26. Chapter 26
Not Your Oasis, the aptly named desert haven for anyone with a demon tattoo—or at least the start of one—on their arm was split between the Red Den and the McCleans’ private living quarters.
The Red Den was for the Demons. A giant, square bar, dozens of cheap, mismatched tables unintended to survive being flung across the room, pool tables with pristine felt, dart boards/piercing stations (Billy’s favorite), a locked boardroom for the vested, upper-ranking Demons to conduct business, a small tattoo parlor, and a single hellhole of a bathroom labeled Pisser.
Entering the Red Den was an initiation itself meant to weed out weak stomachs and pussies.
Neon lights cast an eerie red glow masking some of the blood spatter and stains in the grooves in the floor, and a cloying smell beyond the typical spilled beer and unfiltered cigarette smoke stung the nose and might’ve been blood or other bodily fluids Jason didn’t like to think about.
The stink might’ve also been from the pair of preserved hands nailed above the bar with a sign in Bear’s barely legible scrawl.
Keep your hands off my daughter or lose them.
Billy swore the hands were fake, but Jason caught sickly-sweet whiffs of rotting flesh if he got close.
It was a testament to the woman he was pulling along by the ties of her shirt that he’d risk an actual limb for a taste of her.
Access to the McCleans’ private space was reserved, beyond Billy and Bear, to Curly as vice president and Jason by way of Billy’s bed. Anyone else who crossed the jagged line carved at the edge of the Red Den had a death wish or was in serious trouble.
The kind that cost a man his hands, or worse.
Inside Billy’s bedroom, Jason locked the door on the raucous voices and metal on the jukebox and gifted himself a moment to just look at her, blindfolded and needling her left canine with her tongue the way he sometimes thought about when he wasn’t there.
“Well?” she drawled. “How do you want me?”
“How long have I got?” The end of the question—until your dad gets back—didn’t need to be said.
“Mm, maybe a minute. Maybe an hour. How are you going to make the most of your time?”
He wanted to play with her blindfolded for a while, but he also wanted to keep his hands, so he didn’t waste any time pinning her to the door and kissing her.
No, kissing was what amateurs did. Open the lips, slip in the tongue.
With Billy, kissing was consumption. Violent, ravenous taking.
Tongues and teeth and gasping for air. She bit his lip and he tasted copper, and his dick practically shot through his pants.
Those canines. This woman. He never knew where she was going to draw blood.
Sometimes it was his mouth, others beading from burning drag marks down his back.
Last time he left with two red bites on his neck where her teeth punctured the skin.
He tore at the ties of her shirt, cursing the knots, until they finally loosened and fell away. With the threat of Bear slightly more pressing than Jason’s dick against his zipper, he only gave Billy a few quick sucks on her nipples before bending her over the bed.
Her skirt crawled up her thighs, leaving her ass barely covered by a string of black lace. He bit her ass cheeks, one, then the other, and shook his arms out of his leather jacket.
“I need you,” Billy said. Begged. What a beautiful sound. “Now, Jay.”
His pants around his knees, he entered her in one hard thrust, earning him a strangled moan that was worth the drive every damn time.
Since time was very much not on his side, he didn’t waste a second of it ramping up or giving her time to adjust. Jason gripped her hips and pumped himself into her hard enough to bruise his pelvis against her ass.
With Billy, sex was carnal. Fucking, raw and simple, and couldn’t be confused with anything else.
He settled into a punishing rhythm, and in true Billy fashion, she started crying out his name to let every member of the Desert Demons Motorcycle Club know she was spoken for, whether or not Jason was around to make her scream.
Between the jukebox squealing metal and Billy’s lungs putting on a show, he didn’t hear the shouts coming from the bar until they were almost at the bedroom door.
“Where is he?” Bear bellowed. “Where’s the fucking Kid?”
Jason wrenched back, and Billy reached behind her, grabbing his hip.
“No, keep going,” she panted. “I’m almost there.”
He plunged back in.
“Billy!” Bear screamed.
Jason froze.
“Did you lock it?” Billy asked.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“Then don’t fucking stop.” She smacked his side as if she was smacking a mule, and like any good pack animal, Jason adjusted his grip on her hips and obeyed. “Harder, Jay! Harder.”
Through the pounding on the door—big, heavy fists capable of splitting a man’s head—Jason pounded Bear’s daughter.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuuuuuck. She was moaning and writhing, and if he stopped she might actually break his dick off, and that was scarier than Bear trying the knob, hollering to unlock the door, scarier even than the hands ripped off at the wrists hanging above the bar that Jason imagined closing around his throat.
Bear suddenly walked away, warning his goons to back off, the Kid belonged to him.
Even as he pumped, Jason wondered if he could fit through the room’s narrow window and make it to his bike.
He’d leave his jacket behind as long as he got away with his balls, and just as the first shotgun blast left a hole in the door where the locked knob used to be, Billy screamed, “I’m coming,” and Bear burst into the room with a double barrel in his hands, foaming at the mouth.
“The hell you are,” he growled, yanking Jason backward by the neck. Billy fell ass up, facedown onto the bed, screaming through her orgasm.
Jason tripped on the pants around his knees as he spun out of Bear’s grip. The burly man pointed the gun at the ceiling and fired again, sending broken bits of drywall down on Jason’s head.
Billy pulled off the blindfold and shouted, “Daddy, stop it!”
“Put some clothes on, sweetheart,” Bear said in a surprisingly gentle tone for a man on the warpath. Gentle, and reloading his gun with fresh shells from the pocket of his leather cut. The spent shells fell to the floor, smoking.
“Dad, put the gun away. Now.”
Jason tried scrambling for the window. Bear wrapped one giant paw around his neck again and set Jason on the floor beside the bed. “Your ass is grass, my friend. Grass.”
Whole lotta holes in the desert.
The club’s motto, carved into the front door of Not Your Oasis, and plenty of other places no one dared to look, flashed in Jason’s mind and he suddenly believed it wholeheartedly.
“Hey, boss, you good?”
Curly was in the doorway, eyes bouncing around the room as if afraid to land.
“Curly, man—” Jason called out before Bear’s boot smashed into his chest.
“Can it,” Bear snarled, turning to Curly, whose gaze snagged on Billy’s chest. “What are you looking at? That’s my daughter.”
Curly backed out of the room. “Call if you need me.”
“Curly—” Jason tried again. The boot dug farther into his chest.
“Keep everyone else out of here. You got it?” Bear hollered.
Curly got it. They would all get it. No one messed with Bear. Or Bear’s only daughter.
Except Jason, who could feel his heart thumping against the sole of Bear’s giant boot.
“Stand up. Get your pants on,” the man said in a quiet voice somehow more menacing than when he shouted orders. Bear didn’t have to yell to get men to listen.
He just ripped off your hands.
Bear eased up enough for Jason to cough the breath back into his lungs and pull his pants up.
“Let’s go,” Bear said.
“Dad.”
“Get dressed, Billy. I’m not going to tell you again.”
With the shotgun barrel pressing circles into his back, Jason led the way out of Billy’s bedroom, down the hall to Bear’s office. The gun rack behind his desk was missing the double barrel.
Bear locked the door behind them, as if anyone would risk death to enter, and pushed Jason into one of the chairs in front of the desk. Jason had never been inside the office. It wasn’t a place any self-respecting man with no desire to join the Desert Demons ever wanted to find himself.
The desk was empty, its wood surface pockmarked from knife tips and brass knuckles.
There were four other guns on the rack behind the desk. Bear sat in his throne, keeping the shotgun straight up, propped on his thigh to remind Jason the trouble his dick got him into today.
I’m a dead man.
Bear took a deep breath. A mountain of a man, he could be called something smarmy like Earl or his actual name, Brian—confessed by Billy under threat of death if Jason told anyone else—and not lose one ounce of the terror his imposing form inflicted with a look.
With the hand not balancing the shotgun on his leg, he smoothed his beard.
Of the rings on his fingers, the singular pointed pyramid bothered Jason the most for the dent it could leave in a man’s skull.
Finally, in a low and deliberate voice, Bear asked, “What are your intentions with my daughter?”
Jason looked around to see if he was being messed with and another prospect was waiting out of sight to jump him.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Bear warned.
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t like you,” Bear continued. “I just watched you jackhammering my baby girl from behind, and I wish I could say it was the first time.”
“You’ve never—”
“I didn’t mean you. She’s always been…we’ll call it promiscuous. It makes it hard for a man to run his business—especially this business—if every hopeful Demon thinks sleeping with my daughter is part of their initiation.” He paused, eyes darkening. “It isn’t, by the way.”
“No, sir.”
“Now you…don’t ask me why, but she cares about you. Which is why you’re still alive and the only reason you have all your limbs. But I need to know. What are your intentions with Billy?”
Jason cleared his throat and sat up in his chair. If there was a way to answer and keep his limbs, he didn’t know it.
“I’m waiting.”
“Honestly,” Jason said, “I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you what it’s not. You shacking up with my daughter for a couple of days, then disappearing again.
Personally, I’d prefer it if you stayed gone, but you’re like a cock-sucking venereal disease.
You just keep coming back. That’s why I’m going to give you one chance to keep your hands. Are you listening?”
Jason nodded. Bear grunted and rested the gun on the desk in front of him.
“I can’t do this forever,” he said. “Leading this bunch of assholes…let’s just say something, or someone, could take me out at any time. You know what I mean? Billy’s next in line to the throne. It’s her birthright, and it comes with all the perks of running this place. You follow?”
“I think so.”
“It also leaves her exposed. Unprotected in ways I can’t prevent. At least, until she’s older and won’t just shack up with any asshole that looks good on a bike.”
“You think I look good on a bike?”
He didn’t know why he said it, or why he smiled. All goodwill—if there was any—drained from Bear’s face.
“Don’t think I still won’t take you out. I haven’t made up my mind about you. If I didn’t think you were slightly better for my daughter than any of these other dirtbags, you’d be dead already. We clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Bear rocked back in his chair. “What I’m offering is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And I do mean once-in-a-lifetime. These men would kill for it. You see this on my arm?”
Bear set his left forearm on the desk to show Jason the tattoo he’d seen variations of on every left arm of every member: a demon, this one complete, while some of the others only had legs, a torso, arms, or hooves.
“The mark of the Desert Demons,” Jason said. “You all have them.”
“They don’t all have this,” he said, pointing to the fiery pitchfork in a taloned fist. “The pitchfork means I say jump, they all fly off a cliff. You hear me? Men try their whole lives and never get more than a set of hooves. It ain’t easy.
We aren’t for everyone. What I’m offering you has never been done. ”
“What is it?”
“A pitchfork. One for you and one for my daughter. Only if she wants it and only if you’re staying.”
The sound of “Bad Moon Rising” from the jukebox in the bar came muffled through the door. An omen? Jason didn’t believe in superstitious crap.
He also didn’t believe he was being offered the chance to be a king. The king of Hell, but still a king, complete with an army and a queen.
This was so much more than Billy. Bear was offering an entire life.
Bear turned and repositioned the shotgun on the rack behind him.
“I’m sure you’ve got some loose ends to tie up, but this offer is final and finite. You’ve got one month. If you want it, and Billy wants it, it’s yours. But…” He paused. “If you don’t, your time here is done. If I ever see your face in my Oasis again, I’ll cut your fucking throat.”
Jason swallowed, his trachea still intact for the moment, and nodded. Down the hall in the bar Bear was offering to give him, CCR warned him to prepare for death.
Definitely an omen, Jason thought.
He’d remember that moment in Bear’s office every time he heard the song for the rest of his life.