Chapter 6
SIX
Zedekiah
“Bye, babe.” I pause at the door for a lingering kiss.
Harper laughs even though she’s tired.
“Mommy. Mommy!” The kid grabs at her legs from below us, but I don’t let her go, deepening the kiss.
“Z,” she laughs again from underneath my mouth. “He needs my attention.”
“Maybe I need your attention more,” I growl against her lips, pressing into her hips with my hard-on. “We could put on another Cocomelon episode. We’ve got time for a quickie.”
“We don’t actually.” Harper reaches down and squeezes my aching cock with an arched eyebrow. “You’re already running late. But nice try.”
I groan. “You gonna send me out on my long haul aching like this?”
She just shakes her head at me. “I already emptied you once in the shower this morning. How on God’s green earth are you like this again already?”
I lasso her around the waist and tug her close again, smirking into her mouth. “I always want you. You know that.”
Her lips quirk up, and I fucking love it when she looks at me like this. Eyes so open and full of adoration.
Most people’s lives have taken a one-way ticket into the shitter during this pandemic, but mine all of a sudden has gotten sweet. At least as far as me and Harp are concerned.
Like, for the first time, I really believe it’s me she loves.
That I’m finally the only one she thinks about when I sink inside her.
It might’ve taken years, but I did it.
All it took was a little worldwide pandemic to seal the deal.
Her chair at Elio’s tattoo shop got shut down, so now she waits on me hand and foot when I’m home, and I’m free from all babysitting duties.
I thought I’d fucking hate having to be the one out there bringing in the bacon, but it turns out it’s not that bad trading my side gig dealing for a long-haul trucking job instead.
It actually feels good to be the one taking care of our little family.
I’m almost… turning respectable.
Maybe this really is the way things could be now.
Me out on the road. Coming home to the little woman who worships the ground I walk on. I’m even thinking about talking Harper into letting me knock her up again. This time for real, with my kid.
Then she can stay home with the two little ankle-biters.
I don’t actually mind trucking. Sure, it’s not as fun as staying at home and gaming while pretending to “watch” the baby, but it’s not bad, either.
I like talk radio and audiobooks. At least I get to sit down all day. And driving a big rig is badass.
Plus, there’s the way Harper looks at me when I get back home.
She always loved me, in her way, but now that I’m her only connection to the outside world, the woman all but worships me.
And the way she rides my cock—fuuuuck. I can’t get enough of that.
She dropped to her knees in the shower this morning, all but swallowing my balls in her eagerness to get me off.
A man can’t ask for more outta life.
So yeah, I’m feeling pretty damn good about shit when I pull into the gas station where all the usual truckers gas up, hooking it up to the pump and heading inside for the tar black coffee I like.
This life’s a little more humble than I maybe envisioned, but as long as I got Harp, I can take not having as much flashy cash like I did when I was dealing and gambling.
This has been a good reset, not only job-wise, but also of my priorities.
Like, maybe Harper and me really can live the dream we always dreamed about when we were kids. About getting out of that hellhole we grew up in and making it the way normal people do. Working a respectable job and raising kids together. Her and me against the world, just like we always swore.
I know shit started out as a lie, but I’m starting to think that maybe, if you just have one person in this world who believes in you, it’s enough to make it true. Like I’m starting to believe in myself, too.
And that I can start to be the man she thinks I am.
I think I want to be him.
It’s time to start earning the trust that shines in her eyes when she looks at me. I love her so fucking much. I need her. And Goddammit, with her at my side, it’s easy to believe anything’s possible.
Even being a good man.
The station’s half-empty, which is normal these days. Most of the truckers are masked up and keeping their distance.
Essential workers, they call us. Means we’re the only ones allowed to move freely while everyone else is locked down like prisoners.
Before I load up my Big Gulp with coffee, I head to the bathroom to take a piss.
The door swings shut behind me with a heavy thunk that echoes off the tile. Fluorescent lights flicker overhead, casting everything in that sickly yellow-green. The place reeks of industrial cleaner.
I’m halfway to the urinal before I register I’m not alone.
Two guys stand by the sinks. One’s leaning against the wall like he’s got all the time in the world—tall, rangy, with a patchy beard and a Lonestar Kings patch on his vest.
Fuck.
Another patched motherfucker’s blocking the door I just came through, thick arms crossed over a barrel chest.
My gut clenches. Shit. It’s never good to see the Kings anywhere before nine a.m. on a Tuesday.
“Z.” The tall one—Viper, I remember his name now—pushes off the wall with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Been a minute.”
I force my shoulders to relax, even though every instinct is screaming at me to bolt. But there’s nowhere to go. Plus that’s a prey response, and these motherfuckers are definitely predators.
The one at the door—I don’t know his name, just that he’s got dead eyes and a scar running from his temple to his jaw—shifts his weight. Not threatening. Just… present. But I know he’s got guns on the back of that low-slung belt of his. Knives, too, most likely.
“Viper.” I nod like this is normal. Like running into MC enforcers in a truck stop bathroom is just any other Tuesday. “How’s business?”
“Funny you should ask.” Viper pulls a toothpick from his pocket and sticks it in his mouth, working it from one side to the other. “Business has been… complicated lately. State of things, ya know. Not so many kids in the clubs these days.”
I don’t say anything. It’s an old instinct to never volunteer information or offer to fill a silence.
“You remember Crash Martinez, right?” Viper tilts his head. “Guy you used to move product for with the Kings? Before you got all respectable on us?”
My jaw tightens. Crash ran the club circuit in East Austin, a mid-level dealer who’d pay me in cash and cocaine to move party favors and eight-balls to the college kids and wannabe badasses who thought they were slumming it.
Easy money after Harper and I moved down here from Dallas, even easier when I was supposedly “watching” Bruiser and could make drops between diaper changes.
A connection from Dallas hooked me up with Crash.
But I’m all done with that now.
“Haven’t talked to Crash in months,” I say carefully. “I got out of that life.”
“Yeah, we noticed.” Viper’s smile sharpens. “Noticed a lot of things, actually. Like how you got yourself a CDL. How you took out a loan for that nice new big rig, with great, legitimate contracts lined up.” He leans in. “And how you got a pretty little family at home.”
The way he says pretty little family makes ice slide down my spine.
“What do you want, Viper?” I bite out.
“What I want,” he says, stepping closer, “is for you to remember where you came from. Remember who gave you a chance when you were just some punk-ass kid dealing dime bags behind the high school bleachers.”
He’s talking about the first time I got pulled into their orbit. It was back in Dallas. I saw the MC guys hanging around Harper’s dad’s BDSM Dungeon and figured I could make a few extra bucks by selling to those rich bitches at her school.
But then, when I saw I was losing her heart to that dickhead Caleb…
Well… it all started out innocent enough.
The weed in her locker seemed genius at the time. Enough to get her arrested, but not enough to actually ruin her life.
I just wanted to remind her where she came from and that she belonged with me. She wouldn’t have spent more than two years on the inside, and probably not much more than six months, considering it was her first offense.
Harvard boy would’ve been off at college, and then she and me coulda continued on as we’d always been.
No harm, no foul.
Except Silas—fucking Silas—had to go and be the big damn hero, taking the fall instead. Ten years in Gatesville for what should’ve been Harper’s first strike.
And then Helen died, and I had to scramble and spin the story so Harper never connected the dots. Then make sure she stayed far away from Caleb and cement my place in her life.
“I remember,” I say tightly. “But I’m out now. Living clean.”
Viper laughs, short and sharp. “Nobody’s clean, Z.
You know that. And we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t need you.
You’re just too stupid to realize it was Crash’s guys who planted the idea in your head—” Suddenly he’s pulled a knife and is tapping the flat of the blade against my forehead, “to get your CDL and take out a loan on a big rig. This has been our plan for you all along, dipshit.”
The guy by the door shifts again, and I catch the glint of metal tucked into his waistband. Fuck.
“The pandemic’s been good for some people,” Viper continues conversationally, like we’re discussing the weather.
“Bad for others. You know what it’s been for us?
Complicated. Border’s tighter. Cops are more suspicious because there’s less traffic to hide in, but the patrol’s also stretched thin.
Air routes are fucked. But you know what keeps moving? ”
He points at me.
“Truckers. Essential workers. You boys get waved through checkpoints that would have civilian vehicles pulled over for hours. You got credentials, manifests, and legitimate cargo. You’re Goddamn invisible if we work it right.”
My stomach drops. “No.”