Kylie’s head turns in my direction. Those chocolate brown eyes meet mine, and her hand goes to her throat as she murmurs something that might be my name.
Beside me, Tank seems to realize something’s up. “You know her?” he asks me quietly, but I raise a hand to silence him.
My head’s racing to try to make sense of the scene that’s unfurled in front of me in the last two seconds. Kylie, with Axel and Mal, here in the middle of the Ironwood clubhouse. My gut hasn’t been able to keep up. But as the Ironwood prez comes toward me, Mal leans down and mutters something in Kylie’s ear. She gives him a curt nod and goes over to sit down in an empty chair at an unoccupied table. She steals one more glance at me, and then looks away, taking our her phone to busy herself with it.
The sour churning in my gut gets stronger as I try to figure out what to make of this. Jesus Christ, is Kylie with Mal? Is she his old lady? The stiff way she held herself when she was standing between him and Axel tells me that’s not it. But I’ll be fucked if I can figure out why the hell else she would be here.
Whatever it is, it can’t be good. There’s no doubt about that. Kylie Sutton wouldn’t be in the clubhouse of an outlaw MC if it was. That bitch is trouble, wherever she goes. I’ve learned that the hard way.
And that makes me hate Mal even more for bringing her here. Because he of all people should know it, too.
4
Kylie
I sit at the table by myself, fighting a bubbling nausea that has suddenly erupted in my stomach. As I fixate on my phone, trying to pretend indifference, I feel the weight of his stare on me like a boulder. I don’t dare look up again, but I don’t have to. Just the few seconds I saw of him are enough to etch the image of Cameron Hale in my mind for the rest of my days.
He’s always been tall, but he’s wider now. His upper body is a mass of tattooed muscle. The armless leather cut he’s wearing over his light gray T-shirt reveals the patchwork of tattoos that line his forearms and biceps. More ink snakes from his collar up his neck. His jeans look lived-in, the material soft over the hard muscles of his legs underneath. In the few seconds that I looked at him, I couldn’t help but notice the large bulge under the zipper. It makes me redden with embarrassment, though I’m hoping he didn’t notice.
He has a dark beard now, and close cropped hair that’s a little longer up top. His brow is furrowed, his eyes piercing as he seems to stare right through me. I’m too far away to see their color, but that doesn’t matter. I know their whiskey tint by heart already. His normally sensual lips are set in a hard line.
When Cam looks at me, I can’t read his expression, so closed off and neutral it is. I’d almost think he didn’t recognize me, except for the way his gaze finally flicks away from me, his lip curling slightly. As though he’s dismissing me.
It’s hot in the clubhouse bar, but even so within minutes I’m shivering from the adrenaline. Cameron Hale has always had this effect on me. Powerful, dizzying, threatening and tempting all at once. Everything about him has always been big. Overwhelming. Like he has his own force field. A planet with his own gravity.
On the other side of the bar, Mal, Cam, and Axel stand around and speak with two other men I don’t know. From the looks of it, Cam is in an MC, too. His patches match those of the man standing next to him. At one point, that man turns, and I catch a glimpse of his bottom rocker, which doesn’t say, “Ironwood,” but simply “Ohio.” The colors are the same, though: Lords of Carnage.
The five men continue talking for so long that I start to wonder if I can just stand up and slip out unnoticed. But just as I start to uncross my legs and shift my weight, Axel slaps Cam on the back and the group breaks apart. Then Axel and his vice-president move off, leaving Mal, Cam, and the third man. Mal and Cam have what looks like a tense exchange, and then Mal shoots Cam a shit-eating grin and raises his arm to point over to my table.
Oh, shit.
Within seconds, the three men surround my table, each of them grabbing a chair.
“Hey, darlin’,” the man I don’t know drawls, nodding at me. “I’m Tank.”
I give him a grateful smile. “Kylie,” I murmur, trying not to feel too awkward. “Nice to meet you.”
One side of Tank’s mouth lifts. His eyes float down to my breasts, and then back up to my face. “What’s a nice, polite girl like you doin’ with a bunch of reprobates like this?” he smirks.
Mal interjects. “She’s an old friend from way back. Ain’t that right, Cam? You remember Kylie.”
Tank looks over at his friend. “You two know each other?”
“Yeah.” Cameron stares at me with that machine-gun stare of his, his mouth still a thin line. He pulls out a chair and flips it around, bracing his forearms on the back as he sits. “But friend isn’t a word I’d use.”
Mal continues, as though Cam didn’t just speak. “Kylie’s doin’ some jobs for the club. Some deliveries.”
At his words, Cam’s face contorts. His brows furrow, his eyes growing stormy. “Are you fuckin’ serious?” He looks at Mal in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Mal chuckles. “She’s got the face for it, don’t you think? Innocent-like. She looks like a freakin’ co-ed. She’s perfect. Ain’t no cops ever gonna suspect her of being a mule.”
Cam’s reaction says everything I need to know about his opinion of this. His face is a wall of disgust. Loathing, even. His nostrils flare as he looks me up and down.
“I thought you’d learned your fuckin’ lesson,” he growls at me. With a snarl of distaste, he finally turns his eyes away.
His words shouldn’t hurt the way they do. I shouldn’t care what Cam thinks of me. I already know he hates me. Always has.
Well, maybe not always. But for long enough.
So when my eyes start to prick and blur with tears, it takes me by surprise for a second. Even though I haven’t seen Cameron Hale in years, the weight of his judgment hits me like a sucker punch. I want to scream at him that he doesn’t know me — that he’s never known me. I want to cry out that I have my reasons — reasons he’ll never understand.
But I don’t.
Because Cameron Hale’s hatred of me is not something I’ll ever be able to change. He’ll always find a reason to think the worst of me. Whether I deserve it or not.
And because — deep down inside — I’m not entirely sure I don’t deserve it.
I make my voice as cold and unemotional as I can. “Mal,” I say, turning to him, “I’m assuming Axel doesn’t need me anymore today?”
“Nah. But I need to take you out to the garage,” Mal answers. “But we’ll need to get your truck outfitted to carry more product at a time.”
In spite of my resolve, I suck in a shaky breath. “When’s my next run?” I ask. I feel Cam’s eyes on me, but I pretend like he isn’t there.
“A few days from now.” Mal frowns. “Axel wants you to go to Dayton. Small one, trial run.” He glances at Cam and Tank. “You do good, you’ll get your cut of the profit and Axel will set you up for something bigger.”
Next to me, Cam scoffs loudly, setting down his beer bottle with a bang. Stiffening, I rise. “Fine,” I say icily. “I’ll wait to hear from you about the run.”
I don’t bother to say goodbye to either Cam or Tank. I’m hoping I’ll never see either one of them again. Instead, I turn on my heel and make for the front door. There are a few whistles and hoots from the other MC men as they stare after me, but I ignore them.
Outside, I let a single sob escape my throat before pounding my fist against my thigh and cursing at myself to not be such a baby. The fact is, Cam’s judgment of me isn’t anything I don’t feel about myself too right now. But having him look at me like that just now — like the worst things he has ever thought about me have been confirmed — made me feel so ashamed.
I’ve told myself over and over since that day Mal first talked to me about working for the club that I don’t have a choice in the matter. That what I’m doing now is my only shot at saving m
y father’s life. He’s all I have in the world. And even though he’s not perfect, and he’s made more than a few mistakes in his life, I love him. So much it makes my heart seize to think about losing him. If my dad dies, I’ll be all alone. And I’m terrified that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
Cam doesn’t know any of that. If he did, maybe he wouldn’t look at me with quite the same amount of hatred. Surely, my dad’s situation tips the moral balance in my favor, just a little bit? I’m not a monster for the choices I’m making right now, am I?
I hate the fact that Cam’s making me question the choices I already feel bad enough about. I continue walking toward my truck, eyes blurred with the tears I’m fighting against, I’m almost there and reaching for keys, when a rough hand grabs my bicep and spins me around.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Cam growls.
The heat from his touch is instantaneous. Fear, anger, and something else I don’t want to name spike my adrenaline, and as a result the tears I’ve been trying to hold back immediately start to flow.
“Get your hands off me,” I hiss, wrenching my arm from his grasp as my emotions flip from despair to rage. “Mal already told you what I’m doing here! It has nothing to do with you!”
Cam laughs — bitterly, incredulously. “Are you a fuckin’ idiot?” he insists. “Do you not know how goddamn dangerous it is for you to be working as a fuckin’ mule for an outlaw MC? Jesus Christ,” he wipes his hand angrily across his face. “Didn’t you learn your goddamn lesson the first time?”
My stomach flips, shocked and angered that it only took him seconds to throw that in my face. This has nothing to do with that! I’m on the verge of screaming. But I just can’t go there with him.
“This is my life, Cam.” My voice crackles with rage as I wipe angrily at my eyes. “My life, my decisions. None of this is any of your business.”
“The hell it ain’t.” He jams his thumb toward the patch on his right pec. “This right here means it’s all my business.”
“I’m not part of your club, Cam!” I yell, trying to maintain the last shred of my dignity. “I did not ask you for your opinion. My decisions are my own!”
“Your decisions fuck up everyone’s lives but your own,” he snarls.
And just like that, it’s like he’s punched me in the stomach with an iron fist. Just like that, the thing I try not ever to think about is right in front of us again. Right between us, like a third person in the conversation.
I blink back more tears that taste of fury now, as well as crushing, horrible guilt. “You don’t know one single thing about me, Cameron Hale!” I cry out. I want to fly at him. Gouge his eyes out. Punch him in the jaw until he has no more teeth. Inside I rage at the fact that I’m a woman, that I’m not large enough and strong enough to hurt him like that.
That he doesn’t even have to raise a fist to hurt me. He can still do it with a word.
Cam narrows his eyes at me. “The fuck I don’t. I know way too fuckin’ much about you. From bitter experience.”
“Then if you hate me so much, why do you care what happens to me?” I cry. “Just let me fuck up my life. It should make you happy to see me fall.”
He turns away. “Every time you fuck up, someone else ends up paying the price, Kylie. It’s always been that way, and it always will.”
“Fuck you!” I shout at his retreating back. He doesn’t stop, and the words bounce right off of him. A gut-wrenching sob rips through my throat, and I fling open the door to the truck and tumble in.
Then I start to weep like I haven’t since the last time I saw Cameron Hale.
On the day of a funeral that never should have taken place.
5
Hale
When I’m back inside the clubhouse, I shout at the prospect for another beer. But almost as soon as he puts it in my hand, I let out a roar and hurl the bottle at the far wall as hard as I can. It smashes, amber liquid running down in rivulets, shards of glass flying in all directions.
“Whoa, brother!” Tank appears beside me. “What’s with the fuckin’ hissy fit?”
I curl my fist and turn toward him, but I’ve telegraphed the punch at him and he dodges me before I can connect.
“Shit, Hale,” he marvels, raising his hands in a truce position. “What the fuck happened out there with that girl?”
“None of your goddamn business,” I snarl, realizing too late I’m just repeating Kylie’s words to me. I spit out a curse and push past him, blindly storming through the corridor and into the first empty room I see.
I pace back and forth, my boots sounding loud on the hard floor, as though I could walk off the fury and adrenaline that’s built up inside me.
I wish Tank had thrown a punch at me after I tried to hit him. What I need now more than anything is a good fight. In the absence of that, I turn and start hammering at the wall with my fist, punching holes in the drywall that I know I’ll have to answer for later. When I get sick of destroying the wall, I go back to pacing some more. A chair gets in my way and I launch my boot at it, sending it flying across the room.
“Fuck!” I yell at the empty space.
Just half a goddamn hour ago, I was on my bike, riding through the southern Ohio countryside on a job for my prez.
Now, apparently it’s the universe’s sick idea of a fucking joke to drag my ass back into a past I’ve done everything to leave behind.
My feelings about Kylie Sutton have always been… conflicted.
She and her father Charlie moved to Corydon, Kentucky the summer before our senior years in high school. Corydon is a small, unremarkable town right across the Kentucky border from Ironwood, Ohio. Kylie’s mom had just died in a car accident, and her dad moved himself and his daughter to Corydon for a fresh start.
I couldn’t figure out why anyone would move to Corydon. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t enough work for the population of just under four-hundred people as it was. But Kylie’s dad had grown up there, and left when he was eighteen to go into the military. Charlie Sutton put some money down on a houseless patch of land on the edge of town, and plunked a trailer on it. He opened up a lawn and garden service, working out of a beat-up truck with a logo printed on the side. But in Corydon, no one could afford to pay someone else to mow their lawn. So his business more or less dried up before it even really got started.
Kylie Sutton was the first and only new kid our school had seen in years. As the new girl, she got more than her fair share of male attention from the first day of school. She was pretty — very pretty. She had nice tits, not too big and not too small. Her ass looked damn good in jeans, and her legs were long but shapely. Plus, we hadn’t grown up with her since we were in diapers, like we had with practically all the other girls in our town. But there was more to her than just the sum of her parts. She turned heads, male and female, from the first day she stepped foot inside the high school. She had something about her that just made you want to take a second look. And then a third.
The guy that got to her first was my best friend, Scotty. He, Mal, and I were all seniors, too, in the same grade as Kylie. Scotty was a handsome motherfucker himself, with straight teeth and the gift of gab. He also had his own car, which in our town made him kind of a big deal. It was a rusty old Ford that barely ran half the time, but still.
In Corydon, Scotty was considered a catch by most of the girls. A lot of them seemed pretty jealous of Kylie for swooping in and grabbing him up. You could see it in the looks they would shoot her when Kylie and Scotty were walking down the hall. I don’t know if Kylie noticed, or if she cared. But at any rate, it seemed like she didn’t make a lot of female friends that year. So Scotty started bringing her around us, and she started hanging with him, me, and Mal instead.
I liked Kylie fine, at first. I might have even been a little jealous that Scotty got to her before me. I’ll admit to thinking about her from time to time when I was alone in my room at night, horny and lacking for female companionship
. Hell, I’ll bet Mal did, too. The girl was objectively hot, after all. But like I said, Scotty was my best buddy. He was like a brother to me. Any envy I might have felt was more abstract than anything, because he was getting pussy and I wasn’t. And however much I might have wished I’d gotten to Kylie first, I sure as shit wasn’t looking to steal her from him.
Mal and I got used to having Kylie around. We treated her like one of the guys, and kept our thoughts and our hard-ons to ourselves. Scotty and Kylie didn’t seem all that serious — like, they weren’t talking about marriage or any crazy shit like that. Still, you could tell that Scotty was proud as fuck to call a smokin’ piece of ass like that his own. Maybe it made him feel a little more important — like he was destined for something greater than the shitty little town we lived in.
Scotty was always the most confident of the three of us. He had grandiose ideas about the future, most of which involved him moving to the city and being a big shot in some sort of business. But he was also the most likely to get out of hand. He drank more than the rest of us, for example. Whenever we managed to scam ourselves a case of beer or a bottle of booze, he’d drink twice as much as Mal and me, in half the time. He had this habit of telling us these big stories when he was drunk, about how he’d met this rich guy or that one working for his dad, and how they were gonna set him up with a cushy job and then he’d be on easy street. Scotty was usually pretty vague on the details, though. Usually, Mal and I would just let him talk, and then laugh at him later when he was sober and couldn’t remember half of what he’d told us.
About midway through our senior year, Scotty started hanging out with me and Mal a lot less. We couldn’t figure out what was up at first, but Mal guessed he was probably just spending more time with Kylie. He speculated maybe she’d finally started giving it up, and Scotty was too busy drowning in tail to bother with us.
HALE: Lords of Carnage MC Page 3