MARRIED TO MY MASTER

by Nicole Fox

  He bottomed out within me and stayed there for a moment. He pulled away from my neck just to look at me for a moment, right in the eyes. We kept that contact as he rolled his hips back. Our brows furrowed and mouths parted and he kept that pace. Slow. Intimate. Deep. Though he wasn’t fucking me hard, I still clung to him. Though he wasn’t going fast, my nails dug into his back and my toes curled. I could feel my walls tighten around his thick cock, almost as if to plead for him to not leave me. Our foreheads pressed together and here and there, his angle sharpened, his thrust deepened—but he made love to me instead of fucked me and it almost made me fall apart in his arms because it felt too goddamn good and it wasn’t just the sex.

  I let my hips roll with his and my eyes close and basked in the feeling of him inside me until I was panting and my chest was rising and falling rapidly. I shook and shuddered beneath him and the closer we got together, the more he picked up his pace somewhat. It built until it snapped, and I was pulsing around him, and he was releasing inside me. He was warm and it was all wet and filthy, but somehow it was right.

  I should have known that the afterglow wouldn’t last this time. As we settled in the afterglow of our mutual climax, I felt him tense on top of me, as if there had been something that he had just realized, or as if something had shocked him. What came out of his mouth shocked me, and I was quiet for a moment when I let myself process it.

  “Ana ... tell me ... why did you leave?”

  He didn’t look at me when he asked the question. He had his face still buried in my neck, as if he couldn’t look at me while he asked it. I had no idea why he was asking it, especially not now, but he was. It reminded me darkly of the reason I had intended to leave my room in the first place before I had seen that he had been hurt. My hand touched my belly ... where his baby was ...

  “Ana ...?”

  He still didn’t look at me, and I think that was the only reason that I was able to gain the courage to tell him. I had never told anyone about the baby or the miscarriage before. It had been my personal secret hell for all these years.

  “I—I was pregnant,” I said. “Before the raid. The stress of that night ... I lost the baby after Rodent died. I couldn’t—I couldn’t stay here, Grizzly. Not after all of that.”

  Grizzly was silent. The tension remained and he pulled away from me, looking down at me with wide eyes.

  “You—you were pregnant?”

  I bit my lip. “Yes.”

  “And you miscarried. Rodent’s baby?”

  “I—I did.”

  “That’s why you left.”

  “That’s why I left.”

  The look on his face as he pulled out of me was one of a dread that I had never seen on Grizzly before. He was stunned—I knew that he would be, a person didn’t just find that out about someone else without a little bit of shock. I had expected him to try and comfort me, maybe coddle me. Things that I didn’t need, but things that were expected because that’s just what people did in situations like this. They coddled and they felt bad for you, regardless of whether or not it was what you needed at the moment.

  What I needed in this moment was for Grizzly to tell me that it was okay. For him to tell me that I would be okay—I needed him to stay. Because then that would solidify everything that I had been trying to deny about him since I had agreed to get on the back of that damn bike with him.

  He got out of my bed. His cock had softened, and it was still slick with our cum. I had lost the high of our orgasms, however. I couldn’t possibly feel anything close to enjoyment at the moment.

  He dragged his hands down his face, shaking his head. He looked like he had seen a ghost.

  “I’m—fuck. I’m sorry.”

  “Grizzly—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I hadn’t expected him to be so emotional over this information, but there was nothing I could do about it. He had wanted to know, and I had given an answer. It clearly wasn’t an answer that he wanted from me, but I couldn’t change that. I had left because of the baby. I had left because of everything.

  I laid back in the bed, trying to hold back the tears that threatened to fall again. I didn’t know why I had hoped so hard that Grizzly would be the man that stayed—Rodent hadn’t. No man had ever stayed before. Clearly, the knowledge of why I had left was too much for him. Maybe it made me impossible to be with or something. Maybe it disgusted him. I didn’t know.

  The more I thought about it, the less the urge was there to cry. I had cried so much over the years—I recalled back to what Grizzly had said to me when we first met again.

  The old Duchess would never.

  I wasn’t Duchess anymore, though. I was Ana. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t be strong. I breathed in deep.

  I wasn’t Duchess anymore, but goddamn it, for this baby and for myself, I was going to be strong like her.

  ***

  I had been working at Kevin’s long enough to save up a decent amount of money. I was making enough consistently to realize that I could afford the rent on some apartments in town without breaking my back—which was good, since that back would soon be carrying a little more weight than usual. They weren’t perfect, but they were in a relatively safe neighborhood, and I would be close to the bar (walking distance, in fact) and there was a small daycare on the apartment premises.

  When I told Grizzly that I was leaving, he nodded at me.

  “I understand.”

  I admit that I had held out for him to say something to make me stay. To explain his behavior from the other night. To tell me that he hadn’t meant to leave me., that it was just the shock. and he’d had a reason. But he didn’t. He simply said he understood, and in that statement, I understood.

  He didn’t want me. I was used goods.

  Old Ana would have been broken. New Ana, the one that was acting a little more like old Duchess, was hurt—I didn’t have so much pride I couldn’t admit that. But I refused to let Grizzly dictate how I was going to feel and carry myself.

  The boys and the club girls all threw me a going away party the day that I was heading out. Even Candy—who I regrettably hadn’t had nearly enough time to spend with, what with work—participated. Grizzly hung in the background, and didn’t make an effort to include him more in the celebrations.

  Now, I stood in my apartment. It was tiny. It had one bedroom, one bath, a living room, and a kitchen—no dining room. However, I was crafty, and I had lived in spaces almost smaller than this before with less privacy. I wasn’t going to be the one to complain about affordable housing. It was Kid that helped me move into this place; he was the one riding me to and from work the most out of all the Butcher boys, and there wasn’t a whole lot to put in here—on the plus side, the apartment came furnished. Sparsely, but still. Less for me to buy.

  “You sure you’re going to be all right here, Ana?” he asked me, shifting from side to side on his feet. “I mean, it seems a little unsafe here, and you were always welcome over at the bar.”

  “I know I was, Kid.”

  “If this is about you and Griz—”

  “It’s not,” I said, not even wanting to entertain that particular line of thought. “It’s not about me and Grizzly. It’s not about me and anyone. It’s just about me. This was always the plan. I was only there temporarily, anyway.” I smiled. “I will miss you, know.”

  “Will you come back around at all?”

  “I’ll try. You know how busy work is.”

  “Yeah ... Well, if you ever need a ride to work, I know it’s just a little down the road but if it’s like, raining, or something.”

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  Kid smiled brightly at that and came over to hug me. We embraced, and he held me tightly. He kept hold of my shoulders and looked me in the eye.

  “You know, whatever he did, I’m sure he didn’t mean it, or he had a reason, or something. Just ... Just so you know.”

  I didn’t have to ask who he was referring to.


  I let the statement—and Kid—go. I was left alone in my new apartment. It was quiet, almost ... stagnant. Oddly enough, I had gotten used to how busy it often was at the clubhouse. I sighed.

  “Get a grip of yourself, Ana. You know what this is for. You, and your baby.” I put my hands on my belly. It hadn’t really started to get big yet. I did notice that my breasts were getting a little bigger. I made a mental note to go out and buy new bras on my next day off, and decided that I would make myself some tea.

  I could do this, I reminded myself. I’d been through worse.

  Chapter Sixteen Road Rage

  He paced in his office, his mind in a complete ruin. It was always like that when he doped—it never made him calm anymore; it always agitated him, roused him, made him want to kill and fight and fuck.

  Mostly, at the moment, he wanted to kill.

  Grizzly had gotten away from him, and while he had spent a decent amount of time giving the old Skinner grief in the form of fucking with his precious Butchers and his clubhouses, it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

  He wanted Grizzly’s blood on his hands.

  He wanted Ana’s body under his own.

  Road Rage tossed the table in his office over, sending the drugs and baggies and whatever other garbage and filth strewn all over them, soaring. The table itself clattered up against the wall. True to his name, he raged, throwing the chairs about the office, screaming to no one. None of his boys came when they could hear the noise that he was making in there. They were all smarter than that, not wanting to get in the middle of one of his fits. It was very likely that his anger would be taken out on one of them. Likely that blood would be spilled, and a life would be lost.

  Road Rage didn’t care, however. What he wanted was revenge, and it had been so close within his fingertips that he had almost had it when Grizzly had stumbled upon his home.

  It wasn’t enough.

  He punched a wall, sending his fist through it. He pulled it back out, bloody and ruined, but he couldn’t even feel the pain anymore, not really. It was just an aching ebb that was overshadowed by how much the betrayal from Ana and Grizzly had twisted his mind.

  “Fuck!”

  He kicked the wall this time, and picked up another chair, hurling it to a window.

  “That bitch!”

  He screamed again.

  “I gave her everything!”

  He threw another chair.

  “And she fucked around on me. Left me. Killed me!”

  There was nothing of the old Rodent left in the drugged-up freak that expended all of his energy yelling and cursing to no one, flinging things and sinking deeper and deeper into the violent madness that had dictated all of his actions for the last five years.

  Road Rage continued on like this until he had no more energy. Until he fell to the floor on his back, unable to move or to even think clearly anymore. All he could do was pant and stare at the ceiling.

  He started to laugh. It was a little chuckle at first, before he started to really go at it. A mad cackle filled the room and he rolled around, almost giddy, as he started to repeat a phrase that made no real sense.

  “Soon ... soon ... I’ll have it soon ... soon ...”

  Chapter Seventeen Grizzly

  Ana being gone was more of a nightmare than I had anticipated. I missed her every single day since the day that she left. I tried to tell myself that it was the right thing. After all, things were getting hairy around here, and after what she had told me ...

  I couldn’t hurt her anymore in telling her what Rodent had become.

  The man wasn’t who he used to be, and the only thing that would come from Ana knowing that he was still alive would be guilt. Guilt that she hadn’t stuck around. Guilt that she had lost his baby. Guilt that, like he’d accused, there was something between us—even if we hadn’t acted on those feelings when we were younger. It didn’t matter to Rodent, and I knew it wouldn’t matter to Ana, either.

  Maybe I was foolish in making that decision for her. Kid seemed to think I was. He kept in contact with her after she left and was living in those apartments not too far from where the bar was. He reported every time that he visited, and I appreciated the updates while also simultaneously rejecting his advice to me that I should go over there myself and see how she was doing.

  “She seems sad,” he’d tell me. “I think she misses you.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it wasn’t me that she was missing.

  With Ana gone, however, it gave me the clear to begin working a little harder to make sure that the Rodent-Road-Rage problem wouldn’t come to a head. After seeing what I had at his little hideout, I knew that leaving well enough alone wasn’t an option in this situation. We started getting more and more problems—Butchers ambushed on rides, clubhouses fucked to hell, bikes messed with. I was glad Ana wasn’t here for that turmoil, but I knew that the longer I waited, the more likely it would be that she would end up getting pulled right back in.

  I made a decision.

  I sat with the boys in the clubhouse the night before I wanted everything to go down, making sure that I explained everything clearly to them.

  “This guy used to run with us when we were in the Skinners,” I said. “He was a friend ... a brother. He used to be Ana’s man and before she left here, he died in that last raid that wiped us out. Or so we thought. He got away somehow and built up this group sitting in the home, way out in the cut—”

  “That junkie haven?”

  “Yeah, the junkie haven.”

  “Christ.”

  I nodded. “He’s fucking volatile and has a vendetta. He thinks some things happened that didn’t, and he’s not too interested in talking to me or to anyone, for that matter, about the truth of what happened. He’s dangerous. They’re all dangerous. We’re going to settle this once and for all. We’re not having something like five years ago happen again, am I clear?”

  “Aye!”

  That was all I needed to say. From there, I laid down the how and the when; all I needed was for my boys to hang low, get some rest tonight, and be ready for what was to come.

  As they dispersed, I went over to Kid and took him off to the side.

  “I need you to do something for me,” I said. He looked excited and eager to help me, as he always was.

  “Yeah? What is it, boss? Just let me know. I’ll do whatever.”

  “I know you will. Listen. I need you to go to the bar tomorrow and just keep an eye on Ana, all right? You can talk, play around, whatever, just make sure that she’s fine and she gets home fine, all right? I have a feeling ... I don’t know.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. It won’t be suspicious if you go, since you’ve kept contact up with her all this time. Just make sure no one decides that they’re gonna fuck with her, okay?”

  He looked like he wanted to ask something, or say something else, but he didn’t. He gave me a determined look and a nod of his head, shaking it enthusiastically.

  “You got, boss. You can count on me.”

  “I know I can.”

  He ran off, and I sighed. After all of this, I would think about trying to build at least a friendship with Ana. If I had known the extent of her past with Rodent ... Fuck. I felt fucking gross. It was something that had plagued my mind since she’d told me. All I had been thinking about was what I wanted out of her, and there had been so much more going on with Ana than I could have even imagined.

  That’s all right. I would make things right. I would try to at least course correct a little for the selfishness in thinking that I could just take her because I wanted her.

  It’ll be fine, Ana. Soon, everything will be fine ...

  Ana

  I didn’t go by the clubhouse anymore, and after a while, people stopped trying to get me to go. I think that they got the hint that I had left, and left for good. The only one that ever kept up any contact with me (or tried) was Kid, which didn’t surprise me. And to be honest? I didn’t have the h
eart to tell him to go away.

  The only thing that worried me about that was that it wouldn’t be long before I started to show. The additional worry with that was wondering whether or not my boss would want to keep a pregnant girl behind a bar. I couldn’t imagine too many men being all that interested and while it was just a bar and not a strip joint or something, things like that mattered.