by Malcom, Anne
I didn’t argue with the prospect. It wasn’t worth it, and it wouldn’t change anything. He was under orders. And unless I felt like wrestling his gun off him and shooting him, I wasn’t getting out of that gate.
Frustration clawed at my throat, but I forced myself to remain outwardly calm, slowly walking to the edge of the parking lot and sitting on the ground, my back up against the outer wall of the clubhouse.
It didn’t pay to panic in situations like this.
Ones where you were trapped around a bunch of men with guns who followed orders until death. It wasn’t a foreign situation, though it was not one I expected to face on home soil. Or with Liam in the mix.
It was the Liam part that was clawing at my throat.
The rest of it, being potentially labeled as a rat by one of the biggest motorcycle clubs in the country, my fate being held in the steady hands of a man wearing a president’s patch and a cold expression, none of it really compared to Liam.
“I’m gonna marry you one day, you know?” he said, drawing lines on the palm of my hand.
“I know,” I replied.
He stopped. “You don’t seem surprised.”
I grinned. “Of course I’m not. I knew from the moment I met you, I’d figure a way to make you fall in love with me.”
“You cast a spell on me, Peaches?” he teased.
“A witch never tells.”
His chuckle was throaty and deep, more like a man’s every day. He continued tracing. “Doesn’t matter,” he decided. “I’m gonna marry you, spell or no spell.”
I expected the man in the cut that settled beside me to be Liam.
Though I knew it wasn’t the second I watched the figure stroll over.
I remembered Liam’s walk.
It hadn’t changed.
Funny how everything about a person could change, but the way they walked stayed the same.
Hansen settled on the ground beside me.
He didn’t speak for the longest time.
Neither did I.
As a journalist, I knew the value of silence was almost more than that of questions.
As a human going through unthinkable torment, I didn’t have anything to offer the man that might order my death but silence.
“Jagger came to the club fucked up,” he said finally. “Fuck, most prospects come to the club fucked up in one way or another. This ain’t exactly a mecca for the well-adjusted.” He looked at the building as if it were living, staring at him. “But Jagger more than most. I’d served, so I knew the look of a man, one that had seen too much. Done even more. He wore the mark on his face, obvious to anyone, it was fresher then. But that healed. It’s scar tissue now. What hasn’t healed is whatever brought him here.” He paused. “Now I know a little bit of that.”
“You mean to tell me you didn’t know about what he left behind coming here?” I accused. I found that to be bullshit. Hansen didn’t look like a man who only knew half a story. I expected that he helped Liam tie up loose ends.
“Know a lot of what he left behind was death,” he said. “Didn’t know a thing about the things he’d left livin’.”
I gritted my teeth. I knew when people were lying. Hansen wasn’t lying.
“He cares about you,” he said finally when I didn’t respond.
I scoffed. “If he cared so much, or even a little bit, he wouldn’t have let me believe he was dead for the past fourteen years.”
Hansen gave me a long look. “Or if he cared too much, that’s the reason why he let you believe that.”
Then he stood.
“Gonna have to get used to this place for a while, sweetheart,” he continued. “Though I expect you gathered that already.”
I blinked up at him. “So you’re not gonna kill me?”
Hansen chuckled. “Got a wife and two kids I love very much. Don’t plan on leaving this earth or leaving them, which would be what happens if Jagger even thought he caught a whiff of me considering doing that. Even without that, no, I wouldn’t be killing you. What you did, it doesn’t sit well with me. Don’t like it. Doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. Also know you’re not a threat to the club. You weren’t trying to bring us down.”
“And if I was a threat? If I was trying to bring you down?” The question was asked almost instinctively, my reporter’s brain still intent on getting more information about the story that had become my prison.
He didn’t hesitate. “Then I’m afraid we wouldn’t be havin’ this conversation. But you already knew that.”
Then he walked off, leaving me to contemplate the clubhouse that I’d been staring at one month ago, intent on finding a story. And instead I’d found a ghost.
Instead I’d found my destruction.
* * *
I didn’t want to go back inside.
I really, fricking, didn’t want to go inside.
No one had come since Hansen.
Not Liam.
Not even Claw, to kill me when Hansen wasn’t looking.
And he was capable of doing that, killing. A woman. Someone he’d become friends with. Because that’s the way of the club, they valued it so highly that life became cheap when betrayal was present.
I didn’t judge him for it. Not really. Life was cheap everywhere.
But then again, the change after I spoke—after I spewed all those words out at Liam—was palpable. His murderous fury simmered down. He had a human reaction to my story. The sorrow in it. That didn’t surprise me either. He was a good man. As good as this world allowed him to be, I guessed.
I didn’t know if Liam was a good man now.
Liam was alive.
The thought ricocheted through my skull with the speed and damage of a bullet. It hadn’t sunk in yet. Though his death had sunk in. Since the second I heard that horrible, animal scream from down the street. There was no adjustment period, no blissed moments in the mornings when I was ignorant of the truth. No, I woke up every single day lucid with the knowledge of what my life was now, constant dark, storm clouds.
“It’ll be better tomorrow,” my mother whispered, voice no longer strong and sure as I’d come to expect from her in times of crisis.
Because this wasn’t a time of crisis.
I didn’t even know what this was. There was no word for this kind of ugly, soul-destroying, unfathomable pain.
“I don’t want tomorrow,” I replied, my voice was soaked with the tears I hadn’t shed. It was slow, almost slurred, saturated with medication my childhood doctor had injected into me at some point earlier. “I want yesterday. I would trade every single tomorrow there ever could be for one moment of yesterday. Where he wasn’t gone. Where I didn’t have a hole punched through my chest.”
I rubbed that same spot, feeling that same empty space underneath the skin. It hadn’t healed, grown over, with the evidence of what put it there being a lie. Because it wasn’t really a lie.
He was still gone.
Even if he was here.
I went inside because I was cold, because my ass was going to sleep, and because I knew I couldn’t delay the inevitable.
I wasn’t one to delay the most horrible of things. Mostly because my living was made out of staring at the most horrible of things. Making other people stare at them.
It was still quiet when I walked into the clubhouse, the common room illuminated with a dull light that showed a figure slouched at the bar.
No one else was around.
I could tell it was him by the shadows.
Even though his shadow was different. Bigger. Inkier somehow.
He moved the second the door shut behind me. I was surprised that it took that to notice I was in the room. I would’ve guessed he would’ve caught on to my presence the second the door opened. When I started walking across the parking lot. Wasn’t he meant to be a badass outlaw criminal who could sense danger?
Was I danger to him? Did I mean enough to be dangerous?
But then again, he might be as lost in though
t as I was. Sure, he had a lot to think about, how his grand plan of leaving his past behind in the coffin that lay in his cemetery at home was shot to shit now.
“You need to sleep,” he said by way of greeting, his husky voice carrying over the room.
Immediately the chill of that voice, of the emptiness prickled against my arms and I rubbed them. “As much as the possibility seems ridiculous under the circumstances, yes,” I agreed.
I could fall asleep in all different and dangerous circumstances, it was necessary. You snatched sleep when you could in my line of work, because you couldn’t be sure when you’d get it again. It wasn’t New York that never slept, it was the story. It was war. Suffering.
I glanced around at the common room and the worn and tattered sofas scattered around the place.
“I’m guessing this is serving as my accommodations for the foreseeable future?” I asked. I’d slept in worse.
“Fuck no,” Liam clipped. “You’re sleepin’ in my room.”
My entire body went ramrod straight. “No way in hell is that happening,” I hissed. “I’d rather risk getting whatever undiscovered STD lives on these sofas.”
He was across the room in a flash, gripping my upper arm firm enough so I couldn’t squirm out of his grasp, but not hard enough to hurt.
“You don’t have a choice in the matter,” he said, pulling me across the room.
I fought him as he did so, but my protests were weak from the upcoming adrenaline crash and the very presence of his touch. My muscles melted and it was all I could do to let him drag me down the hall.
“I’m not sleeping in a room with you, Liam,” I said as he walked me into the room I’d showered in.
He regarded me, face hard. “I’m not sleepin’ here. I’ll crash somewhere else.” He looked to the door.
I followed his gaze. There was a padlock on the outside.
I gaped thinking about why that had to be there.
He took my pause as opportunity and began to walk out.
Without a fricking word, he was just going to walk out.
“You’re really going to keep me prisoner here?” I asked his back.
He didn’t turn. “I have to.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” I hissed. “You could walk out of here right now, drive back to the family who’ve been mourning your death for almost fifteen years.”
He didn’t move, but I watched his large form stiffen. I glared at the grim reaper on his back and it taunted me with its unyielding stare.
“My club is my family now.”
And then he walked out.
The click of the lock against the door echoed in my brain.
Not as loud, nor as painful as the words he’d spoken.
I’d been in all sorts of situations as a journalist. I’d even been held prisoner before. By people much worse than this. I’d seen my photographer shot in the face right before my eyes. A piece of his skull cut my cheek.
I still had the scar.
I had been eighty percent sure I wasn’t going to make it out alive.
And this time, I didn’t think Liam would hurt me. Certainly not kill me.
No, Liam would never hurt me.
This Jagger character...I didn’t know him. I didn’t know what he’d do to me.
* * *
Jagger
He didn’t sleep. Not a fucking wink.
How the fuck could he sleep when she was there? Right there, behind that door he’d been staring at the entire night. After locking her inside the room.
He’d gone to the bar to retrieve a bottle of Jack.
Then he’d sank down to the floor opposite his door and stared at it. He didn’t need to do so, he knew that she couldn’t escape. His window had bars on it, all of them did now since the attack.
And the lock would hold fast with even Hades putting his weight on it. Caroline wasn’t even a buck fifty soaking wet. He didn’t doubt her strength or resilience, but she still wouldn’t get out.
He half expected her to try. To scream. As most bitches would when faced with the fact they were imprisoned within a motorcycle club that had discovered they were a rat. Imprisoned with a man they’d once known. Once mourned. He couldn’t think of the words she’d spoken in church. Couldn’t think of that empty deadness in her voice.
So he thought about her screaming for rescue.
But there was nothing but silence from the other side of the door.
That silence told him a lot of things.
That she was smart. But he already knew that. She would always go on about how smart he was, the places he would go with such utter confidence. But she had something about her that was more than intelligence. It didn’t surprise him she was a reporter. It fucking enraged him that she was a reporter that did things like risk her life going undercover at a fucking MC. If this was any other MC, even a fucking other chapter, she would’ve been dead.
He took a long swig on that thought.
The Jack tasted like acid.
She was smart, so that’s why she wasn’t trying to escape—because she knew she couldn’t.
But there was something else. Something about that steely glint in her eye when she spoke with Hansen. The even tenor of her voice.
Her fucking voice.
Almost fifteen years he’d gone without it.
He’d imagined her soft whispers every night. Every moment.
There wasn’t anything soft about it now.
It was hard. Cold. Controlled. It was the voice of someone who’d stared death in the face before. Who’d sat at tables with murderers before.
That chilled him.
To the fucking bone.
That’s what kept him up all night. Long after the Jack had gone. That’s what kept him stone cold sober until Hansen’s hand settled on his shoulder.
His president glanced to the empty bottle, to the door and then back to him. “Take it you haven’t slept?”
“What the fuck do you think?”
“I think it’s time for church,” he said in response.
Jagger froze.
He knew what that meant. Hansen was a good friend. Which was why he had let Jagger take Caroline in the alley. Which was why he hadn’t killed her immediately when he found out that she was a journalist.
That she was a rat.
Yeah, he did that because he was a good friend and because he sensed what she was to him even before she spouted that rancid truth all over the table.
He was the friend who didn’t ask a single fucking question about that truth. The one he hadn’t told him in the twelve years he’d been patched. That they’d been friends.
He imagined bitches would have a lot of fucking questions for their friends, for their families if it came out they weren’t who they thought they were.
But this was different. Brothers in the club were different. Everyone had an ugly past. You didn’t come to the club if it was all sunshine and rainbows. It was unspoken that that past stayed buried, just like whatever bodies lived there.
Hansen got that.
He also got that Jagger wasn’t pretending to be someone else. He was exactly who they all thought he was. Which was why he was fucking here in the first place.
So yeah, Hansen was a good friend.
He was also a good fucking president.
Jagger knew what church meant.
It meant Hansen wasn’t keeping his club in the dark about who Caroline really was. The club, the members, it was fresh, new, built on blood, death. Hansen didn’t want lies in the foundation.
He got it.
Respected it.
But it scared the absolute fuck out of him.
Because Hansen was a good friend.
But that didn’t mean shit at the table.
That didn’t mean shit when the safety of the club was at stake.
And the table would call for blood.
Caroline’s.
Jagger took a harsh breath. The air cut his tongue. He swallowed
blood.
Not his own.
Caroline’s.
But the patch on his back got him up.
And following his president into church.
* * *
Curses erupted around the table after Hansen told the club about last night. About Caroline. Who she was. What it meant for the club. And he hinted at what she meant to Jagger. What she had meant to him in the past.
He didn’t tell the full story.
Because in the midst of being a good president, he was being a good friend. Also part of being a president was keeping your brother’s secrets.
So he didn’t tell the whole ugly truth.
He told part of it.
Which was still ugly.
They had a rat in the club. Months after the club was almost destroyed. In the middle of a war that was only gonna get bloodier before it was over.
This was no time for mercy. It was time for action.
But this was Jagger’s woman. He’d declared as much. Hansen reiterated it. But she was also a traitor. It was one of the oldest rules that a member’s woman was protected. That if you put a hand on her, you’d not only lose your patch, you’d lose your life.
Another one of their oldest rules was that rats died. Immediately. Despite gender, age or affiliation.
“What do we do here?” Troy asked after a long silence. He was reasonable. Quiet to the point of mute most of the time. Didn’t drink much. Didn’t fuck bitches for all Jagger could see, and that was not for lack of opportunity. The fucker was a pretty boy. Pale as all fuck. Dark hair. All cheekbones. Strictly black and white tattoos covering his body.
He could have his pick of the bitches.
He didn’t.
Jagger had idly wondered if he was gay. It didn’t bother him. Who people fucked was none of his business. And though the Sons of Templar weren’t known to be particularly inclusive in their history, as younger presidents took over, more progressive ideas came with them. So no one was getting refused a chance to prospect over sexual orientation, race, religion.
Obviously women still couldn’t patch in.
They weren’t that progressive.
But for all the power and strength Jagger had seen from the Old Ladies, they didn’t need a chance at a patch. They already had ones of their own.