“You’re pretty good at that,” I said, forcing a wobbly smile, giving him permission, surprised that he asked for it in the first place.
“I don’t give a flying fuck what all the fairy tales say, what families always say. Love is not unconditional. And it never should be. Everyone should know that there is only so much they can get away with before you wash your hands of their shit. No one gets a free pass just because they have the same blood in their veins. When you wouldn’t tolerate a stranger doing something, you shouldn’t tolerate a family member doing it. Would it be okay if a passerby on the street saw you getting you pulled around by your fucking hair and didn’t try to step in? Fuck no. So why was it okay to you that your father and brother did it?”
“It’s… diff…”
“It’s not different,” he cut me off. “It’s no different. If anything, it’s a lot fucking worse. They raised you. They loved you. And they stood by and let you get abused. I don’t give a flying fuck what threat they were under, they should have stepped in. You know how I feel about my family,” he said, and I did. Nothing mattered more to him. “If I found out tomorrow that Hunter was putting his hands on Fee, there isn’t a force in the world, not even family loyalty, that would stop me from putting an end to it. Nothing should have stopped them, Lea,” he said, shaking his head at me. “You shouldn’t have had to put up with it for…”
“Years,” I provided.
He closed his eyes for a second at that, exhaling hard, trying to stay calm. “Years before you finally got yourself out with no help from their pathetic asses.”
“He stabbed my brother,” I said, hearing the emotion there, not having been aware of it for days.
“I know you might hate me for saying this, but good.”
“Shane…”
“No, Lea. Just… no. I get that you have loyalty. I get that maybe you’re convinced they were so scared for their lives that they couldn’t help you. But, baby, you got away. Just you. Alone. They are two big, burly grown-ass men. They damn sure could have gotten you out. Sooner. And they could have gone with you to make sure you stayed protected. They didn’t. They chose not to. They chose to let you get abused. That isn’t love. And what you feel toward them, it shouldn’t be love either. Or guilt. Or obligation.”
“He raped, tortured, and killed a girl I barely knew…” I went on.
To that, he winced. Then he nodded.
“If you were in a room with your ex and you had a loaded gun…” he started, feeling me out.
“I’d shoot off his dick then unload the rest of the clip into his head and hollow heart,” I answered honestly.
Again, he nodded.
“You can’t have this shit keep happening,” he said, motioning toward the laptop again. “The guilt will eat you alive.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, knowing it was true. Honestly, eventually, it might have been bad enough to drag me back.
“Alright,” he said, voice a little far off. “Then this stops.” With that, he squeezed my knee again and moved to get off the bed.
“Shane… what is that supposed to mean?”
He looked over his shoulder at me, eyes more intense than I had ever seen them.
“It means this fucking stops.”
That night, I went to bed with him.
I woke up alone.
And I knew, I finally knew what he meant.
He was going to take care of Ross.
Fuck.
FIFTEEN
Shane
I grabbed my laptop to throw some receipts into Quickbooks. It was something I did all the time, that I thought nothing of. When I opened it and saw open windows on the browser, I almost clicked them closed without seeing what they were. But the word “obituary” caught my eye. Knowing I hadn’t looked at anything close to an obituary, my curiosity got piqued and I looked at it. It was a town in California which, I figured, was where Lea was from originally. Then when I moved over and found the note and the video… yeah, let’s say shit got serious. I brought up the browser history and checked out the Kill Club site she had been on, finding all the gory, awful details of the woman’s murder.
It didn’t take much to put two and two together.
Especially because the genes in Lea’s family were strong. She was the female version of her brother who had been stabbed and her father who had been standing a few feet away. It was all there in the dark eyes, the dark hair, the height.
And all the men, yeah, they had cuts on. Biker cuts. With one-percent patches. That, paired with how she had her own helmet and Barney told me she cringed at the sound of bikes, it all made a picture come together. She had belonged to a biker. I knew enough about bikers, especially criminal bikers, to know that they didn’t let their old ladies run away. No matter what they put them through.
Lea’s ex, yeah, he seemed like a real fuckin’ prince.
Angry, blood-boiling angry, at both the fact that she had been attached to such a dick and that she had obviously gotten the email recently and hadn’t shared with me, I came on a little strong when I confronted her.
When I backed off and let her give me the gory details, yeah, it took about every bit of self-control I had, which was an admittedly small amount, to stay on that bed and not start smashing shit.
He’d fucking raped her. Repeatedly. For years. And her piece of shit pussy family had let it happen. She had been alone and trapped and abused. And, in my book, knowing abuse was going on and not doing anything to put an end to it, yeah, that made you just as guilty as the abuser. Her brother deserved to be fucking gutted for letting that happen. And she was feeling guilty about it happening.
That shit wouldn’t stand.
I got that she and I, we were new. We were still getting to know each other. But that didn’t mean shit. She was mine and I took care of my people. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to be a bitch and sit there and rub her back and tell her it was going to be okay. Promises were shit without actions to back them up. And me, well, I was an action-oriented kinda guy.
I held her until she fell asleep. I let her kick off me, as she always did. Then I got up, got dressed, and plugged the address into my GPS. It was forty-one hour and some change a drive straight through. If I stopped to catch a couple hours of sleep here and there, I would make it there in three days, tops. That was if I could even settle down enough to sleep. And, judging by the way my blood boiled as I crossed out of Jersey, I doubted I would.
Flying was a choice, a better one time wise. But it also left a pretty clear trail. Cars were a bit harder to track state to state. I had change for the tolls, no electronic thing that could let the cops follow my trail if they ever did suspect me.
She would know too. As soon as she woke up, I had no doubt that she would know exactly where I had gone.
What she would do from there, I honestly wasn’t sure.
Maybe she would follow. But she would be so far behind me that she would be way too late.
Lea didn’t exactly seem like the kind of woman to pace the floors and worry when she could figure out what was going on.
Chances were, she would eventually make the choice to come offer herself up, thinking I was in over my head. Hell, maybe I was. It was an MC. If I wasn’t careful, I could bring the whole lot of them down on me. I didn’t know dick about East coast bike gangs, but it didn’t take much imagination to guess that their ranks were well into the double digits.
But if I could catch him alone, if it could be just me him and me. Maybe he was an evil bastard, but I had the advantage of being really good at violence. I also had the motivation of bone-deep anger to go along with my violent nature. If it came down to him and me, he would be having a nice closed casket service. No way was that bitch getting the better of me.
The thing about men in power is, sometimes they forget that there are men out there more powerful than them. So used to being bowed and kowtowed to, they can’t fathom the fact that they aren’t the biggest, baddest mother fucker out there. Sure,
her ex was a bully. He picked on people beneath him, his men, his women. But I had a lot of fucking experience with bullies in my life. I had a perfect track record for coming out on top.
My parents, for all their hardassery, taught us morals.
When wrong was being done, especially to someone who couldn’t fix it themselves, it was our obligation to step in. Kids at school, the nerdy ones with the glasses and Star Wars lunch boxes with matching thermoses, we didn’t sit by and let them get pushed around. We handled it. We bullied the bullies. We kept shit fair.
Nothing about what happened to Lea was fair.
I was righting the wrongs.
I was bullying the bully.
And there was no way I wasn’t getting back to my woman when all was said and done.
Covered in her exes blood if there was any justice in the world.
SIXTEEN
Lea
Really, what choice did I have?
I couldn’t go by myself. It would be a suicide mission. I would only make it worse. And my contacts in Navesink Bank were limited.
That being said, they were limited to an entire family of fucking loan sharks.
I charged into Chaz’s in whatever jeans I found laying on the floor and still in Shane’s tee, hair wild, eyes wild, aura sparking. I stopped inside the door, scanning for a long minute, looking for the familiar faces. I caught sight of a suit and dark hair and charged over.
Ryan’s head turned as if sensing my approach, brows drawn low, light eyes surprised and a bit confused. “Lea, is everything…” he started.
“You need to get your father and brothers here right now. Right. Now,” I emphasized when he paused.
He didn’t ask questions. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell, dialed, and brought it up to his ear. “Mark, call Pops, Hunt, and Eli and get your asses down to Chaz’s. Lea needs us.”
With that, he hung up and motioned to the seat next to him.
I shook my head, crossing my arms over my chest and pacing a bit anxiously.
“Come on,” Ryan said, standing, reaching for my arm and leading me toward the back of the bar and into a large office. “Wanna tell me now or just tell it once?”
I swallowed, knowing how hard it was to share with Shane and he had been inside me. Sharing with people I didn’t know that well was infinitely worse. “I had an abusive ex. He’s been… sending threats…”
“And Shane went to handle it,” Ryan said without even needing to think about it.
“Yeah,” I nodded, glad I didn’t have to go into more detail than that.
“This ex,” Ryan went on, watching me, intense, penetrating. I hadn’t noticed before just how much more he seemed to see because he didn’t speak much. “What kind of bad are we talking about here? Normal guy on a power trip or…”
“President of a heroin-dealing MC in Cali.”
“Shit,” Ryan sighed, nodding.
He let me have my silence then. Or, maybe more accurately, I let him have his. His silence was an active kind. He didn’t move. He didn’t pace like I paced. He sat on the edge of the desk, staring at the wall. But everything about his face, his posture, suggested a lot was going on under the surface.
The door flew open less than five minutes later, bringing in Mark who, I knew, lived the closest. “Sweetheart,” he said, touching my arm and moving into the room, looking at me for a minute then at his brother, seeming to silently communicate something I wasn’t privy to interpreting.
The door opened again another two minutes later, bringing in Eli with Hunter on his heels. They each greeted me, Hunt with a kiss to the temple, and Eli with a hand squeeze. They all moved in, waiting for Charlie. He came in five after that, Helen on his heels, not being the kind of woman to sit at home when shit was going down. She moved in beside me, kicking the door closed, being a support system without having to touch me or even say anything.
I was just about to say something, to fill them all in, trying to ignore the way my guts twisted and my heart pounded. But, thankfully, Ryan saved me.
“Lea has an ex who is the president of a heroin-dealing MC over in California. He did some shit to her,” he said, not knowing what, but something about the way he said it almost said he did know, like he could see through me. The other eyes in the room drifted to me at once, four sets of eyes sparking blue fire. Helen’s arm went around my waist then, as if helping brace me against the impact of their anger. “She obviously left him. But he wasn’t done with her. The threats rolled in. Shane got word. And now Shane’s on the wind.”
“How much of a head start does he have?” Mark asked, looking at me.
“I was asleep. But not more than five or six hours.”
“He’s in his truck?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah.” It was gone when I ran down the stairs to jump in my car.
“It’s a two or three day trip with breaks. There is where we have our advantage,” Ryan said.
“How so?” I asked, looking between them.
Eli looked at me, giving me a small smile, a little comfort. I needed it. “There are five of us to take turns driving and sleeping. We’ll make it in forty hours exactly. Shane would be behind us.”
Oh.
Yeah.
I hadn’t considered that.
“I’m going too,” I said, looking over at Charlie.
“Hon,” he said, shaking his head a little.
“No. You don’t get to tell me no. I came here for help. Not because I wanted you to completely take over. This is my mess. I want to go.”
“Lea…” Ryan tried to reason.
Then it was Helen who saved the day.
“Since when, in this family, do we think women are in any way less capable than the men?” she asked and her sons had the good sense to look down at their feet. “Exactly. Lea can go. She needs to see Shane. You can’t make her wait another two days after you guys get him to get him back to her. She goes. And, Lea honey, when you get there and if shit goes down, that’s when you let them take over. Deal?”
“Deal,” I agreed. “But… Hunter. I really think you should stay with Fee and…”
Hunter snorted. “Please, it took a lot of persuasion to convince her to keep her ass here. I’m going. Accept it.”
“Alright,” Charlie said, clapping his hands. “Mark, you have that giant SUV. We’ll take that. Eli, go raid the kitchen for shit to eat so we don’t have to stop. Helen…” he said, looking at his wife. He made a ‘come here’ jerk of his head and she untangled from me and went to him, putting her hands on his hips as he leaned forward and planted a kiss to her lips. “Hold down the fort.”
“Always do,” she said, giving him a saucy smile before stepping away.
We all filed out then, Ryan at my back like a body guard. I would have thought I would find it oppressive, his commanding aura all around me. But in that moment, in that circumstance, I found it oddly comforting. When we all climbed into he car and he moved into the seat beside me in the far back, I was glad for it. Even though, in general, I got on with Mark best, finding it easy to throw barbs at each other and joke around and the fact that Eli and I had connected on a deeper level, Ryan was who I wanted beside me then. And he somehow sensed that and stayed beside me.
Hunter drove for the first leg, Charlie beside him, awake, while Eli and Mark slept in the next row back. Beside me, Ryan was awake and silent.
The radio was on, somewhat loud, as if to try to drown out the overall tense feeling inside the car. No where was it stronger than in my little seat, knees pulled up to my chest, arms wrapped around them, rocking ever so slightly, too anxious to be sitting still in a car. My skin felt electric. My stomach was tied in a thousand small knots, each with their own worry stitched in- most for Shane, some for the Mallick family as a whole charging into such a dangerous situation, and a few, yeah, for me. For facing my past. For going back where I swore I would never go again. For maybe seeing my family who I now saw in a different light after Shane’s emphat
ic speech about their behavior with regard to my abuse.
“You’re going to explode out of your skin,” Ryan told me, surprising me after a couple hours of tense silence. When my eyes went to him, I saw actual worry in his eyes. His hand went out, landing on my wrist and squeezing. “Why are you rocking?”
And something about him asking me, someone as stitched up tight about their worries as me, wanting me to share, it made it almost easy. “Ross stabbed my brother,” I told him. “And he killed a friend of mine. After doing some awful things to her.”
“You’re worried about Shane,” he surmised.
“And all of you. And me.”
“Why you?” he asked, his hand still holding my wrist. “I think you know us well enough at this point to know that we won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Not physically,” I agreed.
“Hey, if you’re strong enough to live through whatever he put you through, you’re strong enough to give him the finger from a safe distance. Maybe it will feel like closure.”
I wasn’t sure anything would feel like closure, not while Ross and I shared the same planet.
“Can I ask you a weird, hypothetical question?” Ryan asked, watching me a little thoughtfully.
“Sure.”
“If you were in a room with your ex and you had a gun…” he broke off when I laughed, I think both of us shocked that I was capable of doing that right then. “What?” he asked, shaking his head.
“Shane asked me the exact same question. Is that from the Mallick brothers manual or something?”
His lips tipped up at that, a rare sight for him. And it was something to see, let me tell ya’. “And your answer?”
“I’d shoot him in the dick and then unload the rest of the bullets into his head and heart.”
“So it has to end,” Eli said from the seat in front of us.
To that, I shook my head. “Shane said something like that too. Do you guys have his warehouse wired or something? Do you know my favorite color too?” I teased.
Shane (The Mallick Brothers Book 1) Page 18