Without Consequence

by Victoria L. James

  “Christ,” Deeks mumbled from somewhere, his broad body stepping in front of me and breaking the stare down from Chester. I dropped my eyes to my feet immediately as the sudden mood around me changed. No one had to say a word. This was a power play and the power had clearly shifted, and it wasn’t appreciated.

  The eyes behind me were burning spots into my cold flesh. I shouldn’t have been out there, and every single one of them knew it just as well as I did. I was the reason things had gone from bad to worse, and no matter how much my fight or flight kicked in, I was stuck. I had to stay because leaving would make Drew look weak, and I’d already done too much damage.

  My hands balled around the leather with the last of my strength. Chester was laughing from somewhere beyond Deeks, and though I appreciated the protection, I suddenly felt the need to know what the hell was going on.

  “Easy, Tucker. I’m here because Hernandez has gone walkabout. Wondered if you’d seen him on your travels. He was pretty hot about the shit that went down with Ramirez.”

  “Her-who?” Drew hit back quickly, and even though he probably sounded relaxed and at ease to everyone else, I heard the hint of worry in his voice.

  Slater’s rough laughter broke free, his words traveling back to me as he joined Drew in his bravado. “You remember Hernandez, Tucker. He was the guy that followed Ram around like he was there solely to sniff his ass and make sure the stink of shit wasn’t too strong.”

  Drew huffed out a laugh, but every time I heard anything from him, it only made the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention even more. “The Emp who used to hit like a girl in the ring?”

  “That’s the one,” Slater said, his boots slapping against the porch as he repositioned his feet.

  “Not seen him for years,” Drew answered, sniffing up before he cleared his throat.

  With one hand gripping the leather closed, the other reached forward, my palm against Deeks’ back as I steadied myself. With every passing comment, I just wanted out of there. Everything Drew and Slater were building up, I was terrified that one wrong move from me, one cough or shuffle of my feet, would bring it all crashing down around us. The more I tried to stay still, the more my muscles twitched, nagging at me to stretch them out. It was one of those Murphy’s Law moments that made me want to scalp the bastard.

  “I told the boys he was probably with that bitch he has on the side.” Cortez paused, and Deeks shuffled in front of me, making sure I was out of view before Chester continued. “She was married, but her pussy must have tasted like strawberries because the fucker kept going back for more. If you see him, you tell the dick I’m looking for him.”

  It was Drew’s turn to step up. My view of what was going on was limited, given how much I was staring down at the floor, but there was only one man who moved the way he moved, and as soon as I heard his feet start to fall down against the steps, I knew what he was doing. He wasn’t being the Drew I knew and got to spend time with away from everyone else. He was now being Drew Tucker. He was playing his part and stepping into his role, and that probably scared me more than anything else as I held my breath and waited for him to speak.

  “Quit the bullshit, Chester. You’re no more here looking for your man than you’re here to lick Ben and Jerry’s off my balls. What’s this all about?”

  A few bursts of muffled laughter broke out around us, but even when the Hounds were wearing smiles on their faces, everyone knew that their hands were flexing down by their sides and their readiness to kill was only a heartbeat away.

  “Just checking in with all my associates,” Chester answered calmly.

  “I thought we were enemies now,” Drew said calmly, while I prayed to Jesus for him to just shut the hell up and let them roll away.

  “Associates. Enemies… There’s a fine line between love and hate, Mr. Tucker.”

  “Not in this yard,” Slater spoke up from somewhere in front of me.

  Then there was that silence again – that kind of silence where you never know which side of it you’re going to come out on. The tension in the air was so thick, my stomach rolled from it as I stood there like nothing more than a useless ornament.

  “Well, as your associate, as your enemy and as that lover you dream of but will never get within spitting distance of touching, I’m telling you I haven’t seen your man. I’m sure he hates this place and us as much as you do, Cortez. But if he stops by to deliver my newspaper, I’ll be the first one to call you up.”

  I shifted from one leg to the other. I couldn’t fucking help it. I was close enough to Deeks that I was pretty sure no one in front of him saw it, but the intensity from behind me made me freeze the moment I felt it. This was almost as bad as pulling teeth, and I swore to myself in that moment that if I ever heard someone had rolled up again, I was going to stay in Drew’s bedroom and wait it out, which was exactly where I should have been right in that moment.

  The combative nature between Drew and Chester was obvious, but even blind, I could feel the palpability of the hatred. It rolled from the two of them and put tension in every man on the porch.

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Drew. Good looking out.” The way Chester said it once again made the hair on my arms stand on end. There was a threat buried deep in there, but no one else seemed to feel it. They all seemed frozen in place and locked down.

  I wasn’t sure what happened with them at that point. All I could hear was the crunching of ground beneath the soles of shoes and the creaking of leather as some men folded their arms and others dropped theirs down by their sides. I was too busy holding my breath and waiting for the sound of shots to fire in the air to really make sense of any of it. It was only when Drew spoke up one last time that I knew he was still safe and more than anything, in charge.

  “Cortez?” he shouted out calmly.

  No response came from Chester, but I could imagine his face angled up to Drew’s and the look of arrogance that he was no doubt wearing as he waited for him to finish.

  “If you ever come through my yard uninvited again, I’ll kill you. You got that?”

  The laughter that came from Chester was cut off by the roar of his bike starting, the other two coming to life behind his. I froze where I was, as the sound got louder before leaving and sending up a cloud of dust around us. Looking around Deeks, I saw a couple of guys jump from the porch to lock the gates, and Slater hop down and talk to Drew quietly.

  “Deeks?” I whispered quietly so he was the only person who could hear me in the fading of the engines as they hit the street. “Who’s Ramirez?”

  Deeks half turned, his eyes moving between Drew and me before he lowered his voice and leaned in closer. “Ramirez is the one that killed Pete, but you’d do best forgetting that name and not bringing it up in front of Drew.”

  I nodded in agreement. The last thing I wanted was to make matters worse, and I was already worried about the repercussions of this, even though it hadn’t really been my choice to be out here, and it sure as hell hadn’t been my plan to be prancing around outside his room in his cut.

  The mumbles started only seconds before the bodies seemed to part, and I found myself face to face with Drew. I couldn’t read his expression, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, or if it was for my benefit or the pack’s.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, receiving a shake of his head in response as his arm curled around my neck and pulled me close. The other hand reached out to slap Slater on the chest, asking him to give him ten minutes.

  No one said a word as he towed us both through the main room, but the stares we both got had me shrinking into the leather until I was close to tears by the time we entered his room again. The only thing that stopped me was shame.

  “I’m so sorry, Drew.”

  His jaw was tense when he turned my body in his arms and faced me. I couldn’t get a read on him while I watched his nostrils flare. I knew he was trying to calm himself down. All I could hope was that his rage hadn’t been anythi
ng to do with me or the situation I’d put myself in out there. When his hands met my shoulders to give them a gentle squeeze and his breath came out in one strong force, I had no choice but to listen to what he was about to say.

  “This was what I was talking about when I told you to go before it was too late. You’re making apologies when that should be on me. I’m the one who should be sorry. Not you.”

  Stepping forward, my shoulders sagged now that we weren’t being watched by everyone in the hut. Lifting my arm, I cupped his cheek with my hand, sighing as he pressed his face against it and dropped his chin to his chest. I hated seeing him like this, but for better or worse, it gave me strength.

  “Drew, I’m here because I want to be. I’m here because being with you like this makes me happy.” I tugged the side of the leather vest back with my free hand and tilted my head to the side. “I’m wearing this because I accept you for who you are. All I’m apologizing for is not thinking when you were so obviously focused on other things.”

  His hands slid up to my neck again, his face moving closer to mine while he stared down on me intensely. “Ayda?”

  “Yes?” I whispered, suddenly terrified he was going to ask me to leave.

  “Shut up.”

  Then his lips met mine. It wasn’t the same kind of kiss we’d shared before we’d been interrupted. This one was more intense, the playfulness and neediness replaced with passion and affirmation. I knew he was going to have to leave to sort out this mess sooner rather than later, but the yearning for him was almost painful. I needed him pressed up against me and inside me. I needed that look he gave me just before he took what he wanted from my body. I wanted to be wanted. I needed to be needed, and he was the only one that could fulfill that anymore. I was in it for the long haul. I’d made my decision and I’d chosen him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Drew

  There were many things I was growing to appreciate about Ayda. Despite the obvious, I think my favorite was her ability to walk away from complex situations and not ask questions. All the other women I’d ever been with, even if it was only for one night, used to hit with the ‘getting to know you better’ bullshit before I’d even finished my final stroke and fallen down beside them.

  I was a mystery to the town of Babylon. An enigma. Someone they’d heard stories of but couldn’t believe them to be anywhere close to the truth. Everybody wanted to be the one to crack me wide open and expose the real me – whoever that was at the time. Only I’d never wanted to go there with anyone else up until now. The truth was that I still wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell anyone at all. Not even Ayda, no matter what this was that was going on inside the two of us. But it didn’t matter because she never asked. She never pushed or pressed or made me withdraw. Instead, she would just look up at me as she rested her elbow by my head on the bed, use those fingers of hers to lull me into some kind of relaxed state of mind, and the words just fell from my lips with ease.

  Since Cortez came and went, I’d seen the hidden fear in her eyes every time she looked at me, and I’d not been away from civilization so long that I didn't recognize that she was too small a woman to survive in oceans as big as mine for as long as she hoped to. I was just too much of a selfish bastard to try and do anything at all to change that. For the first time since my teenage years, I had something else to look forward to besides death and darkness when I woke up each morning. For the first time since I last saw my parents or Pete, I had a little bit of light in a world, which carried so much darkness.

  The pack had seen it, too. Their know-it-all smirks and sly winks across the hut would normally have gotten under my skin and made me snap, but for some reason, this time around, they didn’t. With every cocky grin that was sent my way, I flashed one right back and gave each man a salute.

  Although I knew I had to be careful. There was falling fast and then there was falling fast. The last thing I needed was for either one of us to get caught up in something that would be impossible to walk away from if we needed to. And in this line of existence, the stuff you didn’t want to have to think about happening was often what you ended up thinking about the most. Reality was always only a single scary moment away. Anyone who got close to us usually ended up hurt. My job now was to make sure that that never happened to Ayda. Not on my watch.

  Thursday came and went without much fuss. Once she eventually peeled herself away from me and grumbled her tight little ass all the way to the shower, I made a deal with myself to tackle the day the way I intended to handle them all from now on.

  As head-on as I could.

  By Friday morning, I’d called my brothers into the office to have a proper meeting on everything to do with all our businesses, and even though I was hungry and desperate to keep myself fully up-to-date with everything that was going on, I was biding my time and waiting to hit them all with questions over the boxing rings that I still hadn’t seen any paperwork on. A part of me knew that lulling them into a false sense of security would mean that when I struck, it would have twice the effect I originally wanted it to have.

  “Effectively,” Jedd spoke up from the couch opposite my desk, “Harry is the Mr. T of our club now. Anything gold or of value, he wears it and handles it.”

  “Yeah,” Harry huffed out beside him, his chest bouncing while his eyes flickered all around the room. “You should see the looks I get when I tell people I’m in pawn management now.”

  Shaking my head as my own laughter trickled out, I jabbed the pen on the invoice book in front of me and raised my brows back up at him. “Not the right kind of porn for you, Rogers?”

  “Not even close,” he answered with a smile.

  “We missed you doing the books though, Drew,” Jedd offered as his fingers rose to pinch his nostrils together. “Sinclair is a prick. No one has the same take on things as you do. “

  “Figure savvy,” Kenny piped up from the other side of the room. My attention turned to him slowly and the grin played on my lips again.

  “Definitely figure savvy,” I said quietly, winking at the little fucker who I knew was trying to hide his pissy side from me for taking Ayda from him, even though we all knew he’d never really stood a chance. She had too much about her to be the kind of girl that would just drop her panties for a gin, and Kenny didn’t have the patience to hang around and wait to see the fruits of his labor grow in his own hands.

  He rolled his eyes about half a minute after I’d hit him back with words that were obviously a little too confusing for him to understand. Despite making it look like the only thing I wanted to do was wind him up, I actually had as much respect for him as I did for Harry, Jedd and Slater. It always came down to loyalty. Even Deeks was climbing up the ladder these days. Ayda was always talking about him and what she saw beyond what he showed off. She spoke like that about them all in the quiet of my room.

  Dropping my chin down to my chest, I nodded slowly, just for something to do that wouldn’t involve me referring back to the time I’d spent away from my club. I’d always thought I missed them when I was gone, but it was only now that I was truly starting to realize just how much that had been true.

  “Okay, I think we’re done here,” I muttered, shutting up the file in front of me before peering around the room. Each one of them seemed to lean forward and release a small sigh of relief. I knew they weren’t expecting me to notice, but I saw it and noted each one down. Something was going on and I wasn’t privy to it. The only comfort I was taking away from that was the fact that I knew if it was some serious shit, I’d have been the first man they told. This was them making a decision that went against what I’d asked to happen. Of that, I was pretty certain.

  “Anyone else feel like they’ve just sat in on a meeting with Donald fucking Trump?” Slater joked, standing up tall as he stretched out his back and rolled his shoulders around.

  “You’re fired,” I snorted back at him before glancing up at Kenny to point my pen in his direction. “And you… You have som
ewhere to be.

  “Guard dog duties,” Kenny grumbled.

  “More like babysitting,” Harry hit back with a rough laugh before he broke out into that god-awful cough again.

  “Label it what you like. The Hanagan kid needs watching as much as Ayda does. Get over there now.”

  “He loves it really,” Jedd said in his deep, rough voice. “Spending all day outside a high school, checking out all the young blood.”

  Kenny pushed himself up off the wall, narrowing his eyes as he walked to the door and spat back. “You’re sick. You’re all fucking sick.”

  “Eyes up, Kenster,” Slater joked. “We’ll see you at the game.”

  Before I had any time to gift Kenny with a parting insult, my attention had snapped back to Slater and my eyes had widened about as much as my mouth had dropped open. “Sorry, what?”

  He took a glance at Jedd, winking while his smirk broke free like he knew everything and I was left to know shit again. “The game.”

  “What game?”

  “Tate’s football match. We’re all tagging along tonight.”

  “Like fuck you are.” I laughed, even though I didn’t find any of this even slightly funny.

  “C’mon, Tucker,” Harry grumbled beside him, small fits of his cough still lingering in his throat as he tried to clear it and speak up at the same time. “We’ll be good little biker boys for you. It’s been a lifetime since any of us got to see a proper game. Go, Bulldogs!” His hand flew in the air for only a second before his choking fit kicked in again and he had to push his fist back against his chest.

  “You’re all dicks. You hear me? Short, stubby, useless, limp dicks.”