Chapter 24
Lexi
I ’m desperate for Zen to come back to the clubhouse safe and sound. Although talking to my friends helps keep me from going into a full-blown panic, I can’t stop worrying about him and his club brothers. I can’t get the idea out of my head that it only takes one stray bullet to take him out. I can’t bear the thought of him dying while trying to keep me safe. The guilt is eating me up inside.
I’m so nervous that I feel like I’m going to throw up. I barely make it to the restroom before the contents of my stomach come up. After I finish heaving, I wash the sink out and pull an antacid out of my pants pocket. I’ve been eating them morning, noon, and night for the last week or so. I guess all this stress is giving me stomach trouble. When I’m feeling presentable, I head back to the bar.
When I finally hear the throaty roar of multiple motorcycles in the distance, I rush out of the clubhouse to meet Zen. Only there’s another brother riding his bike. I don’t see Zen anywhere. My legs give way, and I fall to my knees and start rocking back and forth. He can’t be dead. He can’t be. The prospect riding his bike walks over and stoops beside me. “Zen’s okay. The fucker we were after knifed him in the shoulder. I had to bring his bike back for him. He’ll be along in the van shortly. Our medic is tending to him. He’s gonna be okay, alright?”
I nod, wiping at the tears streaming down my face. “Thanks for telling me. I’ve been really worried about him.”
His hand comes out to land on my shoulder, and he gives me a little squeeze. “Of course you were worried. You’re a good old lady. The good ones always worry.”
When he walks away, I realize that I am a good old lady. I love Zen, and I think he loves me. So, when the van pulls in, I go running right out to meet it. Their medic helps him out of the van—or tries to—but Zen pushes him away. “I’m not fucking feeble. Both my legs work just fine.”
“Alright, man, you don’t have to get fucking snippy.”
I want to throw my arms around him, but I approach cautiously because I don’t want to make his injuries worse. Yet as soon as I get within reach, he pulls me into his arms. I let him because I’m just so relieved to see him alive and whole.
“It’s so fucking good to see you, Lexi. Are you okay? That twisted old man didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No. He tried to, but Crow and the prospects pulled him off me. They’ve got him locked up in your club’s jail.”
I hear a familiar voice say, “You guys have your own jail? Damn, that’s some crazy shit.”
It’s the cousin I never knew I had—MadHitter, though now I know his real name is Terrance Harris. I turn on him and ask, “Why do you have a different last name from me? If our fathers were twins, it doesn’t make any sense that my surname is Roderick and yours is Harris.”
He looks me over, his expression filled with something approaching pure blind hatred. “You can’t be this stupid. Clearly, when their parents split, each of them took one of the twins. Every time there was a choice to be made, me and my old man got the short end of the fuckin’ stick.”
I frown, trying to figure out what he’s talking about. “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“When their parents divorced, they split the twins. Our maternal grandmother took my dad. She was a horrible shrew who fucked him up for life. After her share of the marital estate ran out, she slowly slid into addiction, allowing a long string of abusive men to move in. He had a rough life growing up. He married a woman who didn’t understand why he was so sour on life. She gave up on me and said I was a bad seed who took after my father. She sent me to live with him when she went and married a cop. I’m sure you can imagine what that was like.”
“That’d be when you were caught torturing one of the neighbor’s dogs,” Zen mutters.
“I’m sorry you and your father went through that, but what does that have to do with my dad and me?” I ask.
Although his hands are chained together in front of him, he takes a threatening step forward. “Your dad got to go with his father’s family. He grew up being doted on, while my old man lived in squalor. He got a college education and became a professor. He married a beautiful woman who didn’t abandon him, and they had a fucking perfect daughter that everyone adored.”
His hands come up and the chains rattle when he slams both fists into his chest. “Everyone knows you’re not supposed to split up twins. If only they had both gone with their father, the entire trajectory of our lives would have been different.”
Zen’s bored voice rises above my cousin’s: “Well, boo fucking hoo. You had a miserable life growing up. Lots of people do, but they don’t stalk and try to kill their relatives whose only crime is having a decent family life.”
Terrance’s expression closes down immediately. “You don’t know what it was like growing up with my dad. No matter whether it was nature or nurture, I’m fucked up now.”
Zen tells a couple of club brothers standing nearby, “Take him to Siege. Don’t put him with his father unless the club officers tell you to.”
The one I recognize as Tex—because of his slow southern drawl—points out, “Y’all know our club president’s gonna want you to be there.”
Rage speaks up. “We’ll be along shortly, but remember, I still have to stitch up that wound on Zen’s shoulder.”
“Will do,” Tex mumbles as he jerks Terrance forward, another brother wrangling him from the other side.
Rage follows them, sparing a glance over his shoulder to Zen. Zen tells me, “I guess I should get this over with. I’ll come to you as soon as I’m finished, okay?”
I gaze up into his bloodstained face and say, “I want to go with you, I want to ask my own questions, and hear what they have to say with my own ears.”
He freezes for a moment, and I can tell he’s thinking it over. I’ll bet that women aren’t often involved in their club business. But in this case, their club business is my business as well.
Finally, he nods. “Stay right with me. If what goes down is too much for you, just excuse yourself. Ain’t no brother in this club would fault you for leaving under the circumstances. You got anything you want me to know before going into this?”
I can feel my bottom lip trembling, but I push out the words anyway. “I think Terrance is the one who killed my father. Going by his build, he’s closer in size and height to the killer than his father.”
“Alright, I’ll make sure to focus on that. Let’s get back there before Siege starts getting antsy.”
I wrap my arm around his waist and walk with him because I don’t know how bad his wound is or how much blood he’s lost, and I don’t want to chance him being unsteady on his feet.
When we get to Siege’s office, Terrance is sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by brothers. Rage has an open med kit by another empty chair. We go over, and Zen drops silently down in the chair.
Siege asks Zen, “You sure you want your woman involved in this?”
Zen gives him a succinct nod. “She has a right to be. It’s her life we’re talking about tonight.”
Rigs drags another chair over for me.
I whisper, “Thank you.”
Rage gets to work on Zen’s shoulder. His other club brothers take turns asking Terrance questions. They hit him with one question after another.
Siege keeps pounding away at why he was stalking me. “Did you have a thing for your cousin?”
“She’s just a girl. I didn’t like her more or less than any other girl.”
“You sure cut and pasted a lot of pictures of her onto nude bodies for your comic book.”
Terrance is so casual, you’d think he was talking about the weather. “I do that to a lot of girls, so that doesn’t exactly make her special.”
“But you had that shrine with all the pictures of her in your old office. Seems like you were crushing pretty hard on her.”
Terrance laughs. “I did that to freak you and your club brothers out because I knew you were looking for me.”
“That was fairly stupid,” Rigs tells him. “It led us right to you.”
“No,” Terrance contradicts him. Looking over at him, he clarifies, “Zen tracked down my real name on the computer somehow.”
“You used your mom’s credit card when you first moved into the apartment. You clearly thought you’d covered your trail but forgot about that one payment.”
Terrance almost looks proud. “You must have wanted me pretty bad to go digging through archived files.”
“Oh, I did. And if I have my way, you ain’t gonna walk out of here alive.”
Terrance’s eyes narrow on Zen, but he’s surprised when Zen shoots back. “I think you do have a thing for your cousin because you tried to get into her house while delivering food, and you came to her house the night of the break-in looking for her, right?”
“I thought at first the killer had just noticed my picture on the mantel and wanted to see me. But that wasn’t it. You came looking for me. And when my dad wouldn’t tell you where I was, you killed him in a fit of rage.”
“That’s just speculation on your part,” Terrance deadpans back. It’s weird that he won’t confirm or deny it.
Rigs says, “It’s not that he has a thing for you, I think he broke into your house with the intention of killing you both. What I want to know is why.”
Zen joins the conversation. “Rigs is right. You wanted to kill them both. But the question remains, why?”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Terrance says with such authority that I would believe him if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Although his face was obscured, he looks exactly like the man who broke into our house and killed my dad.
Rigs switches up the conversation a bit. “Tell us why your fingerprints were found on items in the kill bag buried on Lexi’s property.”
That surprises me, no one had told me they’d gotten information back from the police. Unless of course, Rigs is just bluffing. This question throws him for a loop. For the first time, he looks truly shaken. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What kill bag?”
Rigs shoots me an odd look but decides to let it go, likely because he wants to see what Terrance’s dad has to say about it. A couple of the brothers take Terrance away, but I’m not totally sure where.
I get distracted watching Rage prep Zen’s shoulder for surgery. I realize the room has gone silent, and there is a strange man without a cut standing in the doorway with Siege’s wife, Cleo, and Rider’s old lady, Fran, who says, “No insult intended, Rage, but I thought we’d go with a real doctor this time.”
“None taken. I’m happy to defer to a real doctor.”
Cleo and the doctor walk in together. Cleo introduces him, “Dr. Patchett, I’d like you to meet my husband, Siege—he’s the president of the Savage Legion. Siege, this is Dr. Thomas Patchett.”
“Nice to meet you, Dr. Patch. I appreciate you making a house call to an MC. Not many doctors are up for a gig like that.”
“I’m a surgeon with the VA. Fran was kind enough to introduce me to your wife, and they both spoke highly of your MC. I’m a bit of a motorcycle enthusiast myself, so when I heard one of your club members was injured, I agreed to stop by.”
I can tell the club officers are shocked and a bit annoyed at how Cleo just came walking in with this stranger, catching us all by surprise. They don’t show it, though. In fact, Siege steps forward and extends his hand. “Any friend of my wife’s is a friend of mine.”
“Thanks for the warm welcome. I’d best get to it.” Turning to Rage, he asks, “What do you have for me tonight?”
“My club brother has a four-inch laceration on his exterior deltoid muscle. It looks like it just missed severing a ligament. I have it prepped and ready to suture. It’s a clean cut with a knife, so I don’t think it needs to be x rayed or anything.”
They continue to chat, involving Zen in the conversation when issues relating to pain management, cleaning and dressing the wound, and how to know if it becomes infected come up.
The wives stay, and the conversation turns to more mundane things. I know they must be curious about what happened, but you’d never be able to tell by looking at them. The whole situation is surreal.
It doesn’t take the doctor long to stitch up the wound. It’s a little nauseating to see him trimming away jagged flesh for a clean closure. By the time he’s finished, I’m thinking to myself that the scar will be a lot less noticeable because of the doctor’s expertise.
The old ladies and Rage walk out with the doctor in tow. Everyone is all smiles, and the conversation is rolling right along.
The moment the door shuts behind them, Siege comments, “Out of everything that went down today, I was not expecting Cleo to walk in with some fancy ass doctor to add to our club.”
Rider snorts a laugh. “That’s not what she said. He’s just some random colleague of Fran’s. Just because he likes to ride motorcycles doesn’t mean he’d be interested in joining our club.”
Siege’s voice turns irritated in an instant. “I know my wife. Trust me, she wouldn’t have brought him here if she didn’t think he was a good fit for our club.”
Rigs chimes in, “This thing with Zen is a perfect example of why we need a good doctor around this place. Especially since Doc retired. Rage is damn good, but there’s only so much he can do.”
Dutch nods. “I agree. No harm can come from asking if he wants to join our club.”
Rider insists, “He’s still gotta prospect just like everybody else. Just because he’s a doctor doesn’t mean he can just walk up in here and get patched in.”
Siege gives him a dirty look. “You really have some deep-seated dislike for those VA doctors, don’t you?”
“That’s crazy talk,” Rider responds. “I’m just saying he needs to prospect if he wants to join.” We all know Rider is lying through his pearly whites. Those VA surgeons had to operate on him at least a dozen times, and he hated it every single time. He didn’t really have a choice if he wanted to keep riding his motorcycle, though. He can’t do that with a bad hand.
Tank agrees with Rider, maybe just to smooth the situation over. “Of course he’s gotta earn his patch. There’s no doubt about that.”
Seeing the inner workings of their club is much less impressive than I thought it would be. Tedious, is the word that comes to mind. I move over to sit beside Zen.
His hands come out to hold mine. “How are you holding up, Lexi?”
“Terrible,” I reply. “You can’t leave me alone for a minute or I almost get abducted by a serial killer. I’m nothing but trouble for you.”
He perks up at my gentle teasing and reaches up to tuck a lock of my long, dark hair behind my ear. “You’re right about being trouble, but you’re the best kind of trouble.”
I lean over and place a gentle kiss on his bandage. “I’m truly sorry you got hurt trying to protect me from what turned out to be my own family.”
He grins. “It does sound a bit wacky when you put it like that, but you can’t ever forget these two clowns are extremely dangerous.”
His words hit me wrong, and I tear up. “How could I ever forget that after Terrance killed my dad and his father killed all those innocent women?”
Zen’s good arm comes out and wraps around me, tugging me closer. “I’m sorry if that sounded patronizing. You’ve been through a lot.”
“Maybe I’m being overly sensitive,” I tell him. Before he can deny it, I ask, “Are we going to talk to Terrance’s father this evening? I have a bunch of questions for him.”
Siege’s voice cuts through the din of voices. “Yes. We’re doing that as soon as Zen gets a moment to catch his breath.”
Zen gets to his feet with his good arm still around me. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Let’s get it done,” Siege responds.
We follow the club officers down to the locked cell in the basement.