Take Me, Outlaw(47)

He seemed to sense my thoughts, and sneered. “Wab was I gubba say to'm? Dab your friemb bibn' know how ta take a joke?”



I lost my temper then, and shoved his face down into the water with the damp cigarette butts and fossilized dog shit where it belonged. He struggled, his screams bubbling up below me, and I contemplated how good it would feel to just keep going until he stopped thrashing. Instead, I gave it another moment and pulled his head back up again, listening to him choke on cold slime and puke it back up again.



“I just gave you a long-overdue bath, Vole,” I said. “If you want to thank me, you can start by delivering a message to Giovanni. We don't want trouble, and we won't start trouble, but we're ready for trouble if that's what it comes to. We got a dead Reaper on our side, you've got two dead wiseguys on yours. Fine. We're even. We can all still walk away from this, and go back to business as usual.”



“B-B-Big G ain't gonna go for that!” Vole spluttered. I tossed him aside, then delivered a brutal kick to his stomach, feeling one of his ribs snap under my foot. I heard him moan as he crumpled into a ball, shitting his pants.



“Then you'd better convince him, Vole,” I answered through clenched teeth. “Or next time, your face will be connecting with pavement instead of ice. Think it over.”



With that, I turned my back on him, walking back to my apartment. My bare feet were numb from standing on the cold sidewalk for so long, and I was grateful that the city hadn't gotten much snow this winter. Otherwise, I'd probably have lost a couple of toes to frostbite.



Of course, I'll probably lose a lot more pieces—valuable ones—if this thing with Giovanni doesn't get straightened out.



I tried to tell myself that everything would be fine. Vole would take the message back to his boss, and Giovanni would think it over and realize that an all-out war would be bad for business. We'd have a sit-down—someplace neutral, where neither of us could ambush the other—and the whole thing would end with a drink and a back-slapping embrace and a “Sorry about your guys,” and we could all get back to earning and living our lives without jumping at our own shadows.



Sure. I'll bet it'll play out exactly like that.



Either that, or Giovanni will call in all of the crews affiliated with his own, burn us all to the ground, and piss on the ashes before finding some other MC to do his dirty work for him.



I bent down to pick up Vole's gun from the corner of the hallway, tucking it into my jeans next to my own. I opened the door to my apartment and looked at the few possessions I'd accumulated. Deciding that almost none of them were irreplaceable, I grabbed a rumpled t-shirt, pulled on my socks, and zipped my beaten-up paratrooper boots. Finally I picked up the most important thing I owned—my sleeveless denim “cut,” a vest embroidered with the words “War Reapers MC” and “Chicago” surrounding a bullet-riddled skull wearing an army helmet.



I knew I'd have to crash at the Nest, at least for the foreseeable future. There were plenty of rooms with cots in the back. I also knew that if the Reapers had even a slim chance of surviving this mess, we'd have to rely on strength in numbers.



It was either that, or hop on our bikes and clear out of town for months or even longer. It wasn't as though this was not an option. We'd often hit the highways together several times a year for weeks at a time, visiting with other chapters of our MC, hijacking valuable cargo from well-traveled trucking routes, running guns or drugs. We slept out under the stars most nights and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows like we were on a camping trip.



Those runs were my favorite thing about being a Reaper. They made me feel like Jesse James and a star-gazing, hopelessly romantic kid all at the same time. We could go anywhere we liked, take whatever we wanted, stay off the radar and away from the buttoned-down geeks and weak-ass cagers who could never understand real freedom the way we did.



Yeah, it all sounded like a good plan for getting us out of Giovanni's crosshairs until things quieted down. Except that I knew no matter how adventurous it sounded, all it would really amount to was running away scared. And I knew what Bard would say—that wasn't what the Reapers were about. It could never be what we were about, because the message it sent would be all too clear: The Reapers were cowards. The Reapers were pussies. The Reapers could be pushed around, driven out without a fight, disrespected and dismissed without any consequences.



Well, fuck that.



I hadn't fought and bled for my Reaper patch just so I could paint a wide yellow streak on it when things got tough. None of us had. Other gangs could call us thugs, gear heads, grease monkeys, cavemen, and barbarians. But no one would ever call us cowards, not while even one of us was left alive to shoot a gun or swing a wrench. That was the pledge we'd all taken—the oath each of us had sworn on our own blood when we were patched and officially inducted into the club.



Yeah, well, that's pretty talk, isn't it? Real cowboy shit. The only problem is, these wiseguys all swore an oath too. And there's a fuck-load more of them, an entire army in Gucci and Armani, with access to the kind of firepower piss-poor bikers like us could only dream of. So aside from a flat-out suicide mission, what's my big plan?



I didn't have a long-term plan, but my short-term one was crystal clear: I needed a drink.





Chapter Two



Lauren



I was standing in front of the door, wearing my most alluring black dress and working up the nerve to enter a room full of rowdy bikers. I could already hear them, roaring and cursing and chanting like Vikings who've just returned from a season of violence and pillaging.



The Devil's Nest was a biker bar on the edge of the upper North Side where the slums of Rogers Park grudgingly gave way to the meticulously manicured suburbs of Evanston and Skokie. Its facade consisted of bashed, battered, rotting, sun-bleached planks of wood, many of them pocked by old bullet holes. Its sign was so ancient that the dull and flaking painted words could barely be read anymore. The neon signs in the windows had long since been darkened, casualties of thrown fists and thrown bodies in a hundred different brawls. The main window had been smashed far too often, and a black tarp was stapled over it.



My hand trembled over the door handle, and I thought back to the previous night, remembering how it all started—the six words that had led me to this point.



# # #



“Is there anything I can do?”



I almost didn't hear these words over the sounds inside my own head: my pulse throbbing like someone's palms smacking fiercely against my ears, my breath coming in sharp and whistling gasps of pain and disbelief.



Jared stood in front of me, his watery blue eyes blinking rapidly with guilt, a hateful pink flush blossoming across his neck, ears, and shoulders. Ever since he'd started studying pre-law during our first year of college together, Jared always fretted about that flush. He called it his “tell,” and lamented that it would almost certainly prevent him from ever realizing his dream of becoming a trial lawyer, since it would alert his opponents—not to mention the judges—whenever he became flustered or angry.



I used to tease him about it, telling him that he'd better never cheat on me because I'd know immediately when the raspberry-red blotches appeared high on his cheeks. And he'd laugh and tackle me on the couch or bed, insisting that that'd never happen, telling me he could never even look at another girl as long as he had me.



He'd made these colorful proclamations as recently as a couple of weeks ago, straight-faced, clear-eyed, with no hint of the familiar scarlet stress-rash spreading across his skinny, milk-pale shoulders. Based on what he'd just admitted to, he'd been fucking someone else—no, worse, much worse, he'd been loving someone else—during that time. So clearly, he could control it just fine while he was lying. The rash only seemed to be a problem while he was telling the truth when he'd rather not be, under the disapproving gaze of someone who'd judge him.



That was all I'd become to him in this moment, I realized. I was no longer a lover or a friend or a confidant. I was just a judge to present a guilty plea to. He was speaking again, and I shook myself, trying to clear the red haze of anger and pain that pulsed steadily behind my eyeballs. “What?”



“I asked if there's anything I can do,” he repeated, the corners of his mouth turned down in a sulk like a little boy caught scrawling on the walls in crayon. Not a man, but a weak and selfish child, never truly sorry for what he's done. Only sorry that he has to take responsibility for it now and live with his mother's disappointment.



In that moment, I wanted more than anything for him to be the best lawyer who ever lived—to make a fiery, rousing, persuasive opening argument, to present a compelling case that would allow me to understand how he could have done this to me. I wanted him to stand square and tall, meet my gaze evenly, and soberly offer up evidence to justify his deception. I wanted him to be Perry Mason, Atticus Finch, hell, even Saul fucking Goodman...I wanted him to be a man, even a bad man, instead of the slope-shouldered, mortified toddler standing in front of me.



I desperately wanted him to assemble any combination of words and phrases that could possibly make these feelings inside of me go away. Something that could erase the last few moments and make me believe everything would be okay. Something that could let me unclench my jaw and not feel so utterly humiliated and broken.