Revenge - Reckless Renegades 1 Page 4

  And Bea was who Pops had left the strip club to, entrusting it to me until her eighteenth birthday when she would get it all - the strip club, the club house, the house our mother had lived in because she didn't want to live in the club full time.

  I just couldn't accept that it was a coincidence that just after she aged up, I got locked up, our brothers got shot, and she was still inside with them.

  Calloway wanted to believe she was innocent, that maybe Doug forced her into it, or coerced her in some way.

  But Bea wasn't like a typical girl of her age. She was smart in both a street and a book way. She was strong-willed. She refused to bend to anyone's will.

  And, what was maybe most damning, she liked Doug.

  She'd had a crush on Doug since she was still a starry-eyed fourteen-year-old.

  Objectively, I guess he was decent enough looking. Tall, wide, black-haired, blue-eyed, with a slight Brooklyn accent.

  Outside of that, though, I had no idea what she saw in him. He was a dick through-and-through.

  Then again, plenty of girls went for that type.

  It wasn't so far-fetched to me that with me out of the way, Doug made moves on Bea, got her on his side, got her to give him control over everything.

  I didn't like the idea that she was okay with Doug shooting her brothers, but maybe that was something Doug had kept from her. Maybe he convinced her that Hatcher and Calloway just up and walked away from her, that they didn't give a shit about her.

  None of us liked the idea of a blood betrayal.

  But sometimes life sucked. And you had to be a rational adult about it.

  "Have they kept the staff?" I asked, bringing up the binoculars, never having felt more ridiculous in my life.

  "Bartenders, yes. Doormen, no. They have our old guys handling that now."

  "It's easy to do hand-offs when you look like you're just shaking hands with someone or patting down someone coming into a club."

  It chafed a bit to admit it, but Doug did have some good business skills. It should have occurred to me ages ago to have one of our guys at the door instead of the current method, asking for specific drinks at the bar then being met by one of our guys like old friends.

  It wasn't a sophisticated system, but thus far it had worked.

  We didn't even get cops banging down our door.

  Our clients may have been college-aged kids, and college-aged kids did tend to be stupid, but they were smart enough to keep their lips shut about where their supply came from. Even they knew that if we got raided and locked up, they lost their supply.

  It would be a lose-lose situation.

  "Have you seen our guys?" I asked, wondering why it was almost time to open up for the night shift, yet no bikes had pulled in yet.

  "They'll show up," Hatcher assured me. "Likely about one minute away from opening."

  Some things never changed.

  You could expect bikers to be a lot of things. Punctual was not one of them.

  Like clockwork, they rolled in at two-to-nine, parking in the fire zone, talking loudly to each other as they moved inside. All smiles and laughter.

  Not a care in the fucking world.

  No crisis of conscience.

  Those motherfuckers.

  It was one thing to know your men had betrayed you. It was another to see it right before your eyes, all those years of trust and brotherhood a complete and utter waste.

  A club was nothing without loyalty.

  And every last one of them would pay for their betrayal.

  Without mercy.

  It wouldn't be the first time I had to play judge, jury, and executioner.

  Being a club president meant you had to deal with the ugly side of things. Like handling the situation when you learned one of your men was stealing from you. Or talking to the competition. It had only happened a few times in both my and my Pops' time at the top. But there was only one end to those types of situations.

  We couldn't go to the cops and bitch that someone stole money we earned selling illegal drugs.

  We couldn't let them walk away and hope and pray they didn't share our secrets. Or, worse yet, make them look weak to our enemies.

  No.

  There was only one way to handle disloyalty.

  That was with a bullet.

  We'd all been there.

  Not always by choice, but duty.

  Would it be hard, like Calloway said?

  Fuck yes.

  These were men I shared stories with, drinks with, some of them taught me how to shoot a gun or wield a knife, others I had gone through school with, grown up with, created memories with.

  It would not be easy to raise my arm, point a gun, and end those lives.

  But could I do it?

  For my club, my brothers, my sister, my legacy?

  Fuck yes.

  Without a second thought.

  Maybe that made me a lesser man than Cal who was clearly more conflicted about it, but that was okay. I was alright with being the bastard. I had a lot of practice.

  "We should get moving," Hatcher said a couple hours later, nodding his head toward the clubhouse. "They'll be heading out soon. We don't want to be seen."

  No, we did not.

  Not until the time was right.

  Not until the night we caught them by surprise.

  And got our fucking club back.

  With that, we ran through the woods lining the back of the strip club and the clubhouse, hiking up the slight incline to the left side, giving us a better vantage point.

  "There's a hole in the fence," I growled as soon as we got into position.

  "Doug doesn't seem overly concerned about security," Hatcher agreed. "Which works to our advantage."

  How lax had he gotten, I couldn't help but wonder. Was the security system still up? Was someone watching it? Did they still do rounds to check things out before they locked down tight?

  I guess I would see.

  The bikes rumbled up a while later. The door flew open, revealing a sliver of Doug's profile as he greeted the men, cocky smile pulling at one side of his lips, a cigarette situated to the other, making me itch for one myself. But the night was too still. The scent would carry. There were twelve acres of land I owned around the clubhouse, so there was nowhere else the smoke could reasonably come from. We couldn't risk it.

  "Who's that?" I asked, jerking my chin to a single light cutting through the darkness on the street. The clubhouse was at the end of the road. There was nowhere else it could be going but there, but it wasn't rumbling like a bike, more like a busted car muffler, grumbling and scraping against the blacktop.

  "If that's who I think it is, she will drive half a mile up the road closer to us, then park, then walk to the clubhouse, go inside, then come back out in a few hours."

  "Clubwhore?" I asked, brows drawing together.

  Contrary to popular belief, clubwhores came from all walks of life. Sure, there was a standard. The girls with next to nothing on and next to nothing in their heads and next to nothing in the way of morals, ready and willing to have a train run on them right beside their best friend. But thanks to popular culture - thank you very much, fictional TV shows about bikers - a lot of good little suburban girls with Catholic schoolgirl complexes and minor daddy issues suddenly wanted to know what it is like to get ridden by an outlaw biker.

  It was always nice to have a variety.

  But a clubwhore wasn't going to do me any good right now.

  No one wanted to fuck a guy who used to be president of an MC.

  "I don't think so," Hatcher went on. "She doesn't have the right look."

  "The look?" I asked, shaking my head. They all looked different.

  "You know, that air of desperation. This one walks in there like she owns the joint. One time, she clocked Bud when he grabbed her ass. Just not the type."

  Bud wasn't the best looking of the bunch, but I had never known a clubwhore to turn him down either.

  "Any idea wh
y she parks so far away? Is she trying to score?"

  "It's possible. She never seems high when she comes or goes. But maybe she gets something to take home, share with somebody."

  Everything felt better on Molly from a good, long stretch to a solid fucking. It would make sense if she scored just to get high and fuck.

  Just like Hatcher said she would, she parked half a mile up the road, much closer to us than the club, which was the only part so far that didn't make sense to me.

  Then she climbed out of her busted-ass car.

  See, I knew better than to try to stereotype people who recreationally used drugs. It was a much harder thing to judge than, say, people who are jonesing to get high all day and night. Soccer moms wanted pot to help with period cramps. Veterans wanted Molly to help with PTSD. Stressed out A-students at the local college campus wanted 'shrooms to help lift the weight of their course load and parents' expectations.

  There was no type.

  There was no way to see someone on the street and know for sure they have never - or don't currently - use drugs on occasion.

  But, somehow, everything in me said that the woman that climbed out of that car wasn't there to score.

  Not just because she was fucking gorgeous - it was rare I saw a rave chick who wasn't at least halfway fuckable - but she was definitely hot. Tall, on the lean side but not skinny, long legs, long dark hair, sharp features, arms full of ink.

  There was just something about the casual confidence with which she wore her white tee, cutoff shorts, and Chucks - Chucks, in the swamp-assiest part of summer - that just didn't scream at me that she was there for drugs.

  She was calm, sure of herself, and almost, if I wasn't mistaken by her gait, determined.

  To do what, I had no clue.

  "Got what you wanted to get tonight?" Calloway asked, grumpy because he was tired from work, knowing he only got a couple hours before he had to get up and do the grind over again. Why, I had no idea. He didn't need to work. I'd told him that. I'd shown him the money we had to live on. It was more than enough to get us by.

  Calloway was either proud, or didn't believe my plan would work out, and he would need a backup if he managed to avoid jail.

  Or both.

  "No."

  "What more do you want?"

  "To add kidnapping to his rap sheet," Hatcher supplied.

  He wasn't wrong. So I didn't correct him.

  "You can't be fucking serious, man," Cal objected, and I could feel his eyes boring into the side of my face.

  "We need to know what is going on inside. We can't have that without someone who has had eyes in there recently."

  "We have done a lot of fucked up shit in our day, Thayer," Calloway started. "But we don't kidnap people."

  "We also never had a need to."

  "We don't need to kidnap and scare the shit out of some innocent woman either."

  For the most part, I was on Cal's side. I had done a lot of shit in my time. I'd hurt people. I'd killed people. But those people? They were of the male persuasion. I didn't put my hands on women. Unless they asked for a little ass-slapping when I was going at them from behind.

  I didn't like the idea of snatching some chick off the street, making her think the worst was about to happen, then spend hours questioning her.

  Traumatizing her for life.

  I didn't like having to do ugly shit to decent people.

  But I understood that this wasn't a normal situation, that there was a lot at stake, that we would only have one shot at this. So we had to take advantage of every opportunity that came our way.

  My moral compass never pointed due north.

  And maybe revenge was making the arrow take a turn toward the south.

  But I comforted myself with the fact that I had no intention of hurting her. The worst thing to happen to her was the fear of getting abducted in the first place. Once that was over, I would make it clear that all we wanted from her was information. Then silence.

  "Does she ever come with anyone?" I heard myself asking.

  "No. Always alone," Hatcher told me.

  Good.

  That was good.

  Because it most likely said she wasn't buying drugs for a fuckfest, that she was single. I mean, if that was my woman, there was no way I'd be letting her walk into a biker compound alone. Even just to get something for the both of us.

  Not that I had women.

  Not in an exclusive way anyway.

  I liked my freedom.

  I saw no reason to settle on one meal for the rest of my life when I could sample the entire menu whenever the mood struck.

  My old man hadn't always been faithful to our mother, but she had raised us to believe that fidelity was just as manly as fucking around.

  Maybe someday I would settle down, only take it out for one woman.

  But in my experience, there just weren't many bikers who chose to be loyal to one woman.

  That said, if I had a woman who looked like her - even just a casual fuck-buddy who looked like her - I'd never let her walk into a compound alone without me.

  The longer we waited there, the more I questioned her reason for being there.

  A deal didn't take that long.

  Maybe she was shacked up with someone inside.

  She seemed Roux's type, though he generally went with blonde chicks. But there were a bunch of other men who would like her sexy ass, would be down for a quick fuck session before she got back to her real life that didn't involve cheap sex with a dirty biker.

  "She's coming out," Hatcher told me, snapping me out of my swirling thoughts in time to see the woman in question making her way out the back door.

  Somehow more tense than she had been when she'd gone in.

  So if she was there fucking someone, he was doing a shit job of it.

  "What's the..." Hatcher started to ask before I started down the hill at a run. "Alright then," he agreed, and I could hear him following behind me, gaining. Calloway, however, seemed to be following at a snail's pace, the stubborn ass.

  I had a million questions circling around my head as we closed in on the car, as we crouched down in waiting.

  And then there she was.

  Full of all the answers I had been craving.

  FOUR

  Sera

  She was not doing well.

  That was what was on my mind as I made my way out of the clubhouse.

  My sister.

  Her dull, vacant eyes.

  Her greasy hair.

  Her too-thin body.

  She'd always been slight, had the kind of metabolism that very few people were blessed with as adults. No matter what she ate, she never had to worry about packing on pounds. But this was different. She'd been resting on the bed when I came in wearing a tight tank top that put her concave stomach on display. Her long legs lost any softness they might have once had, looking small enough to span each of them with my hands like a little girl or anorexic woman.

  Just one glance at her made my stomach curl inward on itself.

  Then trying to engage her while she zoned out, while she evaded personal questions, as her eyes shot to the door at every slight noise.

  It took every ounce of control in me - admittedly, this was not a strength of mine - to hold onto my tongue, not to turn on my heel, charge out into the common room, and beat the face in of the bastard who had done this to her.

  Had there ever been a choice on her part, it was clearly currently ripped away. Nothing about the way Doug hovered around, listened in, followed me, implied that she had any freedom; he owned her completely.

  I had no fucking idea how to go about getting her out of that situation.

  That was what was on my mind.

  That was why I was off my game.

  That was why I didn't notice anything out of the usual.

  That was how I missed them.

  Until it was too late.

  Until I felt a hand close around my mouth from behind, felt an arm a
nchor around my stomach, dragging me against his strong body, strong enough to keep me from making any headway even as I lurched forward, even as I crouched as far as his arm would allow only to propel myself upward, trying to break free of his hold.

  It was useless.

  His arms only tightened.

  Everything that happened next was a blur.

  I was dragged backward as another man let himself into my front seat. I was twisted as the man who was holding me bent backward, dragging me onto his lap as he slid into my backseat.

  Another massive body moved in at my other side, removing any chance of breaking away and getting out the other door.

  As he sat, he turned deliberately away, shielding his face.

  I could see the eye area of the man driving for a split second before the hand that was around my stomach lifted only to press down between my shoulder blades, folding me forward.

  Then I could see nothing.

  I tried to be smart, to count the turns, to figure out where we were going.

  I wasn't stupid.

  Three giant men didn't kidnap you to bring you home to share tea and Madeleines.

  Nothing good was going to happen to me when the car came to a stop, and I was hauled back out again.

  In that moment of clarity, I didn't think about the horrors of beatings and rape.

  I thought about Joey.

  I thought about how - should these men kill me - there would be no one to take care of her, get her out, get her back to who she was before.

  That was my job.

  And my job alone.

  If they killed me, there was nothing to stop Doug from hurting her worse, from giving her a similar fate as the one I was facing.

  I had to get through this.

  I had to get free.

  If not for me, then for her.

  I wasn't sure what my best bet was.

  To fight, or to seem meek and passive.

  Sure, meek and passive weren't exactly true to my nature, but two big, strong men with bad intentions, maybe playing at being those things would keep them from killing me.

  Choice made, I stopped trying to jerk my body around, get free, I talked myself into calm as my noisy car thumped a bit as it did when it idled before going into park.