“So fuckin’ what? It is what it is. How does it matter that you used to know her? Now she’s a different person!” Cash responded with a growl and I turned to Grimm.
“She had information for me.”
“What kind of information.”
“On Lynch and the Sons of Satan. Gunther. The asshole who was squirming around with Lynch that night. The truce was a farce.”
Grimm was staring me down and then he looked away from me and at Cash. Then he sighed like he was tired.
“Are you seriously going to use this chick to try and convince me to dishonor the terms of the truce?”
I looked at Cash, I looked at Rogue, and then the other guys standing around me. From the look on their faces I could tell none of them really believed what I’d said. I wished Bones was here. Maybe, just maybe, he would’ve been on my side.
I turned back to Grimm.
“I know the timing seems weird, but that is what she came here to say.”
“And then you fucked her!” Cash reminded me.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with the information she gave me!” I growled back at him and Grimm held up his hand to shut us up.
“Stop it! The two of you. Stand down. Back off. Shouting at each other isn’t going to help. Patch, whatever this Samantha girl told you, does she have any proof for it?” he asked.
I could feel Cash’s eyes burning a hole in my body. Would it kill him to lay off me and just give me a chance to fuckin’ explain this thing?
“No. She has no proof! She was risking her life by coming over here, by being seen walking into our Clubhouse!”
I didn’t know myself if I could trust her completely. I didn’t really know her. Maybe this was all a ploy. Maybe the Sons of Satan were instigating us to make the first move, to break the conditions of our truce so that they would then have the excuse to launch an attack on us. Maybe they had some other complicated twisted plan. There was no way for me to know right now.
But at this moment, I was choosing to trust in what Samantha had told me. I was choosing to trust the way she had looked at me when she said she hated them, that she wanted them dead.
“Maybe she was risking her life, like you say. Or maybe she was sent here by Lynch, or one of his rebelling guys. Like Gunther or his men, the ones who clearly want to overthrow him as the President of their Club.”
I knew Grimm had a point, and the environment in the Clubhouse right now was geared in hostility against me. They all knew I’d fucked her in the supply closet. A woman from the Sons of Satan. They had no reason to trust her and maybe they were starting to lose their trust in me too?
Fuck!
I needed to take a step back and assess this situation.
I needed to first figure out a way to find out if Samantha was telling the truth about Lynch and the truce so that I could use it as evidence to show my club. And all this needed to be done fast. If Samantha was right, then we were going to be under attack soon. An attack that we weren’t prepared for.
12
Samantha
Nothing had worked. I lost track of time. I didn’t know how long I was locked up in this cage. I’d begged and pleaded and cried and tried to do everything I could to get through to Lynch or any of the others in the club, but they were not going to let me free. I was their prisoner and their slave, and even though they hadn’t started hurting me physically yet, I knew it was going to happen soon. It was just a matter of time. None of these men had a sympathetic or kind bone in their bodies. They were not going to miss this opportunity to torture and hurt a woman they could crush under their feet.
I’d been crying, collapsed to the ground, my forehead pressed to the bars of the cage. They had left me alone in this room, in this cage, for who knew how long. I didn’t know what was happening outside. Had they left me alone in the Clubhouse? Had they gone somewhere? To attack the Black Cobras?
Lynch hadn’t even given me a chance to explain. He’d apparently sent one of the guys after me, who’d been watching my apartment all night. He’d followed my car all the way to the Clubhouse. Watched me walk in there. According to him I was inside for close to forty minutes and he didn’t know what happened then, but he’d been walking around the perimeter of the building. He saw me at the back door leaving, he saw Patch there, us talk—after which he made the phone call to Lynch.
The only thing I managed to get through to Lynch was that I knew Patch. We’d been friends as kids. We were neighbors. That was all it was, but he wasn’t willing to listen to any of that. He just wanted to see me locked up and the key thrown away.
I’d been banging on the bars, crying and shrieking on the top of my lungs to catch someone’s attention, to encourage someone to come back in here and at least talk to me—but nobody did. For what was now beginning to feel like hours.
I didn’t know what their plan was. Were they going to keep me locked up in here? To rot away? Starve me? Kill me like that? A slow and painful death.
The tears didn’t stop flooding down my cheeks.
In my misery and my desperation to escape I hadn’t even thought about whether I would have done things differently. Maybe I would have. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone back to see Patch. It wasn’t like he was actually excited to see me. I didn’t even know if he believed what I said.
But I hadn’t been able to keep away from him. Something had drawn me back to him. I had to warn him. I couldn’t have just continued here like normal knowing that his life was in danger. I couldn’t have lived with myself like that, even though these were now the consequences of those actions.
It felt like hours before someone finally came into that dark room to see me and it was the last person I wanted to see; Gunther. In all this time of being at the service of the Sons of Satan, if there was one thing I’d learned, it was that Gunther was the man I needed to watch out for.
No matter how crazy and demanding Lynch ever got, it was Gunther who was the cruel one. The one with the really deranged ideas. The one who would stop at nothing in order to inflict pain and terror on whomever he could get his hands on.
And now, unfortunately, he had hit his jackpot—I was stuck in a cage and had nowhere to go. Nobody would even come down here to check on me if they heard my screams. I meant nothing to nobody anymore. Not even to Lynch.
Gunther pushed the door shut behind him and I heard his boots crunch on the cold ground as he walked towards the cage. I got up off the floor in sheer fear of him and I rushed backwards, as far away as I could possibly get from him. Even though it was all just an illusion anyway. I was going nowhere.
He was walking slowly, with a soft sadistic smirk on his face as he watched me with his icy blue eyes, which nearly looked transparent they were so light. Light seemed to bounce off his pupils, making them glow even in the dark like he wasn’t of this Earth.
I tried not to whimper in fear, not to let him see me cry. Any sign of weakness would only encourage him further.
“So…the beautiful redhead finally cracks,” he said in a voice that sent shivers down my spine. Even though I knew my situation could probably not get any worse, it now felt like it just had.
“What do you want from me?” I shouted at him, and he squeezed his arms in through the bars of the cage, pretending to reach for me even though I was backed far away from him.
“You know you don’t have to be afraid of me, you beautiful young thing.”
The exact opposite was true.
“Stay the fuck away from me!” I snarled at him. He smiled and then pulled his arms back out again.
“You know there are ways in which you could please me and I’ll put in a good word for you with the boss,” he continued.
“He doesn’t give a shit about what you think!”
Gunther threw his head back and laughed, but when he straightened his face again, I saw he was a little angry. There was a sudden wildness in his eyes. He didn’t like to be reminded that Lynch was still the boss around here and that he himself ha
d no real authority. Not yet. Though he was clearly making plans for that.
“You won’t be saying that for very long. What if I told you I’m the only one who can keep you alive?” he said, walking around the cage now, taking one long step at a time. He had his hands behind his back like he was a lecturer in a class of students or something.
He was disgusting.
“You’re going to keep me alive?!” I snarled, with a mocking laugh in my voice. Who did he think he was? How stupid did he think I was?
Gunther stopped in his tracks and snapped around to me.
“If you give me what I want, I could keep the slaps and the blows and the knife at bay. Haven’t you figured it out by now? Who is really in charge around here?” He had brought his face close to the cage, his face was pressed against the bars. I’d pulled myself as far back from him as I possibly could but even from here, I could smell the alcohol on his bad, sickening breath and it made me feel sick.
“I will never do anything for you. No matter what you offer me in return!” I hissed and he narrowed his eyes, looking me over from head to toe. His eyes settled on my breasts for a few moments and I could feel him undressing me with his eyes. Most of the guys around here did that—looked at me like I was nothing more than a piece of meat. But there was something different in the way Gunther looked at me. Like he was ready to devour me. It sent chills down my spine.
“We’ll see about that,” he said, just as the door opened and I heard more footsteps. It was Lynch!
I had to admit, I had never been this glad to see him before. Just because I didn’t want to be alone with Gunther. Lynch had brought two of the other guys with him.
He walked over to the end of the cage, threw Gunther a disgusted look and then focused on me.
“Ready to talk?” he asked. I gulped and nodded.
“I have an explanation. I’ve been telling you, begging you to give me a chance to explain myself to you.”
Lynch’s nostrils flared while he focused his eyes on my body. He clenched his jaw.
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Like I told you. I know Patch from before. From when we were kids. He used to live in the house across from ours,” I said, trying to sound as sweet and convincing as possible.
“I don’t need to hear all that bullshit. It means nothing to me. We all knew people when we were fuckin’ kids. So fuckin’ what?” Lynch growled and I gulped. What else was I supposed to say?
“I just wanted to meet up with him, talk about mutual friends. People we used to know. I’m sorry I made up that lie about my sick mother. I knew you’d be upset if you heard I went to see him. But I promise I won’t lie to you ever again.”
Lynch’s eyes remained focused on my face. He looked like he was disgusted by me. I felt dirty and helpless. What was he going to do to me?
“I don’t give a shit what you wanted to do. If you wanted to share sob stories with each other or not. I want to know what you told him about us. The shit he’s now going to pass on to his club.”
Lynch wasn’t backing down. He wasn’t going to leave me alone till he got what he wanted. But what he wanted me to admit was going to get me killed. I knew that. I wasn’t an idiot. If I confessed the information I’d passed on to Patch—it was the biggest error I could have committed. Ratting on the Sons of Satan to their biggest enemy was going to cost me my life.
There was silence in the room. Lynch, Gunther and the two other guys; they were all glaring at me. Expecting me to carry on—to say the words. Maybe they already knew what I’d said to Patch.
I licked my lips and shook my head.
“I said nothing about you. I said I was happy here when he asked me. I told him I worked at the Clubhouse, serving drinks to you guys. That I’m grateful because the club takes care of everything for me.”
Lynch clanged the bars of the cage, startling me so suddenly that I cried out in fear.
“That is fucking bullshit! You’re going to tell me exactly what you told him!” he hissed. His face was red with rage. One of the guys stepped up beside him and I saw what he had in his hand. A long leather whip with a thick leather knot at the end of it. Even if Lynch himself didn’t use it on me, none of the others in the room would hesitate for a moment to do it instead.
“Tell me now or Mojo walks straight into the cage and takes care of it for me,” Lynch continued. Beside him, Gunther was smirking.
I was shaking. I was cold. I’d held out for so long, was I really going to crack at the sight of one leather whip?
“Now!” Lynch shouted while I stared at the whip in Mojo’s hand.
“I told him…I told him about your plan. About your attack. About the truce being fake…I told him to prepare himself.”
I broke down crying because I knew it was over. Lynch wasn’t going to let me live after this. Admitting the truth to them was as good as signing my own death sentence. Maybe there wasn’t going to be a leather whip, but there were going to be other things. Things more brutal, more fatal.
I collapsed to the ground in tears and all their voices seemed to drown out around me. It was over for me. I was as good as dead already.
13
Patch
Yesterday had ended in tension. I was aware of the fact that all of a sudden the tables had turned on me in relation to my own men. The guys I fought with and trained with and depended on…were now not so sure about me. Despite the truce with Lynch, Cash and Grimm and the others were not trusting of Samantha. Especially since I was the one who had been going on about not trusting the Sons of Satan.
I knew I needed to redeem myself, needed to prove Sophia’s dependability to them and thereby clear my name for being with her in our supply closet—but it had only been one day so far. I didn’t know how I was supposed to do it.
Was the answer for me to go see Samantha? Bring her back here and get her to speak to the others herself?
But I didn’t know where she lived, and unlike her, I couldn’t just walk into the Sons of Satan Clubhouse unannounced. And that was if she was actually telling the truth, if she did really want to help us.
The next day I went back to the Clubhouse and I could sense tensions were still high around me. That celebratory atmosphere from a few days ago when everyone was in a good mood over the truce was defeated now. My friends were suspicious of me, suspicious of the whole situation.
Did they think I was rebelling? Planning something against them? Did they think I was going to betray my own club?
Even Bones, who had been by my side this whole time, now seemed to be avoiding me. I found him when he was coming out of the toilets and I stood in his way.
“You’ve gotta tell me what’s going on around here, man. Like, what the actual fuck? Do these guys think I’m trying to pull something?” I asked. Bones sighed and shrugged.
“I don’t know what to tell you, man. Grimm wasn’t happy you allowed that chick to walk in here. Nor that you fucked her.”
“I explained myself to them yesterday. Where were you?”
Bones looked about him shiftily, refusing to meet my eyes.
“I had some shit to take care of. Grimm had some job for me.”
“A job for you?”
Bones shrugged again and he was already walking away from me.
“Just keep your head down for a few days and stay away from the Sons of Satan. Give it some time and hopefully this whole thing will just blow over,” he said as he hurried away from me.
Bones seemed way more optimistic than I was feeling. I was doubtful that things were just going to ‘blow over’ in a matter of days. It seemed unlikely that people like Cash were going to get over it that quickly. And what was going to happen if Samantha was actually telling the truth? What if we were going to be attacked by the fucking Sons of Satan any minute now?
I spent way longer in the toilet than I needed to. I’d never felt like this before, not in my own club. I’d never been the center of suspicion. Grimm had recruited me a
long time ago. He’d personally trained me. He trusted me. We trusted each other. And now the trust was broken because of one woman?
I knew I should have stayed away from Samantha!
I stared at myself in the cracked mirror.
I needed to go and speak to Grimm, or Cash or maybe even Wilder. Someone who was willing to listen to my side of the story. They needed to believe me when I said I had no agenda here.
And then I heard the shots being fired outside and my first instinct was to pull my gun and run out. I had a feeling this was not friendly fire. The sound of the shots was accompanied by raised voices and when I ran out and looked through a window in the corridor, I saw our Clubhouse was now surrounded by muscle trucks that didn’t belong to us.
They belonged to the Sons of Satan.
They had us surrounded and we weren’t prepared for this. But the shooting had stopped. I watched through the window as Lynch, Gunther and a few other guys jumped out of their cars and were starting to walk towards the front entrance of our building.
“Fuck!” I growled aloud and ran towards the bar where I could hear my friends’ voices. I burst through the door and saw them trying to prepare for a shootout, but we weren’t prepared. We didn’t have enough weapons on us. Most of the guys in our club weren’t even here. It was the middle of the fuckin’ day!
Grimm glared at me and I rushed towards him.
“Lynch and Gunther are headed in this direction. They look like they want to talk,” I said. Cash came over, waving two guns in the air.
“More talking?”
“Don’t fuckin’ agree to anything, Boss!” I shouted at Grimm as he walked away from us and towards the door. Out the window I could see Lynch was at the door now too. We’d locked it from the inside.
Patch (The Black Cobras MC Book 3) Page 9