Here it comes.
No.
“You’re my girl, Lacey. Ain’t nobody in this world I want other than you,” he said.
“But?” I whispered.
“But Jack finding out isn’t what I’m worried about,” he revealed.
“It isn’t?”
“No, baby it’s not. The clubs involved in a lot of shit right now. I got a lot of things I need to make right on the outside before I can claim you to the world,” he paused, lifting his hands to my cheek. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m not ending this. We need to keep it on the down low until I’m sure you’re safe with me,” he explained.
“I’m always safe with you,” I argued.
“Remind me of that when I doubt myself.”
His words gave a glimpse to a vulnerable side of him I hadn’t yet discovered until that moment. He wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me down on top of him.
“I’ll work it out,” he promised. “And then we’ll work on Jack,” he added.
“And then?”
“Then, I’m taking you for a tattoo, get you some ink so you never forget who you belong to,” he teased, squeezing me.
“Blackie! I’m serious, then what?”
“You tell me,” he said, against my hair. “Tell me what you want and I’ll move heaven and hell to give it to you,” he swore.
“Heaven and earth you mean,” I corrected, smiling as I closed my eyes.
“It’s heaven and hell where I come from, baby,” he affirmed.
“This,” I said through a yawn. “This right here is everything I want.”
And it was.
At nineteen years old I had it all.
Now, I had to convince my maker to let me keep it.
I took her to Coney Island that night, rode the Cyclone three times and won her half a dozen stuffed animals—she gave one to every kid we passed that didn’t have one. We were walking around Luna Park when out of the corner of my eye I saw a mother and her young son.
“But Mommy, please? One more try!”
“I already wasted twenty dollars trying to win you a prize that cost fifty cents,” the mother argued with her son.
“Please mommy! I won’t ask after this time,” the kid pleaded.
“I don’t have any more money to waste on games, Joshua,” the mother hissed.
I let go of Lacey’s hand, walked over to the trailer and laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. It was the game where you had to shoot water into the clown’s mouth until you filled the balloon and it popped.
There are perks to owning a shooting range.
You can beat the clown all the time.
The bell chimed, signaling I won, and I dropped the water gun. I kneeled down, smiled at the mom and tapped the little boy on the shoulder.
“Hey, there kid,” I started.
He looked at his mother for approval before he waved at me timidly.
“You see that girl over there,” I said, pointing over at Lacey who smiled but looked back at me curiously.
“Yeah,” the boy said.
“I’m trying to get her to go out with me and she told me she’d say yes if I win you a prize,” I looked over my shoulder and tipped my chin to the water balloon that was declared a winner. “Think you can help me get the girl by taking the prize?”
He looked up at his mother, grinning from ear to ear.
“Can I?”
I lifted my eyes to hers, watched as she diverted her eyes back to her son.
“Sure, wouldn’t want to leave the nice man hanging,” she said as she turned back toward me. “Thank you.”
I winked, slapping my hands against my knees and rose to my full height.
“Can I have the Spongebob?”
The clerk handed him the ugly yellow stuffed thing, and the boy smiled widely at me.
“Thank you! I hope you get the girl,” he exclaimed.
I turned around, my eyes met Lacey’s and the smile she wore became contagious.
“I hope so too,” I told the boy.
I hope I get to keep her.
I said goodbye to the kid and his mom before making my way back to Lacey.
“You won that boy a prize,” she commented, looping her arm through mine.
“Yeah, watching you put a smile on six kids faces when you gave them those prizes must’ve rubbed off on me,” I said.
“Watch out Blackie, you’re becoming more like a big teddy bear than a big bad biker,” she joked.
I growled.
“Cut it out, Lace,” I ordered, taking her hand and pulling her towards Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs. “Come on, I’m starving,” I mumbled.
She was right. I was soft when it came to her. It wasn’t a new development; there has always been a place inside me carved out just for her, but every minute I spent with her I fell deeper.
And she fell too.
Deeper in trouble.
Deeper in danger.
And the both of us threatened to fall deeper in love with the story we were writing.
For her it was an original piece.
For me it was a rewrite.
A story about an Angel and the Devil.
We needed a miracle.
Or just each other.
Maybe we were the miracle.
Ah, fuck. I was soft.
Tomorrow I was going to shoot something.
Anything.
Chapter Twenty-four
I haven’t touched a drink in two months, sixty-one days to be exact, since that night in Boston. Sixty-one days sober and sixty-one days Lacey remained safe and out of the arms of the enemy.
The club had enemies lurking all over the place and we were living life waiting for the world to be pulled out from under us.
When Jack returned from his visit with Victor, I clued him in on what had gone down with the Corrupt Bastards, leaving out Boots threats against Lacey. That shit was mine to deal with, not his and not the clubs. The club needed to worry about the dynamics of war and be prepared for when the Corrupt Bastards made their demands clear.
And then we still had the motherfucking Chinese to worry about.
Every which way we turned, there was someone waiting to fuck with us.
The thing that worried both me and Jack most was that both rival clubs were quiet. They let time pass, life moved forward and the weak ones thought everything would blow over.
But Jack and I knew better.
On his last visit to see the caged mobster, we found out that Jimmy was being sent to Otisville any day now. He needed clearance from one more doctor, there was no more surgeries lined up, that motherfucker was fucked. He was a scary looking dude before, but now he had burns covering ninety percent of his body—that motherfucker was vile.
Life’s a bitch.
Then you die.
Or some biker sets your ass on fire.
That wasn’t the only news Jack brought home with him. Pastore signed over his union contracts to the club, giving us partial control over the docks and partnered us with Rocco Spinelli, the mobster taking over Vic’s territory now that his organization had been dissolved. He was also interested in buying out the gun contracts we had in place with Wu.
Things were coming along, we had protection from Spinelli, should we need extra hands and Bianci was always willing to strap on bullet-proof vest to help the cause. I gave Jack a lot of grief over his ties with Pastore, mainly with Bianci—in the end I respected both men for their loyalty to our club.
Wolf was back…empty-handed but swore he had it handled and that we needed to hang tight.
The new blood was coming.
Pipe had expanded the garage, put the club in the red but vouched for the loss if the business didn’t prosper. Pipe was a cheap bastard, guy didn’t waste a penny so if he offered to put up his own cash, you knew that fuck had something up his sleeve.
All in all, we were keeping busy, working our shit out and getting the club back to where it needed to be. And the best part
about that shit? We weren’t using drugs to do it.
We didn’t sell them.
We didn’t orchestrate deals with them.
And I didn’t do them.
I was still on the methadone, but that shit would change soon too. I didn’t want to be a man who checked into a clinic every morning for a fix. I wanted to be the guy I was on the weekends.
The guy that sanded floors in a house he had neglected for years. A man who allowed Lacey to pick the paint for each room even though her choice of colors drove him insane. The kitchen was aqua blue.
When she wasn’t driving me mad with paint samples she was driving me mad with her smile. I wonder if she knows the power she has over me with that thing.
I shouldn’t limit her control to just her smile.
It was everything she did.
There were so many layers to her I never knew existed but I was discovering all of them and there wasn’t one I didn’t love.
I didn’t see much of her during the week between my obligations to the club, her school schedule and keeping things from Jack, we were lucky if we found a night to be together. She didn’t bitch about it, or bust my balls which I appreciated, especially since I needed to keep reminding myself that Boots had eyes on her.
A week after I returned from my meeting I gave up trying to convince myself that I should let her go. I pulled Bones to the side and lied through my fucking teeth. I told him with everything going on with the Dragons and the Bastards, it was best if we kept an eye on Lacey. Then I told him he needed to keep this shit between us, using Jack’s illness as my excuse for keeping him in the dark about putting one of our brothers on his daughter for protection. I only had him tail her when she was at campus that way he didn’t catch on to what was going on between us.
Jack spent most nights with Reina but he blocked out every Sunday to have dinner with Lacey.
Every Sunday after dinner, she came back to Staten Island—back to me.
Aside from my blue kitchen, I had a bed, one we put to use often.
My girl, was learning she liked to take charge in the bedroom. Her favorite position was when she was on top, riding me as I whispered filthy things into her ear. But the dirty talk didn’t stop there, Lacey got in on that, using her words and her body to tell me exactly what she wanted.
I want your mouth on my cunt, now.
Goddamn, I was lucky.
Fuck me, Blackie.
Yeah, baby.
And my favorite…
I want to try something different.
She nearly killed me when she sucked an ice cube into her mouth and dropped to her knees, giving me the best fucking blow-job I ever had.
Yeah, I was a lucky bastard.
My phone rang inside my jacket, pulling me away from my thoughts as I took the call.
“Talk to me,” I answered.
“Get your ass to the range,” Jack ordered.
“For what?”
“Wu made his move,” he growled before disconnecting the call. I put two fingers into my mouth and whistled as I rose from my chair. I grabbed my gun from the table, checked if it was loaded before tucking it into my jacket pocket.
“Yo, let’s go!” I hollered.
Wolf and Pipe turned to me as Bones came bounding down the stairs. Nobody asked questions, they knew…we were waiting for this moment and it was finally here. They strapped their vests on, loaded their guns and straddled their bikes.
Jack and Riggs had gone to some shindig over at Bianci’s house and arrived before us. I wasn’t expecting to see the place swarming with blue and whites and took that as a sign things were worse than we expected. If Pops placed a call to 9-1-1 instead of the cops we had on payroll someone was hurt. Pops was Cain’s old man and allowed us to keep the gun range in his name for legal purposes. The man was never patched, nor did he want to be, and a part of him blamed the reaper on our backs for taking his son’s life.
I assessed the damage as I dismounted, noting the front of the building was riddled with bullets.
“Jesus Christ,” Pipe hissed behind me. “How’s this place still standing?”
I glanced over my shoulder at him then turned around and scoped the property for Jack and Riggs. They were standing in front of the cops and Jack was going head to head with the man I despised most in this world, more than Boots, more than Wu…he was mouthing off to Craig Brantley. The biggest dick to make his way into the N.Y.P.D.
“Shit,” I growled, as we killed the engines of our bikes and assessed the damage at Pop’s shooting range. I stared at the front of the building, riddled with bullets, then took casual strides toward the dozens of cops swarming the joint.
“Easy,” Wolf warned, placing a hand on my shoulder trying to reign me in. “Keep your head, Black.”
“He’s right. We got a lot of eyes on us right now,” Pipe added.
I gave them both a quick nod before we started for Jack and Riggs. I kept my eyes on Brantley watching the motherfucker grin and gloat before I came up behind Jack and he lifted his head.
“Well, look who it is,” he taunted, stepping around Jack and closer to me. Jack glanced over his shoulder at me, wedging himself between me and the douche bag who held just as much blame as I did that Christine was dead.
“Relax Bulldog, no need to get possessive over a junkie,” Brantley mocked, flexing his jaw. “Scum like that’s not worth the effort,” he added.
“You would know right, Craig?” I clipped, as Jack placed his hand on my chest, holding him back. “I’m good,” I told Jack, shoving his hand off my chest as I glared at Brantley.
I might not deserve to be here but neither did this motherfucker.
The both of us had Christine’s blood on our hands and this son of a bitch wanted to point fingers.
“Instead of taunting my brothers why don’t you assholes do your job and find out who shot up Pop’s business,” Jack suggested.
“We intend to,” Craig promised. “Who’d you piss off this time, Bulldog?”
“Don’t bust my balls. Do your job or get the fuck out of here, put all those hard earned tax dollars to use," Jack hissed, turning around to face the rest of us and nodded toward Pops.
“You people probably never paid taxes a day in your life,” he sneered.
I rolled my eyes, deciding this jerk off didn’t deserve anymore of my time and followed Jack toward Pops.
“Hey, Blackie, I’d watch my back if I were you. It’d be a shame if you suffered the same fate as Christine,” he crooned.
I froze in my tracks.
He didn’t get to say her name.
He didn’t get to use her death against me.
“Fuck,” I heard Jack hiss as I spun around and charged for the douche bag who wouldn’t let my wife rest in peace.
“Keep her name off your fucking tongue or so help me God I’ll slice that thing right out of your fucking mouth,” I roared.
Jack grabbed the back of my jacket and pulled me back before my hands closed around Brantley’s throat.
“Sounds like you just threatened a police officer,” he tormented.
I blew out a ragged breath, shrugged Jack off me and took a dangerous step closer to Brantley, piercing him with a deadly glare.
“You got a hard on for me, motherfucker?” I whispered, extending my arms outward and crossing one wrist over the other. “Go on, lock me up,” I coaxed.
His eyes dipped to my wrists before turning his head side to side and glancing at the brothers in blue.
“Pussy,” I hissed.
Just as I thought.
Man wanted to play the good cop in front of his precinct but he was as dirty as the sole of my boots.
“You okay?” Jack questioned.
“I’m fine,” I confirmed, tipping his head toward the ambulance rolling into the parking lot.
We walked away from “Dirty Harry” and made our way to Pops. He was crouched down on the ground over the young worker’s body. The kid had taken a shot to the leg and
would be fine but Pops was obviously shaken up. Wu had shot the joint up and taken our guns, desecrating any future deal we were trying to make with Spinelli.
“We’re sure it was Wu?” Riggs asked.
Good question.
I pinned Jack with a look, questioning him with my eyes, knowing we had two clubs gunning for us when everyone else only was worried about one.
“Yeah, they didn’t even try to hide their identity, sending their message loud and clear,” Wolf said as he lit up a cigarette. “Those fucking Dragons, man,” he took a puff and turned toward Jack. “Give me the green light, make them watch as I fuck all their mothers,” he offered.
“Christ, Wolf,” Bones snarled. “What the fuck did their mothers do to you?”
“Them bitches brought those fucks into the world,” he insisted.
Fact.
Jack patted my shoulder, assuring me it was Wu, and proceeded to Pops, giving him his undivided attention. I turned around and stared at the damage, knowing it would take a lot to bounce back from this.
I overheard Jack promise Pops he would make things right.
“Yeah, you will,” Pops announced as the paramedics pushed him aside to work on the kid. “Don’t feel like revisiting history son, did my time, buried enough innocent lives to last a lifetime.” He rose to his feet, brushing the dirt from his pants and stepped closer to Jack. “You need to get a handle on these bastards before they draw more blood,” he demanded.
Another fact.
The paramedics pushed us aside and worked on the kid, applying pressure to the wound as the other opened the ambulance doors. They lifted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and Pops climbed up, taking a seat on the bench beside the kid. The paramedic closed the door before running around to the driver’s side. The sirens sounded and brought me back to the day I sat on the floor holding Christine and waited for help.
I shook my head, refusing to go back to that hell, knowing I didn’t have time for that trip. I walked back over to Riggs and Jack, back in beast mode, ready to make someone pay for every hole in the building in front of me, not to mention the one made in that innocent kid’s leg.
“What are we going to do here?” I questioned, rolling a toothpick between my teeth before I glanced back at Brantley.
The Tempted Series: Collectors Edition Page 142