by Penny Dee
Squeezing my eyes shut, I groaned as the heat of the shower engulfed me, relaxing my muscles and relieving the tension in my brain.
When I’d come home from several months in a military hospital, my family and the club had closed ranks around me. They were worried about the broken soldier with violent scars. To get me out of my shell and back to the old Chance, they’d put me right in the middle of MC life: the clubhouse, parties, drinking. Women.
But I felt none of it.
Wanted none of it.
Ok, maybe the drinking.
But not the parties.
And definitely not the women.
Even if it was just for one night.
I lived at my mom’s when I first got home, but Mom’s relationship with Ari had become serious while I was overseas; he lived with her now. They were really into one another, and even though it was my home and I felt welcomed, it was hard not to feel like a third wheel—especially when you came down the stairs to find your mother and her boyfriend in a passionate embrace. Or worse… when their muffled moans drifted through the thin walls when you were trying to sleep after another nightmare.
I just didn’t need that shit.
So, last night I packed up my duffel bag and moved back into the clubhouse.
I knew it was a mistake the moment I walked in and saw the party in full swing.
They got me hammered.
So hammered I could barely see straight.
So hammered I wasn’t even aware of the girl in my bed until I felt her fingers slide across my naked chest and her arms wrap around me. In my drunken haze, my heart ached with longing because I hadn’t felt the touch of a woman in a long, long time. Not since her. And every physical part of me longed for the comfort and peace and the softness of a woman’s caress.
But my mind was in a state of decay. It fought my heart. Ferociously. It didn’t want her. Didn’t want the warmth of her arms around me. I didn’t deserve it. Not after what I’d done.
So I had untangled her from my body, rolled over and drifted into a disturbed, restless sleep.
She was still in my bed when I woke up this morning with a raging hard-on and a desperate need to jerk off.
Not in the mood for small talk, I escaped quietly to the bathroom and now found peace beneath the stream of hot water, my eyes closed, my cock still hard. I moaned and closed my eyes, feeling my muscles relax and the tension leave my body.
I was about to take care of the throbbing erection between my legs when the shower door opened and last night’s girl stepped in, butt naked and beautiful. Before I could stop her, she rose to her tiptoes and kissed me. It was tender and soft, and somewhere inside me a tiny heartbeat of longing began to beat. She was offering her body to me, offering her kiss and the kindness of her arms around me.
But I didn’t know how to accept her comfort, only the uncomplicated offer of her lips as she dropped to her knees and took me in her mouth, in the shower.
My mind warred with the pleasure while my body wanted the sweet suckle of her mouth. My brain told me I didn’t deserve the pleasure. Wasn’t worthy of her tongue licking at my cock. Wasn’t worthy of her lips and mouth making my balls swell with the intensity of an approaching orgasm.
She moaned, her mouth full of me, and the rising tension inside of me snapped. Anger collided with desire, and I braced myself against the tiled wall, feeling the approaching release of my orgasm. I closed my eyes. My breath was quick, my lips wet with water. I was close and if she kept fucking me with her luscious mouth, I was going to come despite the agony taking place inside my head. But she didn’t. Instead she released me from between her lips and rose to her feet, pressing her velvety body up against mine.
I felt her kiss me. Felt my surrender burst through the surface. The last woman I had touched was her, and the sting of her kiss still lingered on my lips. Now I was jamming them against another woman’s mouth, savagely kissing this woman as if I could somehow kiss the memory of her from my mind.
Growling, I pushed her up against the wall and hooked her leg over my arm. My first thrust was hard and deep, and she gasped, taken by surprise by the ferocity. Then she moaned and bit down on her lip, raising her arms above her head as my second and third thrusts plowed into her just as deep.
It was fucking. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t intimate or gentle or the beginnings of anything. There was no promise, no hope, no lies. Just a primal instinct and one man running from his truth. I kissed her fiercely, my hands winding tightly around her neck as light and darkness raged inside of me. Lust roared through me, wild and fierce, and my hands began to squeeze.
At first she whimpered, but then she let out a strangled, almost mocking laugh.
Her eyes darkened and my mind followed as my orgasm possessed me. I squeezed my eyes shut, overpowered by the battle of pleasure and pain as I came violently, rocked by the power of my release as it pumped out of me in perfect time with the blood pounding in my head.
As I started to come down, I became aware of her punching at the hard muscle of my shoulders.
My eyes opened to find hers wide and bulging as she frantically kicked and punched for me to let her go.
Suddenly realizing what I was doing, I loosened my hands around her neck and she dropped to her feet, slumping against the wet tiles, gasping for air.
Alarm tore through me, quickly followed by shame and guilt because I had almost choked her unconscious.
What the fuck.
That wasn’t me.
I was a King and we didn’t lay a finger on women.
We honored and served them. Protected them.
We didn’t tolerate violence against them. And I would be the first to step up to any man that dared try it in front of me.
Fuck.
I was losing it.
I looked at the girl, and she watched me with terrified eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said hoarsely.
“Are you fucking crazy!” she cried, grabbing her throat.
Scrambling to her feet, she almost fell out of the shower cubicle trying to get away from me.
“You should go,” was all I managed to say as I wrapped a towel around my hips.
She snatched her clothes off the floor. “They told me it was an easy gig. No weird shit. If I’d known you were into that, I would’ve charged them more.”
I stared at her, confused, but then anger lit me up like an atom bomb. She’d been paid to fuck me.
I had no idea by who. But I would find out.
“If you like that shit, it’ll cost you more—” She stopped and her eyes widened again. It took me a nanosecond to figure out why. My scar. I didn’t have a shirt on and there it was as plain as day for her to see. To judge. She gasped, her face twisting into an ugly expression of disgust and pity. “What the fuck?”
“Get out of here,” I said, my calmness a direct contradiction to the agony pouring out of me.
But she didn’t move. She just stood there, her wide, glassy eyes darting from my face to the scar tissue on my back. “What did they do to you?” She gasped.
Her pity might as well have been a fucking bullet coming straight at me. Because I hated pity and I’d seen enough of it in the last year to last me a fucking lifetime.
“If you don’t get out, I will throw you out,” I warned her in a calm voice.
But she just stared at me like she couldn’t believe her fucking eyes. “It’s horrible.”
In that moment my mind snapped. I knew it was fucking horrible. I wasn’t blind.
“I said get the fuck out!” I yelled.
Terrified, she took off out of the room, barely covered by the clothes cradled against her naked body.
I slammed the bathroom door behind her and stood there, letting the shock waves ripple over me. I felt rocked, and in pain, the heated sense of shame knotting tightly in my chest.
Walking to the sink, I leaned against the porcelain counter and stared at my reflection in the mirror, hating what I saw.
&
nbsp; A beast.
From this angle, there was only a slight hint of my scars curling around from the back of my neck. But when I turned, the mass of scar tissue stretched from the top of my neck, across my shoulder blades, claiming my back all the way down to my hipbone. Layers of melted skin. Shiny and silvery pink. Scars of war. Scars of hate.
I turned to face the mirror, and my eyes moved to the deep wound on my face. It carved through my eyebrow and up the side of my forehead. It was deep. Pink. Ugly. A constant reminder of what I had become that day.
A beast who took the shot.
But the scars on my body were nothing compared to the brokenness inside. In time, the burns and shrapnel scars would heal, but the invisible ones inside never would. They were open wounds of pain and hatred.
And today that pain and hate had broken free, forcing my hands around the neck of the girl I was fucking and squeezing until I’d almost choked the breath out of her.
I was losing it.
Not holding it together like I kept telling everyone I was.
I ran my palm across the back of my neck and shut my eyes tightly.
It wasn’t just my scars that made me a monster.
It was the darkness inside.
And I knew it was growing stronger every day.
Because the military had made me a soldier.
But war had made me a beast.
CHANCE
Later that afternoon, I rode with my brothers, Cade and Caleb, to Stockade Square. The town was getting ready for Founding Fathers’ Day celebrations, and there was a real buzz in the air for the approaching holiday. Posters about the parade and fireworks plastered every street corner, and storefronts were filled with holiday displays. Decorations in red, white, and blue decorated the town square.
Today, it was busy with people.
We pulled up in front of Iron & Salt, a bar off the main street, and sat in the outdoor terrace with beers.
I loved my brothers.
But I wasn’t like them.
Not anymore.
Once upon a time, we were three peas in a pod. The Calley boys. The cocky kids of the MC, sharing the same dark hair and blue eyes, and the same easy-going charm we threw around like fucking fairy dust to get ourselves out of the trouble we always seemed to get in to.
That was before life kicked me in the balls.
Now we were vastly different, and our paths couldn’t be further apart.
They had their wives who adored them. Stunning queens who loved them fiercely and who gave them beautiful children who climbed all over them. Cade’s son, River, was the spitting image of his father, and at almost two years old, he was as adorable as he was mischievous. And Caleb’s daughter, Ruby, my sweet little niece, was the apple in her father’s eye, and I had to admit, in her uncle’s as well. Somehow, and God only knows why, she absolutely loved me. Whenever I was around, she would reach out her little arms and whine until she was held snugly in my arms. And that smile. Man, it just melted the scar tissue in my heart until all I could feel was a pure, avuncular love coursing through my veins.
I loved spending time with my niece and nephew. It was really the only time I was happy because they held the darkness at bay.
My brothers were lucky sons of bitches.
But that life wasn’t for me. And whenever I found myself longing for what they had, I quickly replaced the ache with anger and hate. I would never have what they had, and it was for the best. A wife deserved love, and my heart was too much of a desolate wasteland for love to grow.
Besides, I didn’t have time for anything but the club. When I returned as a full-time member of the Kings of Mayhem, I was voted in as Sergeant at Arms because Grunt had to move back to Indiana when his youngest sister was injured in a car wreck. At the time, Bull had been considering a few candidates for the position. He needed someone he could trust. Someone who wasn’t afraid to step up when he needed them to. Someone who always had his back and put the club first. A good Sergeant at Arms possessed a certain amount of crazy, and I had a fuck-ton of crazy to bring to the table—not to mention the pent up rage. It was a useful resource when the club needed you to keep them safe.
Club business aside, when I wasn’t busy having my president’s back, I had a small side project to keep me busy. It was my grandmother’s idea. The infamous Sybil Calley. The original biker queen. Fierce and wild. A fiery redhead with a penchant for blinged-out caftans and red lipstick. To help with my recovery, she had given me an old fisherman’s cottage to renovate. It was a dilapidated shack that sat across the river from the family cabin. It was unloved, unlivable, and in such a state of disrepair I could work on it for one hundred days and it still wouldn’t be close to finished.
Which was exactly why my grandmother had given it to me. She wasn’t a fool. She knew I needed help settling back into life outside of the military. She knew I’d find a lot of myself again while I worked on that beat-up old house. I hadn’t yet, but I hoped that one of these days I would find some kind of peace.
Until then, I would bury myself with club business and forget the other part of me that wished things had worked out differently.
I thought about this morning’s encounter and another punch of shame twisted my gut.
“I swear to fucking Christ, you have the attention of a two-year-old,” Cade said, annoyed. “Did you just hear anything I said?”
Nope.
“Where the fuck are you, Brother?”
In my bathroom, with my hands around a club girl’s throat, choking the life out of her while I come.
I felt a flush creep up the back of my neck and shifted uncomfortably in my seat.
“Are those headaches back?” Caleb asked, raising his beer to his lips.
“I have good days and bad days,” I said.
Apparently today was a bad day.
“You still seeing the doctors over in Humphrey?” Cade asked.
I was fucking sick of doctors.
And something told me I was seeing the wrong kind of doctors.
That something being my hands squeezing a girl’s throat as I came.
No, that wasn’t me.
I shifted uneasily. If it was, then I didn’t need a doctor. The only thing that was going to save me was a bullet.
The approaching rumble of a familiar Harley told me that Bull, our president, our uncle, would be joining us.
Watching him pull up to the curb, I felt the shoe drop for the second time that day. My brothers had lured me away from the clubhouse. But this wasn’t a friendly ride into town for a couple of beers. This was a fucking intervention.
I glanced at my brothers, who both pretended like nothing was amiss.
“Assholes,” I muttered, sitting back in my chair and lighting a smoke. “If you wanted to know if I was alright, you should’ve just asked. Not arrange a fucking intervention like I’m some kind of strung-out tweaker.”
“And what would you have said if we did?” Cade asked, knowing there was no point denying it. “You would’ve told us everything was alright. But it’s not, Brother. You don’t sleep. You don’t talk.”
“Something is going on with you, man,” Caleb added. “Talk to us.”
Out of my two brothers, I was closest to Caleb. Growing up, Cade was always busy with Indy, which meant Caleb and I spent a lot more time together.
When I was lying in a hospital bed like the living dead, his phone calls and visits saved my sanity. Sometimes he’d just call and talk shit to me. He knew I couldn’t reply, but he understood how important it was for me to know there was life outside of that hospital room. A life worth fighting for. I needed to know there was a place for the lifeless to live again. Because I’m not going to lie. I spent more time wishing I would die than I did wishing I would live.
“Was it you two who paid that girl to fuck me?” I asked.
The look of confusion on their faces told me it wasn’t them. It didn’t surprise me. This reeked more of Joker and Vader than my younger brothers.
“What girl?” Caleb asked.
I took a drag of my smoke and told them about the girl. Everything except the choking.
“It was probably Joker and Vader,” Cade said, echoing my own suspicions.
“They’re worried about you, man,” Caleb added. “It would be their way of trying to help you out.”
“I don’t need that kind of help.”
“Then what do you need?” came Bull’s voice from behind as he approached our table. He sat down and lifted his dark sunglasses. He had the weirdest fucking eyes I’d ever seen on a human. Almost demonic. It was caused by his acute color-blindness, which made him sensitive to light. As a result, you very rarely saw him without his dark sunglasses.
“I saw Tammi-Lynn leaving your room this morning,” he said. “She was shaken up. Not to mention naked. Seemed she couldn’t get out of there quick enough. Want to tell me about it?”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
We both watched Caleb get up from the table to take a phone call.
“Seemed to me she was a little upset.”
My jaw twitched as I took another drag on my smoke. I didn’t need this right now. “It was a misunderstanding.”
“I see shit like that and I get concerned.”
“There is nothing to be concerned about. Like I said, it was a misunderstanding. It won’t happen again.” My headache was drilling into my temple like a fucking jackhammer. “Look, I appreciate your concern. But it’s misplaced, okay? I’m fine.”
Bull didn’t move. He just fixed those otherworldly eyes on me as his mind worked in silence. To most people it was unnerving, but it didn’t work on me. I wasn’t about to admit anything to my president. My uncle. There was no point. I couldn’t be helped.
“Fuck me,” Caleb growled, walking back from taking his call. “That was Remy from Gunslinger. They can’t make it tonight.”
Gunslinger was the band we used for our celebrations at the clubhouse. They played raw rock and blues. Tonight’s party was to welcome Ruger into the chapter.