WITHOUT SHAME: Babylon MC Book 4
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WITHOUT SHAME
Babylon MC Book 4
Victoria L. James
L.J. Stock
Contents
A Note to The Reader…
Other Books In The Series
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
Suggested Playlist:
A Note to The Reader…
Without Shame is book four in the Babylon series, all of which are written by both Victoria L. James and L.J. Stock. Book One, Without Consequence, Book Two, Without Mercy and Book Three, Without Truth are all available on Amazon.
For more information on the authors’ work together as well as their individual projects, please visit the following pages.
www.facebook.com/Babylonseries
www.facebook.com/VictoriaLJamesAuthor
www.facebook.com/LJStockAuthor
Without Shame ©2018
Victoria L. James & L.J. Stock
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except that of small quotations used in critical reviews and promotions via blogs.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations only. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, events or any other incident is entirely coincidental.
Front Cover Design: L.J. Stock (LJDesigns)
Front Cover Image: ©shutterstock.com
Edited by: Claire Allmendinger of BNW Editing
Other Books In The Series
Without Consequence
Without Mercy
Without Truth
Acknowledgments
FROM BOTH AUTHORS
As always, the amount of help we receive with each book continues to grow and grow. We can’t believe it’s been four years since we released the first Babylon and now we’re so near the end. The fandom this series has created has blown our minds, and we are forever grateful to each and every reader who took a chance on us and allowed our different-from-the-norm MC to come to life inside their minds. So, our biggest thank you goes to you. We love you all.
To Claire Allmendinger of BNWediting, who never fails to give it to us straight while fitting us into her busy, busy life. We adore you. Thanks for being so constant and talented.
To Wendy Shatwell of Bare Naked Words (and Claire, again, of course) we couldn’t do this without you. No matter what we tell you we’re doing or when we’re doing it, Bare Naked Words is there for us at the drop of a hat.
To our Wonderland gang for always being there to share, share, share and support. Amy, Francesca, Charlie… we love you. Let’s always stay friends forever.
To the best Hound Whores in town, Sue Hollingmode and Mary Green, your early input and critique are invaluable to us, as is your friendship. To Trish Kitty Taylor. You’ve flown in and saved our lives with your loyalty, generosity, and by giving us your free time which actually isn’t free for you at all. Thank you for being a good friend and amazing supporter.
To our Babylon Beta group, of who there are too many to mention… THANK YOU! We couldn’t do this without your pom poms, enthusiasm, and support.
To all our author friends, we love you. Thanks for being there for us in this crazy, scary ocean of publishing. To our families, the ones who put up with the REAL versions of us behind all the filtered social media smiles and bad jokes. You’re the reason we do this. We want to make you proud. Thank you for putting up with us and following us on this crazy, crazy journey.
To each other. Like we said in the last acknowledgments, Vic loves Lou and Lou loves Vic. That will never change. Writing together is and always will be a dream come true. Soul-deep friendships come in forms we least expect. We never expected each other, but we couldn’t bloody live without the other now.
And finally, as always, to Drew and Ayda. Thanks for being our dream couple.
Thanks for coming alive in our minds.
Thanks for being our escape.
Thanks for letting us into a family full of brothers who we believe the whole world will one day fall in love with.
Thanks for the adventures.
The romance.
The angst.
The fantasy life.
Thank you for Babylon.
Vic & Lou
To Sue Hollingmode
For being one in a million, and for
being the very definition of a true friend.
We love you.
Prologue
Silence.
That racing heartbeat.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
More silence.
Their deep intake of breath.
That shiver of death down my spine.
“It’s with regret that I have to inform you that Harry Rogers was pronounced dead at approximately 9:07 this morning while serving his sentence at Huntsville Prison in the great state of Texas—”
When the phone fell from my hand and crashed to the ground, my world went black.
Just like last time.
* * *
DREW
TWO WEEKS LATER
“Calm,” I ordered as I circled her.
“Please. Please…” She hugged her knees to her chest, letting them catch her dirty tears on her stained jeans.
“Take a breath.”
She did.
“Listen.”
She sniffed and swallowed hard.
“The only things you should concentrate on are the sounds of my footsteps all around you. Can you hear those?”
She nodded.
“The creak of my leather. You hear that?”
The woman sniffed again. “Y-yes.”
“My heavy strides?”
She nodded again.
“The burning anger in my quiet voice. Hear that, too?”
She shut her eyes and squeezed them tight, pressing her lips together to stop the squeak of desperation that was begging to be released. She wanted to call for help. Her body trembled with fear, and it rocked back and forth without her permission, an unconscious call to her mind to stay in control… to not get herself killed.
I flared my nostrils as I sauntered around her like a lion stalking its prey, waiting for the perfect time to strike and feed. She belonged to him. She was his. She was precious to Satan. As far as I was concerned, she was taking up oxygen she no longer deserved, and she only had her husband to thank for my lack of empathy.
My leather cut creaked as my arms swung slowly, my eyes fixed on her every move, my jaw tight, my teeth g
rinding together, and my fingers flexed around the 9mm in my hand.
One bullet.
One pull of the trigger.
That’s all it would take to steal a little piece of his victory away from him. A victory he had no right to take from me.
“Please.” She sobbed through an urgent breath. “Don’t… don’t do this. I… I have children.”
I stopped by her side, freezing and letting the silence take over, once again. I figured she should be allowed to appreciate the heavy thunder of her heartbeat one last time before I left.
“You do?” I eventually muttered, my voice low and calm.
She nodded furiously, her eyes scrunching tight as more tears tried to escape.
“Okay,” I sighed.
Helen blinked slowly, forcing two tears to fall down her cheeks before she sniffed back her emotion, parted her lips and dared to look up at me through her blurry eyes.
“O-okay?” she asked with disbelief, and I nodded once. “That’s… that’s it?”
My smile turned upside down, and I shrugged a shoulder.
“Now what?”
“Now… you run.”
Helen’s eyes were wild, blinking furiously to try and read my expression. When she was met with a stone-cold killer gaze, she wasted no time in using her hands to push herself up from her cold, tiled floor, her legs scrambling to get her to stand before she tried to run away.
Her breaths were frantic.
They made my heart beat faster.
It was always better when they thought they had a chance.
I watched her from the corner of my eyes. I watched her bump into their kitchen island, and I watched her knock the fruit bowl off the counter. I watched her knees give way and her body buckle as she held onto the edge and tried to escape my vengeance.
I watched as she spluttered and stuttered and almost made it to the door.
But then I took a deep breath, spun on the heels of my feet, raised my gun, and I fired… without shame.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Jon Taylor,” I whispered.
Chapter One
AYDA
We buried Harry on a beautiful spring day. The sky was the most perfect shade of indigo with cotton clouds making it look endless. It was the kind of day where he and I would have sat outside the pawnshop talking about stupid shit that really didn’t mean all that much to either one of us. No one could shoot the shit quite like Harry. He always managed to inject something poignant and full of wisdom in there, but he hid it well because he had a reputation to uphold and all that.
A day full of sunshine for his send-off was all wrong.
It should have been a dark day filled with cold rain. A day that felt like the whole world around us was mourning this man with as much pain and grief as us. We needed the rain to cloak our tears from one another, to hide from ourselves, but Harry wasn’t having any of that. I could almost hear him coughing as he laughed sadistically at a bunch of road-hardened bikers being absolute pussies, unable to hide our emotions, while secretly loving the fact that every single last one of us was taking his death so damn hard.
His resting place was near Pete’s grave, his body encased in a shiny black casket with chrome handles and the club’s reaper and hounds etched into the highly polished surface. Every one of the girls who attended dropped in a black-tipped rose and a pair of their favorite underwear, while the guys poured in enough whiskey to grow barrels as his tombstone.
All I could think as I looked down at his descending body was that Harry would have loved every second of this—the ceremonious goodbye to one of our own in the only way we knew how.
Saying goodbye wasn’t easy for anyone. In fact, it was one of the hardest days we’d collectively had since I’d fallen into the lives of these men and accepted them as my own. Our hearts beat and broke together, every one of us feeling that void in our lives so deeply that it scarred our souls.
Our goodbye didn’t stop at the edge of the grave that afternoon. We sent Harry off in style that night, too. We consumed so much alcohol that I was sure that the mosquitoes were drunk from being in our very vicinity. Like a pack of wolves, we came together and turned off the outside world. We forgot our enemies, we forgot our troubles, and we embraced one another as we howled at the moon
The day we said goodbye was a hard day for everyone involved, it was true, but I would give anything to go back there.
To that day.
That night.
That ritual.
That was the last time I’d seen any real trace of emotion on Drew’s handsome face.
Since that night, he’d become a ghost.
Drew did what was expected of him. He took care of the club and the businesses in a robotic way with only the barest of interactions and participation on his part. I wasn’t sure what everyone else saw, but I knew he was slowly slipping farther from our grasps because behind those eyes there was a vacant space. A face utterly desolate of emotion, even to the pain I knew he was feeling. It was as if he’d chosen to hide the man he’d become in the wake of Harry’s death. He kept himself clear of most of the guys when he could get away with it. He’d escape their company by climbing on his bike and tearing from the yard, leaving nothing but dust for us to chew on as we watched him go. At least he would interact with the guys, no matter how blunt those interactions were or how clipped his tone became. He was still present, and he was still communicating with them.
The same couldn’t be said for me.
Drew no longer met my eyes.
Drew no longer kissed me with that urgency I so desperately enjoyed.
Drew didn’t even like being alone in the same room as me anymore.
I didn’t take it personally. Maybe I should have, but I couldn’t. I knew Drew too well to believe he was trying to hurt me purposefully, and I knew him well enough to know that this was his twisted way of protecting me.
Drew didn’t meet my eyes because he knew I would see what he was trying so hard to hide. He didn’t kiss me with urgency because he didn’t want to let himself go and release the rage that would come so easily as passion. He didn’t want to be alone with me because he didn’t want to use me in that almost violent way of his that fed his own needs, then lock himself behind those self-imposed walls again so I wouldn’t have to see how broken he was.
All of these things were used as tools, each one designed to push me away as painlessly as possible so the fissures that ran between us would eventually turn into crevices. Drew was counting on the fact that I would give up on him and walk away.
There was just one thing he hadn’t counted on…
I wasn’t that woman.
I wasn’t going to give up on him, not ever. No matter how much Drew pushed, how cruel he became, or how ugly he acted toward me, I was always going to bob along again as the life raft he would eventually have to grab onto. I knew being the quiet strength behind his pain wasn’t going to be easy. Hell, I knew I would probably shed more than a few tears along the way, but I was going to let him do what he felt he needed to do, and I would be waiting for him to come back to me.
I was also ready to keep Eric as far away from the club as humanly possible because the bastard was already circling like the vulture he was.
“Drew?” I heard Jedd’s voice call from the bar as I flicked through another magazine filled with bike parts I had no interest in. It was marginally better than picking up one of the nude magazines that these guys often paged through. Sitting in the kitchen, I raised my eyes and peered out from the door as Drew ignored the hail from his VP and carried on to the back of The Hut to our bedroom, which he hardly ever used these days… especially when I was in there.
I only caught a bare glimpse of him as he passed the kitchen, and if it hadn’t been for the stirring of butterflies in my stomach that so often came with his appearance, I don’t think I would have identified him at all. He wore black denim, a black hoodie, his black cut, boots, and gloves. If I were a betting woman, I would have said there was pro
bably a black bandana around his neck or in his pocket. He was like a shadow carrying an air of intimidation as he moved. You didn’t even have to make eye contact to feel the menace rolling from him like an advanced warning system.
Some days, he didn’t bother wearing his cut at all, and that wasn’t a fuck you to his brothers. It was a way of hiding his identity from anyone who saw him. A way of protecting the club when he was doing something he thought would jeopardize them. Sometimes he would take one of the repossessed cars instead of his bike, and those were the nights no one saw him until hours later.
I stepped out from behind the stainless steel island in the kitchen and headed to the door, stepping into Jedd’s path before he could stalk Drew to our room and nag him again. When my eyes met Jedd’s, he sighed and shook his head in silent denial.
“He’s covered in blood again.” There was no judgment in Jedd’s tone, just concern for his friend and brother. “Sutton is trying real hard to avoid him, Ayda. He’s in a tough spot, and as much as he wants to help—”