Sedition

by Raven Dark

  “We lost two members of our family today,” Sheriff said. “Pup and Latch always gave this club and their Brothers their all. They gave their lives protecting us. There is no greater honor.”

  Hawk tossed Pup’s cut into the fire. The flames licked at the leather. He clasped his hands behind him, militant, a warrior’s stance. The flames danced in his eyes, making his gaze look fierce.

  “We grieve for a young life cut so short,” Sheriff continued. “May you always feel the wind on your face, and ride the sky forever, Pup.”

  Diamond dabbed her eyes.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat.

  A chorus of affirmations and blessings rose up from everyone.

  Watching Sheriff now, a little of my anger with him melted. Here and now, he was the consummate leader, the general who cared for, protected, and honored his men, seeing them as more than club members. They were his family.

  He held up Latch’s cut. “Latch gave us all that he had in the little time he was with us. We recruited him three years ago, but it feels like a lifetime. He was a thief, but he became much more. May the jewels of heaven be yours, and may the keys to heaven be ever within your reach, Brother.”

  Another chorus of blessings rippled through the group. The General turned to Crash.

  “We’d rather give you a proper ceremony for this, Crash, but that’ll have to wait. You’ve proven yourself on this trip, boy. We saw you put up a good fight, protecting your Brothers.”

  He slid Latch’s cut onto Crash’s wide shoulders and clapped him on the back. “Consider yourself a full member of the Legion.”

  The others clapped the cook on the back and congratulated him. He gave a half smile, proud, but his eyes looked sad.

  “We’ll have an official patching in when we get back to the Grotto,” Hawk promised.

  “Cherry would be proud, Crash,” I said, putting a hand on his arm.

  He placed his hand over the top of mine and squeezed. “Thanks, Setora. I don’t deserve it. If I did, Latch and Pup would still be alive, and Emmy would still be with us.”

  “Latch and Pup aren’t on you, kid,” Doc said, squeezing his shoulder.

  Hawk stared into the fire with a scowl, stoking it with a stick.

  “We’ll get Emmy back,” I told Crash. “We will.” Please, let us get her back.

  “You just put your club and your Brothers first,” Doc said.” Protect them, just as Latch and Pup did, and wear that cut with pride. That’s the best honor you can give them.”

  “I will, Doc. I promise you that.”

  “How’s your leg?” I asked Crash when he sat down with a wince.

  “Aw, it’ll be fine. I’ll have a nice scar to show Cherry when we get home.” He smiled tiredly, wincing again as he settled his leg out in front of him, held straight with one of Doc’s splints.

  As per Doc’s orders, he rode without the splint, allowing him to bend his knees when riding, but replacing the splint when not on his bike.

  I stared into the fire, hardly tasting my food, and noticing I’d finished it only when my metal spoon scraped the bottom of the empty bowl.

  “More stew, Petal?” Steel held out his hand for my bowl.

  I looked up at my mountain of a master, standing in front of me. Concern knitted his brow. I shook my head absently, and he took the bowl, setting it aside with the other dirty dishes Diamond was setting up to wash.

  He hugged me before I went to help Diamond clean up. His closeness soothed the ache in my heart.

  Soon, I turned in with Steel and Pretty Boy, one sleeping on either side of me this time. From the waist down, pain and stiffness coiled in my muscles, and my back and shoulders already felt the strain of riding so long on a motorbike, pressed into someone’s back for hours.

  Sheriff’s kiss had left me burning with lust, yet neither Pretty Boy or Steel would take me. Not only was I too tired, but they both made it clear no one would be sleeping if they did. If we caught up with the Dregs, all of us needed to be at a hundred percent.

  I agreed, even if my body protested.

  Snuggled between my two masters, I lay under a thin sleeping bag they’d purchased at the fueling station, staring at our odd sleeping quarters. The roots of the huge tree snaked around the edges of the trunk’s inner walls, knotting and crisscrossing in fantastical patterns, showing the Maker for the master embroiderer He was. The inside of the tree rose forever, stretching up into a darkness so thick I couldn’t see where the tunnel ended. Outside, among the faint snores of the men and someone walking slowly around the camp, the trees groaned and creaked in a low cool breeze, an eerie orchestra.

  Pretty Boy rolled over, pulling me close into his warmth, while Steel breathed softly into my ear, his wide chest heating my back.

  Steel wanted to marry me. My lips curled with a smile, but it faded as quickly as it had come. The thought had me thinking far too deeply about the Old World, about a time long gone, of rights long lost, ones that would never come again.

  I tensed, shaking off the seeds of such forbidden concepts. As long as women were slaves, such a bond would never be possible. The reality of it hurt my heart.

  “Can’t sleep, Captain?” I heard T-Man say outside the opening of the tree.

  “As usual,” Hawk said.

  Worry for him nibbled at me, and I sat up a little.

  “I just made the rounds. Nothing to report,” T-Man said.

  I caught the faint whiff of his pipe smoke before his footsteps faded.

  Hawk’s much lighter footsteps walked across the ground and faded to the edge of the camp.

  By my estimation, about an hour or so from now, someone—Hawk, I assumed—would take over the watch for T-Man. We’d have to leave three hours after, leaving Hawk with no sleep again. How did the man do it?

  More importantly, what horrors kept him awake so often?

  Since I wasn’t getting any sleep, I quietly untangled myself from Pretty Boy’s and Steel’s embrace, dressed, and slipped out of the tree, into the darkness.

  The fire still burned, low and dim in the center of the ring of trees and bikes that established the perimeter of the camp. Grunts drifted from the hollow of a tree on the other side of the fire pit. Feminine moans followed.

  Diamond. In the tree Doc had taken.

  A small chuckle escaped me. Doc’s making a house call.

  I found Hawk sitting on a log at the eastern side of the camp and made my way quietly toward him.

  With his back to me, he straightened, and the knife in his hand, which he’d been tossing up and catching, landed in his palm.

  “You should be asleep, Kitten.”

  I walked around the log to his side. “How did you know I was there? I didn’t make a sound.”

  He said nothing, his face the same dark mask I’d seen him wear most of the time since we’d left the desert.

  I wanted to tell him he needed sleep as well, but I knew there’d be no point. He wouldn’t allow it. “May I sit with you, Master?”

  He stood. Again, he said nothing, just slipped his knife back into the sheath at his hip. His swords crisscrossed his back in scabbards, his quiver hung from his other hip, his bow in his other hand. Tension bracketed his mouth, and his back looked tight under his cut.

  Pain poured from him, spilling like blood from wounds I suspected were a lot older than last night and a lot deeper. Loss, too, I thought, and guilt. Over Pup and Latch? My chest tightened for him.

  “Go back to bed, Kitten. We won’t have you falling off someone’s bike tomorrow from fatigue.” His quiet voice nevertheless harbored a resigned edge.

  He was right about sleeping, but I could feel him shutting me out as clearly as if his words were a slamming door. Hurt squeezed my chest hard, all the more painful after what was happening between me and Sheriff. So now two of my masters wouldn’t let me in.

  “Yes, Master,” I said sadly. I turned to leave.

  I heard a low sigh. Hawk’s hand seized mine before I could take a
step. “Stay.” His voice was a whisper.

  “Master?” I looked up at him, confusion pricking at me.

  His hand tightened around mine. I seated myself on the log, and he did the same, leaning his bow against his knee. My mind spun with a hundred things I wanted to say, but I couldn’t make myself say any of them, so I remained silent, letting us just be together. Waiting for him to speak first.

  “What keeps you up, Kitten?” he said quietly.

  Maker, I didn’t want to put this conversation on me, not when I knew he was dealing with so much. “It’s nothing, Master.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” He settled his fingers on my knee. When I said nothing, he turned his head to me. Those yellow eyes glittered in the night. Seeming to see through me with the ease with which his namesake saw the world. “You’re worried about Emmy.”

  “Yes, Master.” Fear for her threatened to crush me. I shut my eyes, but it did nothing for the images of horror that filled my thoughts as I imagined what those Dregs might be doing to her.

  “We will get her back. You’ll see.”

  His voice was so calm, I envied him. My nerves tingled with fear.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just…if they don’t sell her…”

  “Don’t allow yourself to go down that path. It’ll eat you alive.”

  “Spoken like a true warrior. How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Detach yourself like that. How does Sheriff do it?”

  “We just do. We have to.”

  Except Sheriff didn’t just detach himself from Emmy. He’d reduced her to nothing. I shook my head.

  Hawk looked up at the tree branches swaying above us. His raven black hair all but disappeared into the night. “You’re still angry with the General.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Hawk…Master…I don’t want to talk about this. You have enough on your plate as it is.”

  “We are going to talk about it. You belong to Sheriff, as much as you belong to me.”

  He was avoiding his own pain. I sighed. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Whatever it is you’re not telling me.”

  So much for not telling anyone. “I don’t know what you mean, Master.”

  Once again, he looked at me. His fingers touched my chin. “Yes, you do.”

  When I said nothing again, he turned sideways on the log. “Setora, you know how the world works. Emmy is a slave, just like you. She is the same thing all women have been for hundreds of years. Yet you expected Sheriff to see her as more.”

  “Yes, I did.” My shoulders sagged.

  “Why?”

  “Master—”

  “Answer me.”

  I stood up, then dropped my arms. I felt him waiting. Waiting for what he was missing. At long last, I turned to him.

  “Before we left the Grotto…Sheriff…he said he wanted more. He wanted me to be more than his slave.”

  Hawk arched one dark brow. He made a low noise in his throat. “I see.” He stood, leaned the bow against the log, and crossed his arms. “What did you say?”

  “I said the only thing I could say. I said no.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “No, it isn’t. Sheriff loves you.”

  I gaped at him and then shook my head, a hysterical laugh almost escaping me. “Even if that were true, he wants all of me, but he’ll give nothing of himself. If he did love me, I couldn’t accept that love. Not knowing he would leave behind a woman who belongs to him when things get too hairy. Or when he could talk about me the way he did before we left the desert.”

  Certainty filled his eyes, and I wondered what he knew that I did not. “Kitten, have you considered the obvious?”

  When I gave him a confused look, he went on.

  “If you hadn’t challenged him in front of his men, he might have given you a different answer.”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it and dropped my head back. Hawk’s point was hard to ignore.

  But that was just it. Would Sheriff have responded differently if his men hadn’t been there? Was he just playing the role of the big, bad General of the Dark Legion, or did he see Emmy as a throwaway? I sighed and dropped back down on the log. “I guess I’ll never know now.”

  “Trust me when I say this. Sheriff loves you. He as good as asked you to be his old lady. He may not know that’s what he wants, and he may not know he loves you, but he does. If you’d been taken, he’d give his life to get you back. And he will do everything he can to get Emmy back.”

  Old lady. The term was familiar. Then I remembered. That was the term MCs used to use for a wife in the Old World. Sheriff hadn’t used the term, but it couldn’t have been because he didn’t know of it. As a general, he’d know all the old ways of an MC.

  Steel, on the other hand, might not have known it, since it was mostly only used in books.

  I looked around at Hawk, who rubbed his forehead with fingers, lines creasing his cheeks.

  “Headache?” I reached for his hand.

  “I’ll be fine, Kitten.”

  “You need sleep. Please get someone else to take over for T-Man when it’s time to switch. Please.”

  “The others are exhausted. They’ve been through so much.”

  “So have you.” I squeezed his hand.

  He looked away.

  “What do you need?”

  “The power to turn back time,” he murmured.

  Light, I hated seeing him hurting like this. I stood and took both of his hands in mine. “Hawk, Pup’s and Latch’s deaths weren’t your fault. You have to know that.”

  “Yes. They were.”

  “How?”

  He slid his hands out of mine and turned his back to me. His shoulders were huge and tense. When he spoke into the darkness, his voice was so low I almost didn’t hear him. “I should have caught those bolts that killed them. Those shots were meant for me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Because, they—” he started roughly. He dragged in a long breath. “We switched places. Right before the Dregs came, we switched sides. Pup and Latch took my watch, and I took theirs.”

  Understanding sank in. “Hawk…”

  “Latch was teaching Pup how to keep guard,” he added slowly, too calm. “If I had stayed where I was, one of them might have seen the shooter who almost hit me, and they’d be alive.”

  “Oh, Master.” I laid my hands on his wide back, resting my forehead between them. “I’m sorry.” My eyes stung with sadness for him. For a long time, I said nothing, just trying to comfort him.

  Yet in the tension of his muscles, I could feel something else. Something more dangerous.

  “Master, don’t blame yourself. Yes, they may have seen the shooter, but they may not have, anymore than they saw the one that shot them. And you’d be dead.”

  “Better a monster dies than two good men.”

  I stepped back from him. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You heard me.”

  “How can you even say that about yourself? What aren’t you telling me now?”

  He took another long breath. His shoulders dropped. After a long pause, he turned slowly to me. His eyes bored into mine. “Do you know how many Dregs I killed last night. Kitten?”

  “Oh, Hawk.” I dropped my shoulders. “Don’t do that. You were protecting your Brothers. Me, Diamond, Emmy. Just like Crash. Like everyone else. If you hadn’t killed them, we would have lost a lot more than two men.”

  “You don’t understand, Setora. I didn’t just kill them. I slaughtered them. At least eight of those men lost their heads to my blade.”

  “So? You had to! They were monsters. Not you.”

  “And if I told you I liked it?” he growled, taking a step closer to me. “If I told you I wanted to cut off their heads and take out their hearts at the thought of them touching you? If I told you I was relieved it was Emmy who got taken and not you?”

  “I
’d say that makes you human.”

  He shook his head.

  “Yes. You liked protecting us, and you were glad your woman was safe.”

  “No! It’s more than that. I liked killing them. I enjoyed it. I am just like him, Kitten.”

  “Like who?”

  Again, he spun away from me. When he turned to me again, his eyes were hollow. “Like my father.”

  I let the words sink in for a moment. “Tell me,” I said softly.

  Hawk’s eyes closed, the amber glow extinguished like two lights in the darkness snuffed out.

  “My father was an animal, Setora. A murderer who got off on pain and death. He was a monster. Just like me.”

  The words rang in my head, and I saw the first real glimpse of the secrets Hawk had been keeping for so long. The enigma that was him came slowly into focus, but I knew there was more. More darkness, more danger he hadn’t yet uncovered.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just dropped my arms and waited. Waited for him to go on, preparing myself for whatever I might hear next.

  His face became such a hard mask, I thought he’d send me away. Instead, he nodded to the log we’d been sitting on. “Sit down, Setora,” he said softly. “It’s time you knew everything. Even if it means you end up hating me for it.”

  Chapter 14

  Bad Seed

  “Before I tell you anything more,” Hawk said as we sat beside each other once again, “…you need to understand. You cannot unhear what you hear now. Knowing what I am changes nothing. You will still belong to me, only now you will know you belong to evil. When you sleep next to me, when I am inside you, when you wake up in a cold sweat thinking of the nightmare I have told you, you’ll know this is your life, and this damaged man is your master. Forever.”

  I swallowed hard. It couldn’t be that bad, could it?

  “I…I can handle it, Master.”

  I would find a way. I needed to. He was mine, and I wanted all of him. The good and the bad.

  He smiled flatly out at the forest and didn’t look at me. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.