“I can’t eat right now,” I say to him, and he sighs and puts the plate on the table before us, returning to his seat next to me and pulls me against him.
“You always were a stubborn pain in my ass.”
Chapter 14
It hurts because it matters.
– John Green
Tex
I wake up to a strong stinging pain in my side, it radiates from the front right of my stomach and spreads into my back. I try to turn, but it’s no use. I’m not able. I fight it, hating how weak I feel in this moment. I turn my face to the left and look around me, seeing Roxy laying on the bed curled into a ball next to me. We’re in a bedroom, or what looks to be one. We both lay on a massive sized bed, a king if I had to guess. The sun shines in through the curtains, the walls a dark shade of blue. Dark brown oak furniture covers the room, a dresser and then a vanity over on the far wall.
Right about now I’m wondering where the hell she took us, and then it hits me – we have to be at her brother’s club. It’s the only place she would have thought to go, and from the looks of it, it’s a good thing that we’re here.
She rolls over, hitting my side and jolts up, her face turns into pure fear. “Oh, my god! Are you okay?!”
I snake my arm around her and try to pull her closer to me, showing her I’m perfectly fine, but when I go to pull her I strain myself, the pain becoming sharp like a dagger.
“No, no. Stop, don’t hurt yourself,” she murmurs, scooting closer to me, concern laced through her voice.
I scan my eyes over her body, checking to make sure that she’s alright. “What happened?”
“The short version? After you were shot, I drove us here, kind of fast. Lloyd has a doc on payroll with the club, and she patched you up. You lost a lot of blood, had to have a couple transfusions, and you’ve been out of it for a few days. The bullet went through which was good, but you have to take it easy…”
“I’m not gonna stay in this bed forever, firefly.” I won’t. She knows me better than to sit down and get waited on hand and foot.
“You are, ‘cause you know that the second you get up off this bed without allowing your body to heal, I will be terrified beyond belief. Please, it’s only been a few days… we’ve both been through a lot… you need to rest. Please, just do this for me.” And just like that, she’s got me hooked. Rox knows I’ll do just about anything for her, including bowing down and sitting my ass in this bed for a few more days.
“Four days. It’s all you’re getting, take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it, and I’ll take this too.” She leans over me, careful to place her hands on the bed and not my body. She meets her lips against mine, kissing me slowly, passionately in a way that I’ve never kissed any other woman before. I snake my hand up her back, grabbing the back of her neck and hold her in place, getting everything I want out of her. She tastes like cotton candy, vibrant and sinfully sweet.
She moans into our kiss. Right about now I hate how any time I try to move pain shoots through my body like a raging inferno. There are so many things I want to do to this woman, and I’ve already had to wait for far too long. I don’t want to wait any longer, it’s pure torture. She was supposed to be mine years ago, and now I finally have her back in my grasp, right where she’s always belonged.
“We can’t.”
“I fucking know,” I grumble, skimming my hand from the back of her neck down to her perfectly sculpted ass. I give her a good squeeze, holding what’s mine – what she knows is mine.
“Mmmm.”
A knock to the door makes her jump, almost to where she falls straight on top of me. She hops off the bed while I put my arms under me and pull myself up so I’m sitting, pain expanding through my body yet again.
The door opens, and in comes three men, two of them look undeniably similar to Rox. Each of them shares the same medium shade of brown hair but have small differences in their eyes. The men have a light shade of blue where Rox has dark chocolatey brown. “These are my brothers, Lloyd AKA Fist, George AKA Cracker, and this is their Dad, Boone.” Rox points to the taller brother, showing me who is who. The first one is Fist and the muscle packed one is Cracker. Boone is the last man standing with a long white beard that goes down to the bottom of his stomach.
Each man meets my eyes, offering a nod as a greeting. “It’s nice to meet you all. I do wish the circumstances were a bit different, though.”
“Damn straight, you two brought a helluva mess up here,” Fist tells me.
I nod. There’s no denying it. Honestly, he’s being easy on us. We brought a fucking war. After being alongside Rage for years I know what he’s capable of, and I understand how his mind works. He will do everything that he can to hurt us. There are no lines that he will not cross. Anything is fair game at this point.
Roxy starts to shake, tears slide over her cheeks. I try to get up from the bed and fail yet again. Fuck, Rage did a number on me. I’ve been shot a couple of times when club business went south, but never did my body need this long to heal. Usually after a day or two I just bit my lip and dealt with business, but all the other times they were flesh wounds. This did a hell of a lot more than just go through flesh, I hardly even noticed the one that hit my leg.
“What’s been going down since I’ve been out?” I look to Boone first, assuming he’s in charge but quickly remember the Reapers aren’t his club anymore. He’s handed the gavel down to Fist, and now he runs the show.
“Rage has been fucking shit up per usual. Rumor has it he’s got some shit going down in the South with the Sons of Gods. Not really sure what he’s trying to get at, though.”
Roxy’s head pipes up. “Oh my god, you have to get a message to Zeus.” Zeus is the Prez of the Sons of Gods, he wasn’t an ally to the Demons of Hell, but I have a feeling he’s in it good with the Reapers. “One of the other charter Prez’s knows his wife’s routine, there was talk about going after her and the kids. Something was said about their daycare, please Lloyd, you gotta tell him. If something happens to those two baby girls he has…”
“Consider it done. Crack, go call up Zeus and tell him what we’ve learned.” Cracker exits the room on command, leaving us with Boone and Fist.
“From the sounds of it, you’ve been the one to watch out for my sister,” Fist tells me.
“She gives me more credit than what’s due.” I wasn’t there for her enough. I’ve failed her in more ways than I can count, but I will promise her one thing; I will never let her down ever again.
“I don’t really give a fuck how you ended up here or what you let him get away with. Point is, you’re the reason she’s here today, and I gotta thank you for that. She needed a wakeup call, and I’m not really sure what you did, but you got her here. I worried every day if I was going to hear about her being killed. You know how much it pissed me off that I couldn’t just go down and get her? How much it tore me apart knowing that my selfish need to take my sister from that monstrosity of a man would get most of my club killed? It fucked with my head, man. I couldn’t make the decision to go down and take her from him, but her coming here on her own opens up the playing field. Her running from him changes things. It means I have a right, as her brother, as her Prez. I have a vow to protect every Reaper, and a Reaper she sure as fuck is. Same blood that runs through my veins runs through hers. Rage can try as much as he wants, but no way in hell is that motherfucker going to make it here alive. So, I’ll ask you both this, who do you stand with, the Demons of Hell, or the Reapers?”
Roxy and I look at each other, speaking at the exact same time. There is no doubt in our minds. “The Reapers.”
“Good. We’ve got some shit we need to discuss later. Our bylaws are a lot different than that stupid fucking code y’all have down South. We’ll make things legitimate, and we protect our own. For now, rest, we can wait a couple days before we have to go into the nitty gritty.”
“Thank you,” Roxy says to her brother.
“D
on’t thank him yet, cupcake. You two haven’t heard the bylaws.” Boone cackles, smacking Fist on the back. Fist walks out through the doorway, and Boone is left alone in the room with us for only a moment.
“I hope you two are ready to get branded.”
Chapter 15
A queen will always turn pain into power.
– The Minds Journal
Roxy
I couldn’t call Vince a liar, he kept his word and gave me exactly what he promised. Four days. He gave me four days of him laying around, doing practically nothing except allowing his body to heal. It was torture for him but made me happier than I could express. It takes a lot for this man to hunker down and relax. If I knew anything though, it’s that he’d do just about anything for me.
“You can’t keep watching a man like that twenty-four seven, babycakes. You’ll drive him crazy,” Mindi tells me. She’s Lloyd’s wife. She’s this beautiful, drop dead gorgeous blonde. I’m envious of her, and I mean it. I’m pretty, and I know that I am, but this girl has genes that others would kill for. Curves in all the right places, a nice rack that any man would love to suffocate himself between – and this is flat cake Fanny talking. I just found out last night that she’s pregnant. Her and Lloyd weren’t really trying, but here they were. Knowing her just a few days I knew she’d be a great mom. Sometimes you could tell a lot about a person by only just meeting them, and this woman was good people.
“Maybe I want to rile him up a bit,” I add with a wink. Mindi cackles next to me, wiping the dish cloth along the bar to clean it up. Your clubhouse can never be too clean, there’s always filth somewhere. Whether it be good old germs or the club whores who sneak through the cracks.
“You keep talking like that, and I won’t be the only one with an unexpected pregnancy.” I go silent at her joke, but force a small smile along the end of it. She doesn’t know anything about what I’ve been through. After all, it’s not really getting to know one another conversation. That’s the type of talk you have over a few too many beers.
“Nah, we haven’t even talked about that kind of stuff,” I explain, hoping that she won’t dig too much into my personal life. I already feel like Mindi and I will be good friends, but I’m not going to tell her all of my horrors just yet.
“With the way he looks at you? He’ll have you popping them out left and right! Lloyd is gonna do the same, I have a feeling. Let’s just call it intuition, and boy do I have my hands full enough with Zane and Kade, hell, I didn’t even birth those two, but their Pops is a piece of shit if you ask me and I take them along with me as much as I can.” She’s talking about the two toddlers who I’ve seen running around the club, they’re fraternal twins and thank goodness for that. Their personalities are just about the same, and if they were identical there’s no telling which one would be who.
“They’re in awe of you,” I tell her, smiling at remembering how those two boys look at her.
“Damn straight better be! I’m their Momma!” She grins from ear to ear, lifting the towel from the bar she tosses it in a basket behind her. Every day we take them down and wash them, bringing out new towels for the boys to use the next day. It’s Mindi’s dubbed way of making sure the clubhouse stays clean. She has a joke that it isn’t a clubhouse, but the hen house and she’ll run it the way she wants to. I can’t tell you how much I laughed at that one, especially considering the fact she was on my brother’s lap, and he didn’t say a damn thing. I would have been slapped for making a remark like that, but Lloyd just winked and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
Mindi and I tidy up the clubhouse as much as possible, then start prepping food for our big Sunday barbeque. It’s something they – or I guess we do every week. Sunday is a day to be thankful for, a day for our families to come together and break bread. It has beautiful sentiment behind it, and I couldn’t be happier to be here with my family.
We end up prepping over a dozen racks of ribs, a few rib eyes and some Boston butts, ten pounds of mashed potatoes, coleslaw, pasta salad and even made a variety of cookies, cakes and some home-made ice cream.
I see two small little boys come running up to me after the buzzer goes off for the oven, they both try to climb their way up into the barstools and fail miserably, so I lift each of them up and help them get seated. “Are you two little men in here for some licorice?” I tease them, remembering just how much I hated licorice as a child.
Both of them shake their heads.
“Oh, so it must be jello, then?”
“No!” Kade screams out while Zane scrunches up his nose and makes a grossed-out face, causing me to bust into a bout of laughter.
“Ah, so it must be these double chocolate cookies I just made?”
I’m met with two boys who shake their heads at me while eyeing the cookies hungrily. Zane starts to grab a cookie, and I take his hand in my own. “Give them a minute honey, they just came out. And don’t you know what the best thing is with a warm chocolate cookie?”
“No, what’s dat?” Kade asks, his little eyes burning straight through mine.
“A nice cool glass of milk, want me to get you both one?” I don’t wait for their answers as I grab their cups from the cabinet, small ones that won’t hold too much incase they spill. Then I go to the fridge and grab the milk, pouring a little bit in their glasses. After the milk is put back in the fridge I hand them both a cookie then grab one for myself, breaking it in half and dipping it in Zane’s milk, taking a big chunk out of the soggy milk filled deliciousness.
“Mmmmm,” I moan, chewing on the sugary delight.
“Oooooooo,” Zane mumbles, repeating my action and smiling as he chews. Kade follows his brother’s movement and is just as happy with the outcome.
“Showing these two new tricks, huh firefly?” Vince says from behind me as he wraps his arms around my waist, setting his chin on my shoulder.
“Only the good ones,” I counter back playfully.
“Now why is it I don’t believe that?”
I take a look at the clock on the wall and see it’s almost time for dinner. Lloyd, George, and most of the guys helped take the food out a few minutes prior. I was just waiting on the cookies to finish. “We’d better hurry up, boys.” They both look at the cookies, and I sigh, knowing they’re men after my own heart.
I slip through Vince’s embrace and grab four cookies, two for me and one for each of them, putting them in a plastic baggy and hiding it on the tip top of the fridge where no one would be looking for them. “I saved us some cookies for later, alright? Will you two gentleman help me take the cookies out to everyone?”
“Two? What am I?” Vince laughs.
“You, my dear, are not a gentleman by any means, you’ve just been on good behavior as of late” I joke, winking at him.
Kade and Zane are the best little helpers, each holding a small plate of cookies. The four of us walk out to the back of the club and join the rest of the gang. There are tons of us here, it’s not just the main members, it’s their extended families, their cousin’s cousins. I have to admit, I love it; how friendly the Reapers are. They really show everyone what it truly means to be part of an MC.
I sit down with Vince and begin to eat, ‘cause Lloyd told me tonight Vince is getting branded. No longer will he be a member of the Demons, nor will I.
We’re Reapers now, and it’s about time we both made a change.
Chapter 16
The best things in life are dangerous: motorcycles and women. – Anonymous
Roxy
The Reapers didn’t brand the way the Demons did. I discovered that the second I walked in through the door. Lloyd told us to meet him in the converted barn turned garage out back later after most of the families had gone home for the night. It was a little past nine, and we still had a crowd of people at the club.
I look around, scanning my surroundings for the iron that I believe Lloyd is going to use, but I don’t see it, nor do I see a fire. What I see instead is a set up for a tattoo. I’m con
fused and lost at the exact same time.
“What are they doing?” I whisper to Vince, who stands right next to me with his hand around my waist.
“Every club does things differently, the last thing I expected was for them to take it to the extreme like Rage does. I don’t know what they’re going to do until it happens. I wish I could tell you more,” he tells me lowly, looking down at me. I suppose that I should feel grateful that I don’t see an iron. Back at the Demons I had to watch a few men get patched into the club, which included being branded like a farmer would mark a cow. In a way, I guess the brothers were all of Rage’s livestock, to do whatever he deemed necessary.
I glance around, seeing George, Boone, and a bunch of the other bikers whose names I am still learning. There isn’t an obscene amount of them, but it’ll just take me a bit of time to remember everyone. We all wait, standing around, a few of them begin to chat with one another. Laughter fills the room, and suddenly it doesn’t feel like we’re waiting for hours. No longer is my heart pounding in my chest. I’m with my brothers – my family, and they would never do anything to intentionally hurt me or Vince. I have to believe in that, to have faith in them.
Lloyd walks in through the doorway of the garage, as he does everyone goes silent. The respect people have for him is proven in the way everyone goes quiet, looking to him to speak, awaiting what their leader is going to say. It is so much different than what I am used to. Rage instilled fear in all of those around him, which is the only reason the Demons of Hell numbers are as big as they are. People would rather bend the knee and kneel before a demon then lose their lives for believing in something else. I would say they were weak, that your stances gave you meaning, but I would be a hypocrite. I had kneeled before him many times, until I was given the opportunity for something greater.
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