Jetson (Steel Cobras MC #4)

by Evie Monroe

  Something about her had been gnawing at me for the longest time. I wasn’t sure what the fuck it was because I’d never experienced it. So I’d just pushed it down, away, out, ignoring it.

  But then she’d gone and said it.

  She’d told me I was the first man who’d ever made her feel something. And the second she drove away, I knew that was what I’d been denying the whole time.

  She wasn’t a habit. Habits? That was what people wanted to break. And I sure as hell didn’t want to break from her.

  It was easy to go numb. To shove my head in the sand, moving from girl to girl, going after the sex. But with her, it wasn’t just about sex. I would’ve liked to have taken her somewhere, just the two of us, and—this was a revelation—talk to her. Find out what was in that great big brain of hers. Watch her. Listen to her. Observe her. I didn’t even fucking need to touch her, so much as be with her.

  She made me feel something, too. I wasn’t sure what the hell it was, but . . .

  Fuck it. I couldn’t find out.

  She’d made her decision, and it was to kick me out of her life.

  I couldn’t tell her otherwise. If I did, as much as the Cobras would protect her, I couldn’t guarantee she’d be safe. She was better off without me.

  The thought put me in the worst mood I’d been in in a long time. It had begun to get colder, the wind whipping off the ocean. Hands in my pockets, I stalked back into the warehouse where the men were already making plans.

  Nix looked up. “Bro. You’re coming with me in the Dodge.”

  “What are we doing?” I mumbled absently. I’d been so focused lately on ending the Fury, but now, I couldn’t get Nora out of my head.

  “We’re going to dump the body. In that field,” he said, pointing to a map. Nix got up, slid his piece in his waistband, and grabbed his helmet.

  I nodded, staring at the ground, thinking of Nora, begging me with her eyes, crying that it wasn’t fair.

  I wanted her. Damn it, I didn’t care who knew it. Even if the other Cobras ragged on me from now ‘til kingdom come. It didn’t matter. I wanted her.

  If I had any balls at all I would’ve stopped her from leaving.

  I blinked as Nix snapped his fingers in my face. “Yo. What’s up with you?”

  I scrubbed my face with my hand. “Nothing. Fine. Let’s go.”

  He grabbed me by the shoulder. “Don’t give me that. What’s going on? Is it that girl?”

  I shook my head. “No.” That felt like a lie, and my older brother always saw through my lies. There was no point in hiding. “Fuck it. I don’t know.”

  I followed him outside, to where the guys were loading the oil barrel with Slade’s body into the back of the old Dodge truck Hart had brought over from the Lucky Leaf. He lit a cigarette and looked at me. “Come on, kid. It’s not the end of the world.”

  I quirked an eyebrow at him. “What isn’t?”

  “Falling in love.”

  I shook my head. “Nah. You got it wrong. I ain’t in love.”

  Fuck. Lie again. He chuckled, on to me. “Right. I ain’t seen you this whipped since dad was alive. You’ve never let a girl get to you. What the fuck is the world coming to?”

  “I ain’t—” I started to insist, but there was no point. He saw through all of my bullshit. “It don’t matter. She don’t want anything to do with me.”

  “Yeah? She came here after your sorry ass, didn’t she?”

  I exhaled all the air in my lungs as the men finished loading the barrel. Cullen gave Nix a fist bump. “You got the gun?”

  Nix nodded. “Got it all. No problem.”

  We climbed into the car, and he started the ignition. We drove away from the pier, Nix going on about the plans. The old field behind the gas station, not far from Slade’s house, would be good. It was remote, but not so remote that people wouldn’t be able to find the body. We had one of Slade’s guns, which had his wife Roxanne’s prints on it. Drake had been hiding Roxanne out of town for the past week, but if we could make it seem like she killed Slade and skipped town with Cait, we could avoid having them unleash all their fury on us.

  Or something. I wasn’t listening too closely.

  He said something else, but I didn’t hear it. It might have been a question, but I didn’t answer. I was wondering just what Nora was doing, right at that moment.

  Nix was right. She had come all the way over here to see me.

  And I made her feel something.

  And I was going to throw that away.

  Was I fucked in the head? I’d lived twenty-five years and never had a woman do the things to me Nora had.

  I mean, wasn’t it fucked from the start? She was a fucking brilliant surgeon. And I was just what her fiancé had said. A thug. She deserved to be with someone like him, not me. We’d never work, right?

  I leaned my head against the window and looked up at the moon. Then I realized Nix was laughing at me.

  Shit. Had I said all that out loud?

  “You’re asking a guy whose woman is a prima ballerina,” he said, grinning at me. “One thing I know is that there’s a lot of shit out there that shouldn’t work, but it does. You don’t know until you try.”

  I sighed. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Dude. Stop looking like a puppy who’s been abandoned by his mother for fuck’s sake. The second we get done with Slade, go get her.”

  I gave him a doubtful look. “She ran away from me.”

  “That don’t matter. Just fucking make sure she knows you ain’t gonna let her get away again. And then don’t.”

  I played his words over and over again. Fuck it, he was right. I needed to go after her.

  After we were done with this job, I would. And I’d be damned if I’d ever let her go again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Nora

  By the time I parked my car outside my house and climbed the steps to my front door, I’d finished crying.

  It was after midnight, and I’d decided that crying wasn’t going to do any good. It hadn’t brought my father back, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to change things with Jet.

  I was wide-awake as I stepped inside and locked the door behind me. In the kitchen, I put on a pot of tea and looked around at my house. It’d be a stretch, affording this with my student loans, and without Michael’s help.

  Still, right now, it was my house. For the first time in my life, I had no one else to answer to.

  I decided I should make the most out of it. I went to my phone, turned the music up as loud as I could, and started to dance.

  I danced until I was sweaty and breathless until the walls started to shake. I danced out every ounce of stress in my tired body, and as I did, I opened up boxes. I shoved furniture around. I rolled out rugs. I figured out how to connect the television to the damn cable box. I arranged knick-knacks on shelves.

  I got my goddamn living room exactly the way I wanted it. Not the way Michael wanted, or the way that would’ve looked good on the cover of a magazine.

  I made it look good for me.

  When I was done—one room just about finished, hooray!—I collapsed onto the ugly sofa, smiling proudly at myself. No, this wasn’t a showroom, by any stretch of the imagination.

  It was something better. It was mine. It had my grubby little fingerprints all over it, and I loved it.

  I realized as I sat there, that my grubby fingerprints were probably the reason I’d been scared to unpack. I was afraid of disappointing someone. Again. But now, I didn’t care. None of that mattered.

  Living for myself. That was what mattered.

  I figured I had just enough energy to go through the last of the living room boxes and put books up on the built-in bookcases. Then, I reached inside the box and pulled out an old photo album.

  The word PHOTOS embossed in gold ink drew me in. I curled my feet up under me and lifted my teacup from the coffee table.

  I opened the album to the first picture. My father, holding a peanut-
sized me, smiling as proudly as ever a dad could smile.

  I traced my finger over his face, over his thick mustache, his tattooed biceps. He was wearing an outfit much like Jet’s standard uniform—t-shirt clinging to his defined chest, jeans and boots. He looked like Jet in so many ways. I had to think that if they’d known each other, they’d have been friends.

  There were so many photographs of me with my father, so many memories. In each one, he looked like he loved me a little more. From the looks of the pictures in this book, he’d been the perfect father. But in my memories, he’d been more than perfect. Sure, there were other facets of his life that he must’ve kept from me, to protect me.

  But to me? He was the most amazing father I could ever have wanted. It hadn’t been a show, and he hadn’t been deceiving me. He’d done everything for me out of love. I’d been so lucky to have him.

  When I closed the cover on the book, I sat back, hugging it to my chest. I had no right to deny him or be ashamed of him. Sure, his death had destroyed me. But pretending that he didn’t exist? Running away from him and disavowing all association to him? Not revealing anything about him to Michael?

  That was wrong of me.

  He was a wonderful man. He deserved to be talked about, celebrated, loved. Not forgotten.

  “I’m sorry, daddy,” I said out loud. Then I reached into the box, searching for one thing I knew I had somewhere.

  I found it in the very same box.

  It was a framed photograph of me, taken the day I graduated from med school in L.A. I was standing there in my cap and gown, excitedly holding onto my diploma. Michael had taken the picture, a few days before he’d asked me out for the first time. I’d kept that on display when I’d lived in that crowded house with Bella and her family, just because I wanted to remind myself of the things that made me proudest.

  Then I reached into the photo album and pulled out a picture of me with my father. I was five, and he’d just taught a pig-tailed me how to ride a bicycle. In that photo, I was on the bike, and my father’s arms were around me, steadying me, his chin on my shoulder. We were both smiling the biggest, brightest smiles.

  Balancing the photo on my knees, I peered at it for a long time, tracing my finger over our faces. Then I slipped it into the frame, over the picture of me with my diploma. It fit perfectly, as if the frame had been especially made for it.

  I kissed it, right on my father’s head, and stood up, setting it on the very center of the mantle, so that no one who came into the room would miss it.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jetson

  We pulled up to the gas station behind Cait’s old neighborhood. The place was closed for the night, so it was the perfect time. Nix drove in a wide circle in the dirt drive and backed up to the overgrown scrub brush in the field abutting it. He looked at me and sighed. “Ready?”

  This was going to suck. I shrugged and pocketed my phone. Part of me had been hoping for another text from Nora, but nothing came in. Apparently, she was done with me.

  I didn’t try to hide the disgust in my voice when I said, “As I’ll ever be.”

  We climbed out, let down the gate on the back of the truck, tipped the barrel, and rolled it to the edge of the truck bed.

  “Glad you and I get all the glamorous jobs,” Nix muttered, stubbing out his cigarette on the ground. “Fucking hell. Smells like shit.”

  I didn’t need the reminder. I’d been breathing through my mouth during the ride, but even so, the stench brought tears to my eyes. “Well, that’s what marinating in the back of the warehouse for five days is gonna do to you. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Yeah. On three.”

  He counted down, and we hoisted the barrel into our arms, then started to carry it through the brush in tandem, stumbling into pitch blackness. “Here?” I breathed out. My incision under my bandages was burning like a motherfucker.

  “A little farther,” Nix said, checking to see where we were in relation to the station. We had to get close to civilization, but not too close. We took a few more steps. “All right. Here.”

  We dropped the barrel at the same time and it hit the dusty ground with a thunk. Now came the part I really wasn’t looking forward to. Nix kicked off the top of the barrel and let out a grunt. The smell hit me like a wave. I staggered back, then crouched with my hands on my knees, fighting the urge to puke.

  “Come on,” Nix said, motioning me toward the bottom of the barrel. I followed him, and we lifted it up to tip the body out onto the ground.

  The fucked-up mass of blood and tissue that had once been the president of the Hell’s Fury slipped onto the dirt like a pile of wet laundry. In the moonlight, I couldn’t see his ugly face anymore. The maggots had really done a number on him. Just . . . great.

  My eyes watered. I swallowed, trying to stop myself from gagging. I reached for the hem of my t-shirt and brought it over my mouth, breathing through it. “Jesus. Why the fuck didn’t those guys just dump him the night he died?”

  “’Cause we’d just burned down their clubhouse. If Slade was found dead that same night they’d have put two and two together and come after us.”

  I knew that. There was a time when I’d have invited that. I’d been fighting for that, since the Fury’d started giving us shit months ago. But now, I thought of the way Nora had tore into me on the pier. If we instigated this, and the Fury came after us, Nora would go running again. And if there was a way I could keep her, if I could prove to her the Fury and Cobras were in a truce, I might be able to . . .

  Nix snapped his fingers at me again. He had a handkerchief over his mouth. He pocketed it and reached for the corpse’s boots. “Come on, kid. Let’s get this over with.”

  I was left with Slade’s disgusting, maggoty head. I tried not to look as I reached down, trying to get a grip on his once-white t-shirt instead of his actual putrid body. My fingers sank into the fabric, and his skin felt like it was a fucking Jell-O mold. I grimaced, trying to remind myself that the sooner we got done with this, the sooner I could be on my way to see Nora. “Why the fuck did we get picked to do this, again?”

  Nix chuckled. “Might have something to do with you fucking up on the Ferrari pick.”

  Right. I’d nearly forgotten. “Okay. That explains me. What about you?”

  We walked the body about three steps until he said, “Here,” then we dropped Slade on the ground. Dust billowed up into my throat. “You think you could do this yourself? You’re my fucking brother, remember?”

  That made sense. Just one more of a thousand ways in which I owed my big brother. He never kept count, though.

  He crouched in front of the body, arranging it just right, then stood up, inspecting it. “Looks good?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Don’t forget the piece.”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out the gun from a plastic baggie and spilled it on the ground beside the body. Nobody’s prints on it but Roxanne’s.

  “All right. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  We grabbed the barrel – we’d dump it in the ocean later – and started to walk back to the truck when I heard a noise in the distance. I looked up, toward the one streetlight, and saw a form in the darkness. “Who the fuck is—”

  Suddenly a gunshot went off, echoing across the field.

  Nix and I both dove into the tall grass. “Fury,” I breathed out, clutching my stomach with one hand and reaching behind me for the gun I’d brought with the other. “Shit.”

  I peeked up and tried to get a lead on the shooter, but more gunshots erupted. I blinked in the yellow light from the gas station’s sole streetlight but couldn’t make out a goddamn thing. On the other side of the body, Nix was there, holding his gun, too. “You see them?”

  Nix shook his head. “No. There more than one?”

  “I don’t know. This ain’t good.”

  Nix was on his feet, getting set to make a move. “No, it’s not. Stay back.”

  Fuck that. That was always Nix’s
direction. Keep me out of the fray. I’d gotten it even worse since I’d been shot. He started to advance in the darkness, and I crouched in the brush and did the same as more bullets sailed overhead.

  When we reached the parking lot, we saw the guy with the Fury patch, trying to reload his gun. Dumbass was standing out there, right in the open, a sitting duck. Nix leveled off a shot at him, but it missed as the guy suddenly turned and ran. He jumped on his bike, gunned it, and tore into the night.

  “Shit!” Nix growled, breaking into a run to the truck. “That guy can’t be allowed to talk with the other Fury. If he does, we’re fucked.”

  “I’ll get him,” I said, reaching for the door of the truck.

  “Fuck that. I will,” Nix said, shoving me out of the way. “You need to get that barrel back in the truck and get out of here. Call the men and tell them what’s going down. Get them over here.”

  I shoved him again. “Let me go, brother. I was the one who fucked up before. Give me a—”

  He ripped at my shirt. “Don’t fucking do this now. He’s getting away.”

  I shoved him, hard. “Yeah. He is. So let me go.”

  He stared me down, but I met his eyes, and for the first time, I didn’t blink.

  For the first time, he looked away first.

  “Goddammit. You prick. Fine. Go. But you can’t take the truck. I need it for the barrel.” He motioned to the lot across the street, where there were a couple of old cars parked. “Check out those.”

  I nodded at him in thanks. As I ran to the lot, he called out to me, “Don’t get your ass shot again.”

  The first car I tried, an old Pontiac Firebird was golden. The door was open, so I slipped inside, ripped off the ignition, found the wires, and it purred to life.

  Slamming the door as I tore out of the lot, I headed in the direction of the Fury. I didn’t see Nix. He was probably in the field, rolling the barrel back and calling on the other Cobras for back-up.

  But right now, I had a job to do.

  I pushed on the accelerator and sped off. Talking to Nora would have to wait. But Nix didn’t have to play big brother and worry about me now. I was determined to get this prick and end this. Because, no matter what I had to do, I was going to get back to Nora before the night was over.