Savage Kiss_A Motorcycle Club Romance_Shattered Hearts MC Read online

  “It’s not as easy as that. If Jackson finds out …”

  “Jackson.” I say his name like a curse. “Fucking Jackson. He was always a jerk, growing up. I’ve told you about that. He always treated people who were beneath him like dirt and those who were above him like royalty. But this is getting out of hand. My brother shouldn’t be making people this scared. What do you think he’ll do to you if he finds out you’ve helped me?”

  She looks at me gravely. “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

  “Then that’s all the more reason we have to do this, but do it carefully.” I walk across to her, laying my hands on her arms and looking at her until she looks back at me. I have to break her, I reflect with horror, the same way I sometimes have to break men at the store. “Think about it like this. If you leave me in here, I’ll be useless. I won’t be able to help anybody. But if you let me out, I swear to God, Sissy, I’ll help you. I’ll help all of you. What if by keeping me in here you actually end up hurting one of your friends, indirectly?”

  “Don’t be a bitch,” Sissy says sourly. “Why would you say that? What are you going to do, anyway? What can you do?”

  “Something!” I snarl. “What do you think, that’d you’ll get me out of here and I’ll just run and leave you? No, I’ll come back with the goddamn cavalry!”

  “Who? Broken Sinners?”

  I shrug. “I know people. Lots of different kinds of people come by the store. You know that. I’ll find someone, pay them my life savings if I have to.”

  “To do what? To kill your big brother?”

  I swallow. I don’t know what I’d do, not really, only that I can’t stay in here for as long as Jackson wants to keep me. “Do you trust me?” I ask, ignoring her question.

  “What?” She flinches.

  “Do you trust me? It’s a simple question.”

  She chews her lips, looking me over like she thinks this is a trick. “Yes, I trust you,” she says. “So what?”

  “If you trust me, you know that I won’t just leave you and your friends here to rot. You know that I’ll do something.”

  “Maybe, but maybe not. And if you don’t, I’m screwed.”

  I cradle her face in my hands the same way I did a year ago when she got blackout drunk and started crying for no reason. She isn’t crying now but her eyes hold the same sadness. “If you help me, I will help you. I swear on my life.”

  Tears prick her eyes, slide down her cheeks. She shrugs me off her and picks up the tray. “I’ll see what I can do,” she says. “That’s the best I can do right now. Oh, and here.” She takes a small bundle from her miniskirt, wedged in the waistband. “Fresh clothes.”

  “Okay,” I reply, taking a step back. I want to press her but I sense it will only do harm. “I’ll be waiting.” I wave a hand at the window. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

  She laughs, low, almost bitter, and then leaves the room. The locking of the door takes a long time and then she walks down the hallway, leaving me.

  I go to the bed and sit down and try not to think, but it’s impossible. My mind spins. Maxine; Sissy … Sissy; Maxine.

  And Dirk. Dirk most of all. The way Sissy smiled. He’s not like the others.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dirk

  I walk across the bar feeling like I’ve just woken up after years of sleeping. Across from me, Rider sits toying with his reddish-gray beard, trying to tie the two ends of his mustache, making the other pledges laugh like assholes. I look around the bar. I need to talk with somebody who knows what the club is all about, an old-timer. In the corner, Henry Highlander sits with his back to the wall, sipping whisky and scowling at everybody and everything.

  Highlander is a short, mean-looking man with flaring white eyebrows and a bald head covered in purple spots. The right side of his face is taken up with a blotched birthmark and the other side is a mass of wrinkles. He looks older than old; a real ancient. I pick up a bottle of whisky from the counter and walk over to him.

  “Highlander,” I mutter.

  His gaze shoots to me as though I’ve woken him. “Dirk, is it?”

  “That’s right,” I say, belatedly wishing I’d spent more time making friends in the club. “Do you mind if I sit, sir?”

  “Sir,” he echoes, smiling. “Take a seat.”

  I’ve no sooner sat down than Rider takes out his phone, nods briskly, and then stands up and strides across the bar to Jackson’s office. Maybe I’m imagining it but I’m sure the look he throws me is full of meaning. A scowl lines his asshole face.

  “I need to know what’s been going on in this club past the new goddamn pledges,” I tell Highlander.

  He slides a whisky across to me and smiles quietly. “That’s an odd question for a young man to ask an old relic like me, son. You ought to be the one with your finger on the pulse of this here club, not me. You ought to be the one involved in its business. I should be asking you what’s going on.”

  “I don’t need a lecture,” I say. “Just let me know what you know. I see you sitting here day in, day out. You must notice things.”

  He rubs at his birthmark. “I notice everything,” he says.

  “Then …”

  “I’m not in the habit of spying on my brothers,” he mutters sourly, draining his whisky. He pours himself another, hands shaking. I take the bottle from him and finish it. He’s spilled half of it on the table.

  “I bet you miss the old days.”

  “Of course I miss the old days.” He grunts out a laugh. “What old man doesn’t miss the old days? That don’t mean I’m gonna snitch, though.”

  “Jesus, old man. I’m not a goddamn cop. I’m asking you because I know you’ve been here longer’n anybody, even the boss, and I know that you’ve seen shit change. You must remember what this club used to be like. I’ve heard stories. I’ve heard about honor and respect and loyalty. And yeah, the club still has that. But it’s not as it was, I’d wager.”

  “You’d be right there,” Highlander mutters gravely, sipping his whisky. The glass rattles against his teeth. “But if you want information, go and ask the fellas you want to know about. I won’t be some go-between.”

  “We can agree that the patch is the most important thing,” I say.

  “Sure, we can,” Highlander agrees. “The patch means loyalty, lad. The patch means brotherhood. The patch means we have the same mother even if we don’t have the same mother, ’cause the club mothered us all. Fellas with no homes and no lives and no lovers come here looking for shelter and they find it.”

  I try to interrupt him, realizing I’ve set him off. But he barrels on. “The club is the only thing that can make a wild man just tame enough so that he’s some goddamn use to himself and his brothers. Otherwise he just ends up in the slammer. I’ve often wondered how many men in solitary would’ve made good brothers if they’d found us sooner.”

  His speech is interrupted when Rider comes swaggering out. He goes to his table and mutters something I can’t hear, but then I don’t need to hear it. The men immediately start getting ready for a war, going to the hiding place behind the bar and taking out gun parts: the heavy guns, rifles and shotguns and a few grenades. Rider instructs the other men and they look the parts over, checking them for damage, and then click the guns together.

  “A pledge ordering around men,” I murmur. “Rider’s still a pledge,” I add, just in case Highlander didn’t know.

  But he does. I can see that in the way he squints across the bar, lower lip shuddering. “A pledge cleans the boots,” he says, almost to himself. “A pledge washes the bikes. A pledge fetches the burgers. A pledge doesn’t stand up there looking at the heavy guns, thinking he’s something.”

  “It’s bullshit,” I agree. “He hasn’t even been patched. He could take off any time he felt like it and we’d have no business chasing him down. He’s a free man and we’re treating him like he’s some sort of brother.”

  “Not we,”
Highlander snarls quietly. He’s like an injured bear. Everything about him speaks of strength, except his body; his eyes and his general aura strain to be the young man he once was, but looking past that he’s just a tired, near-dead husk. “Screw this. Hey, pledge!”

  I warn him too late. Rider comes over, holding half a shotgun in one hand and swinging the rest of it in the other. He sneers down at Highlander. “What’d you say, grandpa?”

  “My boots are fuckin’ filthy,” Highlander says. “Do me a favor, will you, boy? Take them off and give them a good clean.”

  Rider glances down at the boots, which are clean since Highlander doesn’t do much except sit around here. “Look fine to me.”

  “Don’t talk back to me,” Highlander says. “Just do what the fuck you’re told.”

  Rider strokes his mustache for a stunned second. Then he remembers that his gaggle of followers is watching. His face hardens. “Careful what you say, grandpa,” he says loudly. His men nod. “Talk to me like that again and I’ll clean your boots for you, all right, I’ll clean ’em good and fuckin’ proper. I’ll shine them for days and days and days … sitting at your graveside.” With that he returns to the bar, shooting scowls at Highlander.

  I let out a breath and relax into my seat. “I was ready for a fight then, old man.”

  “So was I,” he says, and there’s no indication that he’s joking. “And I can’t even go to Jackson about that disrespectful little animal. I went to him once, you know, asked that we at least make sure the pledges have got what it takes to become brothers. You know what he said to me? ‘I don’t want brothers. I want soldiers.’ He just wants to keep up that fuckin’ prostitute ring bullshit going. What a worthwhile venture!” He spits out the word. “I knew a club girl, a few years back—or was it a few months back? I knew her, is all that matters, and she was a pretty thing. Blonde—well, it don’t matter what she looked like. Her name was Vasilisa. She was Russian, I think.

  “She was a good woman, a strong woman. She did her job and she didn’t take shit from anybody. She was what a club girl ought to be, Dirk. And then one day I get to the club and I find her in tears. It was a damn strange sight, this tall blonde woman in tears. I asked her what was wrong and she said one of the pledges—one of the pledges that isn’t even here anymore, since they come and go as they goddamn please—he tried to force himself on her. She managed to fight him off, but when she went to Jackson he told her to do what the pledge said. She said no. I comforted her, but the fuck could I do? I’m just an old man; I was an old man, even then.

  “Later I found out through one of my old contacts that this pledge sold Vasilisa to a trafficking organization down in Vegas and that she was moved on to God knows where.”

  “Shit,” I mutter. “Holy fuckin’ shit. Selling women to traffickers? Our women? Hell, we don’t even own these women, old man. They can leave if they want.”

  He raises his eyebrow at me like I’m a naïve kid. Maybe to him I am. Thirty-one must seem pretty damn childlike to an old oak. “Can they, really?”

  I stand up, nod to Highlander, and then go outside and take out my cell phone. I dial the bar and tell Angie to get Ghost right away.

  “What’s the rush?” she says. “Can’t you chat a while?”

  “Just get him!” I snap.

  My mind is racing; I need out of this life, out of this goddamn club. I’m not sticking around to see … my train of thought derails as my source of panic hits me. I’ve never been the inward-looking type. I know that some men are, constantly wondering what’s inside of them. There were a few like that in the army who were always talking about how they’d changed and who they used to be and all that horseshit. But I’ve never cared to do that, even privately. But now I do, and I realize that my panic doesn’t come from any concern for myself. It comes from concern for Meghan. I want out of this life and I want to get her far, far away from her brother. The way he casually implied that I should fuck her … he’d sell her. He’d sell her in a goddamn heartbeat.

  “Dirk?” Ghost says after about ten minutes of pacing.

  “I need a favor.”

  “Okay …”

  “I just—” I cut short, wondering what it is I exactly need. “I need you to get me an apartment ready down there. I’ll be bringing one other person with me. Leave the address and the keys with Angie. And Ghost, get it under one of my aliases.”

  “Okay, sounds good. I’ll sort it.”

  “Thanks, Ghost.”

  “I guess I might be seeing you soon then, eh?”

  “Might be,” I agree. “I just need to get—”

  “You found a girl?” Ghost suddenly asks.

  “Why?”

  “You sound like I did when I found mine.”

  He hangs up, leaving me to stand in the parking lot wondering what the hell’s going on with me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Meghan

  I lie on my back and close out the world, which I can’t do by closing my eyes alone. I have to close my eyes and then lay my forearm over them, and then when that doesn’t work I press a pillow against my face and lay my forearm across that, pressing the pillowed darkness against my eyelids. I want to float away, to not have to think. I can’t do anything until Sissy comes back—if she comes back—so I might as well try and rest.

  But my mind wanders to my first day of high school. A memory strikes, viper-like, and suddenly I’m standing with my cheap rucksack hooked over one shoulder, watching. Hating.

  ***

  I spent the day making friends with Janine. She was a hard girl with a tight blonde ponytail and rolled-up sleeves who none of the older kids picked on throughout the day, though they picked on most of us. One of the older kids slapped me across the thighs with a ruler and a girl in my history class had her bag stolen. But not Janine. So on first break I went over to her and introduced myself, as prim and proper and ridiculous as you please. I thought she might slap me but a smile touched her lips and I realized she wasn’t as tough as she made out. She was just a normal girl and some bad things had happened to her, making her act tough.

  We spent lunchtime talking about her dad and her dead mom and how she wanted to be a vet when she got older. Then it was the end of the day and we were walking home together, since we lived in the same direction.

  Jackson pulled up on his bike.

  He stopped in front of us.

  He was older, but to me he still looked like a dorky kid. He was never bulky, but his jacket—unpatched—gave him some extra padding. He lit a cigarette and watched us silently as he smoked.

  “What do you want?” I said. I wanted to wait for him to speak but it was clear he would just sit there and smoke all day, enjoying our discomfort.

  “Look at this fine piece,” he said, looking Janine up and down. Jackson was a man, nearly twenty, and Janine wasn’t a day over fourteen. And she wasn’t one of those teenagers who looked older. She was flat-chested and flat-assed and looked more like a kid than a woman.

  I knew what he was doing; last night I had thrown a fit because he wouldn’t give me money for a cab. I had thrown a mug at him and trashed his bedroom, not that he ever went in there. This was his punishment. He spoke to Janine but he looked at me, secretly, and grinned when he saw that he was having the desired effect.

  “You’re really goddamn beautiful, you know that?”

  I looked to Janine, hoping she would still have that hard look on her face, hoping that she would tell him to go fuck himself like she had to an eleventh grader earlier in the day. But instead she toed the ground and blushed like a cheerleader who’d just been asked to the prom by the football captain.

  “Um, thanks. Who are you?” Even her voice changed. It went higher in pitch. She looked down at the ground shyly when she spoke, whereas at school she stared everybody in the eyes and glared at them.

  “The name’s Jackson.”

  “He’s my brother,” I muttered.

  “Don’t tell too many people that, sis,�
�� Jackson said, grinning in a friendly way. Only I, who knew him well, saw the malice in it.

  Janine laughed far too hard, took a step forward, took a step back.

  “Why don’t you climb on?” he asked her, still with that asshole grin on his face. “Come on.”

  Janine was hesitant but after some oohing and ahhing she went with him, leaving me to watch them go and pray that Jackson didn’t do anything horrible to her. I never found out exactly what happened.

  One day I got to school to find Janine tougher-looking than normal, her ponytail tied even tighter. I tried to speak to her in the yard and she wheeled on me, eyes full of hate, and twisted a bunch of my hair in her fist. “Stay the fuck away from me!” she snapped.