MIDNIGHT OBSESSION
A Midnight Riders Motorcycle Club Romance
Part 4
Olivia Thorne
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Books By Olivia Thorne
ALL THAT HE WANTS Volume 1
ALL THAT HE LOVES Volume 2
THE BILLIONAIRE’S WEDDING Volume 3
ROCK ME HARD Part 1
ROCK ALL NIGHT Part 2
HARD AS ROCK Part 3
THE BILLIONAIRE’S KISS Volume One (Parts 1-4)
THE BILLIONAIRE’S REDEMPTION Part 5
PASSION AND PRIDE
This book is the fourth and last installment in the MIDNIGHT RIDERS series. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend you read the following three books so you’re up to speed:
MIDNIGHT DESIRE
A Midnight Riders Motorcycle Club Romance Part 1
MIDNIGHT LUST
A Midnight Riders Motorcycle Club Romance Part 2
MIDNIGHT DECEIT
A Midnight Riders Motorcycle Club Romance Part 3
1
Fiona
I came to Richards, California a week ago to find out who murdered my cousin Ali.
In the last five minutes, I’d nearly been murdered myself.
Lou Shaw, the brutal but clever VP of the Midnight Riders, had somehow discovered I had a secret. He put a gun to my head and accused me of working with the DEA.
Which was true… sort of.
An undercover DEA agent named Eddie Deacon had infiltrated the MC over the last three years. A couple of nights ago he’d basically blackmailed me into helping him get closer to the president of the club:
Jack Pollari.
The man I was in love with.
After being continually pulled in different directions – by my loyalty to my cousin, by my devil’s bargain with Eddie, by my love for Jack – I’d done what I needed to do to save my own skin: I’d confessed.
Not to being a snitch for the DEA. That would have gotten me killed for sure.
No, to the part about looking for Ali’s murderer.
Now Lou and the rest of his gang knew why I was in Richards. My search for Ali’s killer had failed. I would never know what happened to my cousin in that back alley a year ago.
As bad as that was, there was something worse: the look on Jack’s face when he found out I’d betrayed him.
He had completely leveled with me just a few hours ago. Jack had told me that Lou thought I was a mole, that I was in danger, and that he was supposed to find out the truth. He’d asked me point-blank if there was anything I needed to tell him.
I said no. He believed me.
He’d risked everything for me… and I had paid him back with lies.
Now he’d lost his position as president… the trust and respect of his men… and maybe even his life.
Even if we both got out of this, I could tell from his expression that I’d destroyed whatever chance at happiness I might have had with him.
It hurt so bad it made me want to die.
Unfortunately, that possibility was still very much on the table.
2
“What do you think?” Lou asked the rest of the Midnight Riders gathered in the Roadhouse. “Should we solve this the Jack Pollari way?”
Lou’s voice became mocking. Effeminate.
“With kindness… and gentleness…” Then his voice returned to a gravelly snarl: “…and ball-less, shitheaded stupidity?”
There was a roar from the MC and a shouted chorus of NO’s!
Lou walked over to me and put his revolver to the side of my head. “Or should we solve this the Lou Shaw way and blow the bitch’s brains out?”
Half of the room thundered their approval as I shook uncontrollably with fear.
The other half just watched in frozen horror.
However Jack had felt towards me ten seconds ago, now his face contorted in rage. “LEAVE HER THE FUCK ALONE!”
Lou turned and looked at Jack. “That’s what you want?”
“Of course it is!”
Lou smirked with amusement. “This lying bitch betrayed you, and you want to let her walk?”
Jack glared at Lou. I could tell he wanted to say something along the lines of, Somebody ELSE betrayed me, too. I definitely want HIM dead.
But instead he looked at me, and the hatred in his eyes felt like a hundred razors slicing my skin. “Yes.”
Lou chuckled. “You’re even more of a pussy than I thought, Jack.”
All of Lou’s boys laughed and sneered.
Kade, Jack’s right-hand man, looked around at his fellow Riders with cold contempt. He couldn’t exactly do anything about it, though, with handcuffs on his wrists, shackles on his legs, and a sawed-off shotgun at his back.
“But I’ll tell you what,” Lou said with grandiloquent magnanimity. “As my parting gift to you… the ex-president of the Midnight Riders… you got it.”
He uncocked the revolver and let the gun drop to his side.
“Now get these pieces of shit out of my clubhouse,” he growled.
3
The Riders descended on us like a pack of wild animals. A dozen hands seized my arms and legs, and their owners cackled and hooted and leered as they simultaneously pawed at me and dragged me through the Roadhouse and threw me outside in the dirt.
Jack tumbled down next to me. A second later Kade slammed face-first into the gravel, unable to break his fall with his hands cuffed behind his back.
“Oooh – looks like that hurt,” Lou called out from the porch.
Kade didn’t say anything as he wrenched himself up to a kneeling position, his face scraped and bleeding.
“Gentlemen, after your disgraceful conduct and complete stupidity in protecting a fucking traitor, you are henceforth busted back to provisional members of the Midnight Riders,” Lou drawled. “You might be readmitted after a probationary period, which is up to my discretion. Take that time to think about what you did, and how you might avoid betraying us all again in the future.”
“Fuck you!” Jack shouted. “You’re the fucking traitor here!”
“You wound me, Jack,” Lou said in mock hurt. “I just want what’s best for the MC.”
“No you don’t – you couldn’t give a shit about the MC!” Jack turned to the other men standing beside Lou. “He’ll sell every last goddamn one of you out just to get what he wants – money and power!”
“Number one – no I wouldn’t. And number two – at least I didn’t sell them out for a piece of ass,” Lou said, then turned around and walked back inside.
Jack watched in helpless fury as the rest of the club members turned their backs on him and followed Lou.
4
“Jack,” I sobbed, “I’m so sorry.”
“Get the fuck away from me,” he growled as he limped over to help Kade.
“You have to believe me, I didn’t mean for any of this to hap– ”
He wheeled around in a berserker rage, spittle flying from his mouth. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!”
I shrank back in terror. Lou’s gun at my head might have been scarier, but it didn’t hurt like this.
Jack stood there staring at me, chest heaving, eyes burning with hatred. When he finally spoke, he pointed at the Roadhouse.
“Three y
ears. Three goddamn years of my life, gone, just like that. Hell, MORE than three years – half my fucking life was wrapped up in that club! Those guys were my brothers – I cared about them more than my own flesh and blood. Yeah, there were some fuck-ups, but every family has those – and that’s what they were: they were family. And I was turning them around. I was dragging them out of the shit and cleaning them off, getting them on their feet. I was making something better for all of us, and then you – YOU – ”
His face contorted in rage, and he bowed his head towards the ground as though trying to control himself. When he finally looked up, his eyes were cold and dead. I knew at that moment that anything he’d ever felt for me was gone.
“You lied to me,” he said, his anger barely under control. “I asked you fucking point blank – ”
“I know,” I whispered.
His words from earlier that night were burned into my brain:
If you are from the DEA or the FBI or whatever, please, just leave town. Now. And don’t come back. Lou gave me 24 hours to find out the truth, and then he’s going to hurt you. And I might not be able to stop him.
One sentence in particular stood out in my memory.
If you care about me at all, don’t fuck me on this.
It felt like a shiv in my gut every time I thought of it.
Jack stared at me. He seemed almost as bewildered as he was angry. “I risked everything – I lost everything – because you fucking LIED to me!”
“She was my cousin, Jack,” I cried, tears streaming down my face. “I had to find out who killed her.”
“You could have told me that!” he bellowed. “You should have told me that!”
“I… I didn’t know if I could trust you.”
The words sounded lame even as I said them.
“YOU DIDN’T KNOW?! When did you ‘not know’?! When I fucking pleaded with you to get out of town? When I said I didn’t care if you were DEA, or FBI, just so long as you left – so I could keep you safe?! Instead, you let me walk in there without a fucking clue! You almost got all of us killed – and now I’ve lost everything – EVERYTHING!”
Tears poured down my cheeks. “I should have told you – I know that now, I should have told you, I should have – ”
“Fuck you, Fiona,” he seethed. “You’re a fucking lying whore, just like all the goddamn rest of them.”
He turned back to Kade and did something to his handcuffs. Seconds later, I heard the crrr-CHK of one of the ratchets falling away.
I stood there, my heart breaking, feeling like I was losing my mind. It couldn’t end like this, it couldn’t –
I reached out and touched Jack’s arm.
He pulled away like I’d burned him with a hot poker. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!”
“Jack, please,” I sobbed.
“Keep away from me, Fiona,” he warned, his voice hoarse. “Do NOT touch me.”
Behind him, Kade sat down on the ground and undid his shackles with whatever Jack had used on the handcuffs. I noticed he avoided looking at me.
“Jack… please. I have to know.”
“About what?!”
“…about Ali.”
He looked shocked, like I’d sucker-punched him. Then he laughed – a dark, vicious, ugly sound. “That’s what you want?”
My face felt like it was cracking from all my grief. I wanted to say, I want YOU, but I knew that would just invite another tirade.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“I got there minutes after she died. I don’t know much, but I know I didn’t kill her. Kade didn’t kill her… and as much as I hate that goddamn son of a bitch, Lou didn’t kill her, either. I have no fucking clue who did.”
My entire body shook. Hot tears ran down my face.
All this sacrifice – the man I loved, a chance at real happiness – and for what?
Nothing.
“You know what I do know?” Jack snapped. “I know I tried to keep her alive. I tried to get her to kick. I tried to save her. But you? Where were you? You weren’t there to help her when she needed it.”
He couldn’t have hurt me more if he’d stabbed me.
You weren’t there to help her when she needed it.
“You know what else I know?” he raged. “Every single goddamn thing I just said, I would have told you two hours ago – before you destroyed my life.”
My heart broke, and I sobbed like I was dry-heaving. I dropped to my knees there in the parking lot and doubled over like a gut-shot animal, howling in agony.
As I bawled, I heard their boots crunch through the gravel. Two bikes fired up and then sped away, the roar of their engines receding into the night.
5
Jack
I stared at the wall of my den as I sat there in the darkness.
Mostly I felt numb. Like a fire had burned away every nerve ending in my body, somehow without touching the rest of me. Just a corpse with a pulse… a dead man walking.
But underneath that, I knew the pain was lying in wait. Like somebody had torn out my insides and replaced them with shards of glass. Heart, lungs, guts… all of it gone. Just broken bottles and razor blades in their place.
While the numbness was still there, I couldn’t feel it. But as soon as the numbness wore off, I knew it was gonna be hell.
I’d felt enough agony for one night. When Lou got the truth out of Fiona, I didn’t believe it at first…
…and then I saw her face.
When Sloane asked for a divorce, it didn’t hurt one tenth as much as tonight. The end of my marriage had been a long, slow decline. I’d had two years to spread out the pain.
Tonight, in the space of two minutes, an atomic bomb had gone off, leaving me without a future, without hope, without my old life.
Without the woman I’d loved.
Fiona was as dead to me as if Lou had shot her in the Roadhouse.
Deader, even. If he’d shot her, at least I could have grieved for her.
That is, if I hadn’t found out she was a traitor before she died.
“Nice of the cops to bring my bike along and leave it at the Roadhouse,” Kade said from the leather recliner across the room. “Even left my keys in it.”
I looked over at him in a daze. I’d forgotten he was there.
He poured some more scotch into his glass. “Of course, they were probably just covering their asses. If Lou shot me, they didn’t want any evidence they’d helped him hanging around the impound lot.”
His voice was unemotional as always. You never would have guessed that an hour ago, corrupt cops had handed him over to his former friends for what could have been a gangland-style execution.
Kade lifted the glass of scotch and took a gulp. “Still, it was nice not having to ride bitch back here on your bike.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I snapped.
“Small favors.”
“Well, could you not right now?”
His face didn’t betray an ounce of emotion at my chewing him out. He just sat there in silence and went on drinking my scotch.
I turned back to the wall and resumed my thousand-yard stare.
I got about thirty seconds of silence before Kade said, “Could’ve been worse.”
“‘Could’ve been worse?’ We just lost the fuckin’ club. We got backstabbed by a motherfucking son of a bitch who threw us out on our asses like bums. We’re laughingstocks. Worse, we’re fucking targets. Every douchebag who wants to prove he’s a tough guy is going to be spoiling for a fight. After we punch his lights out, he’s going to get all butt-hurt, then come around later and try to shoot us in the back.
“The cops, who are now completely under Lou’s control, are going to make our lives miserable. And without the club’s protection, we’re open game for the Santa Muertes – or any other asshole who wants revenge.
“Once word gets out about tonight, nobody in town is going to want to cross Lou, so they’re not going to come to the body shop, which means we l
ose the business and any means we had of supporting ourselves. Selling my house is out of the question, because nobody’s going to cross Lou on that, either. The bank will probably just do whatever Lou says and foreclose on it after I miss a couple of payments.
“Not to mention that every effort we ever made at fixing the club? Making shit legal and aboveboard? That’s gone. Up in smoke. We’re gonna be broke and homeless and walking around with bullseyes on our backs. Our only option is to move to another state without a penny to our names and start over again completely – and Lou is probably still going to put out contracts on us, because that’s exactly the sort of psychopathic asshole he is. And you think it could’ve been worse.”
Kade shrugged, completely unaffected by my anger. “We’re alive.”
“Not for long.”
“Got our health.”
“Again, not for fucking long.”
Kade took a sip of his drink, then mused philosophically, “Your anal virginity is still intact.”
“My anal – ”
I started laughing. A little at first, then uncontrollably. I couldn’t help it. Big belly laughs that kept going and going until tears were rolling down my cheeks.
Throughout it all, Kade just sat there, unsmiling, watching me, and all the while the bastard kept drinking my goddamn scotch.
It took me a couple of minutes to get control of myself. When I finally did, I said, “You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?”
Midnight Obsession: A Midnight Riders Motorcycle Club Romance Part 4 Page 1