Chapter Thirty-Six
Drew
“You look like shit,” Slater said flatly when I pushed open the door and walked into the old training room.
“I feel like shit,” I muttered under my breath.
“You didn’t sleep well?”
My eyes shot up to him as I drew closer.
Given the circumstances, it seemed like the dumbest fucking question he could have asked me, but I guess even people who have been friends for the majority of their lives need conversation starters sometimes.
I tugged on my jeans around one knee, pulling them farther up so I could crouch down in front of the chair, keeping my eyes up on Slater.
“No. No sleep at all.” I shook my head.
“None?” he asked, both brows rising in surprise as he wrapped a fresh white bandage around his right hand.
“Lot of shit going on,” I said quietly, dropping my head back down to the floor just for somewhere else to look.
“This just about what happened on Thursday night, or does this have something to do with the girl as well?”
My jaw rolled back and forth slowly as I kept on staring down.
Since leaving Ayda last night, I had, not just Deeks tailing her, but Kenny, too.
The fact that she was refusing to come into The Hut anymore only made me ten times tenser, and her a thousand times more vulnerable.
I couldn’t leave her out there in the wild to fend for herself, especially not after what had gone down at the Emperors’ place the other night.
I rested my arm across my raised knee and sighed quietly.
In a mere matter of days, I’d managed to fuck life up again, not just for me, but the rest of the club and Ayda.
I’d come out of prison a worse man than I’d gone in, and there was no one else to blame for my fuck ups but myself.
Nobody in the MC was stupid. They all knew better than I did that me putting two of our most important members on Ayda duty meant there was deeper shit going on with me.
This wasn’t just about wanting to keep her safe anymore.
They didn’t have to say it and neither did I.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t even say it to myself.
I just knew that for every morning I woke up without her, I had to make sure she lived another day, even if it meant her being surrounded by people she’d grown to hate because of me.
The lack of response to Slater’s question told him enough. I could hear his sigh of resignation blowing over me and I could feel the shake of his head like it was throwing the whole fucking room off balance. “I guess that answers that,” he blew out.
“I guess so.” I nodded, blinking down at the floor a few more times before I heard Slater’s boots move forward until was towering over me.
“What’s the plan with this one then?” he asked, like it was the most normal thing for us to be doing on a Saturday morning.
It was my turn to blow out all the air in my lungs then.
My head rose slowly, starting off at the ankles of the man who was tied to the chair in front of me as I glanced up at all the blood splattered across his dirty black jeans, rising up to his filthy T-shirt, and eventually, his face.
The guy’s hands were still tied behind his back and the gag that we’d wrapped across his cheeks to keep him quiet was soaked to the core.
I had an Emperor.
A man of no more than twenty-five years of age—one I’d never seen in my life up until he found me climbing out of their garage, just two nights before.
A man who probably didn’t even know my name as I launched myself back out of that window to jump on him and send us both crashing to the ground in the hopes that I would get there in time before he managed to pull his gun out of his cut.
A man who, by all rights, could have made one cry for help and had an army of men there to save him, but who instead chose to stand and fight me, an intruder with a temper.
An asshole who made the wrong decision. An idiot who knew that as soon as he had this rival gang member in his grip, he could never let him go again without there being catastrophic consequences.
As I looked up into his half shut eyes and examined all the blood he wore because of my hands, I hated myself more than ever before.
I’d had to pat the Emp down, steal his phone and call Slater for back up with the van to get him back to our hut. Since then, apart from that moment with Ayda the previous night where I’d found myself selfishly needing to see her, I’d kept the enemy tied up as my hostage.
Harry and Jedd hadn't spoken to me since. The flashes of disgust as Slater and I had pulled him out of the van and shoved him into the warehouse had been enough. I'd started a war again without even trying.
I’d been selfish. I’d been delusional, and I was risking the lives of my brothers once more.
They were better off without me.
Slater’s voice woke me from my thoughts, his foot tapping me on the shin. “Drew?”
I shook my head, blinking quickly to look back up at my friend. “Sorry. What?”
“What’s the plan with this guy?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled quietly, turning my attention back to him as my hands reached out for the ropes around his ankles.
“We need to let him rotate his legs. His circulation will be fucked if we don’t.
” My fingers worked swiftly to release his left ankle.
The man’s eyes fluttered open a little farther as he looked down on me with both confusion and gratitude.
“You beat the shit out of him on Thursday night and now you’re worried about his blood flow?” Slater whispered.
Lifting his leg, I grabbed his foot and moved it around in a slow circle, keeping my eyes on my rival’s bloody face the whole time. “I guess I am.”
“Where's your head at?”
“I don't know how to answer that.”
“You’re losing it.”
“Can’t lose what you never had,” I muttered back.
“Harry and Jedd have any ideas on what we should do here?”
Dropping his ankle down, I grabbed hold of the rope again, pushing his leg back into place before I made sure to bind him a little higher up. “They’re not speaking to me.”
“No shit. This is the biggest mess we’ve been in since…”
“Since I went inside. I know. You don’t have to say it, Slater. I know what a fuck up I’ve made, okay? Nobody knows it more than me.”
“You’re not fucking kidding, bro. This could ruin us all. Pour into the mix the fact that you’ve allocated two of our strongest men to Ayda and her brother, we’re weaker than piss right now.”
My head snapped up to him at the mention of her name while my hands moved to the guy’s other leg and got to work blindly. “Weak or not, that's non-negotiable. She’s in this mess because of me.”
“We all are.”
It took everything I had to not snap back.
My defensive side was always the first thing to come out when someone started laying blame at my door this way, only that morning, I had very little in me that would let me go head first into another fight.
In a matter of days, I’d managed to ruin a lot of people’s lives without fully realizing what the hell I was doing along the way.
“I know,” I whispered back, lifting the Emperor’s other leg up in the air and holding his foot up next to my shoulder as I rotated it around.
“This could kill us all.”
“I know.”
“It could get her killed, too.”
I swallowed harshly, my eyes closing temporarily as I tried to block everything out and find some kind of magic plan on the back of my eyelids that would save the whole fucking lot of us.
Everything in my body seemed to turn to shit at the words he’d just spoken out loud.
My stomach dropped, my mouth went dry, and the dread fed its way through my body like it was slowly trying to poison me with nothing but nightmares of what could happen to her because of my actions.
As I parted my lips to try and reply, the words ‘I know’ seemed to get lodged in my throat, and then everything happened all at once.
One minute, I had the guy’s foot in my hand and I was in control, the next, he’d taken full advantage of my moment of weakness, regained some power in his thighs and swung his leg out to the side before smashing it straight across my face.
I went down like a sack of fucking kittens. The ringing in my head was so loud, it made my hands rise up to grip both sides as I tried to regain some kind of control. My face was scrunching up in pure, absolute, undiluted agony.
Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the scraping of a chair on the floor, followed by the sound of our sergeant at arms getting to work as Slater poured his fists upon that Emp’s face like he was nothing more than a punch bag while he cursed and spat at him.
“You piece of shit.” Smack.
In the back of my mind, as I curled up in a ball, grit my teeth together and grunted through every passing second of pain, I thought of Ayda and I saw her face.
I thought of that kiss we shared when I acted like a dick and pushed her close to the point of breaking, before I even had the chance to tell her what I really thought of her.
I thought of that look she wore as she asked me to stay and I walked away.
I thought of every moment we’d spent together, every smile that had graced her lips, every flash of blue as her eyes stared back into mine, and all the calm she held in them that I found myself craving more and more of.
I thought of what the guy had just done to me.
I thought of another guy doing the same to her.
And suddenly, I was really fucking angry again. The white noise faded. My vision became clearer, and as I looked up at Slater pouring hell on that asshole’s face and body, I knew I had to do worse.
Whether it meant killing the whole of his MC, I didn’t care anymore. I had to keep my brothers alive and safe. More importantly, I had to keep living in a world where someone as pure as Ayda still existed. And nobody was going to stand in my way.
Within seconds, I was crawling to my feet and causing damage again, and for once, I was grateful that Slater let me take over without asking a single fucking question, because right there and then, the only talking I was capable of doing came from the power in my fists. The rest of me was numb.
The rest of me was still with her, on the edge of a football field, wondering how either of us could come out of this alive.