Soulless (Lawless #2) Read online

  Stone bit his lip and his face grew redder and redder as his sadness turned to anger. My own heart started pounding. “I panicked because I left my side arm in my room, but I never figured I’d ever need it against my own life with Prez ’cause I was a good soldier,” he repeated. “Real fucking good.”

  “I know you were, brother,” I said.

  “He grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her mouth off of his dick. ‘Don’t be rude, Em. Say hello to our guest.’ She turned to look at me and her lips were still all wet from him. Her eye was swollen and her bottom lip was split open with blood dripping down her chin. I thought I was going to be sick right fucking there until I saw the fear in her eyes. It wasn’t just fear though. It was like she was blank. Like she’d already given up. Whatever happened before I got in there had to have been bad enough to make her think there was no fucking way out. I think that might have been the most brutal thing of all. Because she was right.” Stone was now sobbing.

  Munch put his arm around his shoulder. “We’ll get that motherfucker, I promise.”

  Stone continued through the tears. “He told me that what he wanted was for his soldiers to be soldiers and not fall in love with the ‘cum-dumpsters’ every single brother in this place had sprayed his shit on a hundred times. I asked him why he was doing this. I didn’t understand. He was my Prez. A fucking king to me. The Bastards took me in off the street and gave me something to believe in. I wouldn’t have ever crossed him, no matter what. Even when you left and I thought he was wrong, I stayed by his side. Not because I thought he was right, but because you taught me not to question my Prez, so I didn’t.”

  “Skip to the end,” I said. I hated that I had to wait for what I already knew was coming.

  “‘Because whores aren’t your family,’ Chop said. ‘Your brothers are your only family. Whores are fucking disposable.’ I didn’t even realize he had a gun in his lap until he held it to her head ‘See? I just came down her fucking throat’ he said, ‘and this whore thanks me by bleeding on me.’ Then he pulled the fucking trigger.”

  “Fuck!” I said. Now I stood up and started pacing.

  “That’s not all,” Wolf said. Leaving Stone and Munch on the bench as he walked over to me and lowered his voice like he didn’t want to upset Stone any further.

  “How is that not all of it? That cocksucker killed Stone’s old lady right in front of him to teach him some sort of sick lesson about his views on family?”

  “Not even close to all of it.”

  “Just fucking tell me already,” I said, thinking about how Chop roughed up Ti made my own stomach start to churn. It could have been her. He could have killed her.

  “He didn’t just kill Em,” Wolf said, looking back at Stone who was face down between his elbows.

  “He killed another one?” I asked, wondering why the fuck Chop would kill two BBBs.

  Wolf shook his head. “No, brother…he killed them all.”

  “Holy Fuck,” I said, taking a seat on the bench. Wolf sat next to me.

  “We took off our cuts and burnt the fuck out of our skin because a Prez, a real Prez, wouldn’t do that kind of shit. He wouldn’t kill people you love,” Wolf said, looking me square in the eye so I could see he was telling the truth. “And I get it now. Why you left. ’Cause he asked you to chose between the club and people you think of as family and that shit ain’t right.” He shook his head. “It ain’t fucking right.”

  “Executed,” Munch piped in. “In the court yard, one by fucking one. We tried to stop him. He shot a prospect in the leg and told us to mind our own fucking business while he took care of his.”

  “Why the fuck would he kill BBBs?” I asked, thinking of the innocent fucking girls whose only crime was wanting to be part of a world they shouldn’t have wanted to be a part of.

  “We got no clue. All we know is that he called them all out into the courtyard and put a gun to their heads. He kept yelling at them, asking them where she was, and when they would ask who he was talking about or tell them that they didn’t know, he’d lay them out and kick their bleeding bodies into the pool.”

  I held my face in my hands. “He didn’t stop until they were all gone,” Wolf said, lighting another cigarette with the one in his hand.

  “It happened so fucking quick. One minute he was fine and the next minute he was murdering all the club whores. When he was done, he walked around muttering and then locked himself in his office. When he came back out, he acted like nothing had happened. He told the prospects to clean up the mess and he played a game of pool. It was real fucking bazaar,” Munch said.

  “He killed my old lady,” Stone wailed.

  I pulled on my beard and glanced over to Stone. “Chop’s been trying to go after my old lady since before she was even mine,” I admitted. “I can’t tell you I know how you feel brother, but I can tell you how it feels to be afraid of that happening every fucking second of the day.” Remembering the bloodied mess Gus had dropped off at King’s doorstep that was Ti made me grit my teeth until I thought they’d crack.

  “First of all, I’m shocked as shit that you, of all fucking people, have an old lady, but we’ll talk about that shit when we have less pressing matters beating on our fucking doorstep,” Wolf said, with a small smile that reminded me of how close we used to be. The familiarity of us sitting at a table, no matter how shitty the subject was we were discussing, was a welcome feeling.

  “There are nine of us. Nine who burnt off our tats the night after the BBB thing. The three of us, Gus, Chump, and a few of the others. When Chop gave the orders to come here and take you out, it was the perfect opportunity,” Munch said, looking around to make sure no one was listening. There was only one guard and he was by the gate on the other side of the yard where they had come in. Well out of earshot.

  “Opportunity for what?” I asked, still unsure of why they would follow Chop’s orders to come to County if they were no longer Bastards.

  “Chop wants to go to war with you,” Munch stated. He held out his open hands and stretched his arms out to his sides. “You’re gonna need an army.”

  Stone looked up from his arm for the first time. “We’re your army.”

  “I appreciate that, but if that war ever happens it might be in here because I got something in the works to get me out, but if it doesn’t come through I’m looking at hard fucking time,” I said, wiping the beading sweat off my forehead.

  “You in here because of the girl, aren’t you?” Munch asked. “’Cause killing two civilians ain’t really your style.”

  “Yeah.” I inhaled deeply, needing the nicotine more than ever. “Better me than her. Would fucking do it again in a heartbeat. I signed a confession, so it don’t look like I’m going nowhere anytime soon.”

  “You leave that to us, brother,” Munch said with a slick smile. The kid could always figure his way around shit, so I wouldn’t put it past him to really be able to get me out somehow. “We already have something in the works.”

  “What Munch means is that a chick he used to bang got herself a job sorting evidence for the county,” Wolf said.

  “That right?”

  “Yep, and it seems that the guns used in the murders have just up and disappeared,” Munch said, making a poof with his hands. It’s not like those guns had my prints on them, but it was still enough to cause a big ripple in the prosecution’s case.

  “They still have my signed confession.”

  Wolf laughed. “They don’t anymore. Funny thing about that too. The prosecutor assigned to the case seems to have lost all traces of it. And the judge—being old and senile and not to mention deeply in debt to us for running his daughter’s fiancé out of town—swears he never even saw it.” He winked.

  Wolf shook his head and smiled. “We also think that hot shot, shady as fuck lawyer of yours had the coroner’s report altered to say a whole bunch of conflicting things about the murder. She filed for a case dismissal, so now we just wait.”

  Munc
h cracked his knuckles and slid an unlit cigarette behind his right ear. “That bitch is shady as fuck, and I’d like to show her how much I appreciate the way she looks in those tight skirts by way of fucking her cougar ass sideways. She prosecuted a couple of cases where I wound up on the wrong side of the courtroom, and I swear I didn’t care how much time I got as long as she kept bending that fine ass over her table to sort through her papers.”

  The three of us laughed and even Stone smiled briefly. It all felt normal.

  Well, as normal as I’d ever known.

  Somehow I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be the last time Bethany Fletcher and I would be working together.

  The prospect of getting out and seeing Ti made my heart beat stronger, faster, and more powerful.

  And then suddenly it hit me.

  “I think I know how to get to my old man,” I said, taking a long slow drag from my smoke, my thoughts firmly on my surprise visitor from that very morning.

  “How?” Munch asked, leaning in close.

  “Not how. WHO,” I said.

  “Okay who?” Wolf asked, also leaning in.

  “You said Chop was asking the BBBs where SHE was.” I stubbed out my smoke and pulled on my beard. “I think I know who SHE is.”

  In the yard of the county jail on a day where the sun relentlessly beat down on us like it was trying to punish the occupants of the earth, a broken piece of me was put back together.

  “So what do you say, brother? You want some new soldiers, so we can all wear a cut again? So we can all believe in shit again?” Munch asked, stubbing out his smoke. “We can be our own club, do shit right this time.”

  I cracked my knuckles. “I ain’t putting a fucking cut on again. That part of me is fucking dead. I won’t be your leader. I won’t be your Prez, but I’ll be a soldier with you. We’ll go to fucking war together, and we’ll bring that motherfucker down.”

  We may not have been an official MC.

  But we were officially at war.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Thia

  “I thought you were taking me to the grove,” I said as King pulled up at a motel off the highway, halfway between Jessep and Logan’s Beach.

  “I am, but Bear didn’t want you to be alone out there. He called someone to watch over you. We’re meeting here.”

  “Who?” I asked, but King was already out of the truck and opening one of the motel room doors.

  We waited for what seemed like hours, but in reality was probably only minutes when a knock came at the door. King placed his index finger over his lips. He slowly moved toward the curtains, peeling back the thick fabric and peering out the streaky window. Satisfied with what he saw, he removed the safety latch and unlocked the door. He opened it only a few inches and stepped aside to let whoever it was in the room.

  What I saw standing there was not what I expected.

  It was not who I expected.

  What I was expecting was another burley biker. Someone who looked mean and was draped in skull and cross-bone tattoos. What I didn’t expect was the blonde petite thing standing before me.

  I certainly never expected a girl.

  “This place is a dump,” she said bluntly, pushing past King. She looked around the room as King shut the door, latched it, and took another peek out the window.

  “Any possibility you were followed?” King asked. She ignored him, flitting about the room like a fly trying to find an open window.

  “Do you know how many people a year contract diseases from places like this?” she asked, eyeing the bathroom with a look of pure disgust. “Statistically, given the age of the motel and approximate patronage—based, of course, on available parking spaces and number of maid carts in the hallway—there is essentially not a single spot of this room, or any of the other rooms in this building, that hasn’t at one time or another been defiled by semen or fecal matter.” It’s like she didn’t breathe between sentences.

  She walked around the room, appraising everything from the chord leading up to the lamp to the base boards. She wasn’t much older than I was. “Did you know that two thirds of all cases of food poisoning aren’t actually food poisoning at all, but just the side effect of some little murderous, single-celled, bullshit organism waiting on your hands to jump onto your food and then into your mouth and digestive track to cause you, if you’re lucky, hours of indigestion and spastic colon problems, and if you’re not lucky, your sudden and untimely demise?” She shook her head. “Death by diarrhea.”

  I was getting a headache.

  Country-slow was a term I was sure was invented in Jessep, where life moved along slower than a tractor driving down the main road. This girl was motoring around the room at such a high rate of speed that she looked and sounded like she was stuck in fast forward.

  “Rage!” King snapped. The girl spun around from where she was inspecting the doorframe of the bathroom. “Do you think you were followed?” he repeated.

  The girl scoffed as if what King was suggesting was impossible. “If I were being followed, I would have thrown them off. If I were being followed, I wouldn’t be standing in this disgusting motel room right now wondering what microbial being is going to do me in.” She rested her hands on the strap of the bright blue duffle bag slung across her shoulder, that read LEE COUNTY HIGH SCHOOL across it in big white block lettering. She looked up at the old popcorn ceiling. “You know me better than that.”

  “Your name is Rage?” I asked, trying not sound as surprised and confused as I was. She was barely over five feet tall. She wore a pink fitted T-shirt that said something about wearing pink on Wednesdays, cutoff white shorts, and white Keds. “Are you a friend of Bear’s?” I asked, trying to put together what the fuck was going on.

  The girl turned her attentions from King to me like she was just realizing I was in the room. She looked me over and smiled sweetly. It wasn’t the kind of smile that screamed friendly or outgoing as her casual attire and perky personality would suggest. This was a pageant smile. A rehearsed smile.

  Badly rehearsed.

  She looked as if she were in pain.

  Rage moved back to the door and opened it. I thought at first that she was leaving but she unhooked the plastic do-not-disturb sign hanging from the inside of the door and moved it to the outside, before closing it again and turning back toward us. “Yes, my name is Rage, and no I’m not a friend of Bear’s. I’m a friend of whoever pays me the most, which right now is King and Bear.” She pointed her thumb to King. “And by the way, Rage is short for Ragina.”

  “No, it’s not,” King said, calling her out.

  “Okay, it’s not,” she said, dropping the fake smile. “The truth is that my name might or might not have something to do with a possible minor-to-major extreme anger management issue I may or may not have had at one point, or possibly still have now.”

  I looked at her but didn’t say a thing. I couldn’t. I was stunned into silence.

  “We aren’t staying here are we? I’m not a fucking gross biker. I can’t just snuggle up and sleep in a bed that I know is breeding living and breathing organisms and is full of crusted leftovers of failed impregnations.” She shuddered. “Don’t even get me started on the fucking towels.

  “You sleep now?” King asked.

  “No,” Rage answered flatly, still searching the ceiling. She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe I should tell you I was being followed so I can get the heck out of this Bates motel situation over here.” Her eyes went wide. “Oh my God, I see mold!” she exclaimed, pointing to a few black specs around a crack in the corner by the door. She bent over at the waist and put her hands around her throat like she was suddenly suffocating. Each intake of air sounded like a very loud, very phlegmy struggle to breathe. “I can’t breathe. The mold triggered my asthma. I’m having an attack! I need my inhaler!”

  “What can I do?” I asked, springing up and over to her, in hopes of saving her life.

  “The warehouse explosion in Ocala. That you?” King as
ked, unfazed by Rage’s predicament.

  Rage stood up straight and smiled, and I had to lean to the left in order to avoid being whipped by her ponytail. Her asthma attack suddenly forgotten and her eyes turned dark, her pupils grew large, like she’d just snorted a line of something. “That was beautiful wasn’t it?” she said excitedly, jumping up and down, clapping her hands together. “My best work yet. A symphony if you will. It was magical.”

  “You blew up a building, Rage. You’re not fucking Mozart,” King said sarcastically.

  She looked off dreamily into the distance. “Mozart was a visionary. His brain saw things, the world, differently.” She raised and lowered her arms, holding an imaginary baton as if like she were a conductor, instructing her orchestra, “And so do I.”

  It was King’s turn to roll his eyes.

  Rage dropped her arms and tapped her foot. She held her bag tightly to her chest. “I don’t know you, but unfortunately if we stay here any longer, I am going to blow up this fucking motel, and you might be collateral damage if that happens, and I super love your hair so that would be a real shame, since I’ve been put in charge of keeping you safe and all.”

  “Her?” I asked King, not caring if she could hear me. King’s knuckles were white and it looked as if it pained him not to set the girl in her place after she’d insulted him.

  “Oh. My. Shit,” Rage exclaimed. “I think some of the mold in the corner just moved. Let’s motor before I decide that babysitting Jem over here is a really fucking bad idea.”

  King opened the door and we filed out.

  “This is going to be fun!” she announced sarcastically, as she got into the truck and tossed her bag to King who set it in the truck bed. She shifted to the middle as I got in beside her and we headed off to Jessep.

  Bear was in jail for me, because of me. If he wanted me to go home and he wanted Barbarian Barbie to accompany me, then I would do it.