My head snapped up when I heard something crash upstairs. I was on my feet and moving before Deck or Ever even reacted. When I got upstairs Lucy was standing there in our bedroom and she had another framed photo in her hand. From the looks of it, the last she had picked up – our wedding picture – had been hurled across the room. She turned her head and the look on her face sunk me. It was just empty. My Lucy wasn’t in there right now.
“Get out,” she hissed quietly.
“Luce,” I called out with my hands in the air, as if in surrender.
“Get out! Get your shit, and get the hell out of this house. You don’t belong here. You’re not welcome here!”
“Momma!” Ever called from the door to our bedroom.
“He has to go. I can’t look at him right now.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Momma-Luce. Let’s sit down and have a talk, then when you’re feeling…”
“When I’m feeling what? Better? Worse? Like I died in that hospital right beside my son and grandbaby?” Her voice cracked on the last. “I can’t do this.”
“I’ll give you some space, Luce,” I told her. Just a bit though. You get today, and then we’re going to talk because we can’t get through this alone. Neither of us can.”
She looked like she was going to say something, but then she clamped her mouth shut and turned her back to me. She refused to turn back around even after I was finished going through the room to grab some things to take to the clubhouse with me. Even after I cleaned up the mess she’d made from our wedding photo launching into a wall. She still didn’t acknowledge me.
I moved behind her, ignoring Ever’s protest as I did so. I didn’t touch her, but I leaned to Lucy and whispered in her ear, “I can’t fix what’s happened, but I will see to it that things change or I won’t be a part of it anymore. I promise you this, Luce. I know it seems too late, but we were trying. Toby and I, we spent our last day together setting those wheels in motion in a way they couldn’t ignore it this time. I know you don’t believe that now, but you’ll see.”
She turned, tears flowing down her beautiful cheeks that had taken on a sunken look from her lack of sleep, constant crying, and just being brought low by grief. I moved to swipe the tears away, but she flinched back and I dropped my hand to my side again. She took me in a moment more, and then just spun around and gave me her back again. I took a step back away from her, then another. And with each step back I watched her shoulders sag in relief that I was getting further away from her. There is a point in your life, a point in the middle of the worst of it, where you wonder if this is the thing that will finally break you. I didn’t have to ask that question though because I already knew the answer. If I lost Lucy, I would never find myself again either.
I turned and was immediately faced with Ever’s sympathetic look and Deck’s watchful eyes as he held onto my daughter the way I wished I could be comforting Lucy right now. “Stay with her,” I whispered. Ever nodded her head.
“We have her,” Deck let me know and then I left my house with a packed bag not knowing what my future held for the first time in almost 18 years.
I had not kept a room at the clubhouse all these years. The fact was that I hadn’t needed one so I’d left it open to whoever had needed it instead. When I got there I let Merc know that I would be taking the room behind the kitchen again since it was open. It was the only one open since we had so many visiting members from other clubs. The families with room in their homes were putting quite a few of the brothers up since there wasn’t room for everyone at the clubhouse. Still, I guess even the guests didn’t want to be in this room. Couldn’t blame them. I knew what they called when they didn’t think I could here. It was the “rape room” and I hadn’t been back to the scene of the crime in all these years. Twenty-two fucking years and this section of the clubhouse had remained off limits to me.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew why I chose to hunker down here instead of going to get a hotel room. I wanted to punish myself just as much as Lucy wanted to punish me. If I had pushed harder when that shit happened to me, maybe my son wouldn’t have… I crashed down on the bed and dropped my bag on the floor next to my feet. It didn’t take Merc long to follow me in here.
“What the hell? Why aren’t you with Lucy right now?” He was angry.
“She woke up,” I told him as if that explained everything.
“So?”
“She didn’t feel any differently than she had at the cemetery. She told me to get out.”
“Shit!” Merc came and sat down beside me. “You know she doesn’t mean that shit,” he told me.
“Oh no, she means every bit of it. She blames me for not doing more to see to it that the whores never had enough of a foothold on our club to cause the kinds of trouble they have over the years. She absolutely blames me and the club for just as much as the whore who took my son’s life.”
Merc ran his hands down his face. “Christ. Maybe we did the wrong thing by telling that bitch she was banned from the club. Should have just taken her out. I didn’t foresee a woman doing something like that though,” he admitted.
“No? Even after what happened to me? In this room?” I held my hands up to indicate the place we were sitting. “You forgot about coming in here and finding me almost dead with a whore riding me?”
He flinched. “I relive the nightmare of pumping your fucking chest when your heart stopped working on its own too often to forget all that,” he admitted. I guess I always thought the majority of the blame for that was on Stiff’s shoulders. The whores were just pawns. Never thought they would have had that in ‘em if he hadn’t encouraged it, you know?”
I waved off his words. “I know. This was different. We weren’t dealing with the same thing, and that’s the problem. Club issues with business, we look at it from all angles. Club issues with pussy, and everyone puts their blinders on and just sees the wholes that are there for their pleasure. The only ones seeing that shit any different are the few who ain’t using them.”
He nodded.
“How long you think you’ll be here?” He glanced around. “I gotta tell you, I am not a fan of you staying in this room.”
I laughed bitterly. “It’s no more than I deserve right now.”
“Fuck that!” He yelled out at me. “You came here with Toby. You both did what needed doin’. We fucking acted as a club on that shit. We didn’t know we were making the wrong fuckin’ call at the time. Thought we had that shit handled.” He sighed then calmed his voice a bit. “I know that shit Lucy screamed at the cemetery is eating at your head, man, but this is not on you. It’s on some crazy fuckin’ bitch who was off her rocker so far we didn’t realize just how bad shit was. Even Toby hadn’t thought it was all that much more than annoyance, and if he thought his girl might be in danger he would have done more too.”
We sat in the quiet a while. “You weren’t much older than him when that shit went down here and we almost lost you,” Merc mentioned. I looked over at him. “Never occurred to you to change the way club runs then, just to take out the ones who had fucked with you. Toby was probably thinking the same.”
“I keep waiting for him to show up and ask me what the fuck I did to piss his momma off this time,” I admitted. It doesn’t feel real. I know that I identified his body. I know that I stood at his grave, watched them lower my boy into the ground, but I’m still waiting for him to come home,” I told my best friend. “Now, I don’t even have Lucy with me through this. All the things I’ve been through, I don’t know this is going to be one I come out ok on the other side.”
“Get some rest, man. It’s going to take time, for both you and Lucy. We’re having church in a few hours. The whole club’s here, figured now is as good a time as any.”
“Whole club’s here, why wait a few hours?”
“Wanted to give you some time,” Merc insisted.
“Nah, let’s go. I’m ready.”
“Everyone who is not a patched brother or wear
ing a prospect patch for this club needs to get the fuck out now. We’ll let you know when you’re able to come back,” Merc called out as we entered the main lounge area. “All brothers and prospects need to be in this room in the next 20 minutes or their vote will not count, and they won’t have room to complain. Prospects, get your asses moving through the building, flush out any and all strays. There better not be a single woman left in this building, and there sure as shit better not be a man here without a patch.”
“On it,” One of them called out and took off. The other two glanced at each other warily and then moved to get on it too. Merc took in everyone in our surroundings and realized we still had a fuck of a lot of company from other chapters here. I knew this because I noticed the same shit.
“Those of you from other chapters are welcome to sit on the periphery, but we’re about to handle some chapter business. We aren’t taking this to church, because we need the room. I expect you to be respectful and keep your mouths shut about our business while you’re here though.”
“You heard the man, you think you might not be able to hold your peace, and you don’t wear the Charleston patch, get the fuck out now and don’t come back ‘til you’re called,” Ghost, our club’s national president, called out to the crowd.
We waited the twenty minutes. Our prospects found two women trying to hide out in the bathroom so they could listen in. One was a club whore the other was a hang around who wanted to become a club whore. They thought they might learn something that would help the new girl get on quicker. What they ended up doing was highlighting exactly the shit we had problems with in the clubhouse.
As soon as they were ousted, I started in. “That right there is our biggest problem and our weakest link in this chapter,” I told the men as I pointed to the door the prospects had just ejected the women from.
“What? Not enough pussy to go around,” one of the men joked. I turned my glare on him and he shut his fucking mouth.
“That pussy that just got booted out the door was hiding so they could listen in on our meeting after we were pretty fucking serious about who could be here in the building and who couldn’t as while that meeting happened. You need to think on that a minute. They’re so disloyal and disobedient that they ignored a directive from not only our chapter prez, but also the national.” Murmurs swept through the room full of men then. “Maybe, they were telling the truth and just trying to see if there was something they could glean to get the new girl in here quicker. Maybe, we have two other MCs nearby, and one that we don’t really sit on too good of terms with depending on the day, and those bitches could have been listening in for a hint of something to take back to those they actually gave loyalty to.”
“Come on, man. That’s a stretch,” one of younger members, Glass, called out.
“Is it?” I asked. He was probably around T-Bone and J-Bird’s age, I realized as I took him in. Then I realized whom I had just compared him to. My son who wouldn’t get the chance to age anymore, and who wasn’t here to weigh in. “Shit like that just doesn’t happen, right?” I asked.
The kid looked around nervously but nodded his head. I turned the full weight of my attention on him.
“You know who our last prez was?” I asked him and he also tipped his chin up and down quickly. “But you never got to meet him though, because he was dead long before you were old enough to prospect. Let me tell you about him though. He was in love with an MC Princess who wanted to be a snooty, uppity bitch. Unfortunately for her, she loved him too. They had a baby together. There was a woman who earned a spot as a club whore here, who found a job at the hospital where our prez’s old lady gave birth. Who then attempted to steal that baby so that it could be used as leverage in an ongoing war over territory in the area.
“That same baby, that same old lady, the prez gave them up to keep them safe after that. Another brother had been in love with her too, and said he’d leave the club to ensure they stayed protected. He’d raise that kid as his own. He did too. Our own president lost out on raising his kid, keeping his old lady, and ended up dead for it all in the end anyway. All because some bitch wasn’t above using her body and playing club whore while she got information and tried to steal a kid from our club.”
“That didn’t really happen, did it?” Glass asked.
“My old lady was that baby the bitch tried to steal,” I informed him. Then I spun around taking in what everyone thought of that story. When I got with my woman, I planned on having her wearing my kutte and my ring. I set up something special with the club to get that shit done. A brother who proved to be a jealous fuck and a disloyal motherfucker drugged me that night before my woman could get to the clubhouse. The night I was supposed to propose to her and officially claim her before the club. Not only did neither of those things happened, but the asshole who drugged me set a few things up too. Had some whores on his side, set them to work, stripped me, had their way with me while I was knocked out but still functional thanks to the fucked up cocktail mixture they used. Had my woman walk in and see that. She saw enough that it looked like I was doing wrong by her.
“Then, my brother,” I pointed to Merc, “realized something wasn’t right. I wasn’t even fuckin’ breathing anymore and this club bitch was still riding my cock. She was basically fucking herself off on a dead brother. Merc brought me back. I coded again on the way to the hospital. They lost me several times that night before they brought me around. I woke up from that shit. Woke up from being dead. Woke up from being raped.” I shook all over as I spat those words out. “Never fuckin’ talked about that shit with you guys. Never fuckin’ used that word, because it’s humiliating, right? How’s a fuckin’ big guy like me, a biker, a bad ass, a man who had been an enforcer at one time end up raped by some club bitches? It fuckin’ happened. Because they had opportunity to get that shit done. Because we let them run around here like they own this place. Those bitches are in the ground now alongside the brother that set that shit up. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen again.”
“I’m pretty fuckin’ sure there’s more than just me who has experienced some shit these women have put us through. Maybe what you have been through hasn’t been that extreme. But just in my family alone, there’s been some pretty fucking crazy extremes that highlight the fact that we are doing something terribly wrong.”
“They ran my Jackie off,” Bubba admitted. “Been three years now. That cunt, Sapphire, started as a dancer at one of the clubs and then ended up here most nights servicing whoever wanted it. She was relentless any time I had Jackie in here she was cornering her and telling her all about the things I was supposedly doing with the bitches at the clubs. Described shit in vivid detail to her, and then one day made her way into the bathroom down the hall that the smaller rooms share. She made sure I was in there too on one of the nights Jackie stayed over. Soon as she saw that bathroom door open she dropped to her knees and started hollering about ‘Bubba, I don’t think its right to do this when she’s here,’ Of course that shit made me look guilty as fuck. I had my fuckin’ pants down and my dick hanging out ‘cause I’d just taken a piss. Jackie was the one for me. She has a kid with some accountant across town now.”
“You weren’t the only one Sapphire fucked with. That’s the bitch that got tossed. Happened one too many times,” J-Bird stated evenly. “Plus, I found her going through my room when I wasn’t there.”
“We need to vote this shit for real this time. No more club whores. No more!” I called out.
“Now, wait a minute,” PeeWee called out. That fucker. I couldn’t believe had the nerve to speak up. He barely kept his kutte after I found out that he had been saying some completely vulgar shit to my daughter whenever he found her unescorted at the clubhouse. He went nomad for a few months. Hell, I thought the only reason he was back was because of the funeral, not because he was looking to stay. “I get that you’re all up in your emotions right now, but the single men need a place to stick their dicks,” he offered with a thrust of his
hips.
“Then the single men need to go find pussy at one of the clubs or with a fucking Tinder App on their phone. I don’t care how you do it, but a fucking stable of shifty ass bitches with their own agendas shouldn’t be crawling around here unattended just because you don’t have enough game to pick up a woman to fuck on your own.” I saw the brothers who would stand with PeeWee on this. We would lose some over this if a vote went my way. I did not give a fuck though. “See all these men gathered today?” I asked the question. He didn’t answer and no one else did either. “DO YOU SEE ALL THESE MEN HERE?” I shouted, voice vibrating through the rafters as I did.
“I ain’t blind,” PeeWee answered.
“Why do we have so many bodies here today?”
I watched the wind in his sails deflate a bit. “Come on, man. Even your own son wouldn’t have wanted this.”
“You telling me my son’s mind now? Fuck that. My own son brought his concerns to Merc and Sandman days before he was killed by another fuckin’ club whore.” That shut up the men who had been talking about how fucked this vote was. “He wanted this brought to a vote, and he was told that it would have to wait for a full club vote which took time to organize. Time, as it turned out, that my son did not have.”
I held up a fisted hand in the air. “JUST MY FAMILY!” I called out as loudly as my voice would go. I ticked one finger into the air. “A club whore tried to kidnap my wife as a baby. That baby was then lost to our club president at the time.” I ticked another finger up. “I was drugged, raped, nearly killed, and lost my woman because of a disloyal brother and club whores. Lost out on seeing my boy born into this world. Lost out on a whole fuck of lost of firsts and didn’t get to meet him until he was three fuckin’ years old. Considering I just lost him, those missing years were even more precious, because our time was already going to be too short.” I ticked up yet another finger. “My son was killed by a club whore who fancied herself an old lady after he used her once and told her no more. That’s three in just my family. Those three things were no small things. They brought with them loss, and brought our club low each time. Those of you who were here for any of the first two remember what it felt like to deal with the aftermath. Those who weren’t can see what it looks like now, on the day you buried your brother. I buried my boy. I am telling you now, this vote goes any way but to ban the practice of having those cunts available in house here at the clubhouse I will no longer be wearing this kutte. It’s too much. I’ve lost too much. I won’t stand by and watch this play out on repeat for my family again, or for anyone else’s family. If easy pussy is more important than your brothers, their losses, and the hits this club has taken for it then we know your priorities.”
A Love So Hard (Aces High MC - Charleston Book 2) Page 30