“Don’t think that’s part of my job as a prospect,” Ig laughed. “Sorry, Slayer.”
A silent chuckle rattled my chest. “Not my type, Ig. I like actual pussy, not guys who act like them.”
“Fuck. That was deep,” Zart snorted groggily. “Let’s get some breakfast. I’m fucking starving.”
3
Slayer
“Slayer, man, I think he gets the point,” Ig said as he grabbed at my shoulders, trying to pull me off the sack of shit I was strangling. Booming laughter bellowed from my throat and I released the guy’s windpipe.
“Ig, out of all the guys here, how did you get elected for this job? I’m at least three times bigger than your scrawny ass.” I chuckled, pressing my fingertips against the pavement and got to my feet, spitting on the worthless coward as he flinched. “Get the fuck out of here,” I nodded toward the end of the alley leading to the street and glared at the woman-beating piece of shit as he tucked his tail and ran.
Most of us brothers took turns getting a few licks in against the guy, but Ig was the look-out. There was no question why he was chosen to stop me. He had no idea how bad my anger could get, but my brothers knew too well. I’d swung at several of them on accident because I was lost in rage. Honestly, I almost landed an elbow in the middle of Ig’s gut, but I got too tickled. He was like a gnat trying to stop an elephant.
“Fucker got blood on my leather,” I complained, brushing my fingers across the Enforcer patch resting over my heart, adding to the amount of red staining the stitching that used to be white.
“I’m the smallest . . . and the meanest,” he added, adjusting the denim vest that hung off his slender frame, and smiled with a sense of pride. “Let’s get you a beer.” He led the way as he took a few steps across the dark alleyway, water sloshed around our boots, and he held the bar door open for me to go inside first.
“Sounds like a fan-fucking-tastic plan. Get me a beer, prospect.” My deep voice boomed a little too loud as my eyes landed on a sweet ass across the small bar chewing on her straw. She released the straw from her teeth as I watched her tongue slide up one side of the white and red-striped plastic and then down the other. Fuck! Even though we both knew what she was insinuating, it didn’t stop the shock that thrummed through my body and throbbed to the tip of my dick. Maybe I’d just do her quick and dirty, bending her over my ape hangers as I took her from behind. Perhaps I’d make it slow and agonizing, only fucking her when she begged. The steps of how it would happen really weren’t a concern to me as long as it happened. I didn’t call myself a sex addict because who the fuck needs that label, but when the opportunity presented itself, and it often did, I almost always seized the day.
My night life was typically the same— ride, drink, and fuck. There were only faint tidbits of nights that somehow filtered into my memories of the following day. Often I questioned if they were even real. It’d been a balls to the wall, fast paced life, and fuck if it hadn’t been fun. The choice of poison and where we got shitfaced might vary every twenty-four hours or so, but the one untouched constant was my bike. She was my baby, and no one fucked with my baby.
Right after I turned eighteen, I started riding as an official brother of the Dogs of Chaos Motorcycle Club. Most of the time that had passed between then and now was a blur, especially since she ran. She was the only other person alive who had meant something to me, who I had loved other than my ride. I didn’t do commitments, so if that was what was expected of me, I quickly made the opposite abundantly clear, as I did most things. I spoke my mind and honestly, always had.
Growing up, I always knew my life would be tied to the club in one way or another, but what I hadn’t guessed was how tightly wound the two would actually be. Now, every decision made was with keeping in mind how it reflected on or influenced the club and my brothers. For me, it was easy to transition from a hang-around to a brother because I had been around the club since sometime in elementary school. The first time Chief and Little Foot snuck me into their dad’s clubhouse, our clubhouse, I knew it was going to be my future. It was a whole lot fucking cooler than any lame clubhouse I’d been to, which usually consisted of a couple of boys in one kid’s basement trading baseball cards and drinking Kool-Aid. My little brain was on fucking overload with excitement and didn’t know how or what to process first, so I soaked in it all at once. Any chance I got, I suggested the three of us go hang out with their dad.
A lot had changed since then, but then again, there was so much that could be said is similar. Instead of killing cup after cup of shitty water, flavoring, and sugar, I drank whiskey now. I still hung out with some of the old crew, but it wasn’t baseball cards we swapped. It was pussy. I was pretty damn happy with who I was for the most part when I drank enough to be numb and forget. On rare occasions, like tonight, I remembered the regret buried deep within the crevices of my mind. It wasn’t my brotherhood in the club that brought on the remorse, it was her. The thing was, sometimes the two subjects followed each other, depending on what was going on or who was speaking.
Ig slid an ice-cold beer into my hand and I nodded in appreciation, looking up from the bar to him as the stool raked across the floor. “What’s on your mind, Slayer?” he pried, his eyes shifting from me to the blonde as he wiggled his eyebrows.
“Same as usual. Pussy,” I answered in a disinterested tone, giving him a half-truth. It had been on my mind, but it wasn’t the most important thing in my opinion. It was the only thing I could control, though. I didn’t have one fucking iota of power over the other subject now, and truthfully, even though I thought I had in the past, I never did.
4
Lilly
Three days passed since the blue-eyed stranger from my past showed up, but labeling him as someone I barely knew was a sham. He was no stranger at all. Nothing about his muscular body was familiar, but his strong jawline etched in day-old stubble and his eyes told me all I needed to know— it was him.
I panicked. I should have told him the truth, but I couldn’t. If he was here, that meant he wasn’t alone. I probably knew the by-laws of the Dogs of Chaos MC better than some of the brothers. They’d finally found me, and they were smart about it too. Slayer was the only one I wouldn’t fight. I couldn’t. I lived every day of my life missing him and wondering if I should have stayed and faced my punishment. I was a fucking coward, though. I was still a fucking coward. Even though I laid awake each night and Slayer’s face was the last thing I saw, he was the only person I didn’t want to see but hoped I would someday. I still loved him, but he would never love me back after he found out what I did.
* * *
I was three years old when my daddy started wearing a leather vest and bought his first motorcycle. In my eyes, everything about his ride was the definition of cool, from its sleek black finish down to the way the chrome glistened in the sunlight when he would ride it during the summer. I wanted nothing more than to be a biker when I grew up, just like Dad. I found nothing frightening about men who wore leather and ink covered their skin. They were my adopted family.
People often overlooked the small town my family lived in when they passed through on their daily travels. Yet, going unnoticed by outsiders was probably what the Dogs of Chaos had in mind when they started the chapter here. Privacy was everything to them, but I didn’t understand the reason. Until I was much older, that was. The majority of them were upstanding citizens as far as most people were aware, who were always doing some type of charity event or fundraiser of sorts to help all the kids out with school supplies. The fact they did drugs, drank, and did illegal things on their own time shouldn’t have mattered. The Dogs did a lot more good for our community than bad. Well, most of them.
However, with most things in this world, there was always bad with good. “It is essential to balance the world out,” my dad had said to me when I questioned him. Looking back, his road name, Ash, fit him perfectly. He was the indirect cause of twelve deaths, including his own. He didn’t directly sta
rt the fire, but he was the main reason a lot of our brothers were gone.
I hated watching the news and hearing them slander the motorcycle club, or MC, because they weren’t to blame for what happened to them. Their deaths had nothing to do with motorcycles or the MC— it was Dad’s gambling problem. He singlehandedly squandered away every penny of Mom’s hard-earned money she put back for Austin and me before she died. Once we were on the verge of bankruptcy, he began taking out “loans” from a drug dealer, Sonny.
In the eighties, cocaine was the poison of choice where we lived in Cleveland, Ohio. Unknown to me, the back door of our house served many purposes. It was there most addicts quieted their demons as they snorted cocaine up their nose. Hell, they probably used our jungle gym’s slide as a makeshift serving plate for their greedy habit.
Dad was the cause of all this. He trafficked cocaine and heroin from Sonny’s home in West Virginia during the yearly charity poker runs the MC held. While everyone else raised money for cancer, he raised money for himself. Of course, he always kept it well hidden and no one expected he was a dealer. At least, I didn’t. My world was crushed when I found out my daddy, my hero, was banging the needle. As I got older, we all dabbled in a little bit of this and that but stayed away from the hard shit. Dad always made sure of it. The reason was because he was a user and didn’t want it for us. Maybe I was jaded because of what it eventually led him to do, or maybe it was just an excuse.
Regardless of it all, I couldn’t stick around in the middle of it. It was too much. I drove away from every bit of the disaster I called a life in my shitty little car that had more Bondo on it than actual steel, and I never looked back. It has been said that hindsight is twenty-twenty, but whoever said that hadn’t gone through what I did. Honestly, I hadn’t given much thought to my past, at least not until Slayer walked into Bermuda. I didn’t let myself think of the darker days of my life. It’s funny that as shitty as my life was right now, it was good in comparison to the latter years I had spent in Cleveland.
I thought I had finally found a clean slate in West Virginia, but I hadn’t. I was tired of moving around and constantly looking over my shoulder. I was a fucking idiot to think I could stay in one place for too long. I bet it was Caroline who tipped them off. She acted like she didn’t recognize me, but it seemed a little too convenient to be a coincidence that she disappeared, and Slayer was here in her place. I needed a plan and fast. Luckily, Steve had been sick with the stomach flu or something similar last week, so I played off my distance and missing work on that. In reality, I was hiding. At any given minute, the sound would come. One solemn knock followed by Slayer’s voice telling me to open the door and come with him would seal my death. I wouldn’t fight him. Truthfully, I welcomed dying, because I was so fucking tired of running.
The brakes screeched as I pulled into the only remaining empty parking spot of Bermuda. Every second, I hoped Slayer would not be there. Not knowing what car he drove or if he would be on a bike scared the mortal piss out of me.
Once a month, Weston, the club owner, saw fit to hang a sign outside that said, “Bikers Always Welcum”. I hated reading that disgusting sign, not only was it spelled wrong, but every guy who owned a bike felt the need to call himself a biker and take the liberty of trying to pull out their dick. It was like clockwork, they would drink until they spoke broken English and twenty minutes later, they were mumbling something about coming. They always felt the need to involve one of us dancers in the conversation when none of us had zero interest in assisting them at all.
I guess I was a little more sensitive to the term ‘biker’ than most. I actually was a biker, but no one at Bermuda knew that, not even Chaos. West Virginia was the last place I thought it possible to find another suitable family as the Dogs had been so long ago.
Good or bad luck, I wasn’t sure which led me to the Maverick’s Dagger Motorcycle Club. Of course, our clubhouse was an hour away from Hale, where Bermuda was located. I didn’t intend to join another club, but Worm made me a deal I couldn’t refuse. It was the real reason I stuck around this state.
Not only was Worm the boss of the MDs in Fury, West Virginia, he was a retired police officer. Normally, someone affiliated with the law, no matter if it was past or present, would not get into the club much less end up leading an entire chapter. How or why Worm was the only exception to this rule that I’d ever caught wind of was a mystery to me, and it would stay that way. One very important lesson I did learn from Dad was you never dig around in the law’s business unless you want your name in it somehow.
He had connections within the precinct, dirty cops, and when I was going to turn down his offer to join, he told me he could wipe my record clean. There wasn’t any reason to lie to myself. I was a killer. Something I wished to forget, but never would. If Worm were actually capable of erasing my bloodstained past from the public eye, I would take it. No matter the cost. I’d already drowned in a sea of despair and bloodshed in Ohio, so things couldn’t get worse. I was sure of this now more than ever since Slayer had shown up. I doubted he gave up the hunt for me so fast, but couldn’t hide out any longer.
5
Slayer
Time was a cloak of darkness and it was possible over the span of years that Camille had become someone different. It was without question I was someone completely altered from the boy she knew years ago. Life struck my soul with an unrelenting whip of reality and I no longer cared about who I was. I surrendered my self-control the last day I saw her and dove fist-first into the MC. Literally, that was how I earned my road name “Slayer”. I sent one of my alleged best friends to the Emergency Room after he referred to her as a stupid fucking cunt.
My mind raced as we put the miles between us and West Virginia and headed back home. I was like a dog on a trail, though. The woman said she wasn’t Camille and it was almost the exact situation as every other time before, except I couldn’t forget how she reacted to me. Even though the words she spoke told me I was wrong, her body said otherwise. Maybe I’d finally lost it. I kept telling myself to forget her. I had to. It wasn’t Camille. The most rational place she was right now was dead. I didn’t want to accept that either. I fucking hated this. I was in a constant hell, always guessing what had happened to her. I would hate myself for not protecting her if she was in fact dead, but at least I would have closure. I could move on. Not sure what I would move on to, but at least I would stop finding her at every twist and turn of my life, only to realize I’m bat shit crazy and seeing my ex when she wasn’t there.
Camille was the only woman I ever gave two shits about. She was my best friend and the love of my life. She was the only woman I would ever consider important enough to be a back warmer as she rode against my sissy bar, even though she would have kicked my ass if she ever heard me refer to her as such. She could handle a Harley double her weight, and when we rode alongside each other, I saw my future. My sexy and deadly as fuck future.
She shed light on the disaster I lived in and kept my head above water when I was drowning. All of that was violently ripped away when Ash and Austin overdosed. I wished she would have talked to me instead of running away. I should have chased her, but thought she needed time to process things. Who wouldn’t after something so life shattering happened? I sure as shit would.
6
Lilly
“You’re fucking kidding me, right?” I shook my head and chucked the half-full bottle of liquor across the bar. It crashed between Weston and Steve’s head, and shards of glass flew around them and landed on the woodgrain behind them. It was too early in the day for anyone else to be in here, and the only reason why we were in here was it was supposed to be payday. The other girls would pick up their check later when their shift began, but I hadn’t decided if I was coming in today or not. Now there was no question left in my mind— hell no, I wouldn’t be working here today. Maybe never again if they didn’t give me my money.
Weston ducked. “I’m sorry, Lilly. He said he would give it t
o you, so I assumed he gave it to you.” He cowered behind Steve and pushed him forward. I wanted to rip into both of them, but there was no point. I might be able to take one of them on my own, but actually winning a brawl with both of them was basically impossible. I wasn’t finding out the odds of me being right either.
“Bullshit, Weston. That’s fucking bullshit and you know it!” I yelled, contemplating what to chuck at the two of them next. My fingers wrapped around a round ashtray and I curled my arm, releasing it like a frisbee. It bounced off the edge of the bar and shattered into numerous pieces that fell to the floor. I fucking hated them both on the principle of the situation. It wasn’t that my paycheck would have made me rich, or really paid for much of anything for that matter, but it was my money.
After a quick cleansing breath, I shook my head. “You know what? It isn’t fucking worth it. I’m done. I quit. Keep my shitty little check, you lying sacks of shit,” I spouted as rage forced my blood to pump. I didn’t care anymore. My cover was blown here anyway, not that I really had too much of one to begin with. There was no longer a muzzle of secrecy holding me back in silence, so I let loose.
Every day since Slayer was here, my tolerance for bullshit had lowered a measurable amount and I was done. I refused to put up with the shit anymore. It was true I didn’t have many trade skills, but the one thing I could do a thousand times better than dance was ride a Harley. I was raised to be a biker and fucking loved it.
Twisted Steel: An MC Romance Anthology Page 24