Chapter Twenty-One
Bonfire, Barbecue and Bullets
“It’s my fault.” Shiloh sat very still by my side. We were back inside the clubhouse and gathered around the same table we’d vacated when Shiloh screamed. Her friends were also seated at the table with their men, while Tyr, Ajax and Slash stood in front of us, the table between us. Like the rest of the women, Shiloh’s face was bloodless, and she sat with her shoulders hunched, as if she were trying to make herself smaller. My hand clasped hers as we sat with our knees touching, ready to take her out of there if she showed any sign of breaking. But so far her shock-darkened eyes were dry, and though her lips were ghostly pale, they didn’t tremble with fracturing emotion.
My amazing Shy.
She was stronger than anyone knew.
Tyr frowned at her. “What do you mean, it’s your fault?”
“I sent Arthur away from the Barracks to deal with a delivery screw-up—twenty pounds of buffalo wings were missing from the order. I gave him the receipt and told him to try to catch the delivery guy, while I stayed in the kitchen unloading groceries and getting ready for tonight’s barbecue. Then the girls showed up, and I got distracted with chatting and making mimosas, and before I knew it two hours had passed. Arthur still hadn’t returned. When I realized he was missing, I wanted to rush out and look for him, but Mabel wouldn’t let me go alone, so all four of us wound up walking around the compound.”
“Thank you, Mabel,” I said, glancing over at the older blonde with Ashtray, where she sat gripping one of his hands with both of hers. “Thank you for looking after my woman.”
“I told Shiloh we’re chosen family now, honey.” Unlike Shiloh, Mabel’s voice shook like she was suffering some sort of internal earthquake, and she gripped her man’s hand that much harder. “And family looks after each other.”
“Yeah,” Ashtray said with surprising force, before he put a supporting arm around Mabel and held her close. “What Mabel said. Your Shy girl’s good people, just like my woman here. That means they’re family, practically by blood.”
Actually that wasn’t what it meant at all, but I was too fascinated by Ashtray’s total about-face on Shiloh to comment.
Tyr shook his head a little, as if he too, had to work at getting past Ashtray’s Shiloh-is-a-super-scary-ninja to Shiloh-is-my-family transformation. “Oh-kay,” he said after a moment, and focused on Shiloh once more. “You went looking for Arthur, and…?”
“We couldn’t find him anywhere, so I decided to ask the guards at the service alley gate if they’d seen him or the delivery guy he was supposed to catch up with. As we approached, a dark blue pickup roared by. A body was thrown out of the back. It was Arthur. The bastards didn’t even slow down. They just tossed him out like… like garbage.”
A faint tremor began to creep into her tone, but even an idiot could have spotted that the tremor came from a place of rage, not fear.
“Okay, baby. Listen, I’ve got something for you to carry at all times, yeah?” I reached into my jacket’s inner pocket and handed it to her. “This is an SRK military-issue knife, with a six-inch black-matte blade. It’s got a nice sticky rubber grip and easy-snap sheath. I’m hoping you’ll never need it, but I still want you to practice drawing it as fast as you can. Understand?”
I heard her take a calming breath, and her fingers were steady as she took the blade from me. “I understand. Thank you.”
“Also, as of now, no more going anywhere by yourself, yeah? Not even here within the compound. Not until this shit blows over.”
“I sent Arthur out alone, Romeo. I put him in danger. It’s my fault.”
“No, Shy.” I brought her hand up to my mouth so I could press my lips to her knuckles. When she leaned toward me like a flower reaching for the sun, a velvet fist caught my heart and squeezed hard enough to make it hurt in the craziest, sweetest way. “You did nothing wrong. In fact, I’m proud as hell at the way you’re handling yourself. The fault lies with the people who did this, not you.”
“What happened after that?” Tyr said, the muscles flexing with tension in his crossed arms. “Did you see where the truck went or who was driving it?”
“I recognized Radar in the passenger seat, and one of Hades’s lieutenants, that skinny bald guy with the bad teeth—Ghoul, I think?—was in the back of the truck,” Mabel offered, her lip curling in distaste. “There were four of our guys at the gate. Three of them went tearing off after the truck. The other one—I think he’s a prospect, he looked so young—locked the gate behind them and then tended to Arthur. Shiloh cussed that boy up and down for locking us in so we couldn’t get to Arthur. That’s all I know.”
“The one left behind is our newest prospect, Ethan,” I offered, glancing at Tyr. “And he did a damn fine job in locking the place down.” Which I would explain to Shiloh once we had a minute to breathe. “The other three are Gunner, Indy and Mal. We need to know if they’ve returned.”
“They have.” Tomahawk approached our table, looking like he’d just chewed on some glass. “They came in through the front gate about two minutes ago. I put them in your office, Tyr, so they’re ready for you whenever you are. You should know that Indy recognized Ghoul in the back of the truck, so it’s confirmed. This was no random attack. It was Hades.”
For a full five seconds the whole room went silent as the enormity of this shit bomb went off. It was official. As of now we were at war, and the first casualty was the kid I’d placed as my woman’s personal bodyguard.
Goddamn it.
“Do you know how Arthur is?” Shiloh straightened in her seat and looked to Tomahawk, her expression filled with equal amounts dread and hope. “I saw the EMTs working on him before I was dragged away. Do you know if he’s… you know… alive?”
Tomahawk shook his shaggy head. “I just know they loaded the kid up in the ambulance and peeled out of here, sirens blazing. That makes me think he was still breathing when they left.”
“That makes sense.” She nodded, her voice faint. “They wouldn’t be in a hurry if he was dead. Right?” She looked to me with so much hope in her eyes it hit me like a dagger.
“Hoping for the best while bracing for the worst is the only way to handle situations like these,” I said carefully, not telling her that I’d gotten a good look at what our prospect had been through. In addition to an obvious beating of a lifetime, there had been at least three stab wounds to Arthur’s torso, not to mention the header he’d been made to take out of a moving vehicle. “All we can do is make sure Arthur gets the best possible treatment, because Gravediggers take care of their own, yeah? And Arthur is definitely one of ours.”
“He wants to be a Gravedigger so bad, Romeo. Just this morning he told me that there was both power and pride in wearing the jacket, and he doesn’t even have his patch yet.”
“He sure as hell earned it today.” Tyr’s voice was gruff, and he sounded more emotional than I’d ever heard him before he turned to Tomahawk. “I’m going to head over to the hospital to be with Arthur and let him know he’s not alone, so I need a couple things from you and Romeo. First, I want video of when and how they got Arthur out of this compound, so Romeo, I need you to trace his every move from the moment your Shy girl sent him off with that receipt.”
I nodded. “As soon as I have it, you’ll have it.”
“Tom, I need you to get Gunner and the others over to the hospital so I can talk with them.”
Tomahawk nodded. “Understood.”
“And Tom, make sure everyone who’s traveling is loaded for bear, yeah? Every brother is packing, as of now. Even here within the compound itself, as well as at church and the barbecue tonight.”
Being armed at church was usually forbidden, but war changed everything.
“You can’t possibly have a party now,” Ana-Sofia said, literally doing a pearl-clutch. But it was done so daintily she made it look both natural and adorable as she turned wide black eyes to her man. “Zee, baby, someone was nearly killed right on your doorstep as a clear message that war is coming. You can’t have a party now. It’s… it’s just not done.”
“Sure, Fancy, it wouldn’t be done at Lincoln Park Country Club.” Zee pressed his mouth to her shiny black hair, no doubt to blunt the harsh reality of his words. “But here in this world—”
“The crazy-macho biker world.”
“Yeah, the crazy-macho biker world,” he agreed with a grin, and suddenly I understood what had drawn Zee to such a Richie-rich woman from the wealthy elite side of the tracks. There was a world of spice hidden beneath that finishing-school fa?ade, and Zee had always had a taste for spicy. “Here in my world—your world now—we always move forward. We don’t show weakness, because we’re not weak. We don’t show fear, because we’re not afraid. Arthur would be the first to tell you that you never show your enemy even the perception of weakness or fear, which is exactly what canceling tonight’s events would do.”
“So in other words, the show must go on?” Shiloh said, not in a condemning way, but in a tone that told me she was doing her best to understand the rules of her new world.
“Exactly,” Zee said, nodding at her. “But for us it’s more than just a show. It’s a declaration of strength—a statement that they’re incapable of knocking us off our stride, much less off our feet.”
“I get it.” Ana-Sofia took a calming breath. “It won’t stop them from trying to knock you off your feet, though.”
“Let them try.” To my surprise, Shiloh snarled the words that both burned with rage and threatened to ice the world over. “I know their cruelty firsthand, and Zee is right—any sign of weakness will only fuel their fire and make them think they’ve won. I’ll be damned if I’m going to hand that kind of weapon over to them, so yeah. Tonight we’re going to party louder and more fiercely than ever, and I hope they watch. I hope they see how strong we are and how impotent their attempts were to get at us today. Their limp-dick energy is obvious as they take potshots at us from afar, so we’re going to have a kickass barbecue right in their faces, and we’re going to have a great time doing it, goddamn it.”
“Preach, sister!” Ashtray pounded the table with his fist before pointing a finger at me. “See? I told you she was a keeper, Romeo. You need to listen to me more often.”
Jesus Christ, tonight was going to be fucking insane.
*
Shiloh
Come to find out, I didn’t know how to dress for a biker bash that promised to be full of bonfire, barbecue and bullets.
In truth, I didn’t give a damn about what I wore. All I really wanted to do was go to the hospital and stand vigil for Arthur, but Romeo had told me—even before I’d asked to go, that’s how well he now knew me—that it wasn’t safe outside the compound now that war had begun. It clearly hadn’t escaped him that it was my personal bodyguard that got attacked. The message was about as subtle as a jackhammer to the face—you took Chef, we take anything remotely connected to Chef. They may as well have posted an announcement on Reddit that I was their number-one target.
Sadly that meant I couldn’t go shopping for an outfit for tonight’s barbecue, but I figured no one would notice if I just wore what I currently had on, a pair of jeans and a sweater. When my new friends heard that, they instantly decided this would be a disaster of epic proportions and mobilized to turn me into a biker-world Cinderella. Misty and I wore the same shoe size, so she promised that whatever outfit we could put together, she’d have the right kind of “fuck-me shoes” to go with it.
Fuck-me shoes. Now I’d heard everything.
Then came the problem of the actual outfit. Thankfully Mabel knew the family that owned the stripper apparel store across the street—The Vixen’s Den—so she wasted no time in picking up the phone. Next thing I knew, I had what had to be half the store’s inventory spread out all over the room I shared with Romeo in the Barracks. The owner of the shop, Ginger Sisko, looked every inch her name, with flame-red hair and a Jessica Rabbit bod. She came over to the compound with garment bags stuffed full of inventory, the likes of which I’d never even seen before.
Clearly I needed to get out more.
I straight-up adored the look of a black-studded pleather catsuit, but the moment I tried it on every pore my body possessed began to sweat. So not sexy. I also loved a pair of stretchy skinny jeans that looked painted on, paired with a loose black cotton halter top with a massive silver-sequined skull-and-crossbones on the front. Ginger slyly pointed out that just one tug on the halter’s tie would make the whole thing drop off, which had both advantages and disadvantages, at least in my mind. The final outfit I went nuts over was a black leather miniskirt, thigh-highs and a lace-up corset-style leopard-print top that pushed my boobs up so much that even I was impressed.
If this didn’t make Romeo forget all about the little mamas, club girls, easy fucks or whatever else was hanging around at the club, nothing would.
In the end, I took everything but the catsuit and handed over my one and only credit card. To my surprise, the statuesque Ginger shook her glorious head of hair and pushed the card back at me.
“That was your bodyguard we watched get taken away in an ambulance earlier, right?” When I nodded, she gave me a thousand-watt smile. “Consider this my gift to you, Shiloh. This is your battle armor, understand? You need to show up in it looking your finest, so the world sees you’re not cowering away somewhere. Far from it. You’re getting your glad-rags on and showing everyone that Hades is incapable of breaking a Gravedigger woman.”
I blinked, overwhelmed. “Oh, I couldn’t—”
“You can and you will, because I said so. Don’t thank me, my unofficial sister,” Ginger added, waving a casual hand when I tried to stutter out my gratitude. “You’ll learn soon enough that we support each other around here, especially when it comes to sticking it to a common enemy.”
“Unofficial sister?” There was so much that needed to be unpacked in that statement, so I started from the top. “Do you, uh, belong—” God, I’d never get used to that, “—to one of the Gravediggers?”
“No, but I grew up in the life. My mom was Hades’s on-again, off-again ol’ lady, and I hate that asshole’s guts like you wouldn’t believe. He’s not my father,” she added hastily when she correctly read the widening of my eyes. “Dear God, no. That shithead was an abusive fucker from start to finish, and he’s still the star of some of my worst nightmares. I’m totally in on anything that works to get under his skin, even if it’s something as simple as getting you the proper battle armor you need to show his evil ass how unafraid you are. God, I just want to giggle at the thought of how pissed he’s going to be when he sees you being the life of the party.”
And like that, I was in possession of some seriously cute outfits from a stripper apparel store. Honestly, my life was that much better for it.
With the problem of what to wear taken care of, it was then time to make sure the party preparations were going smoothly. As more and more bikers roared in with their women perched on the backs of their bikes, I was in the Barracks’ kitchen learning an awesome marinade from Mabel while assembling my killer queso con carne and setting it to simmer in a large crockpot. Then a bunch of us shaped about a million hamburger patties and set them in the fridge for later tonight.
As we worked, a commercial-sized smoker on a small flatbed trailer was pulled up to the back of the kitchen, and soon the scents of hickory wood and smoking brisket and turkey legs perfumed the air. As the afternoon rolled on, more Gravedigger woman—some with jackets, others without but still known to just about everyone there—wandered into the kitchen to see what they could do to help. I found myself with less and less to do, despite the fact that there was a staggering amount of food—most of it some kind of meat—being prepped for the party.
Clearly, vegetarianism wasn’t a thing in badass biker world.
It was almost five in the afternoon when Mabel sent Misty, Ana-Sofia and me off to our respective rooms to get ready, while she continued to marshal the troops still coming in to lend a hand. As I climbed the stairs to Romeo’s and my room, I noted that an unlit bonfire had been built log-cabin style in the parking lot area not far from the Clubhouse. I had been told that it wouldn’t be lit until it was completely dark, and it was the biggest bonfire structure I’d ever seen. The statement it made was clear. Far from being broken over Arthur’s attack, the Gravediggers were ready to party like their lives depended on it.
The only thing more head-shaking about this was that I was beginning to understand the ways of this new world that I’d found myself in. It was amazing, really, how far I’d come.
I pushed through the door to our room and found Romeo already there, standing next to the built-in where I’d hung the outfits Ginger had given me. He had the thigh-highs in one hand and a half-smile on his face as he turned to look at me while I quietly closed the door behind me.
“I met Ginger Sisko today,” I offered, for some reason ridiculously embarrassed that he had my pretty sheer stockings in his hand. “She calls that battle armor. Which outfit do you like?”
“I like you naked, but since there’s no way in hell I’d ever let any of my brothers put eyes on what’s mine, let’s go with the skirt.”
The hungry possessiveness in his tone thrilled me. “Like a bit of leg showing, do you?”
“Baby, what I like is easy access to that sweet, sweet pussy of yours.”
Oh, my. “If you’re a fan of easy access, you’re going to love that shirt with the skull and crossbones on it. According to Ginger, if you tug on that tie at the back of the neck, the whole thing just falls off. Doesn’t that sound interesting?”
His low chuckle sounded like a purr. “Interesting is definitely one way of putting it. The skull shirt and skirt’s your outfit for tonight, and I don’t want you leaving my side for the entire night. Can’t have anyone else tugging on that tie.”
“Yeah,” I whispered, while my skin heated and the place between my legs grew damp with need. “You’re the only man who gets to unwrap this particular present.”
“Hell, yeah, I am.” Still smiling, he gave me a thorough once-over with burning, hungry eyes. “Need help getting changed, Shy girl?”
Like a switch being thrown, I heard Misty’s admonition to satisfy my man before church and all the “services” that happened after. “What time is your meeting?”
“Six. About an hour from now.”
Plenty of time. “In that case, yes.” Smiling, I shrugged off the jacket he’d given me and set it carefully aside. Then I pulled my sweater over my head before making long, hot eye contact with him as I held it off to the side and deliberately dropped it to the floor. “I would love to have your help. Hands-on help, preferably.”
The look in his eyes was a masterpiece of all things sinful as he closed the distance between us.