“And we're a bunch of street thugs,” Manuel spoke up. His eyes flashed with anger, but his expression remained passive.
“You said it, not me.” Train took a sip of his coffee.
“I'm not arguing with it, either.” Manuel cleared his throat. “I started with The Street Kings when I was twelve, not much older than Javi or Leo. By the time I was thirteen, well, let's just say my mother spent most of her days praying for me. We stopped recruiting kids when I took over. I had really high hopes that I could change things. I tried. I really did, but as you know, our numbers have thinned over the years, and so has business. Members have left, unhappy that I'm not going back to old ways to keep us alive.”
“And you're like rats off of a sinking ship, trying to jump on ours,” Train said.
“That's harsh.”
“Life is harsh,” Train replied with a shrug. “You really ready to give up every tie to The Street Kings? The ink? Are your guys? Are you ready for what comes with being Nightshade? Riding your miles? Paying your dues and everything else that comes along with it?” It was disturbing to Train that they were ready to cut ties, lose ink and just go to another side. He couldn't imagine any circumstances under which he'd up and leave Nightshade. The club was a part of who he was.
“It wasn't an easy choice,” Manuel spoke calmly, but his hands were clenched. “We're ready. You've just got to give us the chance to show it. You vote against us, and we've got no way to do that.” He said no more as a different waitress approached with the plates of food.
They started to eat in silence. Train considered that Manuel might be telling the truth; he and the others might want a new start because they wanted things to go another way. There was no way to be sure. He liked to be sure.
The bell over the door caught his ear, he looked up and couldn't believe his eyes. Of all the places to eat, Josh had just walked into this one, as if he didn't have a care in the world. “Motherfucker.” Train set down his fork. “Excuse me.”
Manuel turned, looked to see what was going on. “Where do I know that asshole from?”
“That's Leo's father.” Train felt rage like he'd never known rush through him. “I'm going to fucking kill him.” He got up from the table without waiting for a response from Manuel. He didn't need one. All he could see was red, his mind full of images of Josh bloody and begging for his life.
Josh spotted him and ran. He was fast, faster than Train would have given him credit for. It wasn't really a surprise, junkies tended to be fleet-footed out of necessity. Once they were on the street, Train gained a little ground, but before he could close the distance so he could take Josh down, a car pulled up, an expensive car, the top-of-the-line Mercedes, with heavily tinted windows and Michigan plates, screeched to a stop and Josh jumped in.
Train knew that chasing the car was pointless, so he turned to head back for his truck. Manuel was rushing towards him. “Caesar is on him. His place is up the street, he saw him head past.”
“Thanks.” Train didn't know if Manuel was helping him so that his vote would be to bring the guys into the fold, or if he was just the kind of guy who stepped up.
“He's the piece of shit who put pills in the boys bags, right?” Manuel's expression was one of cold fury.
“Right,” Train replied. “Can you get Caesar on the line? See if he can get the plate. Ace will be able to find out who it belongs to.”
“So will Einstein,” Manuel pointed out. “He'll get the plate. He'll call and we'll find the fucker.”
“We?” The last time that Train checked, this was his fight, not Manuel's.
“I'm not going to let you do this alone. You need someone to watch your back.” All Train had to do was pick up the phone, and any of his brothers would rush to help him. Manuel was in front of him offering help, already had one of his guys following Josh. Just because Manuel was helping him out right now didn't mean that he was going to change his mind about the vote.
“What are we still standing here for then? Let's go.” He started towards the truck at a fast pace, tried to slow down the beat of his heart. Adrenaline was starting to seep through him. Josh was about to pay for all the shit that he'd done to the boys and to Meg. He'd forgotten all about Meg. She must have still been asleep, otherwise she'd have sent him a text. Had she sent him a text? He took his phone out and used the key fob to open the truck doors and start the engine.
“Caesar says that the car stopped in front of some law firm downtown, he's got eyes on the front.” Manuel rattled off the address. “I've got Einstein on the way to watch the back.”
“I'll call Buster, see who he can spare. What the fuck is he doing at a law firm?”
“Kind of a smart move, going to a law firm.” Manuel cleared his throat. “Not like you can bust in there after him.”
“He's not that smart. It's got to be whoever was driving the car.” Train was sure of that. He couldn't figure out who would be helping Josh. It wouldn't matter much; if they got in his way then they would be collateral damage. There was no way that junkie son of a bitch was walking away from what he'd done.
The lawyers' office was in a part of town where they didn't stick out much sitting in the truck. There were several stores and a pharmacy within the same block. Train watched the building as if it would disappear if he looked away. His phone rang, he answered without looking. “You see him?”
“I think you've got the wrong person,” Meg's voice flowed into his ear. “Thanks for taking Leo to school and letting me sleep. I think I needed it.”
“I know that you did. What are you doing now?”
“I'm making myself a grilled cheese with bacon,” she answered. “I can make you one if you want to come home.”
“It's going to have to be later. I'm in the middle of something right now. Club stuff.” Train shifted in his seat. “Do me a favor, stay home today. Just chill out and relax. I'll be home later.”
“I've got to go and pick up Leo when he gets out of school,” she reminded him, but she didn't ask what the club business was.
“I'll get him, don't worry about that.” Train checked his watch. It was just after eleven, he had four hours before school let out. “I've got to go. I'll call you later.”Train tossed the phone back onto the dash, turned his attention back towards the building. All he had to do now was be patient, wait for Josh to come out. Hours ticked by and no one came in or out of the building. Something wasn't right. Something hadn't been right from the start when that car had come out of nowhere and scooped Josh up.
Hours passed slowly. It grew hot, stuffy inside of the truck even with the windows down. Train didn't think that he could smoke another cigarette or stare aimlessly at the street any longer. Sitting around doing nothing wasn't something he enjoyed.
There was still no sign of Josh when the time to pick Leo up rolled around. “I've got to go and get Leo. Do you need to get your kids?”
“No, my old lady is going to get them. She's out of work. Look, I can stay here and keep an eye. You go. Get your boy. It's almost the end of business hours, how much longer can he stay inside?”
“Thanks.” Train realized he was rapidly becoming indebted to Manuel for the events of the day. There was no way to be sure if it was because of that or because the men had stepped up to help him, but Train now knew how he was going to vote on the matter of patching in The Street Kings, and it wasn't the way he'd thought.
Chapter Twelve
“I could probably find some hours for you at Sugar Sugar. I've already got Sam there full time, but maybe some afternoon shifts or something,” Caroline offered. “I didn't realize that there would be so little to do here.”
“It's fine, Caroline. I knew this was just temporary. Besides, I've had a couple of interviews.” Meg didn't think that she'd get any of those jobs, but she didn't want to seem like she had no options. Caroline already looked like she felt guilty enough. “Oh crap, I've got to go and get Leo.”
“If you change your mind, call me. We'll wor
k something out. Call me anyway, and grab some goodies for your guys on the way out. Train's partial to the chocolate chunk cookies.”
“You've ruined him with your baking. I brought a pack of cookies home from the store the other day, and you'd think that I was trying to poison him.”
“He can be a big brat sometimes.” Caroline's words had no sting because of her smile. Meg knew that she was genuinely fond of Train. There was no threat in their connection; she'd never seen anyone so in love as Caroline.
“Sometimes,” Meg agreed. “He's a man, though, what else can we expect? I'm getting the cookies and getting going. I'll call you later.”
She grabbed a dozen cookies, which would be enough for Train and Leo. She was avoiding sweets, or avoiding them as much as possible with Train's sweet tooth and apparent ability to eat anything he wanted without gaining a single ounce.
Meg got behind the wheel of Train's truck and had a moment of panic, she always did. She worried that she'd crash the truck; it was so much bigger than her car had been. If there was a choice, she wouldn't have driven it at all, but it was too cold, the sidewalks were a mess from the snow, and there was no way she could afford a new used car or to take a taxi everywhere.
Honestly, there was no way that she'd afford groceries if Train hadn't started leaving money for them along with a list of things he and Leo absolutely needed to have. He gave Leo money for school stuff and had started giving him an allowance for doing chores. The growing bond between the two of them had opened Leo up so much that it hurt her heart to look at them sometimes and realize just how much he'd been missing a man in his life.
Meg made it to the school just before the bell. The parking gods took pity on her, and she found a spot less than a block away and walked to the front to wait. She took out her phone and was surprised to see a missed message from Train. He'd be home late. They shouldn't wait for him for dinner. He hadn't had dinner with them in three days.
Leo rushed down the stairs and over to her. “Can I go to Javi's and stay for dinner? Please? His dad will bring me home after. You can talk to his mom, she's right there. Please? He just got a new game. Please.”
“As long as it's okay with his mom, you can go.” Meg laughed as Leo let out a victorious whoop. He took off to where Javi was with his mother. Meg walked over at a more sedate pace. “Hi Sandra, you sure that you want an extra monster for the afternoon?”
“The more the merrier,” Sandra replied. “I'd have called you, saved you the trip over here, but I didn't have your number. I thought that I did.”
“I'll give it to you now.” Meg dug in her purse and scribbled it down on a piece of paper. “Just call me when you're ready to kick him out. I can pick him up if you need me to.”
“No, Manuel will bring him home after dinner,” Sandra assured her. “You guys ready to go?”
“Yes! Bye, Meg.”
Meg watched Leo go and realized there would have been a time he'd have turned down the invitation to Javi's because he was just more comfortable at home with his brother and her. Now, he didn't even look back as he got in the SUV.
With Train out working and Leo with his friend, Meg walked into a perfectly silent house. Once she'd stowed away her coat and hat, she went to the living room and turned the television on for background noise while she straightened up the never-ending mess that seemed to follow Leo and Train around. There was no laundry to be done, no dishes to be washed. With three of them pitching in on the chores, they didn't pile up anymore.
Meg sat down to her least favorite pastime, her unsuccessful and increasingly worrisome job search. She typed in her password and pulled up her email to find half a dozen form letter rejections, three work-from-home scam offers. “Fuck you all.” She replied to each form letter rejection, thanking the person for their consideration. The scam offers got deleted. The rest of the email she'd gotten wasn't exciting, notifications from websites that she frequented.
At first she'd thought she read the sender of the remaining email wrong. Josh. Why was Josh emailing her? What was the video attachment? She opened the email, and there was only a hashtag indicating that it was Throwback Thursday. Had he sent her something by mistake?
Part of Meg wanted to just delete the video without looking. There was a pit of acid in the center of her stomach; it spread as she clicked the file. It started to auto-play, and she was glad that she was alone in the house as the sound of screams, her screams, came from the speakers. She muted the sound, swallowed hard so that she wouldn't throw up right on the keyboard as she watched herself.
The worst night of her life had been captured for posterity and uploaded to the Internet, where it would live forever. She'd trusted Carlos; they'd been together for nearly a year at the time. He'd told her they were going to his friend's house to party, and she hadn't had a second thought. At the time, she hadn't realized her drinks had been spiked, and she'd had a lot of drinks. She'd ended up being the party. The next morning she'd woken up, naked and bruised, in bed between the two of them. Her memory had been fuzzy, but her body had told the story. It had taken the doctor at the ER ten stitches to close the wounds between her legs. Blood tests had shown low levels of a drug known to cause memory loss and blackouts. They'd offered to call the police, but she'd refused. There was no way she was going through that humiliation. Instead, she'd tried to go on about her life as if nothing had happened.
Pretending that it never happened had worked pretty well for about a month, until Josh sat her down to watch a movie with him. The asshole had nearly pissed himself laughing when she'd freaked out. He never believed that she had been drugged, no matter how many times that she told him it was the truth. Eventually, she just stopped trying, and with time Josh had dropped the subject. She'd thought that maybe he'd forgotten, but obviously, he hadn't.
Fear spiraled through her as the thought he might have posted the video on one of his pages with the same hashtag. Meg checked all of them, held her breath as each page loaded. The fear eased when she didn't see it there. It was a small thing to be thankful for, but she was thankful that at least for now her secret hadn't been exposed.
<#<#<#<#
Meg looked out the window at the falling snow. “You're right, Sandra. They won't have school tomorrow, but are you sure it's not too much to keep Leo?” She'd barely noticed that the snow which had been falling earlier in light flurries was now coming down fast and furious, fueled by a sharp wind.
“I'm positive. Hell, I might invite him over every day after school. He's a dream.”
“Alright, call me tomorrow when they start to drive you crazy.” Meg hated that she felt relief that she didn't have to put on a happy face for Leo. She ended the call with Sandra and stepped away from the window.
She was still alone in the house. Train hadn't been back. For the past three days, he hadn't been home much. He'd come in after she was already asleep; she'd wake in the middle of the night to feel his warm body next to hers. Just next to hers, not wrapped around her the way that he would normally be.
Bile rose in her throat at the thought that he hadn't touched her in those days because he knew about the video. What if Josh had sent it to him? What if he was so disgusted that he didn't want her? Since they'd started having sex, they had it at least once a day. Meg tried to reassure herself that if he had seen the video, he wouldn't still be there at all. He'd have been long gone. He could just be tired with all the hours he spent working and doing club work, but the worst case scenario just kept pushing to the front.
The storm grew worse as the night went on. Meg dug out the emergency flashlights and some candles when the power started to flicker around nine. By ten o'clock, she was reading by the light of the candles and was very glad that she'd charged her phone, though she didn't dare go on the Internet because she was nearly over her tiny data plan as it was.
The book she was reading was fantastic, about a woman turned into a werewolf after a vicious attack, but she found herself reading the same paragraph over and
over because her mind kept wandering. Each hour that passed with Train not being there somehow convinced her that her worst fears were the truth. Finally, she gave up and headed upstairs to bed because she knew that when she woke in the morning, he would be there.
It was still fully dark when Meg woke. The illuminated numbers on the digital clock told her it was just shy of five. The bed next to her was as cold and untouched as it had been when she'd lain down five hours before. Train hadn't come home.
<#<#<#<#
Meg pulled on her snow boots and grabbed her jacket. It was still snowing, but if she stayed in the house one more minute, she was going to lose her mind or what was left of it. The power had come back on earlier that morning, but she honestly expected to lose it again. She'd set everything from the freezer outside to keep it from spoiling. It was certainly cold enough.
She realized she should have come out earlier, or even last night, and shoveled some so that she wasn't facing what had to be ten inches of fresh white snow. The mere thought of how heavy it would be made her back ache, but it had to be done. “One of these years, I'm going to buy a snow blower,” she grumbled to herself as she started to clear the porch. She'd heard one earlier, so she looked around to see if she could see who had the blower. Maybe it was one of the neighbors she knew who would lend it to her without a problem.
All That Matters (Nightshade MC Book 3) Page 16