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Savage Redemption
“My life was all about revenge until I met her.”
I want them destroyed.
The Anarchists killed my father, haunt me and my brother, and seek to destroy my club, the Savage Kings.
For years, I have stopped at nothing to annihilate them.
But for years, I also never forgot her.
She was everything to me.
She brought joy to my life.
And I had to leave her without explanation.
But a chance encounter has brought her back to me.
And now, everything has changed.
My life is now all about having her—and nothing can stop me.
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Forbidden Romance
Carter Steele
Contents
1. Brock
2. Heather
3. Brock
4. Heather
5. Brock
6. Heather
Epilogue
Other Books by the Author
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1
Brock
“Bust down the goddamn door!”
I yelled my instructions before we had even gotten off our bikes. Behind me, five Savage Kings joined me on a quest to save Heather Richards from, at best, traumatic rape and at worst, certain death. Parker, Tyus, two prospects, and my brother Landon had accompanied me. We all bore AK-47s and a full willingness to use them at any cost. Whatever it took, we were going to do to break Heather free.
In front of us, an abandoned warehouse stood—the same one at which we had lost two members from before. Parker led the charge first. He barely slowed down before he raised his leg, kicked the door down, and fired a few rounds into the building. The rest of us followed him, hungry for the blood of the Anarchists for what they had done.
When we got inside, we came into a long hallway with multiple doorways.
“Clear out each and every room!” I yelled. “Make it fast! Kill any Anarchist you see!”
Parker, Landon, and one prospect took one hallway, while Tyus, the other prospect, and myself took another hallway. Silence never lasted long, interrupted by gunfire, screams, and shouts at different spots. But we weren’t having any luck finding Heather.
We cleared out about half-a-dozen rooms each before we reconvened on the other side of our hallways.
“Are we in the right building?” Tyus asked.
“They’d have her here,” I said. “It’s the only place they’ve been hiding. They—”
A loud scream punctured the air before it got cut off abruptly. It came from one floor down.
“Heather!” I roared. “I’m coming!”
I stormed toward the only door we hadn’t yet cleared out, busting it down with my shoulder and ignoring proper protocol for covering and moving in. The door led to a stairwell down below. I got halfway down before someone fired a gun at me, nearly taking me out. Parker had to yank on my shoulder and pull me back to prevent me from getting hit.
“Don’t be a fucking numbskull, ya moron!” he hissed.
He chucked me back once more into Landon’s arms before he turned the corner, fired his rifle, and took out whatever Anarchist had tried to kill me.
“You ain’t good to Heather with a slug in ya skull,” he chastised.
“Save it, Parker,” I growled.
We hurried down the stairs. Heather’s screams were getting louder and louder. Just hold out, baby. Just don’t let them hurt you. Stay strong. We’re coming for you. We’re coming.
Her screams acted as a sort of magnet for us, allowing us to ignore doors that we might have otherwise wasted time busting down. When we finally reached the door that led to her, I didn’t wait for Parker’s suggestion to do it right. I kicked the door down, raised my gun, and marched forward toward the two Anarchists in front of me. On the other side of them, Heather screamed.
“Hey!”
They turned to me just in time to let me land clean shots to both of their skulls. The two Anarchists dropped dead instantly. My only regret was that they had died quickly; they deserved to suffer eternally under our pressure for what they had almost done.
I ran over to Heather. She still had her clothes on, but her jeans had been tugged down on the left side. She had a bump on her skull and a few other slowly-developing bruises over her body.
“Jesus, Jesus,” I muttered to myself. “Are you hurt?”
“No, no, no,” she said, crying. “I’m OK, I’m OK. You got here in time, Brock. You got here…”
Her voice trailed off as I comforted her. I squeezed her tight as she wrapped her arms around me. For now, I was only grateful to have her alive.
“Let’s clear out the rest of this area,” Parker said behind me. “Give ‘em some space.”
The rest of the Kings gave us room, leaving us by ourselves. I kissed Heather on the cheek repeatedly as she squeezed even tighter.
“It’s OK, it’s OK,” I said. “You’re safe with me now. You’re safe.”
Heather’s tears slowly subsided as she seemed to come around to the fact that I had her back. Nothing bad was going to happen to her. If anything or anyone tried to hurt her, they’d have to go through me first.
“Brock,” she said. “My uncle—”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. But—”
“No, it’s fine,” she said. “Brock, let’s just get out of here. We have to kill him. We have to stop him. We—”
“We will,” I said.
Finally, Heather untangled herself from my body. Her poor eyes looked worn. They looked like they needed forty nights worth of sleep. They also looked betrayed—I knew now that she had no idea that her uncle had incited so much of this.
“He knows about us, Brock,” she said. “But I don’t think he knows about us from high school. I think he just… he just…”
“Hey,” I said, gently cupping her cheeks with my hand. “Let’s not worry about that right now, OK? The important thing is that you’re safe. We’ll deal with strategy and your uncle later. But let’s get you the hell out of here.”
Heather nodded. She leaned forward and gently kissed me on the lips. Her lips were cracked and dry, but I had never had a kiss so sweet in my life. It was, after all, only minutes ago that I had feared I would never get to kiss her again.
“Parker!” I shouted.
Seconds later, my sergeant-in-arms came running down.
“How’s it look?”
“Like a bunch of the Anarchists abandoned this place a short time ago,” he said. “No sign of Vulture.”
“Not surprised,” I scoffed. “That asshole should be nicknamed Ghost for how damn hard it is to catch him. But let’s get Heather to safety. We can all pull out. Are any of us hurt?”
“Landon got a little scratch on the face when one of the Anarchists tried to ambush him, but he ain’t hurt. If anythin’, it’ll pretty you King boys up.”
“How delightful,” I said with an eyeroll.
I got up off the bed, still holding Heather with my left arm. I nodded to Parker, who had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. The rest of the club members met up with us moments later, and we had an escort of five Savage Kings to our bikes.
Heather hopped onto the back of my bike and wrapped her arms around me. I gently ran my hands over hers, letting her know that if she could trust anyone, it was me. With that, very slowly, I revved the engine, gently gunned the engine, and drove her back home
.
When we got to her doorstep, I didn’t kill the engine. I was planning on dropping her off and going home. But Heather, once she got off, held her hand out.
“I don’t want to sleep alone tonight,” she said. “Please don’t leave me.”
I wasn’t stupid enough to think this was an invite for romance. This was a request for security. For Heather Richards, there was no difference at the core between the two. Both were acts of, well, love.
“I won’t.”
2
Heather
How did I survive that?
The way the two men from Uncle came at me… the way gunshots were going off everywhere… the way they called me precious and threatened to take me…
I got lucky.
I sat in bed. It was 2 a.m. in the morning. There was no way that I was going to make it to work in five hours. I was bruised and looking beat up physically, but that was far from the worst of it.
I kept replaying the events of that afternoon in my head. From walking into my apartment where Uncle Rick greeted me, to waking up in some abandoned building with two men who tried to rape me, to having to depend on Brock to come and help me…
How did I survive that?
I had no clue. I wasn’t sure I ever would get an answer other than the fact that fate looked out for me in a big way. I owed Brock big time, that was for damn sure.
It was only 8 p.m. when we got back to my apartment, but my emotions ran the gamut over the ensuing hours. I cried. I raged. I moped.
And then there were the things I tried to do but failed. I tried to fall asleep. I tried to put it behind me. I tried to talk to Brock about it. I tried to write about it and then give it to Brock. I tried to make sense of what had happened.
None of it was working. None in the slightest. Nothing was giving me any sort of comfort or any sense of feeling better.
Nothing, that was, except for one crazy thought.
I wanted to help Brock.
I wanted to help him fight my Uncle.
I wanted to help him fight the Anarchists and get revenge on the motorcycle club that had nearly raped me and quite possibly killed me despite my father’s wishes.
I had no idea how the hell I would do that, though. My father had given me a little bit of training with guns as a child, but most of those involved BB guns and paintball guns. To say that because I could do that meant that I could handle a real gun against real criminals was atrociously stupid. It would be as if I said that I could have fought against an MMA fighter because I had watched cartoons as a child. It was a good way to ensure that I got killed.
But I couldn’t shake the thought that I had to help somehow. I couldn’t just be the damsel in distress. Circumstances had forced me to play such a role for a few hours, but I refused to allow myself to fall into that trap again.
The question was, how the hell was I going to do that?
I didn’t know.
I started to feel hungry in bed. I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep, and so I got out of bed in nothing but my t-shirt and gym shorts and headed for the kitchen. Brock, who was on the couch, was passed out; I think he recognized that getting in bed with me would not have been the right move. I grabbed myself a protein bar and started to head back to my room.
“Can’t sleep either?”
Brock’s voice initially made me jump in terror, but it just as quickly brought me back down. He sat up on the couch, wearing nothing but his jeans. I came over, sat by him, and rested my head on his shoulder.
“Not at all,” I said. “You can go home if you want. If something was going to happen, it would have—”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine. You’re the priority right now.”
“Brock,” I said, but I didn’t know what else to say. I finally found words, but they weren’t any good. I knew that as I spoke them. “I can ask Sheriff Jones for help, I can get the police to—”
“The police won’t protect you from the Anarchists,” he said. “No one can protect you from the Anarchists except the Savage Kings. The police have to follow the law while protecting you. We don’t. We protect you when the law can’t and won’t.”
I hated how right he was. I hated that I had to rely on him for help. Maybe that was part of why I wanted to help fight back so badly.
“I’m sorry you got dragged into this,” I said. “I guess this is why you broke up with me and didn’t say a word about it a decade ago, huh?”
Brock breathed in slowly.
“It hurt me so goddamn much,” he said. “I loved you. But I knew that is Vulture murdered my father, he’d murder anyone else associated with my father. He’s been trying to kill me and Landon for the better part of a decade. That’s fine. I’m a Savage King. I’m used to having the target on my back. But I knew that if he couldn’t hurt me, he’d hurt the people around me. Even his own family.”
Even me.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t have believed me,” he said. “And even if you did, you would have said something that would have given you away to your uncle. And that’s not to blame you. No one could hold their tongue for that long. So I just chose to act like the asshole and hope that you never ran into me again.”
“But here we are,” I said, turning into his body. “Caught up in each other’s world again.”
Brock chuckled.
“You know, it really hurt me when you said you wanted to end it,” he said. “But I promise I won’t take offense if, knowing what you do now and having gone through what you did today, if you chose to not be with me.”
“Brock, don’t say that.”
“I’m serious. Ever since I saw you at City Brew, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. You’ve been on my mind, and the only thing that’s stopped us from picking up where we left off is the Anarchists. But that’s a pretty big ‘only thing.’”
He let out a long sigh, leaned over, and kissed my forehead.
“My focus right now has to be on the Anarchists, Heather,” he said. “They’re a much more serious threat than I would have guessed. They’re getting violent and aggressive, far moreso than they ever have before. I need to stay away from you while we deal with this. I guess you could say that I’m not just saying I wouldn’t mind you being away from me. I need you, for your sake.”
“Brock, I want to help.”
The words burst from my throat. I knew he wasn’t going to accept them. I knew he wasn’t going to allow me to do something so seemingly batshit insane. But my emotions overpowered my logic. They forced me to speak my mind.
“Heather, you can help by staying out of the way as much as you can.”
“How?” I said. “By staying here? Uncle knows where I am, Brock. He won’t have to go to much effort to find out I’m a teacher. He can cause hell at the school. He doesn’t seem to be afraid to disrupt things in Romara to accomplish his goals.”
Brock took his arm from around me, placed it on his lap, and hunched over. He looked so much older than 28 at that moment; he looked like a man who, though he had only aged ten years since I knew him, had gained the wisdom and the baggage of someone twice as old as he was.
It only invigorated my desire to help him even more.
“I can give you a gun for protection,” he said. “It goes without saying that you can’t let anyone know about it. Another teacher sees you with it, they’ll claim you’re triggering them or something stupid. But the closer you are to me, the more danger you’re in. At the absolute most… when we go to strike at them, you can come to the clubhouse for protection. But I’d say that’s it. Otherwise, stay the hell away from me.”
“Brock—”
“No, Heather,” he said, his voice rising. “This isn’t a business deal. This isn’t some romantic fight. This is life or death. You were close to dying today. You were certainly close to being traumatized for life. Those men that I killed, the two that were over you like so? The rest of the Anarchists are like that. Snarling animals, just waiting for the chance to
take a bite out of you. I cannot let you near them at all, Heather. OK?”
He stood up, went over to his pile of clothes, and reached for something. It was his pistol.
“Carry this with you at all times,” he said. “Even if you never fire it and only brandish it, it’ll buy you some time in a dangerous spot. But don’t get involved, Heather. I could get killed. You don’t need to join me.”
“Brock…”
But he was right.
“OK,” I said. “Stay until sunrise, please.”
“I will.”
It was implied from those words that I would go back to bed and try and fall asleep. But I never did leave that couch again.
It wasn’t until I was in Brock’s arms, with my eyes closed, that I finally felt safe enough to fall asleep.
3
Brock
As soon as I saw the first blinding ray of light from the sun, I got up from Heather’s couch.
I leaned over to kiss her. She murmured something, but I hurried out of her apartment before she could say anything or try and stop me. She was understandably a little rattled by what had happened, but the last thing that I needed was her thinking that she could somehow help.
If she tried to storm into battle, she was as good as dead. That was exponentially true if she ran out of bullets or had no weapons to protect herself. The best that she could offer was tactical, long-range support if—and this was a big if—she knew how to handle a gun. Most people severely overestimated their ability to use a gun. They thought that because they’d held their parents rifles or because they’d played video games they knew how to handle guns.
Forbidden Romance: An MC Romance (Savage Kings MC Book 4) Page 1