by Jessie Cooke
“So how did I get here? I obviously didn't kill Marcus. He's still alive.”
“No, you didn't. I don't know what happened after I took off. All I know is that then next day you were gone when we all left to go back to our club. When we got back to Jersey, Marcus holed up in his office with his uncle...an old biker named Beaner. Everyone knew something was going on, but no one knew what. Your girl was asking everyone where you were, but nobody knew. When Marcus and Beaner finally came out of their meeting, Marcus told her you'd gone on a run. When she asked where and why you hadn't told her you were leaving, he snapped at her in front of everyone and called her a ‘nosy whore.’ Then, he locked himself back in the office and Beaner took off. It was about three days later when he told your old lady you were dead and made an announcement to the rest of the club.”
“Where was I supposedly in this accident and who witnessed it?”
“Somewhere in New York man, I don't know. Marcus said you were still working on business related to the alliance. Marcus went up there and ID'd the body. We had a funeral and everything man.”
“I don't get it. Who was in the fucking box?”
“It was you man. The fucking casket was open. The man in that box was fucking you.”
“It doesn't make sense.” Jigsaw was sitting in the office with Dax and Handsome hours later in the middle of the night. He was exhausted but filled with an almost uncomfortable energy. He wanted Rush to tell him more so badly that he'd almost been willing to beat it out of the little man. But that would have been futile too, since it was obvious he'd told them all he could. He watched in frustration as Rush left with Hunter and the others and then he'd ridden his bike along with Dax and Handsome, back to the ranch. They were going over everything they knew now, trying to make sense of it...but it seemed to Jigsaw like that was futile too.
“Maybe they just had a guy that looked like you...” Handsome tried.
“You saw that guy's face,” Jigsaw said. “He looked at me like he was seeing a ghost. He was physically sick over it when he first saw me. It had to be more than the guy looked like me.”
“There has to be an explanation,” Dax said. “Marcus was willing to keep killing, to make sure whatever someone knew about what happened to you didn't come out. He killed Carl just because he thought he was asking questions about you.”
“Seems to me that Marcus is just worried about saving his own ass and not letting people find out he's a fucking pedophile. Are the Knightriders and the Blackhawks still allies?” Jigsaw asked.
Dax nodded. “Yeah, the Blackhawks have gained a lot of momentum over the past year. It has a lot to do with the IRA backing them.” The Irish Republican Army were some of the largest suppliers of illegal guns in the US. They were also some of the most dangerous people on the planet. Dax had personally dealt with a few of them, one of the top gun dealers worked out of an accounting office in downtown Boston.
“If Cyclops ever finds out Marcus was trying to rape his fourteen-year-old daughter, not only would that alliance probably be history, but Marcus as well. If Cyclops didn't have it done himself, any of the other guys, hell, even the IRA would probably love to help.” Not many men, criminals or not, thought there was anything lower than a man that would touch a child. “Marcus is probably going to be willing to kill anyone that even hints at knowing anything. Carl probably denied knowing anything right up until he took his last breath, but he's dead now just on the off chance that he did know anything...so what I don't understand is why wasn't he still looking for me. I'm sure he would have demanded to identify my body, just to make sure I was dead. What convinced him that it was me?”
Dax's phone rang, and he looked down at the face. “Maybe we're about to find out,” he said. He put the phone to his ear and said, “Chase, what do you have for me?” Chase is Hunter's cousin and partner, the one looking into Beau Blackwell's past. Dax listened to whatever Chase was telling him with the crease between his eyes growing deeper by the second. After several minutes he said, “Thanks Chase, I'll send Gunner out with a payment for you in the morning.” He ended the call but stared at the wall behind Jigsaw's head for several seconds before he finally said, “Chase is faxing over his notes and the documents he dug up.” He looked at Jigsaw and said, “Have you remembered anything else, anything about your family?”
Jigsaw shook his head. “I have dreams sometimes about an old woman that I think is my grandmother and she's telling me my parents are dead, but that's it.”
“Chase found a birth certificate for Beau Blackwell. It was a multiple birth. Jig, it looks like you had a twin, an identical twin brother.”
16
Kimber was sleeping soundly when Jigsaw got up to their room. It was after three am and he knew he shouldn't wake her, but he needed her and he also knew she'd want to be there for him. He slipped into the bed, fully clothed and pulled her into his arms. She was warm and pliable and in a sleepy voice she said, “Hey baby.”
“Hey.” He kissed her face, her cheeks and her lips and on top of both of her eyelids. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too. You okay?”
“I don't know,” he said, honestly.
“Tell me, baby, what happened?” She suddenly sounded wide awake, but when she tried to sit up and look at him, he held her tightly. It was what he needed at the moment, he needed her in his arms. She must have sensed he wasn't ready to talk, because she didn't question him any further. She put her arms around his big body and snuggled down deeper into his chest. They lay there like that for a long time before he finally said,
“I had a brother.” She moved to look at him then and he let her. He could see the concern shining in her pretty green eyes as she looked up at his face.
“You ‘had’ a brother?”
He nodded. “A twin brother. But...he's dead.”
“Oh baby, I'm so sorry.”
“Me too,” he said. “Especially because I think it's my fault.” He was struggling with everything, but the guilt of being the reason his twin brother, who he couldn't remember, was dead because of him.
“Baby, I don't know why you think that, but I know you and you take too much on yourself.”
“No. This isn't about my self-doubts. This is about me sticking my nose into something dangerous and not giving a thought to how it might affect the people in my life. I almost did it to you.”
“What are you talking about, baby? You've never done anything but keep me safe.”
“I almost took you to Jersey and led you right into the lion's den.”
She propped herself up on her elbow and said, “Tell me what happened baby, all of it.”
He took a deep breath and then he told her, everything that Rush had said. She listened quietly, like she always did, waiting for him to finish. When he stopped talking, she waited a few beats and said, “'None of that was your fault. You did the right thing. I knew you had to have been a good man all your life, to be so good now. This is just proof that you've always been good.”
He smiled despite the black cloud he could feel all around him. He wished that he was half the man she thought he was. The truth was he was confused and now he was guilty. He didn't feel like the “good man” she kept telling him that he was. “Thank you, babe. Obviously, I went about it the wrong way or I wouldn't be here today.”
“My heart breaks for you, but I can't say that I'm not happy you're here. I know that's selfish of me, especially because of what you just told me.”
He pulled her back into her side. “You couldn't be selfish if you tried,” he said. He held her, thinking about getting up and at least getting out of his clothes, but he was so tired...and in minutes sleep claimed him, and when it did, he was thrust into the past.
Eleven Months Earlier:
Beau was already fed up with Marcus, the club and almost everything about his life before the night that changed everything. The only reason he stayed in Jersey was Natalie. She was attached to the club and their life there, and she didn'
t want to leave it. She drank too much and sometimes he got frustrated with her because she never seemed to want to look toward the future unless it was to the next party. But Beau and Natalie had both been forced to grow up way too soon so he gave her a lot of slack and most days he told himself that in a few years things would change and she'd start thinking about having a real family and settling down. He was a mechanic, and a damned good one and he knew that when they left the club, he would be able to make a living and support a family. They'd have to go far away, because Marcus would never just let them leave...but Beau had a brother who lived on the west coast and he knew that no matter how many miles or years were between them, Nick would do whatever it took to help him and Natalie when the time came.
The day they left for the meeting in New York had started off bad. He wasn't happy with the club becoming involved with the Blackhawks or the IRA. He'd voted against it, but Marcus always got his way and the rest of the votes had been overwhelmingly in the club president's favor. Beau was already in a bad mood over that before he caught Natalie smoking weed with one of the prospects out behind the clubhouse. Natalie was an alcoholic. Beau had known that for a long time. He was an enabler, he knew that as well. But he had justified her drinking and his enabling by getting her to promise she'd only drink with him and she'd leave the drugs alone. They'd had a huge fight that morning and by the time he rode out with the rest of the crew for the meeting in New York, they still hadn't made up.
On the way to New York he did a lot of thinking about his life, and Natalie. He wondered if they had just finally outgrown each other. She'd only been sixteen when he met her. Beau was already twenty and a new patch into the club. He met her at a party and luckily one of the club girls had warned him ahead of time that she was only sixteen. He was attracted to her right away, but despite all of the things he'd done in the three years prior to meeting her, he still had some scruples. As soon as Natalie found out he wasn't going to sleep with her, she didn't want any more to do with him. But Beau had been where she was, alone, afraid and looking for a way out. He felt a connection to her and he felt protective and no matter how much she protested, he appointed himself as her guardian angel.
After following her around for almost a year, Natalie finally started coming around to the idea of being friends. Once they started hanging out for real, they found out they had a lot in common and Beau found out what a shitty life she'd had thus far. He had his own little place by that time and she begged him to let her stay there, but he insisted she wait until she was eighteen and promised her that if she still wanted to leave home then, he'd take her away that very day.
Before she was finally legal and Beau's scruples would let him touch her, he had already fallen in love. On her eighteenth birthday he picked her up on his Harley and took her away from the house of horrors she lived in. He had worried about her leaving her younger sister. Beau never met her but Natalie talked about her a lot. The funny thing was that as much as her need to take care of everyone annoyed Natalie, Beau sometimes felt like Natalie could be describing him when he was just a kid. Of course that wasn't him any longer...or at that point it was what he was still telling himself. At first, riding with the club, buying and selling guns, boosting and racing cars, drinking, partying and having no real boundaries or limits had been everything Beau was looking for, especially once he had Natalie by his side. But eventually the thrill wore off...at least for him.
Beau had grown up with his grandmother and his twin brother. Their parents were killed in an accident when the boys were only four years old. His grandma, or Mamaw as he called her, was a sweet, God-fearing woman who loved Beau and his brother Nick fiercely. She was over-protective though and the expectations she had for them were sometimes too high. Beau and his brother Nick both tried to please her, getting straight “A's” in school and not getting into any trouble. But one or both of them eventually breaking underneath all of that pressure was inevitable, and the first break had been Nick's.
When the boys were fifteen and freshmen in high school, Nick started getting migraine headaches. Mamaw took him to one doctor after the other and ultimately, he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. It was at that point that Mamaw quit her full-time job and spent every waking moment at Nick's side as he went through his cancer treatments. For almost a year Beau was left mostly to his own devices. But, where most boys that age would have found trouble to get into, Beau found a job with a local mechanic and learned how to work on cars and restore bikes. Nick got better for a while and they thought he was in remission...and then suddenly he got worse, and they thought he was going to die. Beau loved his brother fiercely and the idea of being in a world without him was almost too much for him to bear. He spent all of his free time either at the hospital or working on an old Harley that his boss had given him, restoring it back to its former glory and telling Nick that if only he'd get better, it would be his. Nick proved that miracles could happen, beating the tumor by the time he was seventeen and after only six months in rehab, regaining almost all of his motor skills. Beau gave him the Harley as promised not knowing then how it would ultimately change both their lives.
When Nick started hanging out with a group of Harley riders and not coming home for days at a time, Mamaw worried and so did Beau, but neither of them wanted to stifle his second chance at life. Eventually Nick stopped coming home at all and Beau was left with a full-time job and an elderly woman whose health was failing to take care of. It was during that time he found out that Mamaw had mortgaged the house to pay for Nick's medical treatments. After nursing her through a year-long battle with heart disease and then losing her, Beau came home to a foreclosure notice on the family home. It was then that the pressure of being an adult at such an early age came crashing down around him. He had his own bike by then and he started hanging around with his brother and his friends, working on the bikes for extra money. When he wasn't working, he was drinking, or fucking everything with boobs and a pussy in sight. It wasn't a bad life...but somewhere deep-down Beau knew it wasn't going to satisfy him forever, especially when Nick got an opportunity to prospect for a club in California and moved away.
Beau thought about going with his brother, but just before Nick left, Beau met Natalie. She was gorgeous, and he was captivated by her. She was also drunk and from what his friends told him, easy. When he found out that she wasn't quite eighteen yet, his protective instincts kicked in and he appointed himself her guardian angel...despite her objections. That was where the whole Delilah/Apollo tattoo reference came in. He always told her he would love her forever, no matter how much she protested.
Before he met Natalie, Beau's boss at the garage had introduced him to a guy from Newark that belonged to an MC and needed a part-time motorcycle mechanic. Beau started working on the Knightriders bikes about a year before he met her, and by the time he took her away from her crappy home life, he was a patched member of the club. He had been a little leery of taking her there, but found out quickly that Natalie loved club life, likely more than she'd ever love him.
That day he'd sat miserably through the meeting with men that were going to be the death of them all as far as he was concerned. They did a video conference with a man named Ian McAllister in Boston who was a part of the IRA. The man presented himself as a businessman, but he was known to be one of the most lethal men on the east coast. Beau knew Marcus was obsessed with making their club more powerful and richer than any other MC on the coast, and he also knew Marcus didn't care if they had to ally with the devil to do it. He was already disgusted with his president for the position he was putting them all in...and then he'd happened upon the situation in the alley. Marcus was trying to rape a little girl. That was the moment when Beau finally knew for sure that he was finished with it all. He'd put that gun to Marcus's head and despite the fact that he'd never killed another living soul, he was sick enough over what Marcus intended to do, to pull the trigger. Unfortunately, Scab, the club enforcer came up on them, and Beau was taken
at gunpoint in the club van out to the edge of town and he was sure his life was over. Marcus didn't go with them, Scab drove the van and another enforcer named Kit rode Beau's bike out to the location. He found out when they got there that Marcus wanted them to make his death look like an accident. When they let him out of the van and he knew he was fighting for his life, and probably dead no matter what, he found strength that even he didn't know he had. He left Kit and Scab bloody on the side of the road and he got on his bike and headed for Boston. Boston was where Cyclops and the Blackhawk's president had gone right after the meeting was over, to meet with Ian McAllister. Beau planned to tell him face to face what Marcus had tried to do to his daughter and he wasn't worried about his own life which he figured was already over at that point.
Beau could see himself get on the bike and take off. He could feel the cold air whipping around him and his heart pounding like a drum in his chest as he raced toward Boston. He saw the curve approaching and then the light from the other vehicle, on the wrong side of the road. It was just a single headlight...a motorcycle. It was going too fast and weaving like the driver was drunk...Beau heard the loud boom of the crash right before he felt Kimber's hands on his chest, shaking him awake. “Baby, you were yelling. You sounded like you were in pain. Are you okay?” A pain shot through Jigsaw's head as the memories...not a dream, but memories, came rushing back. He was Beau Blackwell, and he wasn't dead. That meant the man in the box had to be Nick...the fuckers killed his brother.
17
“I need to talk to Dax,” he said, pushing upright in the bed. Kimber sat up next to him and her small hand rubbed up and down his back. She was trying to calm him down, and he appreciated it...but, it wasn't working. Nick was dead. His brother. His other half...and it was his fault. He looked at Kimber and said, “I'm sorry baby, I'll explain later...but, I need to talk to Dax.” He got up out of the bed and with a concerned look she said,