Chapter 3
Fox
As I sat at the bar with my beer in my hand, the smell of the kitchen trapped itself underneath my nose. Usually I didn’t eat the food they made here. I heard it was good, but I never wanted to ruin my appetite with shit like food when they had the best beer on tap in town. But as I kept thinking about Calais and this shit with the KG9’s, I grew more frustrated at my circumstance. The beer wasn’t working to settle my mind so I could figure my shit out, and now my stomach was growling with hunger.
This night was getting worse and worse by the second.
“Hey, bartender. Can I get some wings?” I asked.
“What kind and how many?” he asked.
“Ten of them. Hot. With lots of ranch,” I said.
“Give us twenty minutes. Want another beer?”
“Just keep those coming. Open up a tab or some shit.”
“You got it, boss.”
“Don’t call me that,” I said.
The bartender slid me another beer as he put in my order for food. I hunched over the bar, my shoulders spreading against my leather jacket. I never went out in public in my leather cut for the club anymore. Not with the clients, I was wrangling and the connections I was making. The last thing they needed to know was that I was part of a biker gang around town. That was another thing assholes like Calais could hold over my head just to keep me under their thumb.
I wasn’t sure how I lost control of that situation, but I was determined to get it back.
Either way, I was pissed at myself for getting into the god damned mess. I knew branching out from the club was going to be risky, but I didn’t think it would lead to shit like this. The KG9’s thought I was one of them, and that shit wasn’t the case. Calais thought he could order me around like his newbie cronies in his fucking street gang. But those assholes weren’t anything. I didn’t even know they existed until a client of mine ditched their shit for mine. It was how I met up with Calais in the first place.
He tracked me down to beat my ass for stealing his clientele, and I cut a deal with him that worked in both of our favors.
Nothing in that agreement established a long-term relationship. But something must have in Calais’ eyes. Or at least his boss’s. Now, I was expected to deliver on shit I never promised him. I didn’t promise him a long-term relationship. I didn’t promise him an influx of the drugs I was selling. I was a peddler. Just like they were. I wasn’t a supplier.
And they were treating me like one.
Maybe that was my fucking fault. Maybe this whole ‘renting their services out’ thing made me look like a supplier. But I made it very fucking clear that the drugs I was running were limited. There was a chance I could go to Snake and Mac and take what they had left of their stash, but with the way the KG9’s were selling this shit out, that would only buy me another month. If I was lucky.
The only way out of this I saw was to find a supplier of the drugs The Road Rebels were running. Mac had originally set up the relationship, and since then he had been very secretive about it. I couldn’t use the club’s own connection, but I could try to track down another connection for the same drugs. The KG9’s could be very lucrative for me, which would help me keep up my father’s bills and shit. I couldn’t afford to take a month-by-month dive in my income just so the club could get some fucking bars up and running. That shit would take months. Maybe even years.
I didn’t have that kind of time to wait for money. My father needed that shit money.
He needed it now.
Throwing back the rest of my beer, the bartender handed me another one. My wings were set in front of me, setting my mouth ablaze with saliva. I was hungrier than I had imagined as I dove into the wings, relishing how good they tasted. Fuck. These were the best wings I’d ever shoved in my face. I tore through them, slathering them in ranch dressing as my mind continued to swirl.
If I were going to continue to sell drugs on my own, that would be a way to keep the club out of it. I could keep these two lives separate, I could switch from drug-running to helping out with the opening of our new bar, and that would help me keep my head low. Opening a legal bar would give me more brain power to focus on running my own drugs, establishing connections, and getting back on my feet financially.
Plus, getting my own drugs to sell meant I didn’t have to rely on the club any longer.
Right now, how much I sold was reliant on how many pounds of drugs our club had to offload in order to get out of the game. Once I could clear out the rest of the stash I had, that clipped my ties to the club in terms of drugs. That would keep them clean and out of the loop, and I would no longer have to continue lying to them about what I was doing. When Mac asked me how I was selling everything so fast, I told him it was because I was that good. Untapped potential and shit.
I wasn’t telling him I had established a connection with a local street gang to help me offload these drugs for a small price.
The KG9’s and their operation could be very lucrative for me, but it all hinged on establishing a connection with a supplier. If I could gain the upper hand and find a way for Calais to make payments to me instead of the other way around, I had the possibility of making more money than I ever did with The Road Rebels. I could see it now. My father in the best care facility in the state. Money in his account to buy whatever he wanted in the stores they had on the facility grounds. A new fucking bike decked out in gold trim and the darkest black anyone had ever seen. Money to blow on women that wanted to fall at my feet and suck my cock.
Shit. I’d be the talk of the fucking town.
That was what I had to do. I had to find a supplier, and I had to rework my agreement with the KG9’s.
“How are the wings?” the bartender asked.
“Decent,” I said. “The sauce could be hotter.”
“Then you should’ve asked for ‘hotter.’”
“You’ve got a sauce named ‘hotter’?” I asked.
“Yep. We’ve got Chipotle, Teriyaki, Honey Mustard, Medium, Hot, Hotter, Hottest, and Bold.”
“Bold.”
“Yep. You gotta sign a waiver for that one, though,” the bartender said with a smirk.
“Should’ve given me that rundown before. I would’ve gladly signed a waiver for your pussy chicken wings.”
“Next time you come in, ask for one. Then I’ll watch you cry like a bitch before the ambulance picks you up.”
I liked this guy. He was good. But it took more than some hot sauce to send a man like me to the emergency room. I might look like a pretty boy to some. In fact, that was how I got my nickname with the club. They called me ‘Fox’ because of my pretty boy face they were all jealous of. If it wasn’t for the sleeve of tattoos running down my left arm and the sleeve of tattoos covering my neck, I could model. I had people who approached me on the street sometimes and asked if I’d be willing to cover them up just so I could model.
I wasn’t doing that shit though. I was proud of my tattoos.
It started with my arm. When I was first inducted into The Road Rebels, I went and got our logo tattooed on my forearm. It was my fucking pride and joy. I loved that damn thing. But I became addicted to ink. The way it felt and how it burned. How it changed my appearance and erased some of the scars, I had acquired during my childhood.
I couldn’t blame my mother for her addictions. Miscarriages were hard. But for her, it was more than that. Thirty-seven weeks and one day, there was no heartbeat. Just a dead child her body was carrying that she would still have to go into labor for. My father stood by her side, holding my dead sister in their arms as they tried to find the good side to all that shit. The positive side my mother tried all those years to find at the bottom of vodka and pill bottles.
She was never the same after that, and as much as I hated her for it, I couldn’t blame her.
Two things happened that day. The day my sister was born. I learned that life was a shithole and I learned that getting attached to people was never a good thing. My father loved my mother, which meant he was incapable of helping her. He fueled her addiction instead of trying to pull her out of it. The pills made her smile, and the vodka made her loose, and it was her smile that helped him heal from the death of my sister.
From having to bury their stillborn child.
But then, the addictions turned my mother mean. She threw things that at me and left marks on my arms for the rest of my teenage years. My father’s love went from being enabling to being suffocating, and I watched my mother wither in front of my eyes.
That was my second tattoo. Her birth and death dates when she finally overdosed on her pills.
Tattoos were how I coped with everything. The pain and the anger and the confusion that surrounded my mother’s death. I hated her, and yet I felt sympathy for her. I loved her, and yet I couldn’t stand her. I got tattoo after tattoo that cascaded up the back of my arm, covering up the scars she left on my skin with things I wanted to see. A portrait of her when she was at her best. My parents’ wedding date. Her favorite flowers shaded in all her favorite colors and random geometric patterns to fill in the blanks.
Covering up the evidence of her tortured spirit helped to cover up the confusion I felt when her addictions took her under.
“Those any good?”
The small voice wafted over my ears as I slowly turned my head. I dropped the empty chicken bone into the basket as my eyes raked over the woman sitting next to me. She was gorgeous. Fucking fantastic. Brown hair with red that shone underneath the shitty fluorescent lights of the bar. Sparkling hazel eyes that would look nice staring up from my cock. Jeans that hugged every curve her legs had to boast about and a yellow blouse that teased the luscious tits she had underneath it.
And those lips.
Those bold, red lips.
I could see them making streaks along the veins of my cock as I stuffed her throat full of me.
She was radiant. The kind of woman I had been hoping to meet tonight. She had this innocence about her, but behind those sparkling eyes, I knew there was a freak waiting to be set free. I bet she was a moaner. A woman who lost control of all her senses when my tongue hit all the right spots. I wondered what her pussy tasted like. How sweet it would be on my tongue after chewing on these tangy wings all night.
I watched as the bartender approached her, his eyes settling on her cleavage before he looked her in her eyes.
He better fucking back away.
Because that bitch was mine tonight.