Twelve

 

PREACHER

 

The final breech of confidence that Duke had done for me was to pass me the letter that Kyle had given him the day she’d shown up on his doorstep after finding her mother.

Looking down at it, I took a deep breath as I saw the familiar scrawl of Lindee’s writing. Apparently, it was bad form to speak ill of the dead, but she was a vicious, poisonous, and psychopathic bitch and I was glad she was gone.

Now, I had to see what she’d said that had ruined everything with Kyle.

 

I’ve never hated anyone more than I hate you and him. You were meant to be the ticket to all of it, but he just didn’t care. He hates you, hates me, hates that I didn’t give him a son and that he got you instead. I tried telling you, but you wouldn’t listen and now look?

He was fucking that whore Store today and when I confronted him, he hit me and told me he was going to kill both of us. He’s never been faithful and hated you being at the MC because he thought he looked bad to the men if he was caught fucking a slut while you were around. He also couldn’t sell the little girls if you were there so he made excuses and sent you home.

I hate you, you ruined my life, but as your mother I will do you one favor…

RUN.

 

That was it? That was the best she could come up with? It was a badly written immature letter full of bullshit and I could just see her downing a bottle of vodka, high as a kite, with the gun beside her as she wrote it. She knew that Kyle would be at her most vulnerable when she read it after finding her body, so she’d take it all to heart and do what she said.

The one thing she probably hadn’t counted on in her state, though, was that Kyle would run to Duke.

I’d known where she was and what she was doing the whole time, most importantly I knew that she was safe; well, to an extent. If I’d known that she was contracting for the military, I would have lost my shit and put a stop to it before it began. Look where she’d ended up.

I scrunched the letter up and put it in my pocket as I sat beside Kyle’s bed watching her chest go up and down. She’s been in a medically induced coma for two days now, and they had just stopped the drugs a couple of hours ago so that she’d wake up. Her leg was broken in two places and she had three broken ribs. There had been some internal bleeding, but with the medically induced coma, they’d managed to stabilize it without going in surgically. She would still have to stay still though so that it didn’t start up again, but the longer she was in the coma the more they worried about the effect it would have on her mentally on top of the trauma that she’s already been through.

In some instances, it was considered best to keep patients comatose, but with Kyle’s mentality and her strong psychological profile, a psychiatrist had recommended that she not be kept under for too long, as it could induce a psychological breakdown when she finally woke up. A lot of coma patients experienced severe shock when they first wake up and realize that they had missed out on windows of time, add onto it the trauma that she had been through on the mission, and the strong control that she required at all times, and the longer she was under, the worse it could be for her to recover from mentally.

Now, I sat with Duke and Jagger as we waited for her to open her eyes. She’d made some noises and had twitched, but as of yet, hasn’t opened her eyes. They did scans and it hasn’t shown any trauma to her brain, but as her dad, the worry was that they missed something and that she wouldn’t come back to us. I had a ton of what if’s going through my head and so many regrets; and at the back of it was the fury over the letter left by Lindee. I still  couldn’t get my head around how basic and immature it was, but the trauma of finding her like that on top of all of the years of abuse that I’d had no idea about…well, it worked.

I was just about to get up and go and find that fucking fraud, who called himself a doctor, when I heard a rattle of breath followed by a groan and turned to find her eyes open and focused on me.

I want to say I stayed the man I prided myself on being, the one that didn’t take shit and who had no issues killing someone who deserved it, but my legs gave out and I found myself curled up on the floor in a ball crying like a pussy. I didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about me at that moment, my baby was awake. My reason for living was alive.

 

JAGGER

 

Seeing her pass out when she turned in our direction was something that I’d never forget. It wasn’t dramatic, she just turned, looked in our direction and then her eyes had rolled back and she was out cold. She stayed that way while they carried out all of the necessary tests on her at the hospital, too.

Hearing the extent of her injuries and the internal bleeding, wasn’t as bad as it could be, but I remember one of my dad’s guys having a bike accident and then dying a week later because of internal bleeding. The shit of it was, when he was in hospital they diagnosed bruising, but something had happened when he got home and he bled out slowly. I spoke to the Doc about it yesterday, and he said the guy must have had a blood condition he hadn’t known about, but that didn’t make me feel any better about Kyle.

We left Preacher alone with her and the letter that Duke had kept from her mom while we went and got something to eat and when we got back, the man who looked broken since she’d left, now had his fire about him. Preacher was a complicated man to get to know. He was fiercely loyal, he was level headed, he was just fucking fierce, but he was also a slow burner. I’ve known situations where you couldn’t tell that he was pissed or that he was going to do anything, you’d never have guessed that that was even going on underneath the surface, yet on one of the intercepts with the traffickers, he’d smiled and joked with the asshole, going as far as lighting the guys smoke for him. The guy had turned at a noise and Preacher had snapped his neck. The fact that I could see the rage in his eyes…if Lindee wasn’t dead, I’d have been counting her minutes, gladly. Duke had outlined the letter to me, and initially I’d been confused how it had hit its mark, but then I had to think of the emotions and vulnerabilities of a seventeen-year-old girl who had been abused and had found her mother missing part of her head. The conniving bitch knew what she was doing.

I finally asked the one question that I didn’t want to and face the worst answer to. Duke and me had been sitting with that vile shit they called coffee, and I’d finally asked it.

“What if she doesn’t forgive me?”

Duke stirred his coffee and had stayed quiet for so long that I figured he was telling me to already give up. Then he’d sighed and had sat back, the plastic chair creaking so much I thought it was gonna shatter.

“Kyle came to me years ago, she had no one and, fuck me,” he scrubbed his face tiredly. “She was broken, Jagger. I knew deep down that she knew that the letter was bullshit, but how do you make sense of all of the shit that’s hit you throughout your childhood after you found your mom’s brains on the wall?” He looked like he’d aged over the last couple of days and if there was ever an indicator of how much Kyle meant to him, it was now. She would never realize how special she was, but every guy who I’d seen working with her cared about her and protected her. “I know my girl, she needed time, but once she makes sense of it she’ll move forward. She’s complex, Jagger. You know she’s never gone into a relationship and that feelings give her the willy’s,” we both chuckled, that was an understatement. “But she let you in, she let me in, and she was beginning to let Preacher in.”

Nodding, I did the only thing I could and hoped he was right. I wasn’t religious, a guy doing what I did would be a hypocrite if he was, but if I had been I’d have been praying to all that was holy at that moment.

When we got back to her room, Data was there. He was what I figured a cool nerd would look like. He had one of those short Mohawk things on his head, the big holes in his ears, and had tattoos down his arms, but he also had rectangular glasses with thick frames and was constantly typing on his laptop or building something. I knew he had ADHD, but it was like he found something that would keep his attention when everything else wouldn’t. I’d never seen him look pissed, though, but this time he looked ready to kill someone.

“Jared?” Preacher asked. I felt Duke tense beside me at the same time I ground my teeth. I really fucking hated that guy.

“What about him?” Duke barked, getting Data’s attention from where he was bouncing on the toes of his boots.

“It was him.” We all went quiet trying to process this information.

“It can’t have been, Data. He wasn’t there.” Duke knew the finer details of what Kyle had been doing and who had been around. When he’d told us a couple weeks ago that Jared wasn’t involved and hadn’t been sent on the mission with them, it was a relief for all of us.

“He arrived six days previously,” Data took out a file from the backpack that was sitting on the floor. Duke flipped through it while we watched on, his eyes skimming through the information in front of him. On the final page, he grabbed it and lost his shit. “You didn’t think to tell me she’d asked for this shit?” He roared at Data. I’d give him credit; the guy didn’t even flinch. “Did you read what it registered? He gave their exact location away!”

“She asked me not to,” he replied, holding eye contact with Duke the whole time. I was pissed, but he had my respect in that moment. “She was worried that the rat in the MC would pass it back.”

“Fucking hell,” Preacher got up and walked over to the window. I never wanted to go after anyone so much in my life than I did at that moment. He had literally handed them over. Three men had died out there and two of the guys who’d been brought back on the plane with Kyle, had lost their fights, too.

“What the fuck is he up to?” I needed to know. Was he a terrorist? What?

“I don’t fucking know,” Duke fumed. “But I’m gonna. Data,” he turned and walked out with Data behind him.

Preacher and I didn’t say a word in case there were ears, but the look we gave each other left it clear that we’d be involved in finding Jared, and when we did…the sinister smile that I let free was mirrored on Preacher’s face.

 

 

It had been a week since Kyle had woken up. She was stable and had been cleared for discharge from the hospital. We upped security at the compound and would be bringing in men we could trust to help out. Preacher was also working on dealing with Satan, the President of 412, who was trying to fuck us over, but right now, the priority was getting Kyle home and settled.

We were worried that she was going to have the mental break that they’d warned us about, but the more things she found out, and the more details she passed onto Duke, the more evident it became that she was focused on retribution. I wasn’t a shrink, but maybe that was the key for her?

Preacher had tried speaking to her, but she kept it to work related conversation. He made a point of being with her most of the time though, and there were moments where I saw her watching him when she thought no one was looking. In those moments, her walls would be down and you could see the confusion, but also hope.

I stayed with her every night, not wanting to leave her in case Jared decided to try and get to her in the hospital. No one had seen him or heard from him, he was in the wind, but Kyle had said he couldn’t hide forever, and she wasn’t wrong. Duke had put out feelers everywhere he could, and there were people looking to right a debt to the Ghosts looking for the bastard.

Last night, she had her first nightmare and had been screaming and yelling names. The doc had come through wanting to give her a sedative, but we woke her up gently and then I crawled in beside her. That’s when I got my first real burst of hope that things might not be totally fucked between us. She held onto me and had stayed calm and asleep for the rest of the night. The issue was, PTSD was a minefield; there were no set symptoms and reactions. All I could do was be there for her when she needed me, and I was going to make sure that she knew that she had me at her back, regardless.

 

KYLE

 

I was back at the Knights compound after being released. It had been a couple of days, and although I didn’t remember each second of what had happened, I had pieced it together and Data had the evidence that we needed to make it conclusive. I knew that Duke had put out feelers to our contacts to be aware, but I had contacts of my own that I’d managed to contact, too. I was weaving a web that the fucker was going to get sucked into, and when I found out where he was, I was going to make sure that he paid for what he’d done. I lost five amazing men, and he turned his back on his country. Death would be too good for him.

Duke and I had spoken, and while I wasn’t over it, I was calmer over it. He had a way of explaining things and pointing out the condition that I was in mentally and emotionally when I arrived with him, I agreed that if he’d pushed it or had brought Preacher into the fold, then yeah, I probably would have run. It took me years to truly feel safe with Duke and stop looking over my shoulder, any knock to that balance before then would have been bad.

Before the incident, I had been thinking about the situation with Preacher. It’s actually what I was doing when the message, was picked up, that Jared had sent. I could see that he’d been set up by her, too. I knew that my reaction and feelings were based on a teenager’s situation still, but it was hard to just drop that after all of these years. When I could, I was doing what I’d been taught to do by the counsellor and I was breaking it down so that I could figure it out and take control over it all.

He’d been in my room this morning and we spoke about some of it. I knew how angry he was that he hadn’t known about the abuse and that there had been so many occasions when he came close to it, but hadn’t. He was pissed that she manipulated me so that I was so desperate for his attention, that I didn’t see exactly how much of it I had. One of the old timers, Tommy, had come to visit me the night before. When I asked him about my childhood, he told me stories about Preacher filling them in on my grades, shit I’d been doing, not wanting me to ride a bike in case I got hurt but seeing how much I loved it…he ordered me a Harley for my eighteenth, a custom one that I know I would have loved. What shocked me most was that he still had it stored in one of the sheds.

Slowly, I was opening myself up to the possibility of moving forward, finally. The more I broke down my feelings and looked at what had happened with as many of the emotions removed as possible, the more I hated my incubator for what she’d done. At the same time, I didn’t regret what I became, I was proud of it, and if I didn’t go through what I had, would I be here now?

There was no sense in wondering about ‘what if’s’. Preacher asked me to help him with the removal of the MC’s rat, some asshole with a cliché name, Satan. I remembered his daughter vaguely from a couple of the meets when I was a kid. She was a couple of years older than me and had never fit in with her dad and his MC. They were more of the debauched type of MC, hedonists with swinging dicks, alcohol issues, and just fucking pathetic. Olivia had always carried herself with dignity and had been quiet if I remembered right. The fact that her own father had set up her sale to the traffickers…we had to get her out fast.

We formed a plan for Preacher to go to the quarterly meet with the 412’s. The club’s had been in such close proximity for so many years that they had to hold formal meetings often to keep each other in the loop and to make sure that relations stayed firm between them. Well, at least that’s what the Knight’s had thought. Turns out, a bit of pussy and a ton of money and power swayed a man into the arms of Satan.

The plan was for Preacher to request that the meeting be held at the 412’s club when it was normally held on neutral ground. It was a risky move, but the Ghosts would be behind them providing cover, so they’d be safe. It would also make Satan, Jesus that name made me cringe, feel more powerful and cocky thinking he had the upper hand on his own territory, so he’d be more inclined to slip up. Preacher was going to take Olivia, too, and bring her back here so that she was safe. I didn’t know if he was going to fill her in on exactly what was going on. I might sound like a hypocrite, but was this one of the scenario’s where ignorance was bliss? Her own father had set up her sale to men who would gang-rape her before sending her into the center of trafficking hell in Boko Haram. I didn’t know the woman, so I couldn’t say for sure if she’d be strong enough to deal with that knowledge.

Jagger was a complex situation for me. The second the plane had touched down in the Pits, I knew that I’d already forgiven him. I had heard the tone in his voice as he told Preacher to tell me. I couldn’t say what I would have done in his shoes. It was up to Preacher to tell me and when I thought about it, he’d been dropping hints for me for ages.

The first night I had the nightmare in the hospital, I laid beside him in the bed and I knew we needed to talk, but I also knew that I wouldn’t be living life without him. Again, you can’t just forget something like that overnight, it’s a slow process to work through it, but he was showing me daily that I could trust him and I really needed to let him know that I already knew that.

I just didn’t know how to do it.

 

JAGGER

 

“You wanna know how to get past this shit, man?” Gauge walked up behind me as I stood outside the club, looking over the fields in front of us. There was now a wall that went around the entire perimeter of the land owned by the Knights, but around the clubhouse was a wire fence. We also had gadgets installed and explained to us by the Ghosts, some of which had been made by Data specifically for us. It would take a lot for anyone to get the slip on us again, not saying that it wouldn’t happen, but we would definitely have the element of surprise on them.

Focusing on the Sergeant at Arms of the club, I thought through what he’d asked and totally drew a blank. “What shit?”

“Kyle.”

“I’m not with you, man. What shit with Kyle?”

Sighing, he laid it out. “She’s forgiven you, Jag. Anyone can see that. Don’t dwell on the shit, just show her the real that’s you in a way she knows you see the real that’s her.” And ending on that cryptic note, he walked away leaving me feeling more confused than I think I’d ever been in my life.

Why was he talking in riddles?

Shaking my head, I looked back at where I’d been looking when he’d started his shit and realized I was looking at where the targets had been set up that day and she had taken her shots from the roof.

Then it hit me what Gauge was talking about. I knew what I was going to do.