by April Lust
Really, I had no fucking clue. There was no manual, and my only guidance was locked up. I was on my own here. I knew that if they were excited to see us back together, they were going to be hysterical if they knew we were expecting a possible heir to the MC leadership legacy.
“This is big news,” I said, prefacing the announcement with a pause. I could feel the anticipation growing in the crowd before me. I relished the feeling, but I knew if I waited too long, I’d lose everyone, so I finally said it.
“We are expecting,” I told them, rubbing her stomach for everyone to see.
They started cheering then, but I wasn’t finished. I wanted them to understand what I was trying to tell them beyond a shadow of a doubt. Some of them already got the magnitude of the announcement, but there were others standing around practically yawning, ready to go home rather than go face off with the Demons.
“In a few short months, we’re going to have an heir to the MC,” I announced. “There will be a new generation, ready to be groomed to take over when my time is done.”
The crowd erupted. Cheers and applause filled the air in front of the clubhouse. I had finally inspired the kind of energy we needed if we were going to have a successful ride.
“What we have to do now is ensure that there is still an MC when this little one is ready to take over behind me,” I added. “Today, we are preparing for a ride against a threat to that future. We have to take these guys out and push them back from our turf.”
A few moments earlier, the same statement would have been met with bored stares and dead eyes. Now it was met with hardy cheers and hungry faces ready to stir shit up. This was the Shadow Reapers I knew and loved – the men who were ready to do whatever had to be done.
I kept my arm around Nora while I talked to the crowd, pumping them up to go. This was my first big ride – my ride. I didn’t have to tell Nora or Ozzy what it meant for us to come out on top of this situation. If we came back victorious, I had a pretty good chance of taking the presidency away from Alan when it was time for him to come back from prison. If we won today, and our child turned out to be a boy, there would be no stopping me.
Suddenly, realizing what was truly at stake, I felt a surge of ambition. I wanted to take the presidency. I wanted to continue to be in charge of the MC, and I wanted to do whatever it took to make that happen. The presidency of the Shadow Reapers MC was going to be mine. I could feel it already.
I was ready to ride.
###
Nora
“You ready to ride?” Alice asked with a sarcastic little smile on her face as she started up the car and pulled out of the parking lot behind the group of bikers heading south.
“I guess so,” I said. “Do we really have a choice?”
She laughed. “No, we really don’t,” she said. “We sort of have to do what we’re told, but it’s not so bad, right? They only act like they care about us when they need something, and after that, we’re shoved aside. It’s all for the MC, right?” she continued.
It didn’t take a genius to see that something was very wrong here. Alice was usually pretty gung-ho about Shadow Reapers. She was as much a member as a club girl could have been. To see her acting less than thrilled about the MC or her place in relation to it was disheartening.
The look on Ozzy’s face at Mark’s little pep rally made more sense as I listened to her. I had spotted him standing off to the side with a serious scowl on his face while Mark had been talking.
Ozzy was the only member who wasn’t sharing in the excitement of the rest of the MC. I had thought initially that his expression had to do with the dressing down he received from Mark after our talk, but I was starting to think it might have been due to the trouble in paradise.
“What’s going on?” I asked Alice. “I saw Ozzy back at the clubhouse, and he didn’t seem to be in a very good mood either.”
“I think he’s done with me,” she started. “He doesn’t seem to be in love with me anymore. All he ever talks about is you. He doesn’t want to see me. He’s always got to watch you, or he’s talking about you and Mark. I just don’t know, Nora.”
She shook her head with a sad, put-out look on her face. I knew I needed to be reassuring and to try to tell her that there was no way Ozzy did not love her.
“You know Ozzy loves you,” I said. “There’s no way he doesn’t.”
“You don’t know that,” she fired back immediately. “Honestly, he seems like he’s half in love with you most of the time.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at the notion. “He’s stupid if he is.”
“What do you mean?” She looked over at me in disbelief, like she couldn’t imagine I would say anything like that.
“I mean, Mark would surely kill him if it came out he was in love with me, even just a little bit,” I explained.
“It must be nice to have someone so devoted to you that you know how they’d react if your relationship was challenged,” Alice said thoughtfully. She had turned inward, comparing what I’d said to what was going on in her relationship with Ozzy.
“I’m sure Ozzy is very protective of you.” The conversation was starting to make me feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t believe Alice’s jealousy over my relationship with Mark.
“I don’t know. I’d do anything for him. Hell, I do pretty much anything he requires of me already. But I don’t know if he feels the same way. I don’t have the kind of devotion from Ozzy that you have from Mark,” she said.
I didn’t say anything in response. I looked out the windshield and thought about Mark. He was a very devoted man. I was very lucky, especially considering where he came from. I hadn’t expected the president of a club like Shadow Reapers to be such a loving, devoted man, especially not when I first started spending time alone with him.
Still, I felt like he led by example most of the time, and I figured some of that would have rubbed off on the people closest to him in the MC, like Ozzy. Surely, Ozzy had to have picked up on some of Mark’s gentlemanly traits, even if he did still have to maintain that rough biker exterior.
The ride seemed to go on forever. I started to wonder how far south we had to go to get to this other MC. I didn’t know if I could spend hours in the car with her, talking about our relationships. Mine still wasn’t an official relationship yet. We were still calling it our arrangement, but it didn’t change the fact that even as only a business deal, I had a pretty good thing going with Mark.
“How far is this place?” I asked her after we rode in awkward silence for a while, having abandoned our conversation after her comments about Mark’s devotion.
“It’s a little further up the road,” she said absently, making it clear she wasn’t trying to commit to more conversation yet.
She focused her gaze on the road ahead, not looking away as we rode the rest of the way. I couldn’t see the bikers up ahead of us. They’d sped off into the distance. I hoped Mark or Ozzy had given her the address or good directions on how to get there. Of course, having already dealt with Mark’s failure to talk to people beforehand, I didn’t have a lot of faith in him to be able to do that.
I had to have faith. That was all. And faith seemed to be in short supply in Alice’s car. She didn’t have faith in her man, and mine had been challenged, despite his encouraging words and hugs.
I felt the weight of the gun on my hip, reminding me that I was carrying a weapon with me to the meeting with this other MC. It still didn’t seem like a good idea to have a gun at my side, but like Alice had said, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about some things.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Nora
“Looks like we’re here,” Alice said eventually, swinging the car into the parking lot of what looked like an abandoned warehouse. There were motorcycles all around, and a few black SUV’s and sedans, much like what was parked in front of the Reapers clubhouse. Then, it hit me. We weren’t meeting the other MC at some random location the guys had decided on.
“We�
��re meeting them at their clubhouse?” I asked in disbelief.
The only guys standing around were Shadow Reapers. They stood around their bikes, gathering in front of the door to the rival clubhouse. I had expected a meeting on much more mutual grounds, but this looked like an ambush.
“Where else would you have done it?” Alice asked. “These guys didn’t want to meet anywhere else with the Reapers, so they brought the fight to their front door.”
“It just doesn’t seem safe,” I said. My main concern was still the safety of my unborn child. I didn’t want to be right in the middle of enemy territory, and we were at ground zero.
“Don’t worry, I’ll park out of the way.” Alice pulled the car down to the edge of the parking lot. We were out of the way, but we could still see the action. She backed into the parking space so we were facing the building.
I leaned forward and surveyed the blacktop around us, making sure no one else was hiding out near us, watching us. I didn’t see anyone nearby or watching the parking lot.
“You feel safe now?” Alice asked. I thought I heard a hint of sarcasm in her voice, but she didn’t seem to be making fun of me.
I nodded as I sat back against my seat. I turned my attention to the front of the clubhouse building, particularly the door where the men in the Reapers were congregating. I didn’t see anything at first.
“Congratulations on the pregnancy,” Alice said while she stared on at the bikers at the building.
“Thanks,” I said, not turning my attention away from the scene in front of us.
“Do you know the sex yet?” she asked me.
“Not yet,” I told her. “We’ve still got a few weeks left before we learn that.”
“Oh.”
Silence returned to the car as we both turned our attention to the rival clubhouse and the men standing outside. There had been something odd in her tone when she asked me about the pregnancy, something very detached but curious. It was like she was standing back, away from the scene, but she desperately wanted to see in.
“Someone’s coming out,” I said, sitting forward again to try to get a better look.
“That looks like the president,” she replied.
The guy who walked out first was pudgy compared to Mark’s wiry frame. While Mark’s body was all lean muscle, the other boss seemed to be thick and chubby. He was not in the same shape as Mark, that was for sure, but his fists were as big as my man’s head.
A conversation started, and other members of the rival MC filed out of the building behind their president.
“The Asphalt Demons. These guys are basically the big city equivalent of the Shadow Reapers. They’re a bunch of ruthless cutthroat bastards. They’d as soon kill someone as shake their hand,” Alice said.
I heard people shouting, so I rolled down my window to try to listen to the conversation. We were too far away, though, and I couldn’t hear what was being said. I could only hear their voices. Soon, those voices turned angry. As they grew louder and angrier, my heart slowed, as if it were trying to silence itself so I could hear better. I breathed lightly, quietly, trying to listen more closely.
I glanced at Alice, who didn’t seem too concerned. She sat back and watched with a bored look on her face. She’d seen it all before. She’d probably tagged along with Ozzy on many different jobs like this one.
It looked like the other boss pushed Mark, and a fight broke out between the two of them. There were no guns or other weapons. It was a good, old-fashioned fist fight. The two of them threw punches left and right, back and forth. They grappled with each other, trying to take each other down.
I was impressed that the rest of the guys, on either side, didn’t try to jump in to defend their boss against the other. I did hear them cheering on the presidents duking it out in front of the door. I also imagined that some of the sounds I was hearing were Mark’s punches landing on the Demons’ president.
It was fortunate that Mark didn’t take any punches from the other guy. His huge fists and the weight of his arms would have made any punch into a crushing blow. One hit from him had to be a game-ender. If he’d landed one punch, I found it hard to believe anyone would have been able to get up from it.
“I guess they aren’t using guns because of the close proximity,” Alice mused while we watched.
“You mean they don’t normally have fist fights like this?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Usually fights with the Reapers end in shoot-outs. But the last time they squared off with the Demons, it was a fist fight.”
“Maybe they’re doing this to honor the last fight,” I thought out loud. “You know, Mark really seems to be bothered by Alan being behind bars as a result of that last fight.”
“Yeah, it was a pretty intense blow to the whole MC,” Alice said. “I know Mark’s supposed to be the acting prez and all, but there still seems to be a power vacuum at the top.”
“Maybe today he can fix all that.”
While we watched, Mark got the other boss on the ground and started pummeling him while the other guys surrounded them. No one joined in. In fact, it looked like the members of the other MC were backing away from the fight as the Reapers closed in around them.
“Actually, it looks like he’s got the upper hand now,” I said. “It looks like he’s going to get his wish. He’s going to have a kid and come out on top of this fight.”
Then, I heard a gun click beside me, as if being cocked. I stopped talking and glanced over at Alice. I expected to see someone standing behind her at the window, pointing a gun at the back of her head. Instead, what I saw was a gun in her hand pointing at me.
My heart stopped dead.
“What is this?” I asked her.
“Ozzy should be the president,” she declared. “Then, I could be on his arm, and I would get the reverence that is rightfully mine, instead of you. What have you done for the MC besides lay down and let the president fuck you? He’s not even the president. He’s a fool. Ozzy would be a great president, and the MC wouldn’t have to worry about me running off once we have a child.”
I put my hands up and leaned back against the door. My best friend had turned on me.
“He doesn’t even know what I’ve done,” Alice went on. “He doesn’t know I set all this up for him.”
“Wait, you set this up?”
“Yeah, this little confrontation? My doing.”
“So you’re the one who’s been running and telling these guys about what’s going on in the MC? You’re the reason they’ve stayed a step ahead this whole time?” I asked.
I couldn’t fucking believe this bitch, screwing over her boyfriend’s MC so she could make herself look better. Sure, if things had worked out the way she had planned, Ozzy would take over from Mark, but it wasn’t even about that.
All Alice wanted was to be in my position, to have the power and prestige that came with being the president’s girl, or old lady, or whatever my title was.
“You’re crazy,” I told her.
“Am I, Nora? Am I crazy? Would that make this easier? What if I’m just fed up and tired of watching my MC go down the drain because the acting president is more concerned about getting his dick wet?” she asked.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I argued. “Mark loves the MC. He’s trying to change. He wants to settle down. He wants to lead the MC. But he needs guidance.”
“But he needs guidance,” Alice repeated in mocking tone. “Quit making excuses. He’s pathetic, and you have no clue what you’re doing by his side.”
“I think I know how to support my man,” I said. And, dammit, he was my man. I wasn’t merely a piece of property for him. Regardless of our reluctance to label our relationship, it was a relationship.
“There’s so much more to than that,” she said. “But you’re not going to have to worry about it.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Mark won the fight.”
“He may have won the fight, but he
was supposed to die today. Their president was supposed to beat him to a bloody pulp right here in the parking lot.”
While she talked, my eyes drifted back over to where the guys had been fighting. Mark stood up, victorious. His fists and shirt were covered in the other man’s blood. I could see it from where we were sitting.
Alice sighed again. “I guess I’ll have to take it upon myself to make sure he doesn’t take over permanently,” she said, bringing my attention back into the car.
I looked to see that she was aiming her gun at my belly. My eyes slowly raised up to look my best friend in the face.
“What the hell are you thinking?” I asked her. “No, Alice. Don’t do it.”