Cole
“Hey, bro, don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Axel asked, appearing out of the fog next to me at the bar. He slid my glass away from me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. “And gimme that back, bro. What are you doing?”
“Mick called and told me you were sitting down here getting shit-faced. What’s up?” He pulled up on the stool next to mine.
I shook my head and closed my eyes. I ran a hand down my face. I had forgotten how long I’d been at the bar drinking. It didn’t seem like it could have been that long.
“I want an answer, kid. What’s going on?” Axel insisted.
I couldn’t answer. I felt myself drifting off, trying to pass out at the bar.
“Hey, man, help me get this punk upstairs,” I heard Axel mutter to Mick.
A moment later, I felt their hands under my arms, lifting me up from the bar. I felt heavier than normal, but after a moment, it felt like I was floating away. I opened my eyes briefly to look around as they carted me off. The room wasn’t spinning or anything. I was just done for the night.
“Man, I don’t know what I’m going to do if she doesn’t come back,” I found myself saying once we were out of the common room downstairs and marching up the hallway.
“What are you talking about?” Axel asked.
“She left, man. She took... talk to Mick, man. He knows,” I said, disgusted with how hard it was to form words with any confidence that I was saying what I thought I was saying.
“What’s he talking about, Mick?”
The big man sighed. “Lilah, the girl who’s been staying with him, the one he refuses to call his old lady, but you see how she’s got him.”
Axel chuckled, agreeing with his implication that she was my old lady regardless of what I’d said about her.
“She took one of the MC trucks tonight. She must have grabbed the key when I wasn’t looking. I have no idea where she went, but I tried to tell him if she took one of our cars, I figured she’d be back. That’s when he started drinking.”
I laughed at the thought of how much I’d had to drink. I had no clue how much it was, but I knew how fucking great I felt at the moment, soaring up the stairs with my eyes closed and a stupid smile on my face.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on my side on the bed. I heard my door close as Mick was headed back downstairs after dropping me off. Axel leaned against the wall facing the bed.
“You ready to talk now?” he asked.
“Talk about what?” I asked in return, smiling.
“Stop playing stupid. Just because you’re drunk doesn’t mean you don’t know what I’m talking about.” He crossed his arms and looked down at me with a blend of anger and disappointment on his face.
I remembered what I’d said in the hallway, and I laughed. “I guess I admitted a little too much tonight, huh?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know what I mean, brother. Talking about Lilah.”
“There’s no shame in it, brother, but you shouldn’t be getting sloshed downstairs just because you don’t know what to do about the way you feel about her. What sense does that make?”
“That’s not why I got trashed,” I told him.
The bed felt good. My head rested on the pillow, and it was persuading me to stop talking and got to sleep. I took a couple of deep breaths with my eyes closed, fighting off the sleep that kept trying to pull me under.
“I mean, it was one reason, sure, but it wasn’t the only reason,” I added after a long pause.
“Okay, hit me. What was the rest of it?” my brother asked.
Axel was my oldest brother. He’d pretty much raised me, along with the MC. They were the only family I ever really knew. It was embarrassing to be this damn drunk in front of him, to be so inebriated that I was having trouble maintaining a steady train of thought. I was really starting to get mad at myself for it.
“Stay with me, Saw,” he said. “You can sleep after you tell me what’s going on.”
“You’re right,” I said, pushing myself up. “Hang on a second.” I got up from the bed and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. I shook my head a little, trying to literally shake off the buzz. I splashed water on my face a few more times before walking back into the other room. I felt a little better. I was still drunk, but at least I was awake and could focus through it a little better. I sat back down on the bed.
“Better?” Axel asked.
“Yeah, a little bit,” I told him.
“So, the main reason I found you hammered, drooling on the bar tonight?” he reminded me.
“It’s a long story, man,” I said, stalling.
“Try me.” He wasn’t having it. I had to tell him.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, here goes. You know about the break-in at her place and the attempted break-ins at the tattoo shop, right?”
“Yeah, I’ve been caught up to speed on why she’s here. Cut to the chase, Saw,” he said forcefully.
“I found out her ex-husband is behind it all. He staged the break-in at her house, and he sent a guy to vandalize the tattoo shop.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s trying to cover up the fact that he’s run off with her kid. He’s taking him to Belize with him, and I think he’s supposed to be meeting up with a woman there.” I realized that other than the trip, I hadn’t gotten any other information about the emails from Buck. “I don’t know his relationship with the woman. I’m guessing he’s running off with her.”
“Or he’s getting mixed up with a cartel,” my brother said.
I chuckled. It seemed unlikely from everything else I knew, but I figured it could have been a thing for him.
“Have you told her any of this?” Axel asked.
I shook my head slowly. “Nope. I knew he was behind it all. The guy who tried to break into the tattoo parlor had told me as much, but I didn’t find out the rest until today, while she was at work.”
“You need to tell her.”
“But how?”
“When she gets back, tell her like you told me. What are you going to do about it? Do you have a plan in place to get her son back and stop her ex from leaving the country with him?”
“I don’t. I’ve been trying to figure all that out today. I told everybody I went to the shop to work this afternoon, but really, I rode around on my bike for a while trying to come up with a plan that will get us her son and stop him. I’ve got nothing.”
Axel sighed. “Talk to her when she gets home, get some sleep, and first thing tomorrow we need to get together to make plans. I’ll be sure to be here for it.” He pushed himself off the wall like he was about to walk out of my room.
“I almost sent someone to his suite tonight,” I continued, stopping him. “I decided not to. He’s got a pretty elaborate plan set up, it seems, so I didn’t want to tip him off that we’re onto him or anything. I didn’t want to put her son in any danger.”
“What was your guy going to do?”
“I was sending him to check the place out, to see if he was there, and to see if he could find any sign of where he went.” I laughed. “At the very least, I was going to have him ransack the place to see how Troy likes it when someone tears up his shit.”
Axel shook his head.
“Be thankful you didn’t waste your time. No one was there,” a voice said at my door.
We both snapped our heads around to see who had spoken. Lilah stood with the door open. I hadn’t even heard her come in. While we watched, she walked in and let the door close behind her. I picked my jaw up off the floor. I wondered how much she’d heard.
She walked in and crossed the room with an air of confidence. She knew she had taken us by surprise. I had no idea what she knew, which put me at a distinct disadvantage. It was possible I had just spilled the beans to her without even meaning to.
“I’m going to leave you two to talk,” Axel said, flashing a quick smile at Lilah as he started to walk away.
“Lilah, have you met my brother, Axel?” I asked her, keeping him from leaving right away and buying myself a little time before I had to face her. “Real brother, not just MC brother,” I added.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Axel said. “You need to straighten him out. If you need any help, let me know.” He winked and left the room, closing the door slowly behind him.
Lilah turned and looked at me. Even in anger, her face was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Of course, there was a threatening element to it when she was angry, but she was still gorgeous. I wanted to look away, but her eyes held me in place. I knew that once she found the words to speak, I was going to be in big trouble.
“How much did you hear?” I asked finally, trying to brace myself for her response.
“Enough,” she said, her voice cold and hard.
Her response gave me chills. I knew what she meant, but at the same time, I didn’t know exactly what she’d heard. Had she heard everything? What did she miss?
Why the hell did I have to get drunk? I had put myself in a bad position to try to handle the situation by having too much to drink too quickly. The good news was that I was sobering up pretty quickly now that she was standing right in front of me.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” she asked.
I shook my head and lowered it into my hands. I wasn’t sober enough to deal with the anger in her tone and her eyes. It was completely understandable. I should have been more open with her as soon as I knew something.
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
“No, let me explain,” I said, lifting my head up from my hands. Whether I had the words or not, it was time to talk. Hell, for all I knew, she already knew everything anyway, depending on how long she’d been standing in the doorway before she said anything.
“Please do,” she said, crossing her arms.
I stood up from the bed, still a little shaky and weak on my feet. I had to present some level of confidence to her. It wasn’t a good time to be sloppy. I had started the evening off worrying that she wasn’t going to come back, and I was finishing it off by giving her a reason not to.