by Zoey Parker
My head was all kinds of jacked up. Cole represented something solid and grounded that I could wrap my head around, putting everything else back in place for me.
“Hey, everything okay up…” Cole started as he poked his head in the room, stopping himself when he saw what I was wearing. “You didn’t bring any clothes.”
“Yes, and no,” I told him, laughing again. This time it was a real laugh, a healthy laugh.
“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” he said tenderly as he came into the room and closed the door behind him.
I could see in his green eyes that he was troubled despite his attempt at covering it up. It must have been hard to break that kind of news to that many people at once, but when MC members didn’t come home, it made sense that there would be questions.
He sat down on the bed and took me in his arms, pulling me against his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said above me. “I’m sorry for using you to get to Fang, and I’m sorry that things went the way they did last night.”
I touched a finger to his lips.
“No, you were right the whole time. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I’m sorry I alerted Fang to your plan to approach him at his hideout. I should have let you go through with that, without expecting anything different from what you were planning on doing anyway. He was going to kill me, Cole,” I told him.
“I know. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
“I saw that when three more men in black suits hopped out of his car to pick me up at your apartment, but by then it was too late. And he told me all about his plan to murder me once he got me to the cabin,” I explained to him.
“I’m sorry, Sasha,” Cole said, and I could feel his sympathy in the way he held me. “The reason we followed you was so that he wouldn’t have the chance to do it. It was pretty obvious when he sent them after you at the park that he was going to try to kill you. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“I know,” I said with a thin smile. “Thank you, Cole, for standing by your word and protecting me.”
“Don’t thank me, baby,” he said. “I’d do it all over again. I’d try to do it differently,” he chuckled, “but I’d do it all over if I had to.”
I hugged him tightly and buried my face against the dirty, sweaty t-shirt he was wearing.
“We need to get you home so you can get a shower,” I teased.
“And so you can put some clothes on,” he played along.
I grabbed the top of my towel and pulled it open, letting it fall around me on the bed.
“You mean you don’t want me to walk around like this?” I asked.
“No, I don’t mind that at all. I just figured you wouldn’t want everyone here at HQ to see you like that.”
“You’re probably right, but I don’t mind if you see it.” I put my arms back around him and kissed him.
While our lips and tongues worked together, I ran a hand along his strong jawline, and he pulled me down to the bed with him. We lay together like that for an eternity, our lips locked, our bodies close, our hands touching each other gently, softly.
He caressed my back lightly, careful not to hurt any of my bruises or tender spots.
Our lips slowly parted, but I wasn’t ready to be done kissing him. I could still feel his mouth against mine as we moved back from each other.
“Cole,” I called to him. My voice sounded like it was coming through a dream.
“Yes, baby.” His hand rested along the small of my back.
“I need to tell you something.” I opened my eyes and met his already staring at me.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I love you,” I told him.
His body tensed for a moment. He stared at me without saying anything, and I knew I’d just screwed up. I’d just gone and told him too soon how I felt. Now he was going to run, and I was going to be alone again. It didn’t even feel like he was breathing.
“Say it again,” he finally said.
“I love you, Cole,” I repeated.
He kissed me deeply and held me close to him.
“I love you, too, Sasha,” he said as he pulled back from our kiss.
“I’ve bene wanting to say it, but I didn’t think you would have believed me,” I confessed clumsily, like a schoolgirl.
“Me, too,” he said sweetly. “I was convinced you wouldn’t believe me if I had told you.”
“You had every reason to be suspicious of me,” I told him.
“Me, too, baby. Me, too,” he added. “I had my eyes so set on getting Fang that I almost missed you altogether,” he confessed to me. He ran a hand along my cheek.
“You didn’t miss me. I promise. I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere ever again.”
Chapter 30
Cole
Back at my apartment, Sasha threw on one of my dress shirts and sat outside on the balcony with a glass of whiskey while I climbed into the shower. She insisted I needed to take this one alone. She told me how helpful it had been for her to wash away everything that had just happened alone and said I wouldn’t regret it.
She was right. The heat eased my sore muscles and unlocked all the tension in my shoulders and back from fighting with Fang and his goons the night before. It eased some of the tension from having to tell so many people that their friends and loved ones hadn’t made it back.
People didn’t seem to mind that their loved ones were involved in criminal organizations when the money was coming in, but as soon as something happened, we became the worst people on the face of the planet. Yes, what we did was dangerous. It was dangerous every day. And it was illegal, so there wasn’t a whole lot we could about it when things went south. We could take revenge, but there was only so much revenge to be had. For twenty of my men, ten of Fang’s men died, including Fang himself.
It didn’t seem just, but that was the best ending we could have hoped for. Fang had to die, and I had shot him dead right in front of his most loyal employee, the one person in his organization who had his back all the way up until the very end, when she realized that he didn’t have hers at all.
Shit like that made people step down from their posts. The thought kept occurring to me, which bothered me a lot. I wasn’t about to step down from being the president of Hell’s Overlords. The president before me hadn’t been worth mentioning. He had been happy to sell a little dope here and there, trade and sell some guns that had been scrubbed clean, and start as many bar fights as he possibly could. I had turned Hell’s Overlords into a legitimate organization, and with Fang’s death, we were about to expand. It was going to be a major expansion in our business to take on what he left behind.
I couldn’t walk away from that. The expansion was my responsibility. I had brought us to that point, and I was going to oversee taking us all the way through it.
The most stressful aspect of dealing with losses like we had just sustained was having to slow down in the process. I had to take it easy because we’d just faced a major setback while also experiencing a huge gain. If I didn’t proceed carefully, I would lose it all.
I closed my eyes and breathed in the warm steamy air in my shower. I brought in the fresh new air and exhaled the negative stress. I had to learn when to put work away. If there was a point when I couldn’t move forward with something, I had to put it away. I had to put work aside so I could enjoy my personal life.
I calmed my nerves so I could go join the beautiful, sexy woman waiting for me on my balcony. As the last little bit of work left my tired, beaten body, I shut off the shower and listened to the water dripping in the tub.
The dripping seemed to cover a profound silence, the dark silence on the side of the interstate in the middle of the night when we’d stopped shooting at each other. That silence seemed to be following me. It wanted to be addressed, but I couldn’t remember anything about it other than the fact that there were places in my memory where it seemed to steal the sound and the voices from me.
I tucked
it away. I figured it was one of those things I had to handle on my own, alone, like Sasha had said, but I wasn’t alone right now. I had a guest to entertain.
I grabbed a pair of boxers from my dresser and pulled them on over me before walking into the kitchen to fix my own glass of whiskey. Then, I joined the beautiful Sasha Winters on my balcony.
It was already the afternoon. The day was moving quickly past us. I sat down with her at the table and looked out over the city with her while we sipped our drinks.
“You need to catch up,” she said playfully. “I’m already on my second one.”
“Well, I can make that happen,” I told her, taking mine down in one gulp. I set the bottle on the table and poured another glass.
“You came prepared, I see.”
“I did,” I told her, turning to look back out over my city. “I figured we would want more.”
“Yeah, I think the word is need. We’ll need more.”
I nodded, drinking to her assessment.
We sat in silence and sipped after that. Neither one of was wanted to talk. It was enough to just be there together. We’d gone through so much together that there was no point in using words just then anyway.
The golden afternoon light reflected off some of the glass towers standing in town. We were above most of the worst glares. We watched as birds flew by in clouds beneath us. Up where we sat, we couldn’t hear the streets below. The city seemed vacant, quiet, and peaceful. It was a great escape from everything to be able to come out up here and look out over everything I spend so much time down in the thick of, and to get a different perspective on it all.
“It’s a beautiful view,” Sasha finally said after a few minutes of silence.
“It really is, isn’t it?” I agreed. “I love it.”
“I do, too, Cole. I really do. The city is gorgeous from up here,” she continued.
I took a deep breath and long drink from my glass, letting any apprehension I had burn off as the whiskey flowed down my throat.
“How would you like to have this view every day?” I asked her.
“Who’s to say the view from my apartment isn’t better?” she asked.
“I’m serious, Sasha.”
“I am, too, Cole. You haven’t even seen my apartment,” she teased, but I hadn’t. We had spent all of our time here in my apartment. There had never been any discussion of going to her place. It might have been nice to give it a shot, I found myself thinking.
“We should go to your apartment some time,” I told her.
“Only to get my things,” she said flatly.
I shot her a puzzled look.
“Yeah, I was just kidding. Your apartment is way cooler. You’ve got a much better view than I do. I’m sandwiched between two old apartment buildings, so when I walk outside, I get to see my neighbors across the street.” She laughed.
“My neighbors are at the tops of other buildings,” I told her, holding my hands out over my city. It really was going to be my city once we started consolidating after Fang’s collapse.
“You know what I would really like?” she asked abruptly.
“What’s that?” I poured myself another glass.
“A house,” she said.
I almost choked on my drink.
“Or not,” she added, laughing at me.
“A house?” I asked.
“Yes, a house, Cole. Something we could call our own. Something our kids could inherit from us.”
“What’s all this 'we,' 'our,' 'kids' stuff?” I asked.
“Oh, am I moving too fast for you, Cole?” she asked with a sly smile on her face.
“Not really, but it may be a little abrupt, I think,” I admitted.
“Oh, well, I guess we’ll talk about it some other time,” she said dismissively, turning to enjoy her whiskey and look over the edge of the balcony again.
“No, wait, what’s all this about?” I asked her.
“No, you don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“You really want a house?” I asked her.
“I do.” She turned those deep blue eyes back my way.
I understood what my dad had meant about making decisions. I understood his choice to buy a home when he’d been able to get us out of that apartment. We could have walked out of my apartment right then and found a house to buy if that was what she wanted. Just like my dad, though, if it was what she wanted, it was what I wanted, too.
It scared me that I was willing to go along with whatever she wanted to do, but I wasn’t about to jump on anything new right away like that. We still had a long way to go to get to the point where we would buy a house. I just didn’t think I was ready, and I didn’t think we were at a point yet where it was a viable idea.
We were just getting started. We had our entire life together in front of us. There was no need to rush into anything, but I poured us both another glass of whiskey and held my drink up anyway.
“Here’s to the we, our, kids stuff,” I said.
“Indeed,” she agreed.
We tapped our glasses together and drank. It felt good to have someone who was on the inside for a change. She wasn’t just another woman I’d picked up along the way. She was my woman. She was my old lady.
I looked at her in the golden afternoon light. Her wavy blonde hair fell around her shoulders and glowed in the light. Her eyes were like pieces of the sky that had been pulled down and set against her soft, gentle features. I wanted to reach across the table and stroke her cheek. I wanted to kiss her delicate pink lips. I could see myself unbuttoning the shirt she was wearing and exposing her to me right there on the balcony, but I didn’t want to take her on the balcony. I wanted to make love to her in our bed.
I felt my desire growing harder for her the longer I stared at her. I watched her thin fingers around her glass and remembered how they felt around me. I wanted to feel that now. I knew we were both sore from last night, from the accident and the fighting. But that would just make it so much better, I thought.
“What?” she asked bashfully when she caught me staring at her.
“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “Just you.”
“What you mean?” Her face lit up.
“You’re beautiful,” I told her. “I can’t tell you that enough. You’re absolutely gorgeous, inside and out.”
“You’re sweet, Cole,” she said.
“No. I’m being honest, Sasha. I’ve wanted you from the first time I saw you, well, the first time I saw you as a woman. When I took that cap off your face and saw your deep blue eyes, when I watched your hair spill out of your cap onto your shoulders, I wanted you then, and I’ve wanted you constantly ever since,” I said.
She blushed.
“Come on,” I said. “While we’ve still got some energy left in us, let’s go make love.”
She looked at me and smiled with her blue eyes. She took another sip of her whiskey, downing the rest of her glass, and set it back on the table.
“Yes,” she said almost cheerfully, “let’s do that. Let’s make love.” It sounded so much better when she said it. I was about to rip through my boxers to get to her, so it was time to make something happen.
I took her slender hand and stood up from my chair. She followed, walking behind me as I silently led her back through the apartment into my bedroom. I closed the door behind us and kissed her, pressing her body against the door.
“You are so irresistible in my shirts,” I told her.
“Be gentle, Cole. I’m sore,” she said, so I turned and took her over to the bed, where we made slow, gentle love all night. I took care of her and cradled her in my arms so that she would know how much I loved her, and I gently made love to her so I could take her to ecstasy without breaking her worn body from the night before.
Epilogue
Sasha
I sat with my arms and legs tied to the metal chair. The rope hurt around my wrists and ankles. I pulled on them not to try to escape, but to adjust to rope to tr
y to find something less uncomfortable.
I was in a small gray concrete room. The walls were dirty and damp. The air felt musty, like we were underground or something. The floor was slick. I could see the smudges of dirt in the thin layer of water over the concrete. The room was lit by a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling by a string. It swayed gently, making shadows dance along the walls all around the room.
I had been captured trying to infiltrate a new crime boss’s hideout. We believed he was trying to take business from Cole and Hell’s Overlords, so once again, I threw on the black ski mask, the tight black sweater, leather gloves, black pants, and my softly padded shoes. I snuck into the dark, abandoned building they were using for their hideout in the middle of the night, just as I always had.