1. Vandal
VANDAL
FOUR WEEKS LATER
“Fuck,” I gasp, inhaling air like I’m dying as I sit up on the clubhouse sofa, my hands scratching and clawing against the leather as I try to outrun the nightmare. Sweat pools beneath my armpits, over my lip, on my forehead, and I rub a hand over my face as I try to ground myself back in the bar.
The unfamiliar lines of my face remind me why I’m having the dreams I’m having.
The healing wounds over my brow and eye and cheek have lumps of scar tissue beneath them.
And as I run my hand through my hair, I feel the one-inch-thick band of hair that’s only just started growing back from one ear to the other over the top of my head.
“You okay?” Havoc asks from his spot at the other end of the sofa. His hand is beneath Steffi’s skirt, and her head is thrown back. I give him another five minutes before he takes her back to his room and fucks her senseless. Thirty minutes tops, and then he’ll return to drink with us all.
“Yeah. I’m good,” I say as I look away. The last thing I need to see on a good day is Havoc getting down with a club girl. Even worse when he’s looking at me with that pathetic pity on his face ever since the…I don’t know what to call it.
Accident? Beating? Assault?
But sleep deprivation is fucking with me. So are the dreams. It’s why I’m in the bar rather than my room, trying to force myself to stay awake. But right now, I don’t want to have to deal with this ridiculous party.
If you’d asked me six weeks ago what my definition of a perfect life was, it would be this. The clubhouse is pulsing wall-to-wall with bikers. Sunny, the club’s clueless, pretty-boy tail gunner, and Ridge, our grace-under-fire road captain, are mocking each other’s plays at the pool table.
Reaper, the club medic, is currently pretending to give Lock, our treasurer, a lap dance, much to everyone’s amusement except mine.
And Knox, our club president, the longest-serving one in Outlaws history, is currently slow dancing with Maren, the woman he just made his old lady.
There’s history between their families. Her sheriff father killed his brother, but somehow the two of them found common ground when they sheltered from a hurricane together.
I say found common ground, but I guess everyone knows that’s code for getting down and dirty with each other.
I heard about the concept of magical unicorn pussy. The kind that turns the firmest of bachelors into family men. But I didn’t see it coming with Knox. The guy is in his mid-forties.
I should be happy for my president.
Intellectually, I’m not so stupid that I don’t know getting an old lady and finding out you’re gonna be a father is a happy thing.
But something inside me is…gone.
Ever since Alvarez’s men beat me to within an inch of my life, I’ve felt broken, like a switch got flipped. They took me from that roadside unconscious. When I came to, I had been hoisted up by a rope. The torture went on for two hours.
Two fucking hours of hell.
Of inhumane cruelty, half of which I’ll never speak of ever again.
During the day, I don’t feel anything.
Certainly not the pain from all the surgeries I’ve had to endure, because I numb it with whiskey and the painkillers I skim from the medical room when Reaper isn’t looking.
Certainly not happiness. Conversely, not anger either.
Not even the restlessness that usually has me chasing a fight or a woman.
It’s all been replaced with an itch beneath my skin.
One I can’t stop from spreading. It’s like ants in my veins.
I need an out of the relentlessness of it before I do the stupid thing I keep thinking about.
I’m fucked.
Because it’s like I’m standing on the edge of something bottomless and dark, and I don’t even have it in me to be afraid of the fall. In fact, some days I deliberately force myself closer and closer to tipping over into the abyss.
Usually, I’m right in the middle of the fun. I’d be standing on a table, singing out song lyrics that would both tease my president and irritate him at the same time.
And Knox knows it’s because I love him. He’s a decade older than me in actual years and a lifetime away from me in terms of maturity. Secretly, I think he knows I think of him as more of a father figure than a brother, because I’ve never had one of those in my life before.
I slip behind the bar and eeny, meeny, miny, moe myself across the top shelf. Vodka. Tequila. Gin. But I end up with whiskey. A true Scottish single malt that is probably too good for what I need given the way I’m gonna suck it down.
“You taking the whole thing?” Knox asks, stepping up beside me.
“You got a problem with that?” I ask.
Knox shifts his arms across his chest and leans back against the wooden bar top.
“It’s not for me to say how a man lives his life.
But, Van, I’m worried about the path you’re on, the life you’re currently living.
There are better choices than this out there for you.
” His eyes shift to the healing scars that dominate my head and face.
“Fuck you, Knox. You know shit about the path I’m on. It’s not like I fucking chose it.”
“Then get the fuck off it.” He shifts, putting himself right in my space, so close that our noses brush. “You need my help, brother, consider it done. Because this isn’t you.”
Intellectually, I know it’s that simple.
And yet…
“Good chat, yeah?” I say and spin on my heel to head to my room. I know I’m the party-pooper. The one they’re all talking about behind my back. I’ve put a damper on Knox and Maren’s celebration.
But it’s really hard to care.
Once inside, I open the pill bottle hidden in the pocket of a shirt that hangs on the back of the door. Then I pour myself a heavy slosh of whiskey to chase them with, but at this point, I might as well be taking it straight from the bottle. Anything to keep the nightmares away.
Because in the darkness, I feel everything.
The crack of steel-toed boots to my ribs, to my skull, to my face.
My teeth loosening, and bone giving.
The burn of those cattle prods ripping through my skin, the electricity almost sending my heart into arrhythmia.
And worse. I hear him.
Alvarez.
Asking me over and over again in that cool, calculated tone that never wavered what I knew about a man I didn’t care about and barely knew. I see that ridiculous gloved hand of his smoothing the hair back from his face after he’d exerted himself in some method of torture.
Every day, I watch the clock tick closer to night, knowing that as soon as I close my eyes, I’ll be right back there. Then I wake, choking on my own breath, drenched in sweat, calling out indecipherable words as I try to escape the nightmares.
So, I drink.
Yeah, it’ll wreck my liver. Sooner rather than later, if I’m lucky.
Because a man who’s scared is no use to his club, and right now, I’m not a man worth keeping around. I’m too broken, too fucked up, too injured to be of any help at all.
I wasn’t there the night they took on Alvarez in retaliation. When club members from across the country came to throw their support against Alvarez’s organization by stealing one of his major weapons deliveries from right under his nose.
Instead, I was recovering from another surgery.
I flop down onto my unmade bed. The sheets are twisted and stale, and I don’t remember the last time I washed them. I know Knox’s eye is on me. He had a couple of club girls try to tidy my room around me, but I told them to get the fuck out.
My phone buzzes on the mattress, and I almost ignore it, letting it ring out.
Something, a habit maybe, makes me glance at the screen.
An unknown number. Yeah, I barely have a minute for people I actually know and like. But in my drunken attempt to swipe it off, I answer it.
“Fuck,” I mutter, tugging it to my ear. “Yeah?”
“Can you help me?” My whole body goes still at the timid, shaky voice of a little girl. There’s a fear wrapped up in it that almost echoes my own.
“You got the wrong number, kid.” But I sit up anyway and put my drink down on the small table next to the bed.
There’s a small sob. “I couldn’t see the number good without my glasses. I want Annie.”
Hang up, V.
I even take the phone away from my ear, but then…
“Who’s Annie?”
“Momma’s friend. Is she there?”
I look around my empty room, somehow wishing I could pull the mystery woman out of my closet for her. Her breath catches, followed by another sob.
I know what it feels like to be that scared.
“She’s not. What’s your name, kid?”
“Elsie.” A loud hammering cracks through the line, and there is a raised male voice. I can’t hear what he’s shouting. She gasps. “He won’t go away.”
A woman’s voice, scared but furious, bursts through the line. “I said get away from my door or I’m calling the police.”
There’s the waver of tears in her voice too. The sound of whatever violence is happening to the two of them makes my stomach heave. I’m not at all certain that I’m not gonna puke. I should get to the bathroom or something but can’t move as my world spins.
It must be something I’ve drunk. Or the volume of pills I’ve taken. It can’t be the sound of raised voices… can it?
Elsie sobs quietly. “What do we do?”
Hang up, Van.
I don’t know why I feel the need to remind myself that’s even an option.
I swing my legs off the bed before I have time to overthink why I’m considering doing this.
“Where are you right now?” I ask.
“In the kitchen,” she whispers.
I grab my keys off the desk and tuck my weapon down the back of my jeans.
Getting in any vehicle in the state I’m in is a terrible idea.
It’s illegal. I’m not cleared to drive. I get pulled over by the sheriff, and I’m going to jail for a while because I’m sure my breath would torch a breathalyzer right now.
Layer in being over every drug limit there is and that would be the nail in my coffin.