OUR SURPRISE BABY

by Paula Cox

  “Listen,” I say, leaning forward. “I know what it’s like to wear the patch, or to think about wearing the patch. I know what it’s like to think that your only chance to be somebody comes from the life. I know that, and I ain’t here to tell you what to do. You’re men, and men have to make their own decisions. But all I will say is this. Once upon a time, I thought that the only family I could have was the club. I used to say it all the time. I never got close to anybody. I never thought there was much else to this life. I used to say to my friend, Zeke: ‘Catch feelings, catch a bullet.’ I was a big, violent, scary bastard. And now…well, I’m still big and scary.” That gets a laugh. “But I’ve left the violence behind. ’Cause yeah, I caught feelings, and I caught a bullet, but this family of mine is sweeter than any club life could ever be. This family of mine has made me feel things I never thought a man like me could. The life of the club is blood and pain and fear; the family life is love and closeness and contentment. But you’ve gotta make your own mind up on that.”

  After the talk, I get on my bike thinking about Carmine and Allison, waiting for me in our three-bedroom on the outskirts of town. Allison often jokes to me: “My parents wanted me in suburbia, and here I am.” But she’s still in the thick of it, still helping people, even if it is part-time now Carmine is here.

  I don’t go straight home, though. I have a stop to make. I have something I need to handle. ’Cause I don’t reckon there’s any reason for Allison not to be able to call herself my wife. Nah, no reason at all. So before I go home, I stop off at a jewelry store.

  When I walk through the door, having to duck my head as usual, I feel like a new man. Rust the Enforcer, Rust the Killer, Rust the Gunman, Rust the Club Man…Rust the Lover, Rust the Father, Rust the Husband…

  Allison

  I’m sitting on the couch, a romance novel in my hand, when Rust walks in. He rolls his eyes when he sees the book . “Got the real thing, and yet you still like those fantasy men.”

  “Some of these have very good stories, actually,” I respond, placing the book on the coffee table. "You’re late,” I point out, pouting at him in mock anger.

  Rust holds his hands up, laughing. “Don’t start with all that nagging stuff, Allison, or you’ll make me take for the open road. Just me, my bike, and the city in the background, getting smaller and smaller…”

  He chuckles when I leap to my feet and shove him in the chest. He catches my wrist, pulls me close, and we kiss hard, my lips somehow finding his through his beard. “Where’s Carmine?” he asks, as I lean back in the embrace.

  “She’s run away from her awful father,” I say, kissing him on the cheek, and then giving his lip a bite.

  “You’re evil,” he says.

  He takes my hand and leads me down the hallway, through our house, to Carmine’s bedroom. Everything is pale blue, a natural color, because the day Carmine was born I promised myself I would let her be whatever she wanted to be. I would never pressure her like my parents pressured me. Rust moves me so that I am in front of him, and then wraps his arms around me. The two of us watch our daughter for a long time, as she snores sweetly. Rust always said he wanted a son, but when Carmine was born, he didn’t care; he told me he was the happiest man alive, and the way he’s acted this past year, I believe him.

  He takes his hands from me and says. “I’ve been saving a year for this. I used my enforcing money for this place, so I had to save my mechanic money, and it turns out fixing cars don’t pay as much as breaking noses. So I guess we’ll have to save for a honeymoon.”

  “What are you talking about?” I say, turning to face him.

  He’s so tall that even kneeling I don’t have to look down very far to see his wicked smile.

  “Allison Lee,” he says, opening the ring box, “love of my life and mother of my child, will you—”

  “Of course I will!” I squeal, and then lower my voice so Carmine does not wake. “Of course I will!”

  Rust rises to his feet, grinning. “You didn’t let me finish,” he says, taking my hand and sliding the ring onto my finger: an elegant band finished with a glinting diamond. “I had a whole speech planned, and then you go and interrupt me. What sort of cruel woman are you, eh?”

  “Shut up and kiss me,” I say, breathing heavily.

  Rust plants his hand on my lower back and presses himself into me, pressing our bodies together, and then kisses me so passionately that for a second I feel as though I am floating.

  THE END

  Read on for your FREE bonus book – OUR SECRET BABY

  OUR SECRET BABY: War Riders MC

  By Paula Cox

  SHE KEPT OUR DAUGHTER HIDDEN FROM ME. TIME TO PAY THE PRICE.

  I did the right thing once.

  Never again.

  No one takes what’s mine.

  Not even the mother of my child.

  I saved Kayla from that hellhole.

  Took in her, kept her safe, made her mine.

  I put my neck on the line for that girl.

  And what do I get in return?

  Lies.

  Deceit.

  Betrayal.

  I was good to her then, but no longer.

  She owes me everything.

  And I’m coming to take it.

  Chapter One

  Kayla

  I lie on the floor thinking that Master is going to come and give me a reading: that long, horrible process in which Master pinches each of your fingers and toes individually whilst aligning himself with the heavens to delve into your soul. I hate this process, hate the way Master pinches just a little too hard, seems to enjoy the wince in my face, in all the girls’ faces. I tighten up at the thought, wishing I could get away.

  My mouth is dry, hair plastered with stale sweat to my head, tongue heavy, limbs leaden with exhaustion, pinned to the floor. I manage to lift my head and glance around. I am drugged; movement is difficult. I am lying in a small box of a room, bare apart from a grimy bed in the corner. The floor is stone, chilling me through my clothes, and dirty. One of the walls is not a solid, but contains a window which looks into a dimly lit hallway. It is the only clean thing in the room.

  The Movement which I escaped from—cult, though they’re viciously opposed to that word—is into some shady things, but I’ve never heard of them kidnapping and imprisoning people like this. Oh, they kidnap and imprison people, but they do that with smiles and beckoning waves and promises of rent-free living. Is this them? I draw in a deep breath, hating the way my bones seem to rattle as it moves down into my chest. I’ve definitely been drugged. I can taste something metallic on my tongue. My gums feel raw, as though something has been rubbed forcefully into them. Then I rise slowly to my feet, having to grit my teeth as my legs threaten to buckle beneath me.

  Where the hell am I?

  I lift my hands into my hair. My hair is a tangle most of the time as it is, but now it feels even more tangled and twisted. I move my hands through it, and that’s when I find it: a flower. I slide it by the stem out of my hair and bring it to my face. A pink, open-petal, thorny-stemmed flower. In drop it when it pricks my fingers, and I can feel the place on my scalp where it’s cut into me. No, this is not the Movement. Maybe not. Or maybe even after running away I’m still underestimating them.

  I look down at myself. I’m still wearing my cargo trousers and hoodie: a no-bullshit outfit. It matches my attitude these days. No bullshit. Just keep going. Just get it done. Over these past few years, I have become a rodent. I am not ashamed to call myself a rodent, even if I should be. A rodent scurries wherever it needs to scurry to be safe, tunnels, scampers here if here is safe, there if there is safe. That is who I have had to become to survive. You can’t have compunctions when you’re running from the devil. But as I search this room, there is nowhere for a rodent to scurry. The only thing I could possibly use to break the window is the bedframe, and that is bolted to the floor. The thin mattress, with a large coffee-colored stain over the sheets, won’t be much he
lp there. If I am a rodent, I am a trapped rodent.

  I limp to the window, which takes up the entire wall. My heart is hammering in my ears, making it hard to think, and yet simultaneously it sounds faraway. It’s like it’s hammering in my ears but I am floating somewhere above myself, drugged up, distant. I know this feeling well, I reflect as I lay my palm flat against the glass and push. Yes, I know this feeling well. I remember innumerable times growing up when it was easier to be outside myself. When Master would roam the Compound with his strange sideways smile, telling a woman he could heal her if she followed him to his office, and then as he strode over to me and stood over me and looked down into my face, and I knew, and he knew, and everybody knew what he was about to ask of this child—but then my mother, Sandra, would stand in front of me and say, ‘Oh, not today, Master,’ and for some reason he would listen. If there is a good person in the Movement, it is my mother.

  I press against the glass, straining, but it is reinforced. This whole place—the bolted-down bed and the reinforced glass—is enough to make my mind start working overtime. But it needn’t work so hard. It doesn’t take much to realize why a twenty-two-year-old woman, with eyes Mom had often told me were so big and brown I looked like a squirrel—even from an early age, I was a rodent, it seems—and a body made athletic from years of running, no, no, it doesn’t take much to realize why a girl like me would wake up in a room like this.

  The voice just confirms it.

  At first, I don’t know where the voice is coming from. It sounds like it is coming from all around me, or from inside my own head. For a second I wonder if the Movement and all its nonsense about interplanetary communication is true, but then I glance up, and I see that there is a small speaker unit attached to the top of the window. The voice is gravelly, but it’s a Kansas voice. Maybe this voice comes from a man who lives right here in Kansas City, got in his car after work and came right here to scare a reddish-brown-haired girl.

  “Let me speak to this bitch,” the man says to someone there in the room with him. There are several of them, I hear, all jostling around the microphone. I wonder how they can see me: a camera aimed from the end of the hallway perhaps, in the murky shadowy recesses where the light doesn’t reach. I imagine the six, seven, eight of them hunched over the microphone and a computer screen. “Let me speak to this fuckin’ whore for a second. Hello, whore, hello, hello. How are you doing today? Are you happy? I hope you’re happy. Hello? Hello? Is this thing working? Please, whore, give me a little sign if this is working. This is a very high-tech piece of equipment, you understand. At least, that is what the man who sold it to me told me. And I would hate for that to have been a lie. I would hate to have to seriously hurt this man. If you do not give me some sign that you can hear me, I will assume you can’t, and send one of my boys down there—”

  “I can hear you,” I say. My voice is croaky with dehydration and fear.

  “Oh, good, excellent.”

  “Hang on, hang on. Let me talk to this bitch.” Another voice, gravelly, too. They are all gravelly. Gravelly and drunk and slurred. A bunch of drunk men all gathered together to watch me squirm.

  I stand completely still, trying to show no sign of fear on my face, try to resist the urge to clench my fists.

  “Hey, bitch. I bet you’re wondering where the door is, ain’t ya? Let me tell you, I’m a goddamn genius. It’s like a secret fuckin’ lair down there. See that glass? That is the door, sweetie, and it can only be opened from the outside by—ow! The fuck you hit me for?”

  “The fuck you telling her that for, dumbass?"

  “She’s going to be a fucking crack whore soon. Who cares?”

  A crack whore. I try not to show fear, because in my experience when you show fear people don’t hesitate long in abusing it. But when I hear that, I imagine a whole life being laid out before this moment. I see myself chained to some bed, drugs being injected into my veins until my arms are covered in track marks and until I actually start to yearn for the drug; I see men, far too many men, writhing atop me. I see, I feel, I fear—

  “Whore, whore, whore.” A fourth voice. In the background, somebody stumbles, somebody coughs, somebody shouts. “Now, these jokers are just that, jokers. Let me tell you what we need you to do, for business. You see, we’re business men. If we were sober businessmen, this evening might have a little more structure. But still, what’re you going to do? So, please, remove your clothes. We want to see what your mother gave you.”

  Sandra gave me everything a cowed, beaten, Movement woman could, but Sandra was big, voluminous, the sort of woman who filled out a room. I am small, birdlike, an under-the-radar sort of girl. And being an under-the-radar sort of girl means I do not, as a rule, undress for strange men.

  “I, uh . . .”

  “I, uh . . .” the man mocks. “No, no, not I, uh . . . no, no, that won’t do at all. I don’t think you understand the situation you’re in, missy. I really don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be talking I, uh . . . no, no, you would be talking, Yes, sir.”

  All the men break into raucous laughter at this.

  “Unless, of course,” the man goes on once the laughter has paused, “you want one of us to come down there and help you undress.”

  The men roar:

  “Let me! But I have to warn you, if I go down there, I’m having a little feel!”

  “She thinks she can hide those perky tits under that hoodie? Cock-teasing little whore!”

  “I want to see those eyes bulge, boy, bulge and water, if you know what I mean!”

  “Look at the way she’s looking; she wants it! She wants it! I can tell. They always want it in the end!”

  “I’ll break her legs!”

  “Listen,” the man says. “We will come down there and takes turns on you unless you start getting undressed in the next five seconds. That is the truth. Come on, now.”

  I swallow, hands shaking, and try to hide my fear as I pull my hoodie over my head.

  Chapter Two

  Dante

  I sit on my bike outside the Wraiths’ warehouse, wondering why they haven’t sent any of their boys out. It is spring, the sun setting, casting slanting yellow beams across Kansas City, which sits in the distance beyond the warehouse. The warehouse itself is situated just off a road which leads to the highway, a squat, unassuming building in almost the middle of nowhere, exactly the kind of place clubs love to buy. A place where folks don’t tend to bother you. Except here we are, and they are clearly here—their bikes are outside—and yet nobody’s coming out to meet us.

  I chew on the toothpick, on the end of it. Chewing a toothpick is a good habit for the leader of a motorbike club. It keeps you focused, stops your mind straying. You start thinking about things you shouldn’t be thinking about, like what happened to you a long time ago, or anything that isn’t relevant to the job at hand, you just focus on the chewing instead. My men are all around me, sitting astride their bikes. Dogma, my VP, sits beside me. A short, red-haired broad-shouldered man with a face which is oddly elegant and womanly, with small blue eyes. The others sit all over the lot, all wearing the War Riders leathers. Then there’s Ogre, dragging the guard across the concrete toward us. Ogre is as fierce and ugly as a man like Ogre must be to be called Ogre.

  Dogma once told me that Ogre is like a pitbull we’ve trained to attack our enemies, only one day the pitbull will get tired of his leash and attack its owner. I don’t know about that. The man’s scary enough, big enough, looming enough, wild enough, but he’s been in the club a long while now and I haven’t had to tighten the leash once yet.

  I start thinking about that man with the big worm-like fingers and the too-big smiling face and the way he seemed to smile as though I was his friend, just his friend and what he was doing was entirely acceptable, what he was doing was no big thing ’cause we were friends and friends could do anything to each other. My mind begins to stray, and so I focus on the chewing of the toothpick.

  Ogre is tall, arou
nd six eight, and wide, a grotesque muscled-bound man with a shaved head and a squashed face, barely fitting into his leather. He pushes the guard into the concrete. The guard, a kid of about twenty, with a freckled face and a mop of sandy hair, lips quivering, looks up at me.

  “Was this the only one?” I ask Ogre.

  “Yeah.” Ogre’s eyes are set deep within his head, a brown so dark they’re almost blood-red. They never seem to move in concord with any part of him. When he smiles, his eyes just stare. When he frowns, his eyes just stare. I saw him shot once, a glancing shot across his middle, and even though he let out a yelp like any man would, his eyes just kept staring. “But I’m sure this little birdie can tweet somethin’ pretty for us, Boss. I like little birdies like this. They tweet so sweetly even when you’ve snapped their necks. Little birdies with snapped necks tweet the sweetest, I reckon.”

  Some of the men glance at each other nervously. I just chew on my toothpick. I’m use to Ogre’s strangeness by now.