by Addison Jane
I couldn’t breathe. I gasped, trying to fill my lungs with oxygen, but it wasn’t working.
I was suffocating.
There are some demons you never escape and some memories you will never forget. Those are things that will never leave me—I’ll never escape them. I know that now because I’ve spent the past six years trying, and yet, right now, I can remember it like it was fucking yesterday.
The sounds, the smells, the pain—I remember it all like I was right back there in that exact point of time.
I remember looking down at the concrete as I lay on it bleeding out.
I remember watching people falling to the ground.
I remember hearing them screaming for help.
And I remember when the backyard was empty, watching the man cry as he placed the gun to his head and fired.
How could I ever forget?
It played over and over in my dreams.
My nightmares.
“You aren’t responsible for the choices that man made.” Kennedy sniffled, pulling her sleeves down and dabbing at her eyes.
“Probably not,” I answered with a shrug, but I was not entirely convinced by my own words. “However, I was responsible for the choices I made. My dad had done something that morning to make me angry…” I pull my eyebrows together, “… I can’t even fucking remember what it was. So, I decided I was going to throw a party in his prized home.”
No one should have been there when that guy showed up.
Maybe if the house had been empty, he would have turned around and gone home.
Decided against it.
But because I was a rich, vindictive bitch looking to get one-up on my asshole father, they were.
And people died.
That is a scar I’ll wear on my soul forever.
“I died that day,” I croaked, looking into the eyes of my best friend as she sat silently sobbing. “They had to shock my heart on the way to the hospital to get it to start again. I was in there for weeks, another couple of months in a rehab to try and deal with the nightmares. The moment I was released, I caught a bus to the middle of fucking nowhere, and there you were. You looked so broken. Like you were barely standing, and all I could think was that I remember being at that point—the point of no return—where you felt like the world was beating on you with a sledgehammer, and I knew how much I wished someone at that point had my back.”
Kennedy swiped at the tears on her cheeks, her eyes were red and bloodshot, and her bottom lip was trembling. I hated seeing her like this, and I hated it was because of me when I’d spent so long trying to protect her.
“I met you when I was only stripping. Things were bad then, but without you, I never would have survived what came after that.”
I shuddered.
When we traded stripping for whoring, I thought that was my hard limits being pushed.
But when we signed up to be club girls for Red Riot MC, they next leveled it.
The humiliation.
The beatings.
Having to let those sorry excuses for men have control over our bodies. We were lucky to still be alive because not every girl who walked in there walked back out again.
I walked around the bed, sinking to the floor at the end of it opposite Kennedy. “I thought maybe I could replace pain with pain,” I whispered, finally saying those words out loud for the first time ever, wondering why it had taken me so long to admit them. “Turns out, I just ended up being twice as fucked-up as I was before.”
Kennedy giggled, and for a moment, I simply stared at her in confusion across the five feet of floor between us, thinking she’d completely lost it. But it wasn’t long before a smile broke out on my face as well.
“Fucking hell,” she laughed, dropping her head back against the door with a thump. There were still tears dripping down her cheeks even with the awkward smile on her face. “We are so fucked-up.”
I sighed, fighting the giggles building in my stomach.
I didn’t know why we were laughing.
There was honestly nothing funny about the situation.
At least, there shouldn’t have been.
Here we are discussing a time when I got fucking shot, how we’d spent the past few years living in this violent, poisonous hell, and finally realizing that neither of us should have been alive right now. “Apparently, the world has it in for us.”
She smiled tightly, nodding her head. “And if you hadn’t climbed off that bus that day, maybe it would have won.” It was the honest truth, a very sobering truth. “But we’re like the Power Rangers. On our own, we’re kind of average, but when we come together, we create this indestructible being the universe can’t fuck with.”
I chewed my lip, fighting a smile. “Did you just compare us to the Power Rangers?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, Kenz… the 90s called, they want their reference back.”
“I’ll be the pink one,” she announced with a self-assured nod. “You’ll be the blue one.”
My nose crinkled as I frowned. “The blue one was a boy.”
“You have manly shoulders.”
I reached behind me and grabbed a handful of the clothes I’d been packing and tossed them at her. She gasped, pinching the delicate pair of panties that landed on her head and holding them out in front of her. There wasn’t much to them. A little bit of string and a black lace trim with a tiny red bow on the front.
A smirk grew on my best friend’s face. “And who are we trying to impress with these?”
I lurched forward, snatching them back and rolling my eyes. “Have you been drinking?”
“Yes. I needed to take four shots just to get the balls to come up here. And even then, Repo still had to carry me up the stairs.”
Sucking in a deep breath, I smiled sadly. It wasn’t easy for her to come up here and talk to me with all the emotions she’d been feeling. I knew when she walked into the room she was hurt and a little angry. To her, what she’d heard didn’t make sense. Honestly, I was still not sure if it did.
“Are we done with this now?”
Kennedy squeezed her eyes shut for a couple of beats before opening them again. “For tonight. But I’m gonna guess with the way things went today, there’s probably more you’re holding in.” Nailed it! “We’ll work our way to the rest.”
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“Yeah?” I groaned.
“You need to come downstairs,” Shake called. “Your dad’s here, and he’s gonna end up in a shallow grave if we leave Myth with him for much longer.”
My gaze met with Kennedy’s, and she cracked a smile. “Would that be the end of the world?”
I huffed out a sharp breath and dragged my tired body to its feet. “Unfortunately, my father doesn’t go anywhere without a solid insurance policy.” Holding my hand out, I waited until she took it and pulled Kennedy to her feet. “Even if he dies, he’ll find some fucking way to make our lives a living hell.”
That was no exaggeration.
The man was an infectious disease.
One you definitely didn’t want to catch.
MYTH
“Well, will you look at that…” Shake laughed. “Her old man showed up.”
I grabbed the rag from beside me, scrubbing at my hands with it. Which, when I looked down, seemed kind of fucking stupid considering the once white rag was now almost completely black. If anything, it was covering my hands in more grease than it was taking off. Tossing it at the trash can in the corner, I made my way over to the roller doors where Shake was keeping watch on the crowd outside.
It had shrunk a little, but there were a handful of news vans that looked like they were in for the long haul. Unfortunately for them, they wouldn’t see much because we were leaving at five in the morning to head to Colorado.
Shake and I watched as the dark SUV made its way across the lot, cruising at a snail’s pace.
“You want me to go get Laken?” Tyler asked, rolling out from under the car he was
working on.
I shook my head, folding my arms across my chest. “Nah, give me a few minutes with the fucker first.” Shake laughed, but I kept my focus narrowed on the creeping car, watching it roll closer until I was only twenty feet from the clubhouse.
“You gonna claim the girl before you tell her dad to take a big one up the ass?” Repo inquired as he strolled in through the door which connected the workshop to the clubhouse. “Kennedy’s up there with her having a deep and meaningful. I heard tears.”
My fingers rolled closed into a tight fist as I felt that little match light the fire in my gut.
The burn at first felt good, that initial rush of adrenaline which surged through was like throwing gasoline on the flames. It fueled them, and it wouldn’t be long before they’d begin to rage. It was at that point they became hard to tame, so I tried to curb them before they reached ignition point because if they got too hot, they’d burn this whole fucking place down.
Slowly, I inhaled deeply through my nose, dragging fresh air all the way through into my lungs before releasing it again.
“I’m good,” I noted, knowing both the boys were watching me with caution.
“Uh-huh,” Repo doubted as he took a seat on a stack of tires. “Tyler, bring Clarke in.”
I knew what he was thinking. He didn’t want the cameras privy to our conversation. Letting the world in on our business wasn’t exactly ideal, and now that Laken had been outed, her face was already going to be posted fucking everywhere. It was going to be like having a goddamn magnifying glass on us for a while until shit cooled down, so we needed to keep as much drama on the down-low as possible.
Which meant I was about to test my hard limits by having a conversation with this asshole.
Hearing the crunch of gravel, I took a few steps backward into the workshop, keeping out of view of the circus lining the fences. “He can’t be that smart if he’s showing up at a fucking MC compound at nightfall.”
“Ah, darkness. The perfect time to hide a body,” Crush joked from across the room with a chuckle, the sound echoing menacingly off the walls as Trenton Clarke stepped inside. “I mean, body? What? Excuse me.” He ducked back behind the bonnet of a jacked-up Mercedes with a smirk.
Trenton took a few steps inside, his shoulders back and a wide smile on his face. “Reef,” he beamed, holding out his arms as if presenting himself. “The Myth and Legend. Wow! Never thought I would see the day I ran into you again.”
“Trust me, I’ve been avoiding it like the fucking plague,” I retorted, instantly getting that stirring feeling in my gut. Call it intuition, or instinct. Sometimes you just know when you meet someone that you need to keep your distance from them. I’d known Trenton for years, and there was a reason I kept distance between us. But now I was aware of how he treated Laken, I was more eager than ever to make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone else.
Trenton pulled at the lapels on his suit jacket. It was dark gray with thin pinstripes through it like he thought he was some kind of mafia kingpin.
I almost rolled my eyes. “Frisk him,” I ordered, and Tyler quickly stepped in, grabbing Trenton’s suit and patting him down.
“Hey!” the man protested as Ty reached into his jacket and fished out his cell phone that just happened to be set on record. He tossed it to me before continuing, searching the asshole thoroughly.
Ty finally stepped back leaving an extremely furious senator glowering at me. “I’ll have that back, thank you,” he demanded, holding out his hand flat.
I held his gaze as I dropped the phone to the concrete floor, grinning as I lifted my foot and put the heel of my shit-kicker through the glass screen, shattering it, and almost breaking the entire thing into two pieces.
See, what you’d usually expect is for the guy who owned the phone to be furious, to swear, to curse, and to make threats. But for a man like Trenton, with this device not recording, it meant he didn’t have to play his part anymore. The part he’d perfected—the state senator who’d lost a wife, the family man who was here trying to make a connection with his long-lost daughter.
So instead of anger, this sick smile started to form. “How much do you want for her?”
For a second, my mind couldn’t make sense of the words that had come out of this dumb fucker’s mouth. “I know you ain’t talking about your daughter,” I hissed, taking a step forward and feeling every single one of my brothers move with me.
Trenton started to laugh. “Well, I’m not here looking to buy a fucking dog. I know how these clubs work. Everything has a fucking price, including your whores.” Repo grabbed my shoulder before I could move any further. “So, what’s your price?”
“She ain’t for sale,” I growled.
“I’ll give you one hundred thousand.”
I shook my head in shock, my fingers rolling into a fist. “You deaf or just fucking stupid?”
Trenton sighed. “Two hundred.”
“How about this instead,” I offered, my feet moving on their own accord. I circled the pathetic piece of shit, wishing to fucking hell or heaven or whoever the fuck was listening, that I could just put two fucking bullets in this bastard’s brain and let the world be done with him. “You walk your dumbass out of here. Forget about Leah. Donate some money to a charity. Kiss a baby. I don’t fucking care.”
His light, airy chuckle was dark and deranged.
I always knew Trenton was dirty.
It was why I stayed the hell away from him when I was at the top of my game—the same reason why I didn’t recognize Laken right away—because I wanted nothing to do with his dodgy deals and disgusting fucking tactics around the ring and within his politics.
He wasn’t a man I wanted to work for.
He wasn’t a man I wanted my name to be associated with.
Yet, people fucking loved him. They loved that he supported two sons and their unconventional dreams to be fighters. They loved how he was a widow and loved his wife so much he had never remarried or even dated. They loved how he grieved for his only daughter who went missing seven years ago and was presumed dead.
And now he was about to try and pull the biggest goddamn voting play of all time.
State senator reunited with long lost daughter.
State senator vows justice for abused daughter.
“I’d like to speak with my daughter, thank you,” Trenton demanded casually while adjusting his suit like he was becoming bored. Or maybe he was simply agitated.
I shrugged. “That’s gonna be a no.”
“I thought you were smarter than that, Reef,” he continued, shaking his head like a disappointed parent. Maybe he thought I’d give a fuck or something.
“Guess I’m just a dumb biker.”
“You don’t want to play these games, not with me.”
A collective group of smiles filled the room around me, my brothers relatively amused at the cocky, rich suit standing in the middle of a biker clubhouse thinking he had the upper hand.
I wasn’t stupid enough to underestimate him, though. I knew what he was capable of, the strings he’d pulled before, but I also didn’t give a fuck. And there was no way in hell I was going to let him get to Laken.
Not now.
Not while I’m still fucking breathing.
“I’ve got a game you could play,” I offered, taking a couple of steps back. “It’s called hide and go fuck yourself. I think you’ve probably played before.”
The senator froze, and for a moment, I caught a twitch in his top lip. It was gone within a blink, and a smug grin appeared in its place.
He’d let his mask fall.
It surprised me because he’d always been so good and keeping it pristine and perfect.
That was the difference between him and Laken. He was a cold fucking bastard whose only emotions he felt were anger and greed, mixed with the occasional tantrum when he didn’t get his way. Laken, though, her soul was different, she felt everything so deeply.
She loved hard and felt pain even ha
rder.
Suddenly the door swung open behind me, Laken stepping through warily with Kennedy and Shake right on her heels. Guess Shake felt like my minute was done. My feet were already moving, my eyes watching the way Trenton’s face lit up in delight at the sight of his child.
“Leah!” he crowed, holding his arms out wide as if she were going to run toward him and launch into his arms.
“Get out,” Laken snapped, coming to a sharp halt.
I stepped in behind her, my chest lightly brushing her back.
She inhaled, standing a little taller and pressing her shoulders back. “There’s nothing else I have to say to you. I want you to leave and take the media circus with you.”
“Leah—”
“I’m not Leah anymore.”
“You are my daughter!”
“I was never your daughter,” she hissed, surging forward just slightly. I caught hold of her belt loop with my finger and pulled her back, needing for my own sanity to keep some distance between her and this nutcase. “I was your show pony. I was the little girl you paraded around. I was the doll you dressed up for special occasions.”
The twitch was back.
This time more prominent because his lip almost curling up into a sneer.
“Leah died a long time ago. So I need you to get the hell out and leave me alone.”
“You and I both know that’s not how it works,” Trenton disagreed, shaking his head, a heavy frown on his face letting me know he wasn’t just stupid, he was fucking delusional. He really was confused to why she didn’t understand her place, why she thought she had a say in what happened next. “Don’t make me do this the hard way.”
I opened my mouth to speak, to scold him for ever thinking it was a good idea to threaten Laken. But she moved quicker, spinning around and reaching into my cut and pulling my 9 mil from inside. I could have grabbed her, could have stopped her from turning back and pointing the gun directly at her father, but I didn’t.
My brothers shuffled, others got to their feet, and I held up my hand, letting them know I had it under control.
Laken needed this. She needed to fight back, and she needed to do it for her.