Chapter 19
Trick/Jase
Lauren put her hand on my arm to stop me as I reached to turn off the light again.
“You don’t need to apologize,” she said, then asked softly, “Do you have nightmares often?”
I was ready to deny it, the lie coming automatically after all these years, but as soon as I saw the genuine concern on her face, I couldn’t do it.
“I used to, but I haven’t had one in a few years,” I admitted. “They started when I was a kid, right after my dad left.”
“I’m so sorry this mess with Beau caused you to have one tonight.” She looked like she was on the verge of tears, and I knew I couldn’t stand to watch her cry. I flipped the light off, then settled back in the bed.
Neither of us said anything for several long moments before I started talking again.
“I thought I killed my dad,” I confessed.
“It was just a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday. He came home drunk again and started beating my mom, worse than he ever had before. Then he went after me. Mom stopped him, so he knocked her to the ground. I grabbed my baseball bat and swung at his head.”
There was something about laying there in a darkened room in the middle of the night that caused the goddamned floodgates to open.
The words trickled out slowly at first, then started flowing faster as I told her about everything.
Dad getting fired, us having to move into the trailer, the escalating abuse, and my panic when I thought he was dead.
I told her about calling King, and how he and Sinner and Viking had taken my dad away, and that we’d never seen him again.
Lauren listened, not interrupting aside from a quiet gasp now and then.
“Mom got a package in the mail a week later. Divorce papers with his signature, along with a request to terminate his parental rights. All Mom had to do was file them.” I laughed then as I told her that I’d wondered for a long time if King and the others had actually killed him that night and faked his signature.
“I looked him up online when I was seventeen and found a small newspaper article from the year before. He’d been killed in a bar fight in Detroit after hitting some guy over the head with a beer bottle.
The guy he hit had a knife and defended himself.
Good ol’ Dad was a mean drunk until the fuckin’ end, I guess,” I said bitterly.
“King and the club helped my mom out financially, hiring her to clean some of their businesses and paying for her to go to school to take some accounting classes. She started working as a bookkeeper when I was fifteen. One of her customers owned an insurance agency, and he fell for Mom right away. They got married when I was eighteen. He retired two years later, and they moved to Arizona. I missed her,” I sighed, “but he was a nice guy and she loved him. I was glad that she could finally relax and enjoy her life.”
I paused for a second, swallowing around the lump in my throat. “She died four years ago. Had an aneurysm in her sleep. They’d flown out to visit me the week before, and she’d been happier than I’d ever seen her.”
My voice trailed off, and I sighed heavily.
“My mom was the only one who ever knew about my nightmares,” I confided. “She would get upset every time I had one, so I started trying to hide them. I moved into the bedroom down the hall, farther away from hers so she wouldn’t hear me.”
A soft sniffle caught my ear, followed by a muffled sob.
“Oh, darlin’,” I groaned, pulling her into my arms. “Don’t cry. It all turned out OK. The nightmares stopped around the time I graduated high school. I didn’t have another one until a few weeks after my mom died.”
She shuddered against me, and her warm tears trickled down onto my chest.
“Don’t waste your tears on me. I don’t need your pity, babe,” I said, the words coming out more harshly than I intended.
She stiffened, then rubbed her hand along my side soothingly.
“It’s not pity, Trick. I’m just sad that you had to go through that.
Nobody should ever have to live with that kind of abuse, especially a child.
I’m sad for your mom, who must have felt trapped until you saved her.
I’m sad that you lost her, just when things were going so well.
I’m sad that you felt like you had to hide your nightmares from her. ”
I hugged her tightly, then pressed a soft kiss into her hair, trying not to give in to the rush of emotion caused by her sweet words.
She hesitated, then asked softly, “That’s the real reason why you always sleep alone, isn’t it?”
I inhaled sharply as the truth hit me like a punch to the solar plexus.
“It’s part of it, anyway. There were a few women over the years who got the wrong idea if I let them sleep over.
But, yeah, the nightmares were the biggest issue.
” I dragged in a ragged breath, then admitted, “After my mom died, I went off the rails for several weeks. I was drinking too much and doing everything I could do to avoid being alone so that I didn’t have to think about how much I missed her.
The last time I had a nightmare, the random woman next to me bitched that I’d woken her up and asked me what the hell was wrong with me. ”
Lauren gasped, and muttered, “What a heartless cunt,” under her breath.
Her outrage made me smile into the darkness, and I kissed her forehead.
“So, I announced my new rule and always enforced it, no matter what. If I took a woman to my room, I made sure she knew the score up front. Some of them tried to change my mind after the fact, and a few of them got ugly about it and caused a scene, so I just stopped taking them to my room at all.”
“I have to tell you, Trick, that when I first heard about that damned rule, I thought you were the most disrespectful asshole on the planet.”
I winced. “You weren’t too far off, darlin’.”
“Lack of respect is a deal breaker for me, especially after what I went through when Beau and I were engaged, and I think that’s why it took so long for me to let down my defenses with you.”
I could have kicked my own ass in that moment.
“Thank you for trusting me with your story, Trick. Your secrets are safe with me.”
“I know that, darlin’.” I yawned as exhaustion kicked in. Aside from the fact that it was the middle of the damned night, the emotional rollercoaster I’d been on as we’d talked had left me feeling mentally drained.
“Let’s get some sleep,” I said when she let out a yawn of her own. I kissed her one last time, a soft, affectionate peck on the lips that felt intimate after I’d shared my secrets with her.
Surprisingly, it didn’t take long for sleep to pull me under, only to wake up when my phone rang, a little after six in the morning. Seeing Bull’s name flashing on the screen brought me to full alertness, despite the lack of sleep.
I connected the call but didn’t even manage to get a greeting out before he growled, “I need you in my office as soon as possible. Don’t bring Lauren…it’s bad, man.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said quietly.
Lauren stirred beside me as I slipped out of bed.
“Trick?” she murmured sleepily.
“It’s OK, babe. Bull needs to see me for a minute. Go back to sleep.”
“Did Beau send another email?” she asked, sitting up and brushing her hair out of her face.
I shrugged. “He didn’t say, but I’ll fill you in when I get back.”
I slipped on my jeans and hauled ass down the hall to his office, bare chested and barefoot.
Bull didn’t look much better, in a rumpled T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants that had seen better days.
Based on the dark circles under his eyes, he’d had even less sleep than I had.
He was talking on his speakerphone when I stalked into the room, and he motioned for me to close the door.
“Prez, Trick just walked in. I’ll fill him in.”
“OK, I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, and Trick, you keep your ass at the clubhouse until I get there.”
King hung up without waiting for an acknowledgement from me, and Bull motioned for me to sit down. He pushed a mug across the desk, then picked up another one for himself.
“I poured you a coffee. Trust me, you’re gonna need the caffeine. If we didn’t need to keep a clear head, I would have added a big fuckin’ splash of Irish whiskey to it.”
I rolled my neck to ease the tension that had gripped me since I’d answered his call, then took a large sip of coffee to fortify myself before asking, “OK, what the fuck happened?”
He flipped the computer monitor around – one of two that he kept on his desk – and pointed at the screen.
“Courtesy of Your Soulmate,” he muttered as he sat back in his chair.
“I warned you to stop making me jealous before someone got hurt. I’ll bet Dustin wishes you’d listened.” My eyes widened as I read the latest message.
“What the fuck? He’s threatening Dustin now?” I asked Bull, who shook his head grimly, then turned his other monitor around. The police department logo was at the top of the screen.
“It was more than a threat. The email was sent about forty-five minutes ago, and I got the alert right away. After I saw it, I accessed the police dispatch records for any reports of activity at Dustin’s address and found that a 911 call came in around three-thirty this morning.
The caller reported finding an unconscious male in the parking garage of his condo building.
The cops on the scene wrote it up as a mugging, since the guy’s wallet, keys, and cell phone were missing. ”
He paused to take another sip of coffee. “The guy was unconscious, and with no ID he was transported to the hospital as a John Doe. Description fits, though. White guy, about six-foot-one, blond hair, late twenties to mid-thirties. King’s calling Randy Hayes to clue him in.”
Randy Hayes was a homicide detective, who also happened to be Abby’s dad.
He was a good cop and stayed on the right side of the law.
He also didn’t look too closely at the MC’s activities, especially if he knew we could get justice when law enforcement simply didn’t have the proof they needed to make charges stick.