“Once I found the club,” he said, “I never needed anything else in my life. I never needed anyone else. But I need you, Annabelle. You’re like nothing else on God’s earth. When we were in that motel, I thought maybe you’d been sent to tease me, because I couldn’t have you.” His voice was soft but loaded with weight. It boomed into me, the vibrations moving through every inch of me and turning to a warm glow. “But now I’ve got you.” His thumbs rubbed slowly across my shoulders as if to prove it. “And I think maybe you were right. Maybe you’re meant to save me.”
He leaned down and kissed me, a feather-light touch, as if he wanted to kiss me without any risk of changing me at all. But I wanted to tell him that he already had changed me: that somehow, even with everything that was going on, I was happier now with him and the Princes than I’d ever been.
Then he was pressing into me and I arched my back as his thickness spread me, throwing out fluttering silver pleasure that turned hot and dark as he filled me. He plunged right up inside me until the glossy curls at his base were against my body, and I caught my breath at the feeling. I could feel myself tight around him, every heartbeat he stayed there triggering new waves of heady sensation.
As he began to move, I ran my hands over him, exploring him in the darkness. My palms slid from the wide shoulders that dwarfed mine down the muscles of his back to the hardness of his ass and I clutched him there. I could feel his ass flex as he pushed deep, pulled back and drove into me again.
The darkness was total, now but I didn’t need to see him. I’ve never felt so close to a person. I was aware of every little detail: the slight roughness of his calloused hands when he pushed my hair back off my forehead; the stroke of his chest against my breasts, my nipples achingly stiff; the push of his thickly muscled hips between mine, holding me open and pinned.
He began to speed up and I went wild, tangling my fingers in his hair and drawing him down into a kiss. As his lips met mine he started to pound me, just as I’d imagined that night in the motel, his hips slamming me into the bed. The pleasure went from silver to white-hot, everything narrowing down to the feel of him inside me and his urgent possessive kisses. He owned my mouth, ravishing me with his tongue and then sucking my top lip into his mouth and biting it just a little. His hips never stopped rising and falling and now he began to twist them as well. I wrapped my arms around him, clutching him tight as my climax approached. “Carrick!” I panted through the kisses. “Carrick!”
The whole bed was rocking. His thrusts built and built, speeding me towards my peak. My fingers dug deep into the muscles of his back as I felt the pleasure spiral tight, ready to burst—
I found his cheeks in the darkness, his stubble rough against my palms, and drew him down for one last kiss. Our tongues met just as I exploded and my climax came out as a long, muffled moan. A second later, he groaned and I felt him shoot inside me.
When we’d recovered, he gathered me into his arms and rolled us onto our sides, my head against his chest. I still couldn’t see him but it almost felt more intimate, that way. Thunder still rumbled overhead, but it seemed to be moving away and there was nothing, nature or human, that could hurt me when I was with him.
As our breathing settled and we lay there cuddling, the mood changed. I think it was the darkness. It made it easier for him to visit the places he hadn’t wanted to go back to.
“It starts with my dad,” he said at last.
41
Carrick
“I was born in Ireland. The North. My mom was over from the US on business, met my dad and fell for him. She wanted to be with him but it was a pain for her to find work in Ireland and a pain for my dad to work in America. So there was a lot of travelling back and forth, when we were kids.”
“We?” she asked. “You have brothers and sisters?”
“Brothers,” I said. “Four of them.” An iron band tightened around my chest. Or maybe just three, now. “We spent some time in the US, some in Ireland. Moved schools a lot. But we were a happy family. I spent more time with my dad than the rest of them: he used to have this motorcycle he’d ride on weekends and sometimes he’d take me out on it. He wasn’t a biker, not like I am now, but he taught me to love bikes.” I swallowed, remembering the smooth metal and chromed exhausts, the grin on his face as he looked round at me to check I was okay.
“Anyway,” I told her, “we’re spending a summer in the US. My dad’s traveling for work and we’re pretty close so I miss him a lot. I spend a lot of that summer brooding and maybe that’s why I don’t see what’s going on.” I could hear my voice going tight. Annabelle must have been able to hear it too because she pressed against me, her soft body calming me.
“She had these friends,” I said. “That’s how she introduced them to us. We’d all be packed off to another room and she’d have five, six hour talks with them. Really intense. A few times I listened at the door and it was like...I don’t know, it was like a therapy session crossed with a bible meeting, only it didn’t sound like, y’know, the bible. Just a lot of stuff about guidance and confessing and them helping her to find the right path.”
I inhaled but breathing was difficult, my rage at my own stupidity filling my chest. “I was just a kid. She seemed happy—in fact, she seemed happier every time they came around. It didn’t occur to me that grown-ups could make bad decisions. I didn’t realize they were indoctrinating her.”
I felt Annabelle’s chest swell as she drew in a slow, horrified breath.
“By the time we figure out something’s wrong, it’s too late. I tell my dad and he starts making his way home. But by now, things are getting really scary. I hadn’t noticed some things until then, like the way some of her friends who came to our house would look at us. Not nasty or angry but...like they were grading us. Assessing us like we were things.”
“Oh Jesus,” breathed Annabelle. I found her hand in the dark and squeezed it. I knew that she’d experienced that, too.
“My brothers had put it together before I did, Kian especially. He’d done some asking around and he’d heard things about these people. He figured out it was a cult. One where kids were—” I swallowed. “Where kids disappeared.”
Annabelle was silent but she gripped me even harder.
“We could all feel it sliding out of control. We tried to talk to my mom, to warn her, but she was too far gone: I think they’d been feeding her drugs, in those meetings. If we criticized her friends, she’d get mad. All the rumors we’d heard about the cult were wrong, she said, propaganda by its enemies. And then she tells us that one of my brothers, Bradan, is going on a ‘special trip’ with her friends. She gets him in the car. We’re all clawing at the handles, trying to get the doors open. Bradan’s screaming, hysterical. And she drives off.”
I drew in a shuddering breath. I could feel the most difficult part bearing down on me and I wanted to get it out while I still could. “Then my dad gets home. We try to explain what’s been going on. My mom gets back and he tries to talk her down but seeing him sends her over the edge. I guess the cult knew my dad would come between her and them, at some stage, so they’d filled her head with really evil shit. She’s convinced that he’s a monster, that he’s going to take her boys away from her, that only the cult can save us. She says she’s going to take the other three of us ‘to safety.’ Tells us to get in the car. When my dad tries to stop her, she grabs a knife—”
Annabelle’s whole body went stiff. I was just as rigid next to her, my mouth the only part of me moving. The darkness made it easier to talk but harder to stay distanced from the memories. I could see it all unfolding in front of my eyes. “There’s a struggle. My mom and dad are down on the floor. We’re all screaming. My dad has to get her to let go of the knife so he hits her head against the tiles….”
“And that’s how my dad killed my mom.”
42
Annabelle
I was glad it was pitch black. I don’t think I could have stood to see the pain in his eyes. I
tried to imagine what it must have been like but I couldn’t even come remotely close. To lose one parent just as another turns into a killer...God! I clung to him for all I was worth.
He was trying to keep his voice neutral and detached: the only way he could get through it. “We couldn’t find Bradan. He’d just vanished. The police came and took my dad to jail. Turned out, the cult had friends in high places, people who didn’t want to see it investigated. They spun my mom’s death as a murder, painted my dad as a drunken Irishman who’d come home and beaten his wife to death. The authorities put me and my brothers into care.” He swallowed. “But….”
He took a breath. Another. Building up the courage to say it.
“I ran. I couldn’t stand the thought of living with some strange family so I ran. Right when my brothers needed me, I disappeared. When we’d lost our parents, when we all needed to lean on each other, I vanished.”
Suddenly, it all started to come together. Why he’d wound up in the MC. Why he was so insistent that he had to give but never take from them. He was still trying to repay the debt to his first family. “You were just a kid,” I told him. “You couldn’t be expected to hold everything together. You just would have gone into care too.”
I felt him shake his head. “I should have tried. Aedan tried. Got us to all get the shamrock tattoos, so we’d remember we were still a family. But the next morning, I ran.”
“I went to Chicago and lived on the streets. Got by by stealing. One of my brothers, Aedan, had taught me how to fight so I could look after myself when I had to. But I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I’d steal from parked cars, boost a TV from the back of a truck, anything but mug someone. I’d seen enough violence.”
“A few years went by. I was on my own and I thought I was doing fine. My brothers were all with foster families but I don’t know much about what happened to them after that. I felt so guilty about running...plus, there was a split down the middle. Kian and Sean couldn’t forgive my dad for what he’d done. Aedan and I still loved him. I went to visit him in jail a few times: that’s how I know that Kian went into the military as soon as he was old enough, because he had to get my dad to sign the forms. Sean, I don’t know. Aedan wound up in New York, making money boxing. I reached out to him a few times, let him know I was in Chicago.”
“But then things started to get too hot for me there. I’d moved onto stealing cars and I stole one too many from the wrong neighborhood, got some gangs after me. I had to run again and this time I hopped a goods train and rode it all the way to LA. And that’s where I met Briggs.”
“Briggs?”
“President of the Hell’s Princes before Mac.” Carrick sighed. “I’d literally just got off the train, was wandering the streets. Never been to LA before, didn’t know where to go or which streets to stay away from. So straightaway, I got into a fight. Three guys have me backed up against a dumpster, I’m just about managing to hold my own but it’s only a matter of time until they get me down on the ground and I get my ass handed to me. And then this Harley roars into the alley and a voice booms out, Let the kid be.”
Carrick drew a deep breath. “He was cool and tough and he reminded me of my dad. He told me he needed guys like me in his club: I’d have to do my time as a hanger-on and then a prospect, but he could get me in, even though I was only seventeen. He took me back to Haywood Falls and that’s how I found the club. Became a prospect and not long after that, I met you.”
He went quiet. I wanted the story to end there: a happy ending. The guy who lost his dad found a new one. But I knew that wasn’t how it finished. I could feel it in his body. I could hear it in his voice, a growing stain of bitterness as he talked about Briggs. Something bad was coming.
“I wanted to impress him,” Carrick said. “And I’d do anything to help the MC. So when Briggs said he had a job for me, I jumped at it. He took me to a poker game someone was running on our turf and told me to smash the place up and teach the guy a lesson. And I did it. And I was good at it. And eventually, the club made me their enforcer.”
“But then Briggs told me about this fed, a guy called Walker. He had some sort of grudge against the club and he’d faked evidence that we were dealing heroin. He was blackmailing Briggs: either he pay him or the whole club would go to jail. Briggs told me that the rest of the club didn’t know, that we maybe had a rat and I was the only one he could trust. He said—” Carrick hissed air through his teeth—”he said I was like a son to him.”
His voice was vicious now, sharp and toxic with the poison he was releasing. “I couldn’t say no. I took an untraceable gun and a stolen car and I lay in wait for the guy. I ran him off the road and then, while he sat there bleeding and helpless in the wreck, I put a bullet in his head.”
“And then, a few days later, I found out it was all bullshit. There was no blackmail plot. Walker hadn’t been about to bring down the club. He had evidence against Briggs: real evidence, just on him. He was cooking up a drug deal behind the club’s back. He’d conned me into doing his dirty work. And the FBI agent? Clean as they come. Had a wife and two kids.” He swallowed. “I couldn’t tell anyone: Briggs said he’d tie me to the murder if I did. Mac and the others eventually found out about the drug deal and Mac wound up killing Briggs over the border in Mexico. Mac took over as our new president. But no one ever found out about the FBI agent. No one except Briggs and me. And now you.”
God...he’d kept this bottled up for years, trusting no one...until me. And I realized why he was able to tell me now, in this pitch-black cabin: he didn’t want to see my expression. He thought I’d be disgusted. He thought I’d hate him. And he was willing to tell me anyway, to risk losing me, just so he could finally be straight with me.
I had to show him I still loved him. That I didn’t think less of him, not for one second. He was lying there silently but I knew he was screaming inside, needing to know. I pushed him over onto his back and rolled on top of him. “Listen to me,” I said urgently. “That is not on you. You didn’t know. That’s on Briggs, one hundred percent. He used you.”
I could feel the battle going on in his body: half of him wanted to believe me but half had been living so long with the guilt that he couldn’t let it go. “He used you,” I said again, squeezing his shoulders. And after a moment, I felt his tension ease just a little.
“Doesn’t bring the guy back though, does it?” he said bitterly.
“No.” I was picking my words carefully. I knew it wouldn’t help to lie. “It doesn’t bring him back. But people can redeem themselves, Carrick. You saved me. That’s got to be worth something.”
His hands slid up my flanks, his palms smoothing over my skin. “Maybe,” he said at last.
I covered my hands with his. “Definitely.”
And I felt his whole body slowly relax under me. I hadn’t healed him, but I’d helped to open the wound so the poison could escape. “Come here,” he murmured, and pulled me down into a tight embrace.
I woke to the sound of scampering. When I realized it wasn’t a dream, I opened my eyes. Sitting on the floor next to the bed, looking up at us with huge eyes, was a chipmunk. It chattered once, then bounded across the floor and out of the door, probably wondering what the hell we were doing in its home.
I looked around. It was light and I was lying face-down atop Carrick, both of us utterly naked. His strong body had kept me warm all night.
When I checked the window, a clear blue sky was waiting for us outside. But when I woke Carrick, the blue I saw in his eyes was even better. I wasn’t kidding myself that his past was dealt with and forgotten: you can’t leave something like that behind you overnight. But I felt like I was on the inside, at last. We could deal with it together.
It was only six in the morning. “We could go to your place,” I suggested. Curling up with him in a warm bed with actual covers sounded very, very good. I pulled on my still-wet jeans. Eww.
“I don’t have much in the refrigerator,” he said, pulling on his s
imilarly-wet clothes. “Don’t know about you, but I need breakfast.”
He was right. I was starving. I hadn’t eaten since before Ox’s accident. Ox! That was a reminder that our troubles weren’t over. Volos was out there somewhere, plotting. But we’d deal with that together, too.
“Let’s go see Mom,” said Carrick. “She’s always up early and she always cooks breakfast for whoever’s around. We need to stop by the clubhouse anyway to let them know we’re okay. And we can get an update on Ox.”
I nodded, pulled on my sneakers and we set off. The forest was completely different in the daylight, tranquil and beautiful. I could see why someone had built a cabin there.
Something was still bothering me, though, something I had to tell him while we had some privacy. As he climbed onto the bike in front of me, his cut and t-shirt rode up and I saw the shamrock tattoo, the one he’d talked about. “The club...that’s your family now, right?”
He froze...then nodded.
I reached out and put my hand on the tattoo, smoothing my palm across his tan skin. “Families look out for each other. The club wants to help us. You should let them.”
He didn’t look around. “Yeah,” he muttered in a way that didn’t mean yeah at all. I could see his shoulders hunching and knotting. He was still too wrapped up in guilt over not being there for his real family. I knew better than to push him. One thing at a time.
“You think you’ll ever get back in touch?” I asked cautiously.
He shook his head and started the engine. “Some things should stay in the past.”
We were the first ones at the compound, other than Mom herself, so we had to unlock the gate and pull it aside ourselves. We figured everyone else had stayed at the hospital until late and was still asleep.
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