by Sadie Savage
Corey said, “Come in. They got cameras out there now.”
Goddammit. That was the last thing he wanted to do. He stepped inside anyway, his eyes scanning every piece of furniture that might hide a person waiting to take him down and out.
Corey wiped his sweating forehead. Ace felt suspicion climb higher. Corey wasn’t the best guy to trust under any circumstances. He was geeked up on crank, and he came off those crank binges with heaping handfuls of oxy.
Corey said, in a high and trembling voice. “I didn’t ask to get stuck babysitting your crew’s cash you know.”
Ace eyed him carefully. Corey wanted something. Might as well find out what it was. “Where’s the cash? Don’t tell me it’s light either. Then tell me what you want. If you tell me you used some of our cash to get your geek on I’m killing you here and now.”
Corey yanked at the cabinet that held the Murphy bed. It came down with a bang, and he grabbed the bags. His head moved from side to side. “Nah, it ain’t right. I don’t wanna die or nothing.”
No? Ace quickly counted cash, his fingers way faster than normal. He said, “So you want a cut?’
Corey swallowed hard. His horsey teeth showed again. “Is that so bad?”
“No.”
Corey’s arms crossed over his chest. He did a little speed freak shuffle. “You holding?”
“You know I’m not.” Ace didn’t mess with drugs. Not him. He reached into a pocket, peeled off a couple of Benjamins. He threw them down on a table littered with trash. “That’s for your twenty-four hours of trouble.’
Corey snatched the money up. A thick film of greasy sweat covered his face. The airless room, filled with the stench of burned meth, drew in tighter around Ace.
Corey said, “Thanks man. I’m down for your crew. You know that.”
“Yeah sure.”
Ace left, closing the door firmly. His legs took him back down the stairs. His eyes scanned the street. No way did he trust Corey not to tell a bunch of his equally tweaked friends that he was holding lots of cash. Corey might be afraid to cross the Brooklyn Son’s, but if someone else did, well how did that impact Corey?
Ace slung a leg over his bike. The leather seat burned under his denim clad ass.
The heavy leather jacket he wore, emblazoned with the Brooklyn’s Sons patch, was a particular misery, but one he wore with pride. Not everyone could get into the MC, and most prospects failed. He’d done it though, and then he had climbed the ranks until he was the second-in command. Six months ago, their crew leader got caught on the bad end of a slippery road and went down, breaking his neck in the process. Now Ace was the crew leader of the most badass club in the Northeast, and if the jacket was too hot on a day like that, so what? He’d suffered a lot to have it.
He pulled onto the street. Taxis weren’t plentiful on that side of Brooklyn and neither were buses, both things he truly hated being stuck behind. He headed toward Greenpoint, riding along slow and easy.
There was a large amount of money in his saddlebag, and he had to drop it off at a high stakes card game. A card game that he and his crew took a cut of every week just like they took a cut of the cash that flowed in and out of the borough in the form of other illicit activities.
Some of the others in the crew handled the drug money. Ace wouldn’t go near dope, and it irritated him that Corey had asked him if he were holding. Not that Corey could have known why Ace didn’t mess with that shit.
His hand tightened on the throttle, sending the bike forward at a higher rate of speed. He didn’t want to think about Margo. He really didn’t.
He did anyway.
It was hard not to.
She was his cousin, and they had grown up together. They’d been tight, facing down everything from their sorry mothers leaving them home alone and hungry at night so they could go out and party. When Margo had been fourteen Ace had hit her then-stepfather with a baseball bat, repeatedly, for laying a hand on Margo in a way he should have reserved for his wife.
Margo had returned the favor by stepping in when thirteen-year-old Ace had been outnumbered and facing down a whole lot of pissed off gang members whose streets he’d gone down by accident.
Margo had run right into the middle of that mess, grabbed him by the arm, and hauled him out before anyone could even get close.
They were more like brother and sister than cousins, and her death had hit Ace so hard he had thought he might not recover. He had, but it had been hard to do. His grief had lessened, but not his rage.
And that rage was directed right at Walker, the leader of the Queen’s Men, an MC from Queens.
The bike purred along toward Williamsburg. His pleasant ride was interrupted when he spotted a young woman walking along in front of a row of trendy shops and boutiques. His booted heel hit the asphalt as he stopped for a light. He recognized her of course. She was Julia, Walker’s youngest sister.
Ace’s eyes crawled over her. Julia was gorgeous, all long legs and shimmering brown hair framing a pale, oval face with wide blue eyes set below dark brows. She had a long thin straight nose, wide Julia Robert’s style-lips, and her tall and thin body had elegant curves of breast and hips. The outfit she wore, a summery little dress that swirled around her tanned and slender legs, was perfect. She could have been a model. Was a model in fact, though not a famous one? Ace knew she did mostly print ads and the like, earning money to put herself through design school. Ace made it his business to know everything about Walker, and what he knew right then was that Walker’s baby sister was in his territory, and she was alone.
Interesting.
The light changed. His foot came up, but then he wavered. His eyes watched her enter the store and then he was moving on, past it. He groaned and turned around.
Julia had always fascinated him. The fact that she was Walker’s sister made her off limits.
Or did it.
A diabolical plan formed in his mind. A wicked grin crossed his well-made mouth. He took the bike to the curb. He got off, and strolled to the windows, peeking in. Julia was inside, not shopping but standing behind a counter.
She worked there then?
His eyes went to the awning. It was a trendy little boutique and the garments in the windows, arranged artfully so that he could see past them to the store’s interior, were obviously expensive.
He made a mental note of the store and then went back to his bike and headed toward Greenpoint.
Chapter 2
Walker stood at the top of the stairs that Julia was trying to go down, blocking the way. His eyes ran along her body in a very unbrotherly way. He said, “Where are you going?”
Goddammit. Not this and not now. Julia managed a tight smile. “Work. I told you I got a new job.”
Walker’s eyebrows lifted. “You get back here right after. Pete wants to take you to dinner.”
Her skin crawled. No way did she want to go anywhere with Pete. That horny bastard was just as likely to bum rush into the trunk of a car and off to a hotel where he could force her into sex without worry than he was to foot the bill for a meal and she knew it. “I don’t know how late I have to stay.”
Walker’s hand lashed out, meeting her cheek. Julia had enough experience with Walker’s brutality to get back from that hand when it came up, but even a glancing blow from Walker was enough to cause pain to explode in her face. Tears welled up but she blinked them back.
Walker’s belligerence came out in full force. “I said get back here soon.”
Walker stepped back, apparently satisfied. “You should be happy Pete wants to take you off my hands. I mean, what good are you anyway? You’re not getting many modeling jobs lately and you’re wasting time at that damn school you spend all your money going to. If you were really smart you’d be a lawyer, and stop mooning over making clothes for those rich fuckers that already have people to buy shit from. We could use a lawyer in the family.”
Julia knew better than to speak just then. How could she say anything? Any answ
er would be met with an escalating degree of violence.
Walker was her half-brother but she feared him far more than anyone else in his crew and with good reason.
She nodded dumbly. Her mouth formed a yes but her heart screamed no. No to Pete. No to leaving the design school she had clawed her way into. No to him, no to living the hellish life she’d been thrust into when her mother died.
Walker stepped back. “I’m expecting you to have your ass here by seven and no later. If you got something else planned you cancel it. Don’t make me come looking for you.”
Julia swallowed back the salty lump in her throat. “Seven. I’ll be here.”
She fled, running out of the house and toward the bus that would deposit her at her new job while thoughts flew around her head.
She had to do something about Walker and fast. To start with she needed to get the hell out of Queens and out of his grasp. It was too expensive in Williamsburg, especially on a student’s budget. The jobs she worked barely touched the very large amount of debt hanging over her.
Walker wanted her to quit school and he wanted her to get with one of his boys. Pete was someone that Walker needed to take on the larger dealers in Manhattan, and to ride over the crews out in the outer boroughs, but he was the last thing she needed. Pete had a habit of hitting his girlfriends and hitting the bag too, not the punching bag—the bags the dope came in.
Walker was pissed at Julia and she knew it. He had no issue with trying to bring his MC into a higher status by using his sister’s bodies. He’d forced Naomi into becoming his first in command’s old lady, a term that meant that guy never had to wed Naomi and never had to do more than claim her and the kids they had together. Walker said it was loyalty, that Naomi was loyal and so was her husband, Charlie. So, apparently was their other sister Carla, who was a brassy haired mess and strung out on the same dope she handed off to her ‘girls’, the hookers she ran for the MC. Carla and Naomi were loyal, but if loyalty meant having to live under Walker’s brutal thumb, then Julia was happy not being loyal.
The problem was if she didn’t get out of Queens soon, and very soon, and as far from Walker as she could get, she was going to get in that mess he called a family whether she wanted to be or not.
She, Walker, Naomi, and Carla had different mothers, which explained the nearly decade long gap between Julia and Carla, the youngest of that woman’s children. Julia knew her mother had regretted dating Walker’s father, and hard, and had not wanted her daughter anywhere around that crew but when she had died from cancer when Julia was just fourteen that was just where Julia had ended up.
Now she was nineteen, and she wanted out. The only problem was Walker, who was forty and the undisputed leader of the crew now that his father was dead, had no intention of letting her go. He did not give a damn about her desires. What he cared about was what her youth and beauty could buy him, and what it would buy was Pete and his connections.
The store finally came into view and she left the bus she had boarded and hurried inside. Corinne, one of the other salesgirls, eyed her warily. “What happened to you?”
“There’s some crazy guy near my place. He clocked me good.”
Corinne’s eyes widened. “Oh, my God. I hope you called the cops!”
“Of course, I did but I had to leave to get to work. I hope they still do something about him.”
She hung her coat on a hook inside a small cupboard and asked, “How’s it going today?”
Corrine grimaced, “We’ve had a few customers. Lots of the hipsters stopped in earlier but there’s been some real shoppers.”
Julia managed to laugh. “Oh, you mean the hipsters that come in to ironically try on our clothes so they can make fun of the fashion and the cost later over their expensive craft drinks and appetizers?
Corinne grinned back. “Yeah. Well, I’m out. Have fun.”
Corinne grabbed her stuff and left, leaving Julia alone in the store.
Julia blew out an agitated breath as she looked around the empty store. The shop paid on a commission basis, and she needed cash fast. She had been short on modeling work lately, and she knew that was her own fault. She didn’t have the time to run down gigs now that she was in college full time, and the constant commute between Manhattan for school and her home in Queens took hours out of her days.
The door opened again and she looked up with a smile that died immediately as she saw Ace strutting through the door.
Her shoulders went rigid with tension. Working in Brooklyn meant chancing running into him or one of his crew, but so did working anywhere in the sprawling NYC area. Crews were everywhere, and in Manhattan she had to face down the Knights, the Wicked ran the Bronx, and Staten Island had the Furies. None of them would have been able to guess who she was at first glance since she looked nothing like Walker and because she had always managed to put distance between herself and the club in some way or another. He knew what she looked like though because Ace’s cousin Margo had been a regular around the neighborhood and the club after Ace had demanded everyone on his crew cut her off.
One night, back when Julia had first been packed up by the social worker and dropped into Walker’s lap, Margo had been overdosed on some pure heroin someone had tossed her. They were not being generous. They had given it to her to find out just how much it needed to be cut. The joke was that if it could kill Margo it needed a boot heel in it.
It had been Julia who had found Ace’s number in Margo’s jeans, and called him after she had found the comatose woman in the middle of the floor of the otherwise empty multi-family house the crew used for their drug running and to which Julia had been sent to retrieve a package for Walker. She had not known, at the time, that Ace was in a different crew or that Margo’s near-death would ignite an already inflammatory situation.
Then when Margo had died later that day he had come alone, riding hard, in the middle of the night, determined to blow the whole goddamn borough up around their ears. He would have, if one of his crew hadn’t shown up and dragged him off before any real damage could be done.
He had not burned them down that night, and he had never told Walker how he had found his cousin that night either. Julia had never forgotten his face staring at her as he sat on his bike, the unconscious Margo dangling limply in front of him.
He’d said, “You never saw me kid.”
She had shaken her head, suddenly understanding just what she had done. Ace had given her a hard smile. “Who are you anyway?”
“I’m Julia.”
“I mean to Walker. You’re too young to be his old lady. Last I heard he wasn’t running kids. If I find out he is I will torch the joint too. There’s a line nobody gets to cross.’
She had not even known what that meant and it must have shown on her face because he kicked the bike to life. She blurted out, “Walker’s my half-brother. I don’t know him well. My mom just died and I had to come live with him.”
“Tough luck, kid,” Ace had said and then driven off into the night. She had not seen him since and the truth was she had hoped she never would either.
He eyed her carefully. Her face heated. Did he recognize her? It would be hard not to recognize him. His face was all lean angles and blazing blue eyes, tanned skin, cruel lips and stubborn chin. He was trim and toned and very muscular. The jeans he wore fit him like a glove. He moved like a man in his twenties, which he damn sure wasn’t. He was closer to Walker’s age, nearly forty, but there was not a trace of silver or gray anywhere in his black hair. He had taken his jacket off, which was odd. Unless he didn’t want to be recognized.
She asked, “are you looking for something in particular sir?’
She moved toward him, her heart hammering in her chest as she walked across the narrow confines of the shop’s floor.
Ace’s eyes slid over her face, probing at hers. She didn’t drop her eyes and she fixed a wide and pleasant smile on her face. He lifted a brow, quirking it upward just a bit. One corner of his mouth came up but
he didn’t look any less hardened and dangerous even with that tiny half smile on his lips.
“I might be.”
He didn’t recognize her! Relived at that Julia took a few more steps toward him. “Oh? We have an excellent men’s section. Are you looking for a suit perhaps? Or a shirt?”
“I don’t know.” His smile got wider and she paused. Her heart kicked into a higher gear, the palms of her hands breaking out into a little sweat. A flutter began in her belly. There was something very powerful and magnetic about him, and the tug she felt in her center told her she should back away and none too slowly. She was in the wrong borough to be checking him out, even if those jeans did sculpt his body perfectly. Looking up was no help at all. All she could see was his wide and deep chest and broad shoulders, the way his shirt lay flat at his taut midriff.
He said, “So, what do you recommend?”
“Um, maybe a royal blue shirt and a silk tie.”
The words made her want to laugh. No way did he belong in a dress shirt and tie. Leather yes, a suit? Never.
Ace nodded. “Yeah, no. Not today, anyway. Maybe another day. See you later.”
She gazed after him, her eyes clinging to the high and firm slopes of his ass. Danger was everywhere. She could not afford to have him recognize her, and yet she wanted to call after him, give him her name and see if he remembered it. How could he have, really? She had been a skinny awkward kid with frizzy hair and eyes hidden behind thick glassed at fourteen.
She had gotten her first print ad because an agent saw her and decided she would be perfect to portray the nerdy gamer girls that the product he was scouting out models for was hoping to target. It hadn’t taken her long to understand that she had something she could use, something that might give her a way out. Clothes were there and she had not been above taking some for herself at a shoot and she knew she could have been fired for that from any number of jobs but Walker could have cared less what she wore, or if she wore anything at all.
Julia had had to grow up fast in that house. She had learned how to defend herself against drunk guys who forgot whose sister she was, and to fend for herself with money too. She got a job at sixteen and eked out a minor amount of money working as a model, and a little more working at pizza joints and coffee shops. The modeling opened her eyes to what she really wanted to do. She not only wanted to wear beautiful clothes, she wanted to create them.