Chapter 21 The Prisoner
KNUCKLES
I left Cassidy in good hands upstairs by the time I finally made my way down to the cells below ground. I didn’t think Simone realized that no one who was brought down here ever made it back out alive. Not unless they were below ground to work the fruiting room of our shroom operation.
“Thank God!” Simone called out dramatically when I came through the door. “Where have you been?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“How is Cassidy? Is she still alive? I swear, I didn’t mean to shoot her.”
I didn’t bother to give her any of the answers she needed.
“Shut your mouth and listen up. This is how it’s going to go. If I think for even a second that you’re not being honest, any deal we make is off and your life is forfeit.”
“I’ll be the one deciding if you’re being honest since Knuckles has always had an issue telling the difference.
” I turned to see Grunt with his arms crossed and back against the wall.
Simone knew he was there the whole time.
The smirk on his face told me she had already tried to appeal to him before I walked in.
“You will start at the beginning, with your parentage, then you will tell us every move you made, why, and how long you’ve been embedded with the Rivera Cartel.
We already know a lot, so there’s no need to sugar coat anything.
If you’re honest, we’ll get you set up somewhere halfway around the world with a new identity.
If we even suspect you’re lying, the relocation will be to a hole in the ground where you’re never seen or heard from again. ”
“You would kill me?” Simone asked. I couldn’t exactly answer, “In a heartbeat,” if I wanted her to cooperate.
“I wouldn’t have to.” I tipped my head back toward Grunt. “That’s why he’s here.”
“Grunt would never,” she started to say and he pulled his sidearm and pointed it right at her head.
“Don’t tell me what I’d never do. You don’t know me, bitch.
Never did. Never will. Now, get to spilling your guts before I…
” he cocked his head in an eerie way and gave her a grim smile.
“Spill your guts,” he finished. I could tell by the panic in her eyes that she believed the vibe he was throwing her way.
Honestly, he resembled a crazy, biker version of Death personified.
Instead of a scythe, he brandished his beloved Colt M1911.
“Now, start telling us your story beginning with who deposited the baby making juice in your mother to create you,” I said.
“No need to be crude, James.”
“It’s Knuckles and I don’t give a fuck what you think of me or the way I say shit. Answer the questions or Grunt can take over.”
“Fine. Sorry,” she hustled to say. “My father is Nero Abruzzo.” Grunt and I knew that name, though we didn’t let it show.
He was one of the fuckers who had invaded our town.
“He’s head of the Morelli Outfit in Chicago since he took out Carmine Morelli eighteen years ago.
That was when he sent my mother and I here to hide us out.
He was afraid of retaliation and we were supposedly the targets. ”
“So, daddy loves you enough to save you?” I asked.
She sneered in my general direction. “Daddy loved me enough to save me because he could use me later. No made man ever has use of a daughter unless as a bargaining chip or a trade deal.”
“He certainly didn’t sell you to me in a marriage contract, so fill us in on how he used you.”
“When I was in sophomore year, he paid a visit to us and explained that the Rivera Cartel found out who my mother and I were. They reached out to him with a deal. I was to get close to one of the motorcycle members, so I could keep tabs on the MC for them. It was going to be a long-game scenario. As in life-long. At first, I was devastated.” Her eyes shifted to Grunt, “But then I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
I had my pick of whoever I would marry from the MC, so long as they proved to be a a fountain of knowledge. ”
“I never told you shit about the MC when we were married.”
“You didn’t. No. Everyone around you did.
Your brothers forgot that they were talking in the open sometimes.
Their women heard more at home and gossiped about it when we all got together, especially Roxy.
She was the best source of intel, since she was so close to Baffle for all those years.
Damn shame she couldn’t seal the deal when I told her how to get him into bed. She was supposed to end up pregnant.”
“Like you did?”
Her eyes narrowed as they came up to meet mine. “Yes, like I did. You weren’t anything special, James.”
“Knuckles,” I corrected again. The only woman I wanted using my given name was upstairs being taken care of by my MC family.
“The cartel was supposed to leave me alone as long as I provided information about the club, but they had eyes on the town somehow. When they found out that I married you and that you didn’t appear linked to the club at all, they came for me.
I tried to tell them that your best friend was prospecting for the club and it was only a matter of time before you did as well.
They didn’t believe me because they already knew that you and Jasper weren’t speaking to one another anymore.
That time I disappeared on a shopping trip with my mom and came back to have a miscarriage hours later, that was when Marco Delgado picked me up, took me to a cabin an hour away in Arizona and raped me repeatedly.
He wasn’t gentle. In fact, he made sure to do his worst because he wanted me to lose the baby, so you would leave me and I could get in bed with a member of the MC. ”
“I didn’t leave you.”
“Yeah, that’s when they started pressuring me to leave you.”
“And you kept yapping at me to join the MC because we needed the financial security they’d bring.”
“They were going to kill you,” she admitted. I couldn’t tell if that part was the truth, but I had no doubt the rest of it was.
“And you were trying to save me by pushing me to join the Kings?”
“Yes, dammit. We may have started out in a bad way, but you grew on me. In a perfect world where I didn’t have the mafia breathing down my neck and the cartel pulling my strings, I think we could have had something real.”
I laughed. That was a bunch of bullshit if I ever heard it. “Finish the fucking story without all the sappy fucking lies, Simone.”
“Fine,” she huffed. “Marco liked what he had when he was abusing me. He would come get me every so often. It started again the day you went to talk to the club about the land and joining. The only thing that saved us both that day was that Marco got word that you were at the clubhouse. He still took his sweet time with me that weekend. That’s why I sent the text telling you I went to see Cassidy.
He kept me there and refused to let me go until he had his fill.
Over the years, he sometimes brought a buddy with him.
When I got pregnant the second time, just before you found out that I was sleeping with other people, it was likely Marco’s. ”
“Jesus, Simone,” I huffed. “I knew I had been careful with you.”
“You had. If you remember, I insisted on that because I didn’t want to get pregnant again. But the real reason was because they were never careful with me and I didn’t want to run the risk of catching something and giving it to you.
A shiver ran down my spine at the thought. “I swear to you,” she continued. “I never wanted to be with them. I forced to do it.”
“Why didn’t you tell your dad? To be sure, he didn’t mean for you to be used a free pussy for the cartel whenever they felt like scratching an itch.”
“I tried once and he didn’t believe me. He’s good friends with Emiliano and he would never take a woman against her will like that, but he doesn’t know that his men would and did. Often,” she sniffed the last word.
I glanced over to see that Grunt studied her like a science experiment. He gave me a slight nod. And I turned my full attention back to Simone. The cartel was the original buyer for Tiffany Baker’s land?”
“Yes, they wanted that land because it sat adjacent to the club’s property.”
I nodded. “Anything else we might find useful considering your father and his men are in town in a standoff with the Rivera Cartel over where the hell you disappeared to?”
“He’s here?” There was hope in her voice as she asked. I didn’t know why. The fucker sold her out long ago. It was obvious he didn’t really care about her beyond how useful she could be as a pawn in whatever he had going on with the Riveras.
“Is that all?” I asked again.
“Yes, that’s all. I swear. Can I please talk to Cassidy? Is she okay? I want to apologize. I really didn’t mean to shoot her. I need to tell her…”
I ignored her plea to talk to Cass and wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing whether Cass lived, died, or was even at the clubhouse. Instead, I asked my final question. “Did you have anything to do with Tiffany Baker being murdered?”
“She was murdered?” Simone asked. Once again, I couldn’t tell if her surprise was real or faked. She was either that good or I had blinders on and didn’t know how to remove them where Simone was concerned.
I walked out of the cell and Grunt followed behind me as Simone called out to us. Once we were further away, where she couldn’t hear us, we were met by Bigfoot for an update. He had been following along via the security feed from the cell.
“Sounded like the truth to me,” Bigfoot said. “The important parts anyway.”
“You’re not wrong. She knew about Tiffany, though. That was a bullshit response.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“She does this thing with her fingers, picking at a nail nervously. Only when she lies, never when she tells the truth.”
“Damn,”I hummed. I had noticed the way she did that but never put it together with her lying to me.
“Now, we have some weapons in our arsenal to get the mafia and cartel the hell out of our town.” Bigfoot started to head upstairs.
“Daddy won’t like that his baby girl was used by cartel members for years, especially when I spell out the fact that the baby she lost was because of a particularly brutal attack. ”
“I think we can go a little subtler,” Dime suggested.
Later that day, Bigfoot met with Nero and Emilano.
He played it perfectly and told them that a woman named Tiffany Baker was trying to sell a plot of land that was situated adjacent to the club.
Simone was the real estate agent helping her before Tiffany ended up dead after Simone agreed to the offer the club made on the land instead.
“No, that’s not what happened,” Emiliano urged Nero to believe him.
“I told your daughter that if she got the deal to go through with us buying the land, she was free and clear to start over her life somewhere else. I put her freedom on the hook for that deal. She would have never taken any amount of money.”
“Except she did because she didn’t trust you.
Your men have been raping her for years.
Marco Delgado was the reason she lost her baby years ago because of how brutally he raped her.
She told me all about it when she begged me to throw in extra cash on her end so she could disappear.
I didn’t like that she was stepping out on my club brother, but after hearing that it was the fucking cartel picking her up and using her as their personal whore, I was fucking sickened.
She hadn’t cheated on her husband. She was raped, brutally and repeatedly.
She had the medical records to back up her story. ”
“No,” Emiliano appeared horrified by the news.
Nero, on the other hand, was enraged. He stood up from the table they’d all been seated at and opened fire on the man with Emiliano.
“Jesus!” Emiliano cried out. Jesus Flores had been the right hand man to the top dog in the Rivera Cartel for years.
Outside of the other Rivera brothers, he was the man at the top and now he was dead.
“Wait,” Emiliano yelled. “I will get Marco here.”
“No, you and Nero need to get the fuck out of my town. Take this meeting to your own turf because my club has nothing to do with what went down. You’re lucky the whole fucking lot of you aren’t dead considering you sent a little girl in to spy on us while you were abusing her the whole time,” Bigfoot told them.
He really liked to dig that knife deeper into the wound.
“Where the fuck is my daughter?” Nero asked him as the others moved around to get the body and get out of there.
“No fucking clue. Haven’t seen or heard from her in over a month. When Tiffany was killed, Simone hauled ass to wherever she planned to start a new life. Don’t think you should hold your breath on her contacting dear old dad, since you gave her to a bunch of rapists and monsters.”
Nero bellowed out a rage-fueled sound the likes of which I’d never heard before. Funny response coming from a man who had used his daughter as a bargaining chip with the cartel when she was barely legal to make decisions for herself.
After both groups retreated from Violence, the club officers met in church to discuss a few things. “She needs to die, but I don’t think I can be the one to pull the trigger, especially not knowing everything that happened to her. She was a victim in all this, too. I can’t ignore that.”
“I can,” Grunt said. “Leave it to me, Prez.”
“If everyone’s good with that, we’ll go from there.”
“How can you be okay with it?” I asked my best friend.
“She’s been ripping my best friend apart for years and the whole time, she would make these little comments to me about how we could have been something special - better - or whatever.”
“You never told me.”
“There was no need to. She was always a conniving cunt, nothing had changed. She shot Cassidy. If we let her go, she might come back to finish the job and take both of you out for spite. That bitch will never be satisfied if she knows you got a happily ever after with the girl she stole you from to begin with.”
“She didn’t steal me from Cass. We were never together.”
“No, but you were meant to be,” Grunt said and I felt it then. Years of missed moments with Cass. The heartache, missing her, hating myself for all the shit I got wrong. It was all there at the surface as regret swam heavily in my gut.