Chapter Fourteen
Drew
There was one thing I hadn’t taken into consideration when I’d fallen back into that chair around the table:
The working hours.
As with everything any of us did for the club, it was voluntary and for a greater good.
Each man played his part, did his piece, and worked as hard as he could to make us stronger, more united and more profitable in the community.
The problem I was having right then was figuring out what the fuck I was, apart from a puffy chest, a man with a swagger, and Ayda Hanagan’s personal watcher.
I wasn’t sure what had driven me to go to the game the previous night. I guess the only way I could explain any of it was that she provided me with something I’d not had in such a long time
Power.
I knew I had that over my fellow man and I knew I had that within the club without question. All it would take for me to regain what I once had was a snap of my fingers and a pointed look at Jedd to get the fuck out of my chair. I’d be the chief again. I’d be the alpha dog. I’d be that guy.
Only I wasn’t sure if that’s what anybody wanted anymore.
Not them, not me, not a single one of us.
Inside, I’d been certain that I’d take my role as President of The Hounds of Babylon seriously the second I got out.
But once out, I wasn’t sure about anything.
I didn’t know why my steps suddenly sounded too heavy against the ground.
I didn’t know whether my plain white T-shirt hung right underneath my oversized leather cut anymore.
I had no clue who I owed my life to and whether or not my eyes still had that Grecian sea glow to them, like my mama always said they did.
It wasn’t just about me taking one day at a time now.
This was about me taking one minute at a time.
5:01 p.m. Survived that shit. 5:02 p.m. Still standing strong.
5:03 p.m. Ain’t no flies on me, brother.
5:04 p.m. I’m itching and twitching, but I’m doing the best I can.
5:05 p.m. I need myself a motherfucking beer.
No two moments were the same. No two thoughts went that way, either.
So when I found myself at that football game last night, it wasn’t just Ayda that was surprised.
I was riding that wave with her. The thing I knew above all else was that I had to let her know.
I had to show her that, no matter how confident and smart her mouth got, I would always be there in the background, watching, smirking, judging.
She was in my pocket now—her and her brother. They owed me. They owed my club.
Saturday came and went without too many thoughts dragging me down or crippling me.
I carried on with the train of thought that I’d shaken her up enough to make sure as shit she turned up on our doorstep on Sunday night, and quite honestly, as much as I enjoyed screwing with her, she was the least of my concerns.
When Sunday morning came around, after a previous full day of dealings over the pawn business with Harry, discussing the accounts of the place and how he saw the gold market being the most profitable for us right now, my mind was shriveling up as much as my balls were.
The fact that I’d had Jedd waiting for me, too, only made things worse.
I had a million things to sign that were way overdue in connection to the repo business, but I just couldn’t find my enthusiasm.
It seemed I was jumping out of the prison ice freeze and straight into the MC’s financial fires.
I was tired. I was pacing. I was trying like hell to adjust before anyone noticed.
I did not have time to be weak.
The four walls of my bedroom were staring at me on that morning as if to challenge my every move.
As I walked around the bed, roaming from one side to the other, I couldn’t take my eyes off a single one of them.
Left. Right. North. South. I walked around that room in nothing more than my sweat pants and just tried to figure out what those walls represented and what I had to do for the day.
No one would have thought I’d spent all those years and months inside a space much smaller than the one I was pacing, but I had, yet I remembered it feeling a million times bigger than the one I was currently keeping myself captive in.
Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to figure out what the difference was.
Inside, I’d kept the walls bare. There’d been nothing but gray magnolia staring back at me each and every day.
I’d worked out in that cell. I’d cried, I’d slept, I’d sweat, and I’d flipped the crap out, all without judgment.
I’d never had my fellow man staring down at me and I’d never had to do a stomach curl while looking into the eyes of someone I’d loved and lost.
Yet my bedroom…
It was nothing short of haunted.
His eyes were everywhere. They were on me. They were judging and they were watching. I couldn’t even slip my hand onto my hard dick on a morning without opening my lids and seeing him staring back at me with nothing but questions.
When are you going to make this right, Drew?
When will you be able to look at me again without feeling guilty?
You took the fall for my death. Isn’t that enough?
Will you only ever feel peace when you’re on this side of existence, right next to me?
I was sane enough to know that it wasn’t really him doing the talking.
First of all, I knew more than anyone that Pete wasn’t that fucking cruel.
In his eyes, I was his protégé, the one kid who he was allowed to beat but never abuse.
I was the man he could taunt but never fail to support.
I was his little brother in too many ways for him to spend any kind of time going out of his way to make me feel like shit.
He’d wanted the best for me from day one—from the first time he slid those threadbare gloves upon my small, curled up fists and promised me a lifetime of happiness.
All I had to do was learn how to take my anger out on the right equipment instead of the wrong people.
I surrendered myself to him then and I was still doing it now.
A part of me knew that it would always be that way between us, no matter what the future did or didn’t hold.
I wanted to run from the room and pretend none of the crap running through my head was really there. But there was something else holding me in place, forcing my feet to stay glued to the spot. My eyes had landed on the one picture of Pete and me that was about to ruin everything.
In it, Pete was fifteen. I was ten—maybe younger.
Eight. Nine. I wasn’t sure. But I knew his age for a fact, which should have told me my own, yet all I could focus on were those fifteen-year-old eyes staring back at me, those god-awful denim dungarees, and that mustard yellow vest that sat beneath them.
“You gotta stop being what everyone else wants you to be, kid. You might have been created for a purpose, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a reason of your own to live,” he’d said as he slid on those gloves and kept his eyes on me like I was nothing more than a coiled spring waiting to break the hell free.
“Why you pulled me here, Pete?” I asked innocently, watching him as he raised his knee up high and planted my arm on the top of it. I couldn’t look away from him as he flipped it over and started to tie up the laces, pulling them much tighter than felt comfortable against my skin.
“To teach you how to hold your own. To teach you how to focus all that stuff you got going on in your belly into the right place.”
“You know about the stuff?”
“Sure I do.”
“You want me to fight?”
“Not unless you know it’s right.”
I stood still for a second, lifting my eyes up to him before looking around at all the big men dressed in leather that were walking around the place like they owned it. “Do I have any choice around here?”
Pete laughed roughly, pulling harder on the laces of one hand, before he switched arms and concentrated on the other.
“Not really. Fighting is a way of life. Although, you got a choice as to how much you want to be able to fight. You can defend, or you can attack. Two different worlds, two sets of rules. One makes you a leader, the other makes you a follower or a protector. I guess that depends on you and what you want to be,” he said, not looking up at me as he spoke.
I loved Pete more than I loved anyone else that I could think of.
I didn’t know what it was that made me think of him as anything more than he was, but I guess a big part of that was because he spoke to me like a grown up when everyone else looked at me like I was a golden egg that couldn’t be touched or cracked for at least another twenty years.
All I ever wanted to do was make him proud.
As someone who could look after himself more than anyone else, even though he was young, I knew my answer before I even spoke it.
“I want to be a leader,” I told him softly.
His fingers worked over the strings without much effort. He knew how to do those crisscross patterns and pull that glove tighter than anyone else. It was like he was made to always do that job. It was quick and it was easy to him, just like the smile he flashed at me as he looked up.
“Yeah? I’d like you to be a leader, too.”
“You would?” I asked, staring back up at him with wide eyes as he finished and I tapped both ends of my gloves together like I’d watched him do a thousand times before.