Two

 

KYLE

 

Once the briefing was done and we had a good idea what and who we were dealing with, the exhaustion of the last couple of weeks hit.

“Let’s get you to your room,” Preacher said as he opened the door leading us out of Church.

Getting up and following him, I started to get a sinking feeling as we went up the stairs. When he got to the door of my old room, I was ready to walk out and drive to the nearest motel.

“No fucking way!” I pointed at the door and shook my head. “Fuck knows who’s done what in there, so no.”

I didn’t much care what people got up to, but this room had been mine from the time I was born. Any time that I spent at the compound was in this room and the thought of walking into some sort of porn palace, pissed me off.

Making a production of taking the key out of his pocket, Preacher reached over and unlocked the door. I knew that Duke and a couple of the guys were behind me, so I just sighed and followed him into the room.

“No one’s been in here unless it’s to clean it since the day you left, Kyle.”

Looking around, everything was where I left it. Even the bedding was the same as when I last stayed there. My photos were on the wall and I even had a detailed sketch of my ideal bike taped on it too.

Nodding my head, I dropped my shit beside the bed and sat down heavily on it, still taking it all in.

“I’m glad to have you back,” he mumbled, drawing my attention to him as he awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck.

“Thanks.”

If I had a heart, the look on his face would have touched it as he asked, “Are you ever going to call me Dad again?”

Fortunately for me, I didn’t have a heart thanks to the man standing in front of me, so it absolutely did not hurt when I looked him in the eye and asked, “Do you think you deserve it?’

He didn’t say a word as he looked back at me and then walked out of the room shaking his head. The cold stone in my chest cracked slightly, but it did that from time to time, so I wasn’t going to look into it too much.

After taking my boots off, I lay back on the bed, remembering how comfortable it was. The best night’s sleep of my life had been in this bed with its pillow topping and memory foam underneath.

“K-k-k-k-Kaaaaiiiii,” the irritating asshole Smokey sang as he dropped down on the couch beside my bed with Mack and Hammer beside him. Duke closed the door and stayed standing which was standard for him. “So, tell me your stories. We saw some shit from Data, but I wanna know what you got up to.”

Grinning at him, I told him news that I knew the guys would appreciate. “I’m getting a new rifle.”

“The fuck?”

A girl could never have too many rifles and scopes, fact. “Canadian’s agreed a TAC-50.” One of the wet dreams of the sniper world.

“The fuck you say,” Hammer snapped. I knew he’d be the one to get his panties in a wad over it.

Grinning at them, something few saw from me, I nodded slowly. “Arrives mañana, Chico!”

Duke’s lips were twitching when I looked over at him, but he also looked a bit green with envy, too.  They all knew that only in the case of an extreme emergency would any of them be getting their hands on my babies and so far, that situation had never come up.

“Right, fill me in. What the fuck happened to your ribs?” Duke’s voice had his ‘no bullshit’ tone, and this situation had been nagging at me since it happened.

After recounting how the enemy soldier had been waiting for us and shot the RPG at us, I voiced the fact that had been like acid inside me, eating away. “They shouldn’t have known that we were there, Duke. There was no way that they would have known where we were.” If it hadn’t been for us noticing him just before he fired and taking cover, he would have hit us instead of the mud wall behind us.

“Unless someone told them,” he murmured, staring at the blank wall in front of him.

“Exactly!” And that conclusion is what I’d come to myself when it happened. The possibility of a rat in my team, men I’d picked out myself, fucked me off. Not knowing who to trust outside of Indigo fucked me off even more. While I’m working this case, I’m also going to be doing some digging into my unit. Someone had tipped them off, but who?

 

 

“I didn’t have you pegged as a whiskey drinker,” a deep voice said beside me. I’d been sitting at the bar thinking while the guys went through their normal banter and bullshitting. After so many years, I’ve given up listening to it and was enjoying a bottle of Whiskey that one of the Irish guys had given me before we left the ‘pits’. When he handed me the bottle, me and Match had burst out laughing at the name - Bushmills Black Bush.

Looking over my shoulder, I saw Jagger leaning against the bar. Turning the bottle of whiskey so that the label faced him, I waited as he burst out laughing.

“The fuck is that?”

“A gift from an Irishman. It’s not bad, well, once you get past the initial shudder that you’re drinking something called Black Bush.” I watched his throat move as he threw his head back and laughed harder. “Then again, it could be a blonde bush or a brown bush and it would still make you shudder.”

Still chuckling, he reached for the bottle and a glass over the top of the bar and poured himself a small measure.

“At least it’s not a red bush!”

I choked on the mouthful that I was swallowing and started coughing trying to clear my lungs which were on fire with the whiskey that I just inhaled. I wheezed as he smacked me on the back and tried not to scream at the pain in my ribs at the same time.

“Ribs…”

“What?” he moved his head closer toward me as he asked it and I’d be lying if I said that he didn’t smell good. This really was a change to the Knights that I’d known before. Most of them had smelt like shit and could cook fries in their hair.

“She busted her ribs,” Smokey the nosey bastard interjected, leaning to talk in front of me to Jagger.

I watched his jaw clench as he reached out and lifted up the side of my tank. Normally, I’d have broken the guys hand, but I think the damn Black Bush was making me nice, or maybe it was him. His quick intake of breath said he’d gotten to the bruise up my side. The scratches weren’t deep and were healing, but even badly bruised ribs hurt like a bitch.

“Someone did this to you?” He ground out.

Shrugging, I went back to my whiskey, nudging Smokey out of the way to get to the bottle again. “Perk of the job.”

“Who?” He was asking like he could go and find the guy and beat the shit out of him.

“A guy had an RPG and fired at them. It hit the wall and if it hadn’t been for Match jumping on top of her,” Smokey pointed over in Match’s direction who was glaring back at him. “I reckon we’d have been visiting her in the ICU.”

A bit of an exaggeration, if you asked me, but I also wasn’t in the habit of discussing shit like this with strangers so I sat quietly taking sips of the whiskey trying to clear my mind of the last couple of weeks. Duke had given guidance on what we could divulge to the Knights, but I preferred to keep shit between me and the rest of Indigo. At the end of the day, this guy, this MC in fact, was Preacher’s and he couldn’t be trusted with jack shit so why would I trust any of them with that kind of information.

“Why do you do it?” He asked quietly, spinning his glass on the top of the bar.

“There are things out there that the public will hopefully never know about, things that would keep you awake for weeks. I’ll fight until my last breath to make sure that they never hit our shores,” his eyes flashed as I said this, but it was true. “The public don’t even know the surface of it. Then there’s the trafficking…I can help, so I do.” Leaning back, I shot back the last mouthful and grinned at him, “And I get to play with fucking awesome toys.”

Standing up, I grabbed up the bottle and waved it at him as I walked toward my room. I needed about eight hours’ sleep, which was double what I normally get, and then I’ll be ready to go again.

I heard footsteps and knew Match was following. After missions it was normal for us to sleep in the same room because of the nightmares, those bastards were brutal. I actually felt sorry for the personnel who returned home and didn’t have someone with them who understood the nightmares and how tightly they gripped you. One of my friends, Hunter, had lost a couple of men on his last mission and had been badly injured by a car bomb; his nightmares were bound to be soul destroying, well with what was left that hadn’t already been destroyed by the incident.

Making a note to give him a call, I went and got ready for bed while Match made up the couch for him to sleep on. Sleeping in this room was going to be fucked up, but sleeping on an actual bed would be like heaven so I could grin and bear it.

Getting into bed, I turned out the light once Match was ready and buried my head in the pillow trying to get the images of the missions that were mixing in with memories of this place. Every so often, an image of Jagger laughing would break into them, so I did what I knew would work and focused on that image so that I could fall asleep.

 

JAGGER

 

Watching her walk away, I mulled over how she reacted when her buddy had told me about the incident with the RPG. The fact she walked out of it like she did…

Shuddering, I made my way toward Preacher’s office knowing I’d find him going over information and tip offs that we’d been given.

He needed to speak to Kyle about what had actually happened years ago; she needed to know. It was like she was putting herself in situations where she’d risk her life just to get away from the shit that had played out with her mom. I got it, I had done the same when I first joined my dad’s chapter. I lived fast and loose like a fucking asshole, just to get away from shit. Then Preacher had accepted my transfer and had given me some harsh truths that hit home. I saw it in a lot of the younger guys now, but we gave them their time to burn and then hit them with the wisdom.

The Knights MC wasn’t about mayhem and hedonism anymore, they were about working to help people who couldn’t help themselves.

The trafficking situation hadn’t been the first government issue that we helped on, but it was now the biggest and most dangerous that we’ve been handed. These guys weren’t just a bunch of assholes looking to sell some drugs and a gun or two just to say they were bad asses. No, they made some of the nastiest guns I’d ever seen, ones designed to kill in volume. They sold that shit to kids on the streets, too. Then there were the drugs which we’d already covered earlier, but if you’ve ever seen a young kid dead from shooting up with rat poison, or a girl eating her arm because of the chemicals in the drugs that she took, people would get the hell that they were reaping. Finally, the human trafficking; tiny kids, teenagers, young women sold to perverted assholes in countries all over the world who gang raped them and then sold them into even bigger nightmares.

It was something we would never give up working to stop regardless. Now, with the Ghosts behind us, I was feeling a bit more positive that we might at least be able to make a dent in the situation.

Knocking on Preacher’s door, I waited for him to shout out to me before walking in. Seeing the look on my face, he dropped the pen in his hand and gave me his full attention.

“You need to talk to Kyle, man,” I started, standing in front of his desk with my arms crossed. This was normal for me, but today it was so I didn’t start punching shit I was that jacked up about the guy’s daughter.

Rubbing his hand across his chin and messing up his normally perfect beard, he stared back at me. “Why?”

Sighing, I moved to the chair in front of his desk and made myself comfortable. When he heard what I had to say, it would be him punching shit and making myself a smaller target was a wiser idea. Preacher and I had gone some rounds before and he was like the fucking Hulk.

Only he could fix this shit though, so he was going to have to get a handle on it as soon as possible. We couldn’t fight the bad guys if the good guys were fighting their issues, too.