Chapter 20
Reeze had known from the moment the phone rang that the evening probably wasn’t going to end well.
There were certain jobs that made your entire body protest before they had even begun, the kind where you knew from the outset that there was no solution that would leave anyone happy when it was over.
He had gone anyway.
That was what he did. The club didn’t give him jobs so he could sit around considering whether he felt like doing them, and sometimes loyalty was a much heavier thing to carry than anyone outside this world would ever understand.
The man they were looking for was called Henrik, and there was nothing particularly remarkable about him.
He wore no colours, held no position worth mentioning and probably would never have attracted the club’s attention at all if he had simply kept his mouth shut.
People had a strange tendency to believe information was worthless right up until they found themselves facing the consequences of sharing it with the wrong people.
Reeze had hoped a conversation would be enough. Sometimes people got frightened, understood the seriousness of the situation and backed down before anyone needed to take things any further, but the moment Henrik saw them, Reeze knew this probably wasn’t going to be one of those nights.
The fear was already there.
So was the panic.
And frightened people did stupid things.
They found him behind the old sawmill on the edge of the industrial estate, where the abandoned buildings stood like rusting skeletons against the darkening sky.
Wind moved through broken walls, carrying the smell of oil, damp timber and old dust as Henrik backed farther into the warehouse, his eyes darting between the exits as though he still believed there might be a way out of the situation.
“We need to talk.”
Reeze kept his voice calm, not because Henrik deserved any particular kindness, but because he still hoped to finish this without anyone getting hurt.
Henrik laughed, a short, hysterical sound without the slightest trace of humour.
“Talk? Is that what you call this?”
Then the words began pouring out of him. Excuses, explanations, denials and more excuses, all the things people reached for when they were desperately trying to escape something that had already caught up with them. Reeze had heard it all before, so he let the man finish without interrupting.
For a few seconds, it actually looked as though Henrik was going to give in.
His shoulders dropped, his gaze fell towards the floor and the frantic stream of words finally began to slow.
Reeze thought he had understood at last that he wasn’t going to argue his way out of this, and some of the tension left him.
Despite what people liked to believe about men like Reeze, there were very few situations where violence genuinely made anything better, and he had seen enough of it over the years to know exactly how it usually ended.
Then Henrik’s gaze slid past him and settled somewhere beyond his shoulder.
Reeze didn’t even have time to turn before the man lunged for the iron bar lying amongst the debris by the wall.
Henrik didn’t swing like a man who believed he could win.
He swung like a terrified man who had suddenly decided the only way out was through the person standing in front of him.
The iron bar struck Reeze across the shoulder with enough force to send pain tearing through his entire arm, and when the second blow came he didn’t manage to get completely out of the way.
Something split above his eyebrow and blood immediately began running down the side of his face and into his eye.
That was where the conversation ended.
Later, Reeze would remember Henrik’s face more clearly than the fight itself.
The fear, the panic and the desperate conviction that he could still get away if he only fought hard enough.
Everything else blurred together into elbows, fists, pain and movement until eventually there was nothing left but silence inside the old building.
When Reeze pushed himself up from the dusty concrete floor, his shoulder throbbed and the blood had already begun drying along the side of his face. Outside, the wind had picked up, and somewhere near the sawmill a loose sheet of metal struck a wall at irregular intervals.
He stood there for a moment looking at the man in front of him, angry at the way it had ended even though he knew he shouldn’t have been surprised.
People made their choices, convinced themselves they had none, then became angry when reality finally caught up with them.
Afterwards there was always someone left to clean up, someone forced to live with the consequences and someone carrying another memory that would eventually disappear into the darker corners of their mind.
By the time Reeze finally left the building and pointed his bike back towards town, the anger had already begun to drain away. All that remained was the exhaustion that always followed jobs like this and the certainty that life would carry on exactly as it always did.
When the gates to HQ slid open in front of him, he rolled slowly into the yard and killed the engine. His shoulder protested when he climbed off the bike, and the blood from the cut above his eyebrow had long since dried in a dark trail along his cheek.
He had barely managed to put the bike on its stand before Billy spotted him and came striding across the yard with a frown and an expression suggesting he had already decided Reeze was a fucking idiot.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
Reeze rolled his eyes.
“I’m alive.”
“That wasn’t really the question.”
Billy stopped in front of him and let his gaze travel over the torn shirt, the dried blood and the fact that Reeze was very obviously trying to pretend his shoulder didn’t hurt.
“You look like fucking shit.”
“I’m still standing.”
“Which isn’t the same thing as being all right.”
Reeze had just opened his mouth to answer when movement farther across the yard caught his attention.
Charlie came around the corner of the clubhouse with Mia a few steps behind her and stopped dead the moment she saw him.
Her eyes found his first.
She had always known he belonged to a world that looked nothing like hers.
She had seen the cut, heard enough conversations and understood considerably more than she sometimes let on, but knowing something and actually seeing the consequences standing in front of you were two entirely different things.
He could see it in her face as her gaze settled on the dried blood along his cheek before moving down to the tear in his shirt.
“Reeze?”
Something inside him loosened simply at the sound of her voice.
“It’s fine.”
She quite obviously didn’t believe him. Her eyes went straight to the shoulder he was holding a little too still, then back to the cut above his eyebrow.
“That doesn’t look fine.”
“It looks worse than it is.”
Billy snorted beside him.
“He means the opposite.”
Reeze gave him a dark look, but Charlie was already moving towards him.
She had only taken a few steps when the low rumble of engines sounded from the road outside.
The noise grew quickly, cutting through the conversations in the yard. Heads turned towards the gates and someone whistled as the first bike rolled through, followed by another and then an entire line of them.
Assholes MC made an entrance the same way they seemed to do everything else.
Loudly, confidently and without the slightest interest in blending in.
Someone revved his engine considerably more than necessary as laughter and shouted greetings began echoing between the buildings and the men rolled into the compound.
Billy looked at them and then back at Reeze.
“Come on.”
He caught him by the arm.
“Let’s get you cleaned up before those idiots start asking questions.”
Reeze sighed but didn’t resist. Before Billy managed to drag him through the door, though, he looked back at Charlie one last time.
She was still standing there with Mia beside her, but something in her expression had changed.
That worried him far more than his shoulder did.
Charlie remained where she was long after the door had closed behind Reeze and Billy.
Around her, the yard filled with motorcycles, laughter and loud greetings as the Assholes members began climbing off their bikes. Someone shouted for Rollo and, farther away, one man slapped a club brother on the back hard enough for the sound to echo between the buildings.
Everything carried on as though Reeze hadn’t just come home with blood dried across his face.
That was almost what disturbed her most.
Nobody had looked particularly surprised.
Billy had sworn at him and Mia had reacted, but neither of them had reacted the way Charlie had, with that cold sensation still sitting beneath her ribs.
To them, this seemed like something that happened.
Something that had happened before.
Mia moved closer and rested a hand on her arm.
“Charlie.”
She blinked.
“I saw him.”
The words sounded ridiculous as soon as she said them, but Mia seemed to understand what she actually meant.
“I know.”
Charlie looked back towards the door.
“That wasn’t just a fight.”
“No.”
Mia didn’t try to lie to her, and for some reason Charlie was grateful for that.
She could still see Reeze standing in front of her. The dried blood on his cheek, the tear in his shirt and the exhaustion behind his eyes that he had tried to hide. Most of all, she could see how little everyone else had reacted to it.
“He killed someone.”
It wasn’t really a question.
Mia ran a hand through her hair and sighed.
“I don’t know exactly what happened, Charlie, and I’m not going to pretend I do. But sometimes things happen in this world that none of us particularly like.”
Charlie swallowed and looked back at the door.
She thought about the man who had held her during the night, who had laughed when she called him a caveman and kissed her as though she were the only thing in the world that mattered. Reeze with a coffee mug in his hand in the morning. Reeze pulling her against him when she was frightened.
And then she thought about the man who had just returned covered in blood from a job for his club.
The strange thing was that she still saw the same person.
Perhaps that was what she needed to understand.
His world couldn’t be neatly divided into the part she liked and the part she would rather not see. He couldn’t simply take off his cut and leave that part of himself hanging over the back of a chair whenever he walked through the door to his room.
The Reeze she was getting to know was also the man the others sent out when something needed to be dealt with, and apparently this was part of what that meant.
Charlie had known for a long time that the world wasn’t black and white. It had simply been much easier to accept the grey areas when they belonged to other people.
Now those grey areas had a face she knew, a laugh she liked and a pair of arms she had fallen asleep in more than once.
She wasn’t afraid of Reeze.
She realised that as she stood there.
But she had seen another part of him now, and she wasn’t going to pretend she hadn’t.
Mia remained silently beside her while engines continued rumbling across the yard. After a moment, Charlie looked back towards the door where Reeze had disappeared.
“I want to see how he is.”
Mia’s hand slipped away from her arm and the faintest smile touched the corner of her mouth.
“Then I think you should.”