Absinthe Dreams (Voodoo Bastards MC #6)

Prologue

A FEW YEARS PRIOR… DURING THE MUTINY.

C hainsaw…

Things were getting hot. The club had a solid schism running right up the fucking middle, and my fat ass was sweating it out big time, worrying the chips would fall on Ruth’s side of things before the guys that were over his bullshit would raise fists, or guns, or whatever the hell else they needed to make sure that we came out on top of the dog pile of infighting that was starting up fierce.

I hadn’t shown my hand yet. Yet being the operative word. Still, it didn’t matter which side I was on – Ruth was so fuckin’ paranoid and high out of his fuckin’ mind, it didn’t matter anymore. He thought you were against him? You were against him, whether you were loyal or not.

It was fucked up – and his disloyalty to his brothers with his own paranoid ravings had been the straw that’d broken my camel’s back.

I’d lost all respect for the dude when he’d accused me of talking behind his back.

I’d meant it when I’d told the motherfucker to his face that I hadn’t made up my mind, but his paranoid bullshit was about to fuckin’ do it for me.

I leaned against my bike and lit a cigarette. I was supposed to meet up with a couple of the guys to handle some business, but shit didn’t feel right. I’d been waiting a while now, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck the more the seconds ticked by.

I wasn’t fuckin’ disloyal – and I told him I’d do whatever it took to prove it, even if I’d had my own private thoughts that maybe, just maybe, Hex, Saint, and LaCroix were right.

Ruth was out of his fucking mind expanding like he was. Shit was getting played too fast, too loose, and it would be all our fuckin’ asses if shit went even a hair sideways with how much we were entrenched in just about every illegal activity happening in New Orleans.

The club out there in Florida, coming into town looking for one of their own, had provided an opportunity, and the muscle and the leverage to take out a bunch of the Eastern Bloc motherfuckers running a human trafficking ring around here.

Of course, we hadn’t been interested in that trade, but we’d happily step up and take over their gun and drug trade.

Taking them out had freed some shit up for us, sure, and we’d stepped up and stepped in to fill the vacuum of power, but both our existing operations and theirs?

It’d been a lot. Too much. We were spread thin, but recruiting to the numbers and all willy-nilly, balls-to-the-wall like Ruth had? That wasn’t the fuckin’ answer.

That was a whole new set of problems. That shit was how you got rats in your house, and that was something none of us could afford.

Speaking of rats, it was two of the new guys that rode up – Ratfuck and Spoon.

I didn’t like either of them. When I said they were new, I meant it. Young, dumb, full of cum, and thought that since they now wore the club colors, they were as equal as some of the long-timers in the club. Even the ones who’d been club since before they were even a sparkle in their daddy’s eye.

While that was how it was supposed to work in club life, they ain’t prospected for more than a couple of months , which is not how that worked.

“You wanna tell me what the fuck we’re supposed to be doin’?” I asked. Ruth hadn’t seen fit to tell me – like I was just a dumb fuckin’ prospect. Which is why I was afraid that this was gonna go south quick.

My hackles were up, but I played it cool, a cigarette bobbing between my lips as I’d asked. Ratfuck and Spoon got off their bikes as I raised my lighter, flicking it to life behind my cupped hand to light my cig.

“Yeah, Ruth sent us out here to take care of business,” Ratfuck declared. I took a drag and pocketed my lighter.

“You gonna fill me in, or you gonna keep me guessing all night?” I demanded.

Ratfuck and Spoon exchanged a look, laughing, and what happened next happened fast.

They drew down on me and fired away. I felt like I had been punched in the upper chest on the left-hand side and likewise in my hip on the lower right-hand side. I was knocked back into the corrugated steel side of the riverfront warehouse building and felt myself slide to the ground.

I gawped like a landed fish and knew I was fuckin’ done like last night’s dinner if I didn’t play this convincingly enough.

I was pretty sure neither of these two dipshits had properly killed a motherfucker before, and I was banking on the fact that if I played dead convincingly enough, they’d fuck off and I could do something about saving my own ass.

I gasped, let out a shuddering breath, and went limp against the wall I was against. I stared into space and heard Spoon ask, “Think that was enough?”

“I dunno.” Ratfuck sniffed, and boom! A shot took me in my leg.

Motherfucker!

My leg bounced from the impact, but I didn’t so much as flinch, just slid to the side in a heap and waited, staring at their legs.

“Come on, let’s go,” Spoon said.

“Yeah, he’s done.” Ratfuck snapped a few pictures of me with his burner.

I waited until the roar of their tailpipes was but a distant echo in my frantic mind, then I dug my phone out of my pocket with my right hand, gritting my teeth against a pain so profound I didn’t even fuckin’ know how to describe it.

I called 9-1-1 for myself, and the rest? The rest came in flashes as I went in and out of consciousness.

I remember hearing the sirens and feeling the grating, burning, lancing, and screaming pain as I was lifted to be slid into the back of an ambo.

I coded, I guess. Came back to light shining in my eyes, people talking, people shouting. I came too again in the trauma center, lights flashing intermittently between ceiling tiles as I screamed out for anyone who would listen to call Saint or Hex from my phone.

There were people, shears cutting off clothes, a snarky male voice – surly and unimpressed, and then I heard her.

Her voice was lyrical and sweet. Thick like honey, and the sound of it alone made me believe that I would survive this. I fumbled, hand and arm full of tubes and lines, and grasped onto her wrist.

Her face came into view. She was beautiful, with the face of an angel. I watched her full lips move as she said, “Don’t worry about them. We’re going to take care of you.”

“Can you gimme something for the pain? Please?”

Her seafoam green eyes softened into something like pity, and the wrinkles of concentration across her forehead smoothed in realization.

She barked out something at one of the others rushing and fussing, doing whatever at my side. She ordered them to order me some goddamned pain meds and said, “I’m sorry. Just rest now. We’re going to stabilize you and get you up into surgery as soon as we can.”

I grabbed her wrist as she pushed off the railing to leave, and she focused on me, some of her blonde hair falling over her shoulder in the ponytail she kept it in. It was bright against her black scrubs.

“Don’t let them take my leg off or anything.”

She smiled empathically and said, “It’s bad, but it’s not that bad. You’ll keep your leg. I promise.”

I let her go and murmured, “Thank you,” just as the drugs took full effect.

A FEW WEEKS LATER…

Saint was manning my wheelchair as we rolled down the hallway.

I was finally busting out of here. My leg was still in a cast, from hip to foot.

You’d like to think I’d laid my bike with it being cast up like that rather than shot, but the bullet had almost shattered my fuckin’ femur, and it was part of the fuckin’ process, I guess.

My arm was in a sling because of the bullet I’d taken in my shoulder.

Apparently, I would be sporting fragments of some of the slugs Ratfuck and Spoon had put into me for the rest of my life.

But the dipshits hadn’t double-tapped me or finished the fuckin’ job, so I was alive, and alive meant I could have my revenge.

The boys had pulled some strings, and I was a ghost as far as Ruth and the rest of the club were concerned, which meant I could heal in peace to get my fucking revenge, which was honestly all I could think about.

That and making things so I was square with the pretty ER doc or nurse – whoever she was, who’d treated me with respect.

It felt good to be back in my colors again.

Saint had stitched them back together for me and brought them with him – blood-soaked patches and all.

They’d cut right across the top of the shoulders, and again, it was the pretty ER nurse or doc who’d cut them with care.

Made me wonder if she had family that was part of the life, or something. She seemed to know, you know…

“I still think you’re crazy,” Saint grunted.

“I’m telling you. I’ll know her when I see her, brother. Just wheel me on out through the ER and let me have a look,” I said.

“Fine,” Saint grated. “But you’re supposed to be dead.”

“I know it, but you know me…”

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled, but he did what I asked, and rolled me through the emergency department.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” a doctor said, pushing off from around the central desk’s wrap. “You can’t be back here.”

“Sorry, Doc, couldn’t figure out where to park and ended up in the lot out this way. I thought it’d be okay to cut through. Not tryin’ to cause any trouble,” Saint said. I was focused on looking for her…

“Saint.” I interrupted the doctor and my brother, and thrust my chin at the woman who’d just emerged from the curtained area.

“Hey, Doc!” I called out, and she looked up and over our way. Her smile was a genuine one as she wandered over our way.

“Well, hello again,” she said with an amicable smile. “Looks like you’re getting out of here today.”

I nodded and extracted one of my cards from inside my cut. It was my last one and had a bit of my blood just starting to soak one corner. I tore that corner off, because gross, and handed the paper with nothing but a number inked onto the front in nondescript block numbers.

“You need anything or anyone taken care of, you just call me,” I told her and held it up to her.

She took it from me with a nervous laugh and said, “I’ll, uh, keep that in mind…”

“Chainsaw,” I said. “The name’s Chainsaw.”

“Chainsaw…” She said my road name, as though tasting it for the first time, and I liked the sound of it on her lips.

“Thanks, Doc,” Saint muttered, and he pushed me past her and the other doctor, who was lookin’ at us both gobsmacked, and out the ambulance bay’s automatic doors.