by M. O'Keefe
“Stop the bullshit. I’m not one of your wives.” I pulled the cellphone out of my pocket. It had been repurposed as a detonator for the car outside.
“I have two bombs, Lagan. One outside. One in this room.”
“You’re lying, Olivia. You’ve always been a terrible liar. Your heart and your mind are—”
I held up the cellphone and with my thumb, pressed the code. Jennifer’s birthday.
A millisecond later a shattering boom split the night. The car in the back parking lot exploded.
I sent up a quick prayer that no one was there. Not even Rabbit.
To my great satisfaction, Lagan’s face flinched. His hand reached forward to grab the edge of a chair.
“Tell me,” I said, “where she is or the two of us are next.”
“Joan.”
Jesus. It was Max, standing back in the shadows in the corner of the room. He stepped forward into the circle made by the bright overhead light.
“What are you doing in here?” I cried. I saw you leave. You LEFT.
“Zo called me back,” he said. “What are you doing?”
For a second, just a second—not even—for half a heartbeat, I wavered.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed to Max. His blue eyes. That electric stillness of him. That gorgeous calm.
Lagan lurched toward me and I snapped back into focus. I held the gun toward Max and the cellphone detonator toward Lagan.
“Where is my sister?”
“If you blow us up, you’ll never know.”
“If I blow you up, you can’t hurt her anymore. You can’t hurt anyone.”
“You’re the only wife I hurt,” Lagan said, giving me some version of a pitying expression. It was bullshit, of course; he hurt everyone he touched. “I give people what they need. Purpose. Work. Family. You…you cheap piece of trash, you wanted to be hurt. Needed it—”
“Tell me, asshole!” I screamed, losing the edges of myself, feeling myself start to explode like one of those time-lapse videos of a bullet through a water balloon or some shit. I was coming apart.
“Never, Olivia,” he said, and he folded his arms over his chest. His dead eyes looked right into me.
“I’m not bluffing,” I cocked the Ruger I had bought from one of the girls’ husbands and aimed it at his head. “And I’m a very good shot.”
“Joan!” It was Max again and he’d been edging up beside me. Fuck. I spun slightly, aiming the gun back toward him.
“Max. Please, stay out of this—”
“So you can blow us all up? Fuck that, psycho,” he snapped. He grabbed the hand holding the gun and twisted it, nearly dislocating my wrist.
I screamed and lifted my knee to nail him in the crotch but he jerked sideways and all he got was a knee to his thigh. I tried to kick him, a leg sweep to take out his ankles, but he sidestepped that, too. I leaned down to bite his hand, but he didn’t flinch. Didn’t do anything but twist my arm so hard my hand went numb and the gun fell to the ground. And then he reached for my other hand, bent back the fingers that gripped the cellphone until they, too, went limp. He snagged the phone and the gun and shoved them into his back pocket.
“Don’t!” I sobbed, watching out of the corner of my eye as Lagan made it to the door. I lunged after him but Max held on to me, nearly breaking my arm.
“Let me go!”
“So you can get yourself killed?”
“My sister…” I sobbed.
“He wasn’t going to tell you.”
I fought him. I fought him with all my rage. Head butts and kicks, everything I’d been taught of fighting dirty in my shitty life.
None of it any use.
Honest to God, I don’t know why I was surprised.
“Jesus, come on. Joan. Cops are coming and you will be put away.” He tried to pull me up by my armpits, but I was a pitbull, trained to kill.
There was no Plan B. This bullshit plan took me months and every penny I had.
Jennifer was farther away than ever.
Smoke was beginning to roll into the room through the door Lagan had left open as he left.
“I have to stop him,” I cried. “I have to. Max—”
“God save me from crazy bitches,” Max muttered. He put his arm across my back and lifted me. I still fought him. I wanted to burn down the night.
“You ruined everything!” I screamed and smacked at him with my dead heavy hands. I clawed and scratched and his hard face just got harder.
Hit me! I screamed in my head. Hit me!
He dragged me out of the room, down the smoke-filled hallway toward the back entrance. He pushed open the door and we were belched out into a black night filled with smoke and fire and screams.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “You really did it.”
My feet hit the gravel of the parking lot. The bikers were back here and there was a lot of smoke. The car I’d blown up was burning out in the weeds. There was one man in a Skulls cut on the ground, but he was getting to his feet.
I felt a momentary relief that there weren’t more bodies.
“Where’s Lagan?” I screamed, peering through the smoke.
“His black SUV is gone,” Max said. “The driver probably had it ready the second the fire alarm got pulled. You didn’t stand a chance, Joan.”
“Max!” Another voice broke through the noise and Max turned, his arm still around me, keeping me up. Because the fight was draining out of me and my legs could barely support me. My knees buckled and I would have been on the ground if it weren’t for Max’s steely strength.
A man limped out of the smoke.
“Rabbit,” Max said. “Everyone okay? We need to get the guys gone before the cops get here.”
Rabbit was beat up. His face was nearly black with smoke and his arm was at a weird angle. So weird in fact that it took me a second to realize he was holding a gun in his other hand.
He lifted it toward Max.
Max pushed me away and reached into his back pocket for my gun. As he pulled it out, my cellphone fell out, too. He pushed me again and I hooked my phone with my foot, dragging it with me as I stumbled to the side. It seemed smart to gather what weapons I could.
It seemed smart actually to get the hell out of there. Max had fucked everything up for me. I owed him no loyalty.
But somehow I couldn’t move.
Suddenly Rabbit wasn’t alone. There were a few more guys with him. Gray-faced and bleeding from cuts and scrapes.
“What’s going on?” Max asked.
It was pretty obvious to me what was going on. There’d been rumblings of dissent in the Skulls for weeks. These boys liked to bitch worse than the strippers.
I reached for the phone at my feet, but I was dizzy and shaky and fell to my knees.
“You can’t be trusted, brother,” Rabbit said.
“Yeah?” Max held out his arms. “Funny, I’m not the one holding a gun on anyone.”
“You left,” Rabbit said. “And we all know you weren’t going to come back.”
“But I’m here.”
“Because I made you!” Rabbit screamed, spittle flying. He looked like a madman. “I made you come back because you’re a coward. And there’s no room in the club for cowards, especially at the head of the table.”
“You want the president patch? It’s yours. You want my cut?” He started to shrug out of the beat-up leather vest. “It’s all yours.”
“Not good enough,” another one of the guys standing in the semicircle around Rabbit said.
“So what’s it going to be?” Max asked, his arms held out.
“Only blood will do.”
“Then what are you waiting for, asshole—”
Rabbit fired and Max went down. His leg kicked out behind him and his whole body followed like he was doing a gruesome pirouette.
I screamed, but it didn’t even register in the noise. The sirens were getting closer. The bikers closed ranks around Max kicking him, stomping him.
Jesus. God.
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When things went to shit, they really went to shit.
They were going to kill him and he was my only link to Lagan. The only person in this shit show that Lagan talked to, and after that scene in the office, Lagan would trust Max.
If I wanted my sister alive, I needed Max alive.
Lo and behold, Plan B.
With shaking fingers I pulled out the cellphone and hit the code for the second bomb, strapped under one of the chairs in that back room.
Another explosion. Small. But there was more smoke. More chaos.
Rabbit and the rest of the thugs looked up and looked at each other.
“What do we do?” one of them asked. Clearly the brainiac in the group.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Rabbit said and pointed the gun at Max’s head and pulled the trigger.
I was working on being very small and very unnoticeable so I clapped my hand to my mouth so no one could hear me scream.
The Skulls scattered like flies and I ran, crouched low, across the parking lot to my car and then drove it closer to Max with the headlights off.
I crept out of the car, left it running, and ran the few feet between me and Max.
He was facedown in the dirt and not moving.
A pool of black blood, reflecting the fire and smoke from the building, was spreading around his leg.
Panic filled my throat like bile.
I had two semesters of LPN training from another lifetime under my belt, but it came flooding back, screamed at me in my aunt Fern’s voice.
Which was only fitting.
Aunt Fern was my go-to in all medical emergencies.
Pulse. Check for a pulse.
I reached for Max’s neck and found his heartbeat. Good and strong. A miracle.
Airway. His chest was moving. We were in luck.
Spinal injury. Aunt Fern and all my textbooks told me not to move him, but we didn’t have that luxury.
As carefully as I could, I rolled him onto his back. He groaned and cried out, and I figured he was dealing with at least a few bruised ribs. His legs and arms all shifted and jerked in pain, so I let go of my worry about a spinal injury.
There was a lot of blood on his face, rivers of it, and I swept some of it away with my hand, trying to see what had happened.
What I was dealing with.
Minutes ago I was ready to burn this whole place to the ground and this man with it.
Now I was risking everything to perform first aid. I couldn’t get Jennifer back from inside a jail cell. But I couldn’t get Jennifer back without Max.
Work faster, I told myself.
Oh Lord, his face was a mess. They really tuned him up. But the second bullet must have missed him.
“A graze,” he murmured. “Bullet.”
“Yeah,” I said, touching the bleeding raw edges of the bullet’s path across the side of his head. The furrow was buried in the edges of his black hair.
He hissed, closing his eyes. A bullet graze and maybe a concussion based on how he couldn’t keep his eyes open.
He was bleeding from his calf; I found the entrance wound, but there was no exit wound. I could feel the lump of the bullet in the meat of his muscle.
Shit.
I grabbed the faded, red-and-white bandana from my hoodie pocket and wrapped it around his calf, which woke him up enough to scream at me.
“Fuck you!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said quickly, like it made a difference. “I’m sorry. Just…pass out if it hurts too much.”
“Get out of here,” he groaned. “Cops will arrest you.”
“Cops will arrest you, too.” The story would be drug deal gone bad. And Max was a big part of that equation. “And if you go to jail, you know those brothers of yours will finish the job.”
“Crazy bitch, what do you care?”
I didn’t have time to explain how he was my link to Lagan. A faulty link I couldn’t actually trust. But the only link I had.
“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t care about you at all.”
But I think I knew, even then. Before all the shit that happened next, the way I hurt him over and over again. The way he hurt me.
Days from now, with a gun to my head and my life flashing before my eyes, I would see the truth in a bright-crystal vision and it would break my heart.
I needed Max Daniels. Not for Lagan. Not for my sister.
For me.
I saved his life so he could save mine.
Chapter 3
Let me tell you, it was not easy getting that man into my car.
I wrapped my hands in the arm holes of his leather cut and pulled with all the fight-or-flight adrenaline I had coursing through my body. He helped a little, using his good leg to kind of scooch himself along. The seams in the leather creaked and tore in my hands, but I kept pulling and he kept pushing until we got to my car.
I opened the door and stepped over him, straddling his body so I could get my arms under his armpits. He braced himself on the door and the foot well of the car.
“Count of three?” I said and he nodded; I could feel his head against my stomach.
I counted it out and on a heave, we got him in. He was barely holding on, his face white beneath the blood. But he pushed himself all the way back so he was leaning against the other door.
When I shut the door, with his body stretched across the backseat I was shaking. Every muscle worked to its limit. The lights of the fire trucks coming down the highway told me we didn’t have much time.
“I’m going to pass out soon,” he said.
“I figured.” I put the car in gear and left the headlights off. The poor Buick was far from an off-roading kind of car, but I headed into the grass on the other side of the parking lot all the same.
“You gotta keep me away from my brother,” he said.
“No shit, they tried to kill you.”
“No. My…keep me away from Dylan. From Pops.”
I skirted the kudzu forest, bouncing through ditches, making Max groan and scream and swear at me.
“Just pass out already!”
“Promise me,” he said. Looking at him in the rearview mirror, I could see he was serious and fighting off unconsciousness with everything he had. This was important enough to defy the needs of his bleeding and battered body. Sheer stupid force of will. “No…family.”
“I promise,” I said.
A second later, I hit another ditch and he was silent in the backseat.
Out like a light. Six feet of bleeding, criminal, badass light. Thank God.
What was I doing? Fleeing the scene of a crime with a dangerous MC president? I mean, I’d done some crazy shit in the last twelve hours, but this seemed…
I stopped myself before I could spiral any harder.
He was my last chance to get my sister. My last chance.
And there was nothing I wouldn’t do to save my sister.
And I’d saved Max’s life. That was a good thing, right? Not crazy. Noble.
I was quickly rewriting the script so I could stay the hero, I know that.
But I had to keep moving and that was the only way to keep myself from curling into a ball and crying for the next week.
Lights off and driving slowly, I cleared the edge of the woods, hit the last ditch, and was up on the dirt road that led back to the Flowering Manor campground. I had a trailer there, or I used to anyway. No telling if my shit was still there. My first aid kit. I needed that.
I had to pray that my pseudo-friend, Annie, still had it. Or even my fucked-up neighbor, Ben, who happened to be Max’s father. I couldn’t imagine that old asshole caring about my stuff.
Or maybe they were all gone. Maybe they all got wise and left that place and the trouble that was brewing just up the road at the strip club.
I’d warned Annie. I did. At one point I even told her I was DEA. I had a fake badge and everything. One of my many tricks. I flashed that shit around and told her to get the hell out th
is place.
And she did.
But then she came back.
Because some women had shit survival skills.
“We gotta make a stop,” I said, looking into the rearview mirror at Max. But he was out cold. Slack and bleeding against the door.
He reminded me of a blade. Even like that. Cold. Lethal.
And I’d lied to him.
I was taking him right back to his family.
—
I rolled through the front gate to the trailer park. The place was dark. A few people were outside, standing on their little porches or yards looking at the illumination from the blaze visible just over the tree line.
No one paid any attention to my car.
I got to the space between my old trailer and Annie’s and I could see Annie was outside looking into the distance with everyone else. Ben, too, and another man, big and wide. Stocky.
That could only be Dylan. Max’s estranged brother.
Sorry, Max, I thought. A family reunion was unavoidable. Good thing he’d be passed out for most of it. I had a weird manic shrieking laugh thinking about the nature of this Daniels family reunion.
No potato salad. Only bullets.
Annie turned and saw the car, and Ben and Dylan closed ranks around her. Protecting her.
I didn’t begrudge her the protection. She was one of those women, you know? Big eyes, big heart, just oozing compassion and potential heartache. She was a Bambi. A little lost creature, alone in the wide, dangerous world.
I was Maleficent. Horned and vicious, my wings ripped off. Ready for bloody revenge.
C’est la who gives a fuck.
I turned off the car and stepped out with my hands up. Ben might be old, but he was former Skulls with a past so violent it put mine to shame.
“Joan!” Annie cried and fought past her two guards who scowled at me. “She’s my friend,” she said to Dylan, but he looked dubious.
Smart man.
He actually looked kind of terrifying, a burn scar covered part of his face, pulling the corner of his lip into a perma-snarl.
“Are you okay?” Annie asked, coming to a stop a few inches from me. I could see her want to hug me, thank God she stopped herself. “Are you hurt?”
“Fine,” I lied. “I am. Really.”
“You were in the fire?”