HIS BRANDED BRIDE: Steel Devils MC

by Sophia Gray

  Chapter Ten

  Cole

  My phone buzzed right by my head. It was a furious noise right in my ear. It felt like someone drilling into my head.

  “Baby, your phone,” Lilah said, pressing her hand against my chest and shaking me gently.

  “I know,” I groaned out. I reached over next to me without opening my eyes, feeling around the nightstand. Before I could grab it, it stopped going off. I let my hand rest heavily against my forehead.

  “What if it was important?” she asked, her voice full of concern like she knew something was wrong. I must have known it, too, because I didn’t pull my hand back and put my arm back around her. I waited.

  “If it’s really important,” I told her, “they’ll call ba—” The phone was going off again. It seemed even louder the second time.

  I reached for it, moving my hand all over the top of my nightstand. Finally, I sat up and opened my eyes. It was on the bed, right next to the pillow. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered anyway – since they were calling back. The voice on the other end was going before I had my phone all the way up to my ear.

  “Saw, man, it’s Jake, one of Trent’s prospects. We’re up here at the shop. Someone tried to break in, and we got him. What do you want us to do?”

  “You caught him?” I asked, pushing the blankets off and turning to sit on the side of the bed. Lilah lifted up her head and yawned.

  “Yeah, we got him right here. We can get rid of him if you’d like, or whatever,” he offered.

  “Hold him. I’m on my way.”

  “Alright, we see you in a few. We’re around back by the dumpster.”

  “Awesome. Don’t go anywhere,” I said, hanging up the phone.

  “What’s going on?” Lilah asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

  “Oh, I didn’t get a chance to tell you. Someone tried to break into the shop the other night. We put a couple of our prospects on it, and they caught him trying again tonight,” I explained.

  “Do you think it’s tied to what happened at my house?” She was slumped forward a little, leaning her elbows on her knees, looking at me with wide green eyes.

  “It might be. There aren’t any coincidences when it comes to stuff like this, so I’d put my money on ‘yes’,” I said, getting up from the bed, still naked.

  “I’m coming with you,” Lilah announced, turning to slide out of bed.

  “No, you’re not. You’re staying here where it’s safe. I don’t know if he’s the only one. There could be someone else waiting on me to show up. The whole thing could be a setup. I don’t know. You’re staying here,” I told her sternly.

  I grabbed the first clothes I could find on the floor and got dressed. I threw my kutte on over my T-shirt and walked over to my dresser. I opened my sock drawer and pulled out my 9mm Glock. I slid it behind the waist of my jeans.

  “Are you really going to need that?” she asked, obviously not a fan of guns.

  “I hope not, but if I do, I’d rather have one with me, you know? I don’t know what this guy’s packing. I’d hate to show up underequipped,” I told her.

  I walked around to her side of the bed and leaned down to kiss her. Our lips met tenderly and lingered together. I pulled back slowly.

  “Keep the bed warm for me,” I said. “I’ll be back soon, baby.”

  She shot me a wary look, like she really wanted to go but was settling for letting me handle it this time. I walked out of the room and locked the door behind me. If anything got strange at the clubhouse, I didn’t want her worrying about anyone walking in on her. Not that I expected anyone to show up and make it to the third floor, but strange things were happening, and I couldn’t rule anything out.

  I looked around when I made it downstairs, checking to see who was still awake and hanging around. We always had someone keeping an eye on the clubhouse. There were still people downstairs shooting pool and watching movies at stupid o’clock in the morning as I was on my way out to check on my tattoo parlor.

  I pulled up just a few minutes later and coasted into the lot behind my building. Sure enough, the prospects were standing there with another man on his knees between them, his face all bloody from where they’d obviously had to convince him to follow them around back. He sat like his hands were restrained behind his back. And the look on his face said they’d beat his ass senseless before I got there. I hoped he could still talk.

  I hopped off the bike and walked up to him.

  “What do we have here, boys?” I asked our prospects.

  “We caught him back here trying to break in the back door this time,” one of them spoke up.

  I raised my eyebrows and nodded. “Gotta hand it to you,” I said to the bloody man kneeling between them, “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for, even though it is pretty idiotic to return to a place like this after an unsuccessful attempt to break in the first time.”

  “We had to rough him up a little bit to subdue him,” the other prospect told me.

  I chuckled. “Yeah, I was thinking you guys had done this to get him to talk. Not too shabby. Good job, guys. I’ll make sure Trent and Bruce find out about this,” I told them.

  They shared a promising look between them. It probably wasn’t going to be quite the job to get them promoted to full members, but something like what they did would go a long way with the senior members like Trent, my brother Axel, and Bruce. I knelt down in front of their catch and looked him over. He wore a nice dark suit, not something I would have expected someone to wear while breaking into businesses. I hoped he at least wore gloves.

  “So, who do you work for?” I asked him.

  “Go fuck yourself,” he replied and spat blood on my face.

  So, I punched him right in his ugly, bloody nose. He fell over backward, and I grabbed the handkerchief from the pocket of his coat to wipe off my face. I stood up after that, looking down on him.

  “I’ll ask you again. Who do you work for?”

  He shifted his eyes toward me again, and his mouth started to move.

  I held up a finger. “Before you answer with something stupid, I want you to understand something.” I pulled my gun out from behind me and cocked it. “Do you understand me?”

  He spat blood on the pavement next to his head. I took that as a “Yes.”

  “I work for Troy Romero,” he said, grinning to show me his bloody teeth.

  “Troy, huh? What’s his game?” I asked.

  His grin broadened into a smile.

  “Not telling? Alright. Guys, teach him about fucking with the Steel Devils.” I stepped back to make room for the prospects to step in.

  “Oh, gladly,” one of them said. I heard how eager he was to stomp the shit out of the man in the suit lying at our feet. They both punched and kicked and stomped on him.

  I put my hands on their shoulders and pulled them back.

  “Had enough?” I asked. “You ready to tell me more?”

  His eyes were closed. His breath was raspy. He spat up more blood and tried to relax his breathing. He wasn’t going to say anything else. If he even could.

  “Good job, guys. Now, help me get him up on the back of my bike.

  “How are we going to get him to sit up straight?” one of them asked.

  “Figure it out. Tie him down somehow,” I told them. “And cover his head. I don’t want him to see where I’m taking him.”

  They set to work without asking any other questions. They pulled a canvas bag out of the trash – why there was a canvas bag in my dumpster, I wasn’t sure, but weirder shit had come out of there before.

  “Come on, hurry up,” I urged them.

  They pulled twine out of my saddlebags and tied him so that he sat up pretty straight on the back of the motorcycle. Another job well done by these two aspiring members of the MC. They just kept giving me more good things to say about them at my next meeting with the senior members.

  “Good job. Keep an eye out in case he wasn’t alone. Let me know
if anyone else shows up.” I climbed on the back of my bike and cranked it up with a roar. They stood back and watched as I peeled out and drove off.

  They didn’t know where I was going, and neither did the jackass on the back of my bike. I drove him past Lilah’s house, out past where we’d had our picnic. I took him down a dirt road in the middle of the night. The only light for miles was my headlight. I parked the bike, running, and walked him into the trees, where I took the twine that had been used to tie him to the motorcycle and tied him loosely to a tree, leaving the bag over his head.

  I figured in the morning, he’d wake up and find himself lost in the woods. I wondered how long it would take him to find his way out, and once he did, I wondered how long it was going to take him to find his way back home.

  I hopped back on the bike and drove off, leaving him there. If he died, fine. If not, he’d have a hell of a time finding his way back to society.

  I drove through the predawn darkness, heading back to the clubhouse and the beautiful woman waiting for me in my bed. I wondered if she would give herself to me again before morning came to wake us up.

  I did have some news for her. Her husband was behind the attempted break-ins at the shop, which meant he was probably behind the break-in at her house, despite what he’d told her about it being someone he owed money to. I wondered why he was targeting us. They were already divorced long before we met, so it wasn’t like I had been sleeping with her while they were together.

  He was holding her kid, and there was a good chance he was behind everything. I didn’t like that combination. That put him in a position of power. I had to find out where he was, who he was working with, and what his deal was.

  I also had to tell Lilah what was going on. I had to tell her that I suspected her ex-husband was behind her break-in and that his whole story about leaving town to take her son somewhere safe was a crock of shit. He was using that to cover something else up. I had no clue what it was, and that left me in a bad position, taking partial information and incomplete theories to her. I was going to sound crazy.

  Hell, it already sounded crazy to me, but it was all I had to go on. I couldn’t make it home fast enough. The drive home seemed to take longer than the drive out had. Maybe it was because I had information to give Lilah, and I was anxious to get there.

  Maybe it was because I was tired, and even though I was glad to have some information on what was going on, I was still pissed I’d been pulled out of bed at an ungodly hour for it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lilah

  “Hey, you’re Saw’s old lady, aren’t you?” a guy downstairs asked me.

  I wasn’t. At least, we hadn’t talked about it any, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from using it to strike up a conversation and get the help I needed. I had grown restless upstairs waiting for him to come back, and that was when I realized I had to return to work the next day. I needed to grab a few things from the house before morning. If being Cole’s “old lady” helped me convince one of his MC brothers to help me get the stuff I needed, then I was his old lady.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I told him. “Lilah,” I added, holding my hand out to him.

  “Tate,” he said, taking my hand. “But they all call me Razor.” His dark eyes sparkled as he shook my hand, another one taken with my beauty.

  “Razor, I need some help,” I told him. “I need someone to go to my house with me.”

  “What’s up?” he asked, putting his pool stick across the table. He crossed his thin, muscular, tattooed arms. I could only imagine how he got the nickname Razor. There were scars all up and down his arms, wounds from old fights most likely.

  “I’m staying here with Saw tonight, but I’ve got to go to work tomorrow, and I left all my work stuff at home. He’s gone to check on his tattoo shop because someone was trying to break into it earlier tonight. I can’t really wait for him to get back. He’s been gone a while, and I don’t know when he’ll be home,” I explained.

  “Say no more. I will be glad to help you out. You wanna ride on my bike to get there?” he asked.

  “No, my car’s here. I just need someone to come with me.”

  He gave me a suspicious look and turned his head. “What do you mean you want someone to ride with you to your house? What’s wrong with your house?”

  “I’m staying here because someone broke in the other night, and I’m worried somebody might show up while I’m there.”

  “Oh, you think the break-in at Titan Ink and the break-in at your house are related,” he said as if it were a revelation to him that they even could have been connected.

  “Yep, that’s it exactly. According to Saw, coincidences like that don’t just happen at random,” I said.

  It was so weird calling him Saw around the guys in the MC. I was so used to calling him Cole, and he’d never corrected me, but it seemed like the guys preferred their nicknames, except for a couple of them. So, I had to deal with it as long as I was talking to them.

  “I mean, he’s been in it a long time. He’d know,” Razor conceded.

  “That’s what I’m thinking. So, are you down with helping me out?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I can ride with you and watch your back. It could be exciting.”

  “Good.”

  The truth was I really needed to get out of the clubhouse for a few minutes and try to clear my head. I was worried that if the two break-ins were connected, Cole was going to be angry once he figured out that I’d brought trouble to his doorstep. I didn’t know what that meant for me. That was the problem.

  Was he going to kick me out of the room when he got back? Was he going to storm in and accuse me of setting him up? What then? What if he did? I didn’t have anywhere to go. I didn’t have enough saved up to rent a hotel room for more than a few nights. I supposed I could have asked Jenna to let me crash on her couch, but I didn’t want to dump my crazy on her either.

  What about my son? If he thought I set him up, was he going to give up on the search for Micah and Troy? Was I going to have to rely on the police to help me find my son? That wouldn’t have worked. I was going to need someone like Cole to help me navigate this new world I’d found myself in.

  That was when I decided to go to the house and grab a few things for work. I didn’t actually need them before morning. I could have left a few minutes early to run by the house and pick them up in daylight – when I didn’t have to worry about anyone hiding at the house – but that didn’t give me an excuse to get out and get some fresh air. Thankfully I had a member of the MC with me to make sure I was safe.

  “Which car is yours?” Razor asked as we walked outside.

  No matter what time of year it was, the early morning air always felt the same. There was something sweet about it, something light. It was as if the weight of the night was preparing to be lifted off the world so that the sun could shine again. The air felt that way when we walked outside. There was an energy in those early morning hours that the rest of the day didn’t seem to have.

  I pointed to my car, parked in the line of cars along the edge of the parking lot. He walked beside me all the way to it. The guys in the Steel Devils were definitely respectful of the women surrounding the MC. They believed in taking care of us, and I wasn’t mad at them for it. It was nice to be treated like I mattered for a change, and not just by one person, but by his friends and associates as well.

  I never got that with Troy or his people.

  I unlocked the driver side door, turning the key twice to unlock the rest of the car. We both opened our doors and slid in.

  “Alright, where to?” Razor asked, eager to get moving. I figured he was probably more eager to try to find a fight than to actually help me, but if there was a fight, that was fine, too, as long as I grabbed what I needed and got out of there, allowing myself a few minutes away from the clubhouse while still coming back afterwards to where I was safest.

  “You’ll see. I live on the outskirts of town,” I said as I pul
led out of the parking space.

  “Excellent.” He adjusted himself in the seat, getting more comfortable.

  As we rode along, he pretended to enjoy the pop music playing on my radio. He bobbed his head and tapped his fingers distractedly on the door. I could tell he wasn’t really enjoying the music, but he was trying to play it off, so he wasn’t as bored.

  “If you’d rather listen to something else, feel free to change the station,” I told him.

  “You don’t mind?” he asked, reaching for the buttons on the face of my radio.

  “No, go ahead,” I said dismissively.