by Nicole Fox
But that was long ago, and it was obvious now that Duchess had never had any intention of staying with him. It was Grizzly. It had always been Grizzly. That bastard had taken everything from him! His club, his girl, his future! Who the fuck did he think he was? Who the fuck?
Rage stood up and started pacing, muttering nonsense to himself.
“Fuckers ... gonna pay ... all of them ... gonna pay ... gonna kill Grizzy ... gonna get Duchess ... Mine ... She’ll be mine ... fuck him ... I’ll kill him ... I’ll kill them all ...”
“Uhm ... boss—”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Rage’s voice rang through the room. His eyes went back to the phone and the pictures. The longer he looked, the madder he got. All those feelings of anger and betrayal welled up inside him. The only thing that he had ever wanted out of life was to ride with that MC, have his girl on his side, and be something. And what had it gotten him?
Nothing! That’s damn well what.
Rage chucked the phone clean across the room, making it shatter against the wall. The sound and the sight was oddly satisfying to him, as if destroying the phone somehow lessened the offense of Duchess and Grizzly betraying him and leaving him for dead.
“Hey—!” its owner yelled, standing up.
Rage pulled his gun out and pointed at him. There was a manic look in his eyes; he would pull the trigger, no hesitation. It didn’t even matter that this person was one of his men. They were all disposable to him. He could always get more. They were just tools, after all, to get what he wanted. Sometimes, he had to remind and show them that. They liked to forget.
“What are you gonna do about it?”
The man eyed the gun apprehensively and sat down.
“That’s what I fuckin’ thought.”
Rage stored his gun away, now that everyone was cooperating the way that they needed to be. He sat back, the others watching him apprehensively, while he thought.
He’d always known that they’d been in shit together. Always. He hadn’t wanted to think that she would step out on him, but the suspicion was always there. He’d been working for years to build what he had, so he could take what had been stolen from him. And it was right there, right under Grizzly’s fucking hands, like he’d always known it was.
He started to laugh. There was no joke. No one had said anything funny. He’d show the fucker; had already started. His Butchers—butchered. Clubhouses and safehouses ransacked. Bikes and property destroyed. He’d show them. He’d show all of them.
And then he would take her back.
Chapter Thirteen Ana
It was weird being back. It was weird having people treat me like I had never left.
It was like five years hadn’t passed, like there hadn’t been a huge, traumatizing event that had driven me out of town. I guess other people had put themselves back together a little better than I had, and honestly? I couldn’t fault them for that. Being in pain all the time was a trial in and of itself and few people were conditioned to just deal with that constantly.
I settled in living at the clubhouse after those first few awkward days leveled out. Grizzly only tried to insist one more time that I work there, at the bar, and while it was fun entertaining the boys—they were a hell of a lot better company than any people I had gotten at Jeremy’s place, that was for sure—I knew that I didn’t want to be tied down to the clubhouse, or to the Butchers, or to Grizzly.
At least that’s what I told myself.
The conversation had, of course, gone as well as any of our conversations had gone.
“I think you need to stay and work here. It won’t bother anyone. Besides, I can—”
“Look after me, yeah. You keep saying that, and I keep telling you my plans, and you’re not listening to me.”
“You’re the one that’s not listening, Ana. We still don’t know fully who was behind what happened at the motel—”
“Something that isn’t my problem—”
“I never said that it was—”
“Then stop trying to trap me here!”
I don’t think that he liked the implication that he was trying to trap me. He’d gone stone cold in a moment, and then it had flickered into something more. I’d ended up in his bed. Again. And I ended up leaving. Again. But he didn’t press me about making me work at the Butcher’s bar after that, at least, even if a very small, desperately clinging part of me wanted him to.
There was another pressing, important thing that was making me reluctant to actually stay here, for good.
As time wore on ... I realized that my period was late.
I was never not regular. My period was always like clockwork. It came, it did its evil little thing, and then it rolled on out as it should. I wasn’t one of those girls with the misfortune of having one that just did what it wanted. Of course ... that was obviously a blessing and a curse. Grizzly and I had had unprotected sex twice now, and I should have insisted the second time, even if I hadn’t insisted on the first, but hindsight was twenty-twenty and I certainly was feeling it now in the worst of ways.
I had avoided getting a pregnancy test, on the merit that if I did that, whatever result would make this whole situation too real for me to deal with while I was trying so hard to keep everything else in line. But the fact of the matter was, Grizzly and I had had ... more sex than I cared to admit. Unprotected sex—because apparently, I was a huge masochist and couldn’t stop myself from suffering. When I discovered that I had missed my period, I had a breakdown in the clubhouse bathroom. There had been a time that I had thought that I wanted to be a mother. There was a time where I had almost become a mother. That night five years ago had changed that, however, and I had resigned myself to never having that happiness. Yet here I was. The possibility of unexpected, unplanned pregnancy (again) loomed over me like a great hatchet, adding to the things that were already looming over me, since Grizzly still hadn’t figured out who it was that had shot up the motel.
Because of these new developments, my plans were altered a little.
Get a job. Get a pregnancy test. Figure out the results. Go from there. If it was negative, I could proceed as normal. Stick around long enough to build up some funds, maybe get my own little place. Maybe move on. The plan was flexible there. But if it was positive ...
Could I really leave the father of my child here, unaware?
Before I got that far, I had to get through the first step of my plan. It didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. I managed to land a decent gig at another local bar, one that was not too far from the clubhouse. I had to rely on one of the boys to get to and from the work and the clubhouse since I didn’t have a car or other way to get there, but at least Grizzly had gotten my I.D. and everything back for me from the motel, so there were a few things that were going well for me.
Well. Mostly.
***
Kevin’s was the biggest, most popular bar in town. It boasted a full house nightly, including weekends, because no one in town believed in having a holiday without drinking, and Kevin, the owner, didn’t believe in giving workers time off like a decent human.
It was one such night, a Friday. Arguably one of the busier nights of the week since it was kicking off the weekend. I was always being put on Fridays, which was good for my tips but not necessarily good for my sanity. I had gotten accustomed to navigating men and was able to get through the slew of male customers, all typically uncomfortable levels of perverted, and prone to crossing the line.
“Hey honey buns, come over and give me a refill!”
“On it.”
“Sugar lips, wanna come let me see what those can do after work?”
“Sorry, hun, too busy. My old man wouldn’t like that too much.”
My responses came with smiles as I poured their drinks, little flashes of cleavage here and there to make them happy so they didn’t cop an attitude about my denial, but as usual when it came to dealing with creeps and other such nasty folk, it wasn’t nearly
as enjoyable a task as I was letting these people think it was.
Still, my tips were hefty, and they kept rolling in and rolling in. I couldn’t complain about that.
I had about three guys in front of me, two off to the side. They’d been there a good portion of the night and though they were something clearly like professional catcallers, I was sure, they were at least behaving themselves. Mostly.
The one in the middle—his name was Jerry, I found out—wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone. Unlike the others, he took my refusals as an open invitation to keep on asking.
“Can I have your number?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, my old man wouldn’t like that, you see.”
“Who says your old man has to know, sweet thing?”
On, and on, and on, and on. Persistence was cute, sometimes, but in this situation, I just wanted to pull my hair out. Maybe go on a sabbatical, or something.
I smiled at Jerry.
“Now, that wouldn’t be very nice of me to my old man now, would it?” I asked him. “Sounds like that would be a little underhanded, and I like thinking that I’m a good girl.”
Something about that was apparently funny to him. Jerry roared with laughter, slapping the bar table in front of him.
“Honey, with them tits peeking out of that shirt, I bet there’s nothing ‘good’ about you. Come on.” He leaned over the bar, sticking his finger into the cleavage of my shirt to pull me closer to him. “What say you drop the act, huh? We all know that you run around with them biker boys, but the only ladies that run around with them are club girls—and we all know that club girl pussy is a free for all. I don’t see no ring on your finger, hot shit.” For emphasis, his finger went from merely dipped into my shirt to sliding his whole hand in to grope my breast.
Something you had to know about Kenny was that he didn’t give a shit how the men treated the female workers in his bar. If it made someone’s dick hard, it made them happy, and if they were happy, it made him money—that’s how he looked at it. Me and the other girls had to handle our shit ourselves, so that’s exactly what I was intending to do.
Unintentionally, the old me, the one that had been Duchess, had been coming out a lot more lately.
I smacked his hand away and leveled a deep glare at him.
“Whether or not I’m a club girl, my pussy isn’t for free—for anyone. You want to keep getting served drinks tonight, you’ll keep your hands to yourself, Jerry,” I said. I turned around, flipping my hair over my shoulders. Like fuck was I going to let him walk all over me.
Of course, Jerry made the mistake of grabbing my hair.
“Now listen here, bit—”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
I had been jerked back a little by the grip that Jerry had on my hair, but it was suddenly released when that voice came booming out. I knew that voice, and the situation was like déjà vu. I whipped around, seeing Grizzly with his hand on Jerry’s throat, and an increasingly red-faced Jerry staring up at the bear of a man that Grizzly was. Pure fear was all over the man’s face, and if I hadn’t just been subject to his disgusting words and his groping, I might have actually felt sorry for the man.
However ... since he had decided to act the way that he had, I wasn’t inclined to do so.
“This man bothering you, Ana?” he asked, looking over at me while Jerry clawed at his meaty arms. I could have thrown Jerry a bone—I wasn’t in the mood to do such a silly thing, however.
“He wouldn’t leave me alone when I told him no on the number. Then he decided that he would put his hands on me.”
“Did he now?”
Jerry shook his head fervently, though the grip that Grizzly had on his throat prevented him from speaking.
“Yeah. He also ignored the fact I told him I had an old man. He thought I would give him my number anyway. Then he called me a liar.”
“Wow. You’re not doing too well, buddy. What do you want me to do to him, babe?”
I’ll admit ... This whole thing was just a little play. I did it with all the boys if they came in towards the end of my shift before picking me up and a shit fucker was harassing me. But it felt good hearing Grizzly call me babe. Especially since it shouldn’t have. Especially since—
I pushed the thought of my most recent anxiety down and smiled at him.
“Let him go ... this time. But he should know I don’t appreciate being called a liar, and I don’t appreciate having someone other than my man touching me.”
Grizzly nodded and looked down at Jerry, who had turned a lovely shade of red.
“You get all of that, you little fuck?”
Jerry nodded again, faster.
“Good.”
Grizzly tossed Jerry away, and he stumbled as he landed on the ground. He scrambled to gather all of his things, and did a good job high tailing it out of there. The others watched this, looked to Grizzly, and then looked to each other. Almost simultaneously, they pulled out handfuls of cash to tip me, and left.
I watched them leave, shaking my head as Grizzly sat himself across from me.
“You know, you wouldn’t get all this grief at—”
“The Butchers. Yes, I know. But other than the creepy guys, it’s not too bad here.”
Grizzly laughed. “It’s not too bad because then you can whip out The Duchess on people.”
I rolled my eyes. I started cleaning a glass for him while a couple of new patrons came up to the bar. I was glad I wouldn’t be serving them long; they already smelled like they’d been drinking booze.
“You know, I told you not to call me that anymore,” I told him very pointedly.
He held up his hands. “Fine, fine. How much longer do you need to be here?”
“My shift ends in five.”
“’K. Gonna take a leak and be right back.”
I shook my head with a little laugh as he went to the back where the bathrooms were. Men. Honestly.
Grizzly
Playing old lady and old man shouldn’t have been as ... whatever the fuck as it had been, but it had me a little more than heated. It was most of the reason that I excused myself from Ana’s presence; if she had been my old lady, I knew a couple ways I could have convinced her to do what I knew was best—namely, fucking her until she couldn’t tell me no.
As it was ... that wasn’t why I was the one picking her up tonight.
I would be riding out tomorrow, running down a lead that I had discovered about the fuckers that had shot up the motel. Mel had had a good start to the information that I needed: there was some new group of assholes running around, but they weren’t just any ragtag group of randos with a random vendetta. They were an actual MC that’d been formed under the radar. They didn’t really go by a name, but they did operate under a president—some junkie that called himself Road Rage. Apparently, he had started piling together people about four years ago. What I had heard about the group of assholes doing all this shit wasn’t all that much—they were a bunch violent, doped up drug users (about what Mel had already told me) who just liked causing trouble. I had no idea why they had decided to target us, but I would be riding out to do some investigating on my own the next day.
Call me a sap or romantic or whatever, but I wanted some time with Ana before I went out.
My father, before he died, had been in an MC, too. And he would always talk about what it was like when he and my mother were coming up. She’d been a club girl. It was because of that, I always knew that I wanted to be with one, too. To take her has my old lady. They were always loyal, always strong, the kind of women that needed to be by an MC member’s side. Whenever my father and his MC were going to ride out on something big, he’d always spend the night with my mother and no one else. It was their ritual.
In a way, I wanted to carry that out.
When I got out of the bathroom, Ana and a couple of the other girls were cleaning up the bar. People were slowly starting to dwind
le out. Kevin’s would only be open for a few more hours, but Ana wasn’t obligated to stay after the rush had settled down. She called it a perk of being willing to bust her ass through not only the late-night Friday rush, but also coming in early to hit the crowd before it. Couldn’t say I liked Kevin all too much, but at least she was given some benefits working here.
She looked up as I came out, a smile on her face. I could tell she was ready to cut out.