by Leah Wilde
I sighed and sipped my coffee, turning my attention away from the men in the room to the hallway where Rogue’s room was. I could only distract myself from worrying about him for so long before my mind drifted back to him.
A noise came from across the river. I turned around and saw that there were men storming the warehouse where we’d just been.
“Hey, guys,” I called out to Mason and the other members sitting in the living room. “Something’s going on at the warehouse.”
“You think they just found something?” Mason asked as he walked up. I could see his reflection in the glass. He looked smug, confident, unshaken. It was like he didn’t even care what they were doing over there.
“What would they have found?” I asked him.
“Probably some secret stash of weapons or drugs,” he said, and shrugged. “Then again, they could just be imagining things. It’s pretty dark out there.” He blew it off as he walked back over toward the couches.
This was my family that we were talking about here. I turned back around to watch. I had no idea what could have inspired the cops to storm a building full of dead men and spent ammunition. Until all of this happened, I hadn’t even known that my brother was a criminal to begin with. I always thought of him as some great businessman.
I took another sip of my coffee.
Mason had been right. Standing by the window trying to stay awake wasn’t going to make the time move any faster. It wasn’t going to wake Rogue up any sooner. I needed a place to sleep.
“I’m going to bed,” I told him as I put my cup in the sink and wandered back through the living room.
“Good. Whatever they find over there will be on the news tomorrow. We can all get caught up to speed then,” he said. “If we need you, we’ll find you,” he added.
“Thanks for everything, Mason,” I told him as I walked into the hallway. Yeah, he was going to find me if he needed me for anything. I was going to lie down next to Rogue and share the bed with him.
I may have been going to bed, but I wasn’t going to put myself in a position that would make it hard to get to him if he needed me. I was going to be right there next to him all morning, until one or both of us woke up.
I carefully pushed the door to his room open and crept in. It was dark except for a small lamp on the bedside table. Rogue was on his back in the bed with covers draped over him.
He was snoring. Snoring! It warmed my heart to hear him snore. I didn’t know much about what happened when people died, but I imagined that people close to death didn’t snore in their sleep. It just made sense to me that he was already on the road to recovery if he had gone from the weak breaths he had been taking when we found him to the deep snoring I heard coming from the bed.
I slid out of my shoes and stepped carefully around to the other side of the bed. I climbed in and pulled the covers up over myself so I could lie there next to him and share his body heat. I would have lain down naked if we had been alone, but I was sure Mason or one of the other guys would have been in there at some point to check on him.
I settled on my right side, facing him. I wanted to put an arm across his chest, but I also didn’t want to risk hurting the wound on his side by putting too much pressure on him. I rested my head on the pillow next to him and closed my eyes while I listened to the amazing sound of Rogue breathing next to me.
Words could not express how happy it made me to hear him breathing normally, and that was fine, because there wasn’t anyone to tell how good it made me feel to know that he was going to be okay. I certainly wasn’t going to talk to Rogue about it, and everyone else was dealing with it in their own way.
Brodie was shut up in his room. Mason was going to drink until he passed out. And the other members seemed to be doing just as I was, trying to sleep through it.
Chapter 32
“I should have known,” Mason said quietly, poking his head into Rogue’s room to check on the sleeping MC president.
“Should have known what?” I asked, sitting up on my elbows. I was blushing and smiling, and I couldn’t help it. I knew what he meant. I knew I had been caught in my overnight vigil.
“Should have known you were going to sleep in here. Come on. I made Brodie cook some breakfast for everyone. He’ll make a good old lady for a biker one day.” He chuckled and shook his head.
“Hey, at least he’s good for something, right?” I said as I slid out of bed.
“Damn, you’re still dressed and everything. And you’re talking like one of us already. This is too good.” He continued laughing.
I checked behind me to make sure Rogue was still asleep.
“He’ll be fine. He’s doing better than the rest of us right now, I promise you,” Mason grunted as we walked into the hallway.
“Where is everybody?” I asked as we walked into the living room. The living room and dining room were both empty, and the kitchen was spotless. It didn’t look like anyone had cooked anything in there in months.
“They’re out on the patio.” Mason was grabbing another beer.
“Did you sleep at all?” I asked him.
“Yeah, just grabbing a little hair of the dog,” he answered. “Need anything? We keep some whiskey here, too, in case we need it. Brodie doesn’t drink it.” I could hear his opinion of his fellow member in his tone.
“So, all joking aside, what’s the deal?” I asked him.
“The deal?”
“Yeah, with Brodie. What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you over breakfast,” he said, standing up and opening his beer.
We walked outside through a glass door behind the dining room. Brodie’s patio wasn’t right on the back side of his house. There were stairs leading down from the house to where the patio sat along the bank of the river. It was very exotic, and the whole set up seemed like it belonged on a beach somewhere, not hovering precariously over a polluted river used only for industry, but I wasn’t about to complain.
He had a pool and a hot tub on the patio along with a raised garden where he had lots of exotic and brightly colored plants growing around the edges of the deck. He also had a fully functional gas kitchen. It was ridiculous.
What was more ridiculous was to believe that he had been able to afford all of this as a member of a motorcycle gang. A lot of my questions about The Hellions were answered just by the luxury in which the VP lived. It made me wonder why I hadn’t seen Rogue’s house yet.
We had bacon, eggs, sausage, and biscuits. Yes, he even had an oven in his outdoor kitchen. Mason and I were both greeted with plates when we reached the bottom of the stairs. Brodie didn’t smile as he served us, but I could tell he was in his element. He obviously took a lot of pride in his home, and especially in his patio.
Mason nudged my arm with his elbow and walked me over to a table away from everyone else so we could sit and talk.
“Hey, does everyone in the MC live like this?” I asked him as we sat down.
“We make sure all of our members live comfortably,” Mason answered, “but most of us don’t have anything like this. Brodie has a nice house. Reese has a large house, but it’s nothing as extravagant as this. Mine is pretty nice. I call it my bunker.”
“Why am I not surprised?” I blurted out, laughing.
“What?” he asked with a goofy grin on his face.
“You just seem so military. I can imagine you stockpiling weapons at home just in case society crumbles around you or something,” I explained, and I noticed he wasn’t laughing anymore. In fact, he had a very serious look on his face. I expected him to tell me that he truly believed society was about to collapse around us, and we all needed bunkers.
“I’m a former Marine,” he said. “I just take my weapons seriously. It’s not even about defense. It’s about toys for me. I have a firing range and a little homemade training course. Those things take up most of my property, along with my arsenal. No, I don’t expect the collapse of society. I’m not one of those guys. I just enjoy fighting, an
d I’m glad I have the training to enjoy it even more.”
“Wow, that’s a relief actually. For a moment there I thought you were about to explain to me why society really was about to crumble,” I said, laughing nervously. “What about Rogue? What’s his house like?” I asked.
“He didn’t tell you?” Mason replied with his own question.
“Tell me what?”
“He gave it up when he went to prison. He put it on the market when he went to trial and sold the property, the house, and everything in it,” Mason explained.
“What did he do with the money?” I followed up.
“No one knows. See, one of the problems guys like Brodie have with Rogue is that while he’s the president of The Hellions MC, he can also be very private. If he feels like he needs to keep something quiet, he can. He’s been known to go outside of the MC to handle MC business quietly. I think it’s brilliant. Like, we had no idea he was working on you while he was in prison because he didn’t reach out to us or to any of our guys in the pen, and yes, we have a few old-timers serving life sentences. They basically decided they could serve us better by serving time, and they’ve created a prison network for us. They’re geniuses, but it’s also kind of stupid. They could be out here living the good life, but whatever.”
“So, he kept the money private?” I insisted.
“Yep. In his own private account somewhere. No one knows where it is or how much he sold the house for, and I, for one, don’t care. As long as he’s not doing something to hurt the MC, he can do whatever the hell he wants with his money and his time,” Mason explained to me.
While we talked, I got Mason to tell me a lot about The Hellions. He wasn’t going to try to keep me out of the MC the way Rogue had tried to do. Rogue wanted to protect me. Mason treated me like I was one of them.
He told me about their history. They had started with Rogue’s old man and a few of his buddies who rode. They made enough money selling drugs to keep themselves afloat. Rogue had grown up in the business, so when he took over, he saw an opportunity to expand the MC, which he had done a good job of up until he went into prison.
“It was just too big to last once he was gone. There was no direction. You should have met Brodie back in those days. He was a badass. Nobody stepped out of line when he was in the room, but losing Rogue broke him, man, and he’s never been able to return. He sort of gave up on the MC once people started leaving. I don’t think he’s going to be around much longer. Now that this situation with Titus has been handled, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these guys were axed.” He took a sip of his beer and looked around the patio.
I could see what he meant. It was like they had just grown too comfortable with the luxury of it all. They let the good life overshadow what got them there. The good life wasn’t what I had seen at the warehouse. The good life didn’t build the MC. It was the rough life of the streets that had built The Hellions. It was taking down competitors like my older brother that allowed them to have nice houses like Brodie’s and Mason’s.
For the first time, I could honestly say I wished my brother had really taken me in all those years ago. I wished right then that he had shown me the ins and outs of his business so that I would have understood everything that was going on. I could have applied myself to what he was doing.
At the same time, if I had applied myself to my brother’s organization, I would have been stuck working with him and the robots who served him instead of sitting at a table with someone as real as Mason sitting across from me.
He was a good person, a genuine person. I knew he wouldn’t shoot me a line of bull, but I couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t care enough to do it or if it was because he cared too much to do it. Either way, it was good to have someone like him on my side. He had singlehandedly taken me under his wing.
While Brodie had asked me many times if I was okay, it seemed like he was just asking because he was supposed to or because he needed someone to talk to himself. When Mason checked on me, it was because he genuinely wanted to make sure I was alright. If I said I was or if he could tell I was, he left it alone. Now, by telling me about The Hellions, it seemed like he was really just trying to make sure I was included and not left out.
“So tell me,” I said after a few moments of eating in silence, “why don’t I see any old ladies around here? Do you guys have some strange rules against women?”
Mason snorted and covered his mouth like he was about to spit out his beer from laughing so hard.
“Violet, I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “It just has not been a big part of Hellions culture, you know? From what I can tell, there have never been a whole lot of old ladies hanging about the MC. Now, I know for a fact that Rogue and Reese love the women. I’ve seen a few other guys pop up here and there with one from time to time, but you’ve probably been around us longer than anyone else, if that tells you anything.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
“Nope, not at all. It’s like everyone’s just too devoted to the MC to have anyone hang around that could distract them from the work at hand, but I think all of that is about to change.” With a nod and a wink, he grabbed our empty plates and took them to Brodie.
After breakfast, everyone went back up to the house and lounged around in the living room. Brodie turned on the TV so we could check the news for what happened in the warehouse.
“Wait, that’s not the local news,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” Mason agreed thoughtfully.
We were watching one of the national news channels as they reported on the raid that took place at the warehouse after the shooting. They showed video of all the drugs they had found in a storage room on the second floor. Several millions of dollars’ worth of heroin, cocaine, meth, and even marijuana had been uncovered in different parts of the warehouse, they were reporting.
I looked down from the screen and saw that all of the MC members present were looking at me, as if I had some knowledge of it, as if I was supposed to have known what my brother was up to over at the warehouse all those years.
“What? I had no clue,” I told the guys. “No clue whatsoever.”
Then, behind me, I heard the groan.
“They found all that?” Rogue asked, leaning against the wall. “In the warehouse?”
I turned and looked at him. He looked rough. His eyes had dark circles around them, and his skin was a pale, almost sickly color. His cheeks were sunken in and he just looked emaciated all around.
I was frozen to the spot where I stood. I couldn’t move. Mason quickly darted over to him, though, thankfully.
Chapter 33
Rogue
We made the national news. Well, Titus made the national news. There was no mention of the gang of bikers who had taken out all of his men prior to police showing up to make one of the largest drug busts in the nation’s history.
I probably had no business getting out of bed. At least that was what Mason told me when he helped me from my spot along the wall to one of Brodie’s couches in front of the TV. It was funny when he had to run the other members off, but I couldn’t laugh. My side was hurting too much from where I had been stabbed.
It had been such a pleasant surprise to wake up in one of the spare rooms at Brodie’s house. When I had closed my eyes the last time, I thought it was for the last time. Then, to wake up and find myself surrounded by the people I cared about the most was amazing. I had the MC and my old lady, Violet.
Seeing her standing in the living room, so overcome with emotion that she couldn’t even move, I knew there was no use fighting it anymore. That was my woman right there. She was with us instead of sitting at home pining over her lost brother.
“What do I need to do?” she asked Mason as he helped me to the couch.
“See if there’s anything left from breakfast this morning. Rogue could probably use something to eat and something to drink,” he told her.
“Yeah, food will be good
.” My voice was so rough and scratchy, like sandpaper along my throat. I wasn’t really hungry, but my stomach felt hollow. I needed something heavy to keep me grounded.
After she brought some food and something to drink in the room, Mason made her sit down next to me instead of letting her run around trying to help. I could tell they had bonded while I was sleeping off the previous night. They acted like brother and sister.
It was official. She was in.
Brodie, however, was nowhere to be seen. He was probably hiding out in his bedroom or outside, just being the moody brat he had become since my incarceration. I didn’t have the time or the energy to worry much about him. There was a lot going on in our world, even as we sat back at Brodie’s house to recover from it.