curls drip water onto my shoulders.
We met halfway between the master bath and the living room, colliding together in the hallway, all arms and mouths and him backing me up against the wall.
There were no words. He was tired, looked like h
e'd showered at the hospital and come home with something from a Chinese restaurant. I could smell sweet and sour pork or something from the other room. My stomach growled but I didn't stop.
His hands were on my back, in my hair, on my face, and I was touching his chest, his shoulders, sliding down to his hips to drag his pelvis against mine. We ground together, slid along the wall, knocked a framed picture of his grandfather to the floor and moved around it, sliding back into the bedroom.
He kicked off his shoes, struggled to get out of his pants. Scrubs should come off more easily. I was tearing at the top, tangling him in the cotton as he kissed my mouth, my neck, my ears, slid his tongue down into the opening of my robe and tried to free me from it without undoing the cord.
We fell back on the bed together, kissing, hands everywhere, touching. He kissed down into the robe, pulled my arms free, finally fought the cord off until I was naked and he was still half dressed, his scrubs not quite off yet.
I tumbled him over, climbing on top, fighting his pants the rest of the way off, running my hands over his thick hard dick, hearing him moan. It was hot and fast and frenetic.
Until he turned me over and got on top. And then somehow the speed and the need didn't fade, but the hot did. Mark kissed and sucked and even sometimes bit – a little tiny amount of biting. Gentle. Never bruising. Never anything like where a dentist could line up dental records to that bite. The most he'd ever done was stretch my hands above my head and try to pin them there and that night I had come unhinged, told him never to hold me down.
Just imagine if he knew about Jesse….
Mark always used a condom, would until we married. A weird code of conduct, because I knew he wasn't cheating on me.
I couldn't say the same. In the line of duty? But it was still – I was grateful for the condom.
And not grateful that Jesse had just gotten into my head, even as Mark slid into my body.