Devil's Dilemma: Satan's Devils MC Colorado Chapter #4

by Manda Mellett

  “Why, Skull? Why did you drag me into whatever you were doing? Why?” I scramble for an answer. “Did you find me so irresistible you had to have me?” He couldn’t have. Else how would he have walked away without a backward glance? Another look at his wife shows me he had better at home. She’s far more the type of person suitable to be seen on his arm.

  But he clams up and I get no answer.

  I try again, my voice rising. “Do you have any idea of what it was like? I expected you to come home and you didn’t. I thought you were dead. Have you any idea of the distress you caused? Have you? You made me love you. Made me expect you were my future. I didn’t even want a relationship, yet you dragged me into it. Were you acting all the time? Was it all an act when we made love? Why, Skull? Why did you just leave?”

  Another shrug from the man in front of me. But this time he follows it up with words. “I’m sorry, Mel. I regret the upset that I caused you, but there was no other way than to make a clean break.” There’s a slight softening of his eyes, but it’s gone in a flash, so fast I think I must have imagined it. “My job had ended so I returned to my wife.”

  He can’t even say he was ever attracted to me. Nothing of our time together had been true.

  If Pyro hadn’t stepped up behind me, I might have fallen to the ground at that point. I’m shaking like a leaf blown by the wind and I need his touch to steady me.

  “Mel,” Pyro says, his voice thick with worry, “you don’t need to talk to this piece of shit anymore. Go upstairs, we’ll handle it.”

  Finding strength from somewhere, I shrug him off me. If I don’t get answers now, Skull will just walk away, and I’ll never get them.

  “Tell me, Skull, Kris, Don or whatever your name is. You said you loved me. Went out of your way to make me believe it. Claimed me in front of the club. You still haven’t told me why? There were sweet butts to fuck…”

  “You needed an old lady, didn’t you, Skull?” Perhaps Red, not involved, is better placed to put things into perspective. “From what I know of Mel, I can see she’s ideal material.”

  My eyes go to Red, then back to Skull. I can hardly breathe. My chest feels like there’s a weight on it crushing my ribs. “You needed an old lady? You picked me as you thought I would do? You never actually wanted me? You toyed with my emotions as though they were nothing. When you went that morning, Skull, when you never came back, you fucking destroyed me.” My voice, shaking, ends on a cry.

  He shifts awkwardly. “It was never my intention to hurt you, Mel. I know the way we work doesn’t look good to a civilian, but the club had to believe I was dead. I actually totalled my bike in one of the ravines, thought it would be found by now…”

  “Fuckin’ coward. You didn’t tell us you were leavin’ as you’d have had a beatdown,” Pyro snaps.

  I see spots swimming in front of my eyes and realise while his wife knows, it hasn’t been mentioned to him as yet. “I’m pregnant.” I move my hands, showing the small baby bump to him. “Pregnant. Almost twenty weeks, and it’s yours.”

  That gets him.

  Gets him good.

  He staggers back as if someone’s hit him. Next thing he knows, someone has. Pyro’s fist in his stomach has winded him.

  “I think your friends in that car would allow me that one,” Pyro growls. “When they hear what you fuckin’ did.”

  Gasping, Skull or whoever he is, slowly straightens. “For getting her pregnant I’ll give you that, for doing my job? Nah.”

  Clare’s been silent while I’ve been questioning Skull. I now risk a glance at her, her sharp inhale when her husband was punched had been audible. She looks worried, as if expecting more violence to follow, or, could it be, that’s she’s becoming disgusted with her pig of a man?

  The Devils can’t fight this battle. The cops waiting outside mean their hands are tied, or, at least, for now. But I can.

  “What’s your name?” I ask, advancing menacingly. “What is your real name?”

  He snaps his mouth shut.

  “Mel?” asks Pyro.

  “He’s going to fucking go down,” I swear at my man. “So, I need his real name to take him.”

  “Donavan Jordan,” Twister speaks for him. “That’s the name we found in his house.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” the man we now know is Don snarls at me. “I was doing a job. I didn’t do a crime. You don’t have a leg to stand on. Look, we’ll sort out something about support for the kid. If it’s really mine, I’m not going to deny my responsibility. We’ll need to talk about custody arrangements.”

  “You won’t be giving her a penny of your filthy money, and you won’t be having anything to do with the kid,” Pyro growls.

  “He won’t be seeing him from behind bars,” I threaten.

  “Whatcha saying, Mel?” Red asks.

  “He raped me. He misrepresented himself. If I’d known who he was, what he was doing, I’d never have given my consent. I didn’t give my body to a cop, I gave it to the biker he was pretending to be.”

  Red’s eyes gleam, as he turns to Jordan. “You were sanctioned to fuck for information?”

  Skull’s eyes widen. “What?” For the first time, his voice isn’t steady.

  But Red’s standing there with an eyebrow raised in challenge. When Skull doesn’t say more, he continues, “Your superiors know? Or is this something you did on your own? Did you want an old lady to get information, use her in some way to strengthen your acceptance into the club? Or did you just want a handy fuckin’ companion?”

  “Don?” his wife asks, almost hesitantly, as though she too wants clarification but is afraid of the answer.

  Suddenly he rounds on her. “Why, Clare? Why did you have to go back to the house? We’d have gotten away, been set up somewhere new. But you had to get that damn toy.”

  “Don’t put this on me,” she spits back. “We’re talking about this… woman here who says she’s carrying your baby. Is that true, Don? Is it really yours?”

  “Get out of here, Mel,” Pyro warns again. But I shake my head. I need to be here. I need this confrontation. I need to be able to make sense of what he’s done. So much worse than him being dead.

  It had all been a lie from the very first moment I set eyes on him. It was never me he wanted. He just picked me like an item he had on a list at a grocery store.

  “Your cut’s club property.” Red approaches him. “I want it back.”

  But the man I knew as Skull shakes his head. “It’s evidence.”

  “You’re building a fuckin’ case against us?” Pyro’s face is bright red.

  There’s a commotion in the room above. Shouts of “Put your hands up!” and another yell of, “Jordan, time’s up.”

  Skull jerks his head upward as if acknowledging the faceless voice. Then looks at Clare apologetically and belatedly answers her question with a demand to me, “I want a DNA test, Mel.”

  I think of all the things he’d said, that was the worst.

  I’m not the only one to think it.

  “You don’t trust her? You have the fuckin’ balls to question the woman you raped and impregnated?”

  “It wasn’t rape. She consented.”

  “I don’t fuckin’ think so,” puts in Red. Like Pyro, his face seems to be glowing, his freckles more pronounced. “We’re going to see you in court, fucker.”

  “Bikers taking a cop to court?” he scoffs. He turns to look at one of his colleagues, who’s bravely descended the stairs. “I’ve said all I’m going to, now I’m taking my wife and we’re both going to walk out of this compound. You’re going to do nothing to stop me.”

  “Not the last you’re going to hear about this,” Red warns him.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Clare’s taken her cue to stand. But she doesn’t walk to her man’s side, the man I had thought was mine. No, she stands just off to his left as if uncertain quite what to do.

  Skull/Kris Cox/Donavan Jordan beckons her to him, but her
eyes widen, and her head moves side to side. I have to feel sympathy for her. How many times has her husband gone away for months or years at a time? Has she been able to contact him at all? Surely, she must worry? His life is at risk if his role was ever discovered. Now she’ll have to live with the thought he may be being unfaithful too. How can she live with that knowledge?

  That Skull could act like a biker and so successfully the Devils never suspected, again shows he’s not the man I thought I knew everything about.

  Had Clare ever suspected that he’d been unfaithful while he was doing his job? That he might have to be to keep up appearances? Surely, he could have come up with an excuse of why he didn’t want to go with a girl?

  I wish he had, then I wouldn’t be in this position.

  From Clare’s reluctance to go to him, I think she’s realised she has a lot of thinking to do. I suppose you might be able to forgive a man for a one-night stand he couldn’t safely get out of, but to father a child with another woman?

  Red puts himself between Clare and Skull and addresses himself to her. “You don’t have to go with him,” he suggests. “We’ve got no argument with you. If you need help, we can give it to you.”

  Clare looks astonished. Her eyes widen, and her hand goes to her head.

  “She’s coming with me,” Skull states angrily.

  Clare looks from him to Red, then back again, then sighs. She eyes the mob of angry bikers with disdain in her eyes, then again shakes her head and finally steps closer to her man.

  I watch them leave, hoping she’ll leave his lying sorry ass, but then, who knows what a woman will do? If I have my way, he’ll be arrested and charged. He’s destroyed my life and for nothing at all. If he’d found anything on the Satan’s Devils MC, surely warrants would have been issued already.

  When he walks up the stairs and disappears from my sight, it’s anti-climatic.

  It’s only then I’m aware of the tears streaming from my eyes.

  “Church in half an hour,” Red announces. “Pyro, see to your woman.”

  Pyro puts his arm around me. I push him away. My skin feels like ants are crawling all over me. How could I have been taken in by the man who’s just walked away from me and his baby without a backward glance?

  It had been clear every word he’d ever said to me had been untrue. How could I ever trust anyone ever again?

  Even Pyro.

  Suddenly I don’t want any man to touch me.

  “Don’t cry, Mel. Darlin’, let me comfort you. Babe…”

  “No, Pyro. Leave me alone.”

  “Mel, please. Let me hold you.”

  “No!” Again I push him away. How could I believe even him? Skull, Donavan Jordan, had targeted me and seduced me, led me to believe it was me he wanted, me he had claimed. In the biker world that was as good as being married. Me. A thirty-four-year-old overweight woman. I’d been right all along; no man wants me.

  “Mel.”

  “No. I want to be alone.” I turn abruptly. I don’t want to see, talk to anyone. I can feel the pitying glances from the men still milling around burning into me.

  “Mel, sweetheart.” It’s Sparky. “Mel…” but his voice trails off as though there’s nothing he can say.

  They’re probably wondering why I believed how a man like Jordan, or any man come to that, could want me.

  “Mel, I love you.” Pyro’s words are spoken loudly.

  I swing around. “Do you?” I scream, my vehemence making him stagger a step back. “Do you? How can I believe a word that you or anyone says? How can I ever trust anyone again?”

  “Mel, you’ve had a shock.” Red shoos Pyro away. “Pyro, she wants some space. Come Mel.” Now it’s the Vegas prez trying to put his arm around me, but I shrug him away too.

  I walk up into the clubhouse and quickly take the stairs to the room that’s been made available to Pyro and me. I slam the door shut behind me.

  I draw in air, then sob it out. Then do it again. Huge racking sobs start going through me, my body violently shaking as each escapes. If I thought thinking Skull was dead had upset me, it’s nothing to how I feel today. I’ve been torn apart. Everything I ever believed in taken away: my confidence, my ability to read people, my trust, my love which, at the end of the day, counted for nothing.

  I can hardly breathe between my cries.

  Who am I? A stupid woman who trusted a man.

  Never again.

  Never again will I give my heart to a man who has such power to hurt me.

  “Darlin’…”

  “Get out!” I scream at Pyro. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

  He’s suddenly pushed aside from the doorway.

  “Leave her be,” Rosa says as she enters the room. “Mel, hon, oh, Mel.”

  Her arms I can tolerate as they come around me.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Pyro

  Cop or not I should have killed him. May have meant I’d gone to prison for life, or, in Nevada, face the death penalty. But it would have been worth it to wipe that smarmy look off his face and stop those words coming out of his mouth that had so hurt the woman I love.

  The woman who’s now pushed me away.

  I want nothing more than to be the one comforting her.

  As I stand, banished from the room from which I can still hear her distraught sobbing, Red approaches me.

  His hand lands on my shoulder. “I have no words, Brother. I just don’t know what to say. What that motherfucker has done to that woman? He betrayed her trust in the worst possible way. She’s going to need a lot of help and support to recover.”

  “She needs him dead.”

  “She needs more than that, Pyro. Killing him is our way, a man’s way. She was out of control, in a situation she gave no consent to. Thought he’d chosen her as a life partner, she found out she was being used.” He tugs at his ginger beard. “Christ, we’ve all been taken for fools. May have happened in Colorado, but he pretended to be a true Devil, the betrayal touches us too. Yeah, I feel you. Think there’s a line forming of people who want to eradicate him, but that won’t help your woman in there. Closure is what she needs, and a dead body won’t provide that.”

  A loud wail sounds from the room I’d so recently been thrown out of. I squeeze my eyes shut and tighten my hands into fists to stop myself opening the door that separates me from the woman I love. “I need to see her. Help her…”

  Red’s eyes soften. “Know you do, Pyro. Know you’d give your fuckin’ life to make things right for her. I know this is fuckin’ hard for you to accept, but it’s not you she wants right now.”

  She’s made that clear. “I thought it would be me she turned to.”

  “Think, Pyro, think. She was with a man who claimed her, and told her he loved her. Now she knows that was all a game, and she got played.”

  His words filter through my brain, and I hate the implication. “She doesn’t trust me.” That’s what hurts. Gets me in the gut as though I’d been sucker punched. At the bottom of it is the question, how can she have faith in any man ever again?

  “She doesn’t trust herself right now, that’s the root of it.” His eyes go to the closed door, and like mine had seconds ago, close briefly as though he can feel the pain of her anguish. “Her judgment of character will be what is bothering her. Can she ever choose wisely in the future?”

  I thought she had chosen, chosen me. “What do I do, Red?” My fist hits the wall, then hits it again. Why did the fucker have to reappear from the grave?

  “Prove yourself to her. Take it slowly. Show her you do really love her.”

  I think back to how Skull had acted. “Skull did that, though. Fuck it, Red. We all thought he loved her.”

  “She’s a loveable woman, Pyro. You’re a lucky man.”

  I would be. If I still had her.

  “This can’t be good for her or the baby.” I smash the wall again. “Christ, I could barely keep my hands off him, Red.”

  He takes out his phon
e and looks at it. “I called church. Brothers will be coming in now. Demon’s just landed; he’ll be in on it too. Pyro, let’s sit and thrash this out around the table. You can’t do anything for now but give her what she wants. Space.”

  “I’ve given her everything I can, Red. Support when Skull went missing. I’ve been with her every step of the way during this pregnancy. That baby she’s carrying? It’s more mine than Skull’s. I’ve proved over and over again my feelings for her. I don’t know what more I can do. Fuckin’ hurts she’s pushing me away.”

  Again, his hand lands on my shoulder, patting it twice before he lifts it away. “And she’ll see that when she’s thinking straight. Give her space. She’s not alone, Rosa’s with her. Another woman is what she needs right now.”

  I bow my head, putting my hands either side of my face. Taking a few deep breaths to steady myself.

  “Got to update Demon,” Red reminds me. “Got to bring him in on this. We need to think what that fucker found out, and whether it was enough to bring down the club.”

  Red is right. I can’t do anything about my woman right now, and my club needs me. With one final look at the door that had been closed in my face, I follow Red down the stairs and into the meeting room of the Las Vegas club.

  The space around the table is cramped, six new chairs brought in. Sparky catches my eye. When I shake my head, he presses his lips together. Demon’s already seated in a space next to Red, and Beef is squashed in beside Crash. Both my prez and VP raise their chins toward me, but Red doesn’t give them a chance to speak.

  “Let’s get this started.” Red bangs the gavel. “Gonna bring Demon and Beef up to speed.” He turns to the man on his right. “Had your man, had to let him go.”

  That flare lights Demon’s eyes more than once as Red lays out the events of today concisely, being interrupted only by quick fired questions, snorts of derision and expressions of hatred together with promises of a painful death.

  With the update completed, Demon’s gaze settles on me. “Skull indicate whether he left ‘cause the case was closed, or because he had enough information to take us down?”