Chapter 10
He hit complete at the bottom of the screen, then stood from where he sat in the small office above the garage.
Jenni, the office coordinator, looked up at him with a small smile.
While he didn’t know the woman intimately, he knew her well enough from their joint tenure at Stallion Motors.
They were about the same age—would have gone to high school together if they’d grown up in the same town.
Jenni was a Missoula lifer.
“Finished?” she asked, reaching for the tablet.
He handed over the device, feeling more impatient in that moment than he was when Cobra sent him up to sort out his employee paperwork in the first place. He wasn’t new; he was back. He wanted to get underneath a car, not on top of tax forms and benefits.
“We done here?” he asked with a lifted eyebrow.
“Yeah, yeah. Get out of here,” she replied, waving her hand with her painted fingernails. The motion caused the bracelets around her wrist to jangle, and he noticed the rock she was sporting on her ring finger.
Pistol had half a mind to ask her who put it there.
Before he got locked up, he remembered she was into those dating apps.
She worked at the garage and spent plenty of time on the compound, but Jenni was never drawn to a man in a kutte.
Last he knew, she was still looking. Pretty as she was, it didn’t surprise him to learn someone snatched her up.
In the end, Pistol didn’t bother asking who he was, the other half of his mind calling his attention down to his own ring finger. As he exited the office, he shrugged off the nagging weight of guilt that kept trying to claw its way onto his back since the scene Lyla made at the clubhouse.
He didn’t see it coming.
It wasn’t getting caught that haunted him.
He didn’t go to the clubhouse looking to get lucky.
Neither had he gone with the intention of hurting Lyla.
That—how upset she was when she found him—that was what took him by surprise.
He still wasn’t sure what to do about it, or if there was anything he could do about it.
He married her, but he wasn’t that guy. He wasn’t going to pretend to be something other than who he was; and who he was, was a Wild Stallion. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The breakfast sandwich he went out of his way to bring her before work had little to no effect, but he hadn’t given her much thought since the fight she tried to pick on his way out the door.
The shit he was dealing with, it left no room for guilt. He was trying to move on. Move past it. Every last bit of it. All he wanted was to find his way back to normal—to find his way back to the life that was put on hold for the last three years.
“Hey,” called Cobra as soon as Pistol descended the last step.
He looked over in time to see the coveralls the VP threw at him. He caught the navy-blue jumpsuit against his chest and smiled to himself.
Blue sure as hell beat khaki.
It was good to be home.
“Been a while,” Cobra began with a smirk. “Got a transmission that needs lookin’ at. Word is you remember how to get your hands dirty—but if you want a warmup, got a few oil changes to get done, too.”
Pistol shook his head as he shrugged his way out of his kutte. “I was in the clink, not a coma. Still know my way around a car. Don’t need a warmup.”
The sound of his voice alone a beckoning call, Reaper left her spot next to Nomad—his head hidden under the hood of a sedan—and trotted her way to Pistol’s side, her tail wagging all the while.
Cobra’s smirk stretched into a smile as he chuckled.
“Right. Figured as much. You’ve been ridin’ wild walkin’ free. Haven’t wasted a second, so far as I can see. Hell—hasn’t even been a week, and somehow you’ve not only tempted fate with snake bait in your bed, you fuckin’ married the pretty thing.”
Pistol hung his kutte on an empty hook attached to the wall before stepping into his coveralls. He thought about Cobra calling Lyla snake bait and remembered what Nomad told him about the woman he was now calling his wife.
‘Should’a known you’d spot trouble the first chance you got.’
So far, trouble was right. How much trouble remained to be seen.
He wasn’t stupid. He knew he earned her ire in more ways than one. Worse, he did it without even thinking twice about it. Instinct and impulse had been the driving force behind his every move since the moment he stepped out of prison.
He planned for everything except her.
But Lyla was more than snake bait.
She was gorgeous, even when she was mad as hell.
Especially when she was mad as hell.
It was an ugly truth, but if she’d been nothing more than a used-up club whore who found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, his back would be protesting the digging of an extra grave rather than the aftermath of a morning spent hauling boxes.
Pistol wondered if that face of hers made her more trouble than he knew.
Shoving his arms into the sleeves of his jumpsuit, he tried to put her out of his mind. “Just handlin’ my own,” he replied.
“Sure you are, brother. Come on.”
Cobra started toward the opposite side of the garage, and Pistol followed after him, Reaper at his heels.
It was nearing mid-day and Pistol barely even noticed, grateful for the distraction of an honest day’s work. He and Cobra were working together, shooting the shit all the while, reminding Pistol of old times. It felt good. It felt right.
It was liberating.
So long as he had tools in his hands and car parts at his fingertips, he didn’t have a care in the world. He was home. He was free.
He was where he belonged.
“Yo, Pistol.”
He turned to look back over his shoulder at the sound of Nighthawk’s voice.
The two men locked eyes before the president nodded, signaling his enforcer to drop what he was doing.
Pistol didn’t need his leader to speak to know the time had come for him to own up to what he did.
It was his business to handle, and he wasn’t about to apologize for it.
But the kutte he wore, and the one he buried, meant it was club business, too.
Cobra straightened, earning Pistol’s attention, and he watched as the VP glanced at Nighthawk before shifting his gaze down at Pistol. “Go on, then,” he ordered, extracting a rag from his back pocket. “This’ll still be here when you get back.”
Pistol set aside his tools before reaching for his own rag. As he wiped at the grease coating his fingers, he trailed after Nighthawk, following him out of the garage and around to the vacant side of the building. Reaper, who’d been laying nearby, was quick to join them.
“You’ve been busy,” observed Nighthawk, folding his arms across his chest.
Pistol said nothing in reply but waited for the president to continue.
Nighthawk coughed out a short, humorless laugh. “It’s annoying as hell how reliably consistent you are. Beat the hell out of that King three years ago, and no one knows why. You get your freedom back, finish the job, and still no one can figure out what the fuck that man did to you.”
With no question to answer, and no point to negate, Pistol kept his mouth shut.
Nighthawk smiled, but Pistol knew it was a look of defeat more than anything else.
This was confirmed when Nighthawk uncrossed his arms and reached up to pull his fingers through his long, blond hair before running a hand over his beard—his whiskers whiter than Pistol remembered. With a sigh, he got to the point.
“Whatever your reasons, it’s done but it’s not over.”
“I wasn’t reckless. It was handled with care.”
“Amount of time I imagine you took to plan this whole thing out, I have no doubt. It’s not the cops I’m worried about.
That man will be missed. Soon. If not already.
You’ve been gone a while, but the peace between our club and theirs is still as fragile as it’s always been. You prepared for retaliation?”
“They’d have to prove it was us, and they won’t,” Pistol stated confidently.
“Doesn’t guarantee they won’t start a war anyway.”
“Look, Prez—wouldn’t have done it just to settle some stupid score. This wasn’t revenge, it was retribution. Whatever happens next, it was worth it. Just hope my brothers will have my back.”
This earned Pistol a frown. “No question. But I don’t want to be surprised. Puttin’ you on recon. You start today. I want to know what they’re sayin’, where they’re lookin’, and if they’re plannin’ anything.”
“Understood,” he replied with a dip of his chin.
Thinking they were done, Pistol turned to head back to the garage, but Nighthawk stopped him.
“Not so fast.”
Pistol raised his brow in curiosity.
“Lyla,” was all his president said.
News of their marriage spread fast.
The drama from the night before caught like a wildfire, and Pistol knew it.
If it were almost anyone else, he’d have blown him off.
But it wasn’t anyone else.
It was Prez.
“What about her?”
“I’ve been read in, so I’ve got the gist—but from what I can tell, you’re actin’ on instinct and nothin’ else.”
Pistol opened his mouth to respond, but Nighthawk held up a hand and kept on talking.
“I won’t pretend to know her well. She’s one of Viv’s, she runs with Max, and she hangs around. Ol’ lady has a real soft spot for her. By now you know she’s no stranger to this life. But I’ll tell you one thing—she’s not a fuckin’ toy. Hangs around but doesn’t mess around, until you.
“Won’t tell you how to live your life, brother, but I will give you some advice. What went down last night? Pretty fucked up. She’s doin’ you a solid. Maybe show a little respect.”
Rather than speak right away, Pistol buried his fists into his pockets and stared at his president, willing himself not to fold.
Nighthawk might have been the first one to say it, but the truth was, he saw the same expression on Fury’s face when they met up at Lyla’s apartment earlier, and again when he got to the garage and saw Nomad.
The guilt he’d been battling was back. This time, rather than ignore it, he let himself feel it. In doing so, his conscious stirred up memories of his mother. He didn’t have to hear her say it. He simply knew.
She raised him better than that.
Nevertheless, he felt compelled to defend himself.
“She wasn’t part of the plan.”
“I’m sure she wasn’t, until you made up your mind to marry her. Now, whatever the two of you work out is none of my business. But don’t be an asshole. You could have done a hell of a lot worse.”
Having said all he intended to say, Nighthawk began to walk away, patting Pistol on the shoulder as he passed. “Finish up here. Report back to me as soon as you hear somethin’.”
Locking his jaw, Pistol looked down at Reaper—staring at the black shepherd as his mind struggled to trudge through the mire of the last couple of days.
Of all the men in the club, Prez and his ol’ lady had the longest and happiest marriage, second only to Bull and his wife, Winnie.
Given how little time he spent with the Gillette chapter, Bull and Winnie were almost folklore, while Nighthawk and Viv were what Pistol always believed was the exception to the rule.
There was a reason he had no intention of settling down.
A reason he approached marriage as a business deal.
A reason why when he woke up Monday evening and found Lyla asleep on his couch, alerting him that the previous twelve hours hadn’t been a wild fever dream, he went looking for an escape.
She wasn’t part of the plan.
More than that, he didn’t know jack shit about being married.
‘You keep your filthy mouth off my husband.’
He hadn’t been able to forget the rage of his bride, still in her white dress.
Short sighted as it was, it shocked him to learn putting a ring on Lyla’s finger meant something to her—strangers though they were.
He moved her into his house that morning, but he still didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
Reaper whined and spoke a half-hearted bark, tilting her head in question. It was enough to pull Pistol from his thoughts, reminding him he had other problems and a recon mission to complete.
Four days back in Missoula and marrying his one-night stand was only one of his issues. Lyla would have to wait.
“I hear you, girl. Hier. Let’s go.”