Chapter 1

So much more was said in the unsaid.
– Bridgett Devoue

Roxy

“I’m so jealous of you, Rox. You’ve got it all.”

That one statement pulls me back to reality. I hadn’t been listening to jack shit coming out of her mouth. To be honest, I don’t even know who the fuck she is. She makes it a point to act like she is my longtime friend. They always do. I am the Prez’s wife; it is important to be friends with me.

What a fucking joke that is.

I scan the packed clubhouse, filled with our members, seeing if I could spot my husband. I take a deep, easy breath when I discover he is nowhere in sight.

The Demons of Hell MC just infiltrated a shipment of coke from the Ramirez’s, who arguably runs the biggest drug cartel in Mexico, next to Frank Lopez and his crew of lowlifes. Now, it’s time to celebrate, considering the club has about fourteen kilos of coke to put back on the streets and the surrounding areas. I know Rage is thrilled by this. It’s the only reason he is leaving me alone right now, and I’d take any reason to not be near him.

I may have been the wife of the Prez, but make no mistake, this life is not glorious. There is nothing glorious about my life. The blonde bimbo to my right has no idea. My life is completely fabricated, nothing but a giant lie.

For one, Rage is not my honey; he is my fucking nightmare.

I would laugh, but I refuse to pity myself for being with the monster I chose.

In the beginning, I thought we were straight out of Beauty and the Beast. Rage was my Beast, and I was his Belle. I learned shortly after that I was so wrong. There was no taming his inner beast. There was only one thing: acceptance.

And even after all these years, I couldn’t accept it.

I am not a dumb girl. I know that one day he will get bored of me and order one of the men he calls brother, from our so called “family”, to kill me. Hell, maybe Rage would even do it himself. He has come close so many times. I was truly shocked that I was still alive. And I could only blame one person for being in the position that I am in.

Myself.

I’d thought of running many times, but Rage is friends with practically every MC across the states. There were maybe a select few that he didn’t have an in with, but I was also not desperate enough to go into the territory of the ones who he didn’t get along with – it was a death wish.

I would always be looking for a way out, even if no one saw the fight I have in me.

“He’s upstairs with Shelia, getting his cock sucked.” Roman, our club enforcer, is to me. He is a man of very few words. Whenever you envision a club enforcer, you’d picture Roman Raines. The man is a tank, bulked up like Hulk Hogan with jet black hair running past his shoulders. Roman is one of the few in the club that I couldn’t say anything bad about. Him, and his wife Quinn. “I’ll try to keep Rage drinking until he passes out. It’ll give you a break from him.”

The bimbo next to me straightens up, peaking interest in our conversation. “Why would ya need a break from that man?” I take a long, slow look up and down her young body. She is probably only a few years younger than me. I remembered when I was that young, that naïve – the naivety that made me marry Rage.

Roman looks to me for a split second, then back to her. I could have bet we were both thinking the same thing. “If you want to entertain him, darlin’ go on ahead. Tell him Roman sent him something fun to play with,” he tells her.

Her expression changes from intrigue to excitement in just a moment’s notice. She didn’t know what we were sending her up to, though. I used to feel bad when Roman did this, when he would send others to get what I would be experiencing otherwise. I don’t anymore. I welcomed any break from a beating. Maybe that made me awful. Maybe it made me a cold-hearted bitch. Did it even matter? At the end of the day, these girls got out. They fucking left.

I was stuck here.

I was trapped.

***

Blondie goes upstairs right after Roman gives her the option. I nod my approval to her; giving her my OK to go and fuck my husband. She didn’t realize what she was signing up for. Not many of the whores that came into our club did. You would think that after the past few years of seeing me being beaten to a pulp on a daily basis that they’d put the picture together and stay leery of Rage, and some of them are – the smart ones, but there are never many of those. A lot of them come to us because they couldn’t kick it at an actual job. So, we employ them.

We have club whores, like lovely old Shelia. Then, we have street whores. The club whores belong to the club, which makes them club property. There is only one rule when it comes to the club whores. Only club members could fuck them.

The street whores are different. We make money off of them. They charge a set rate of prices for blowjobs, handjobs, fucking, anal, slapping, BDSM shit… whatever you could think of, they offer. The club makes sixty percent off of those girls. It is one of the many business ventures that the club has. It is actually our most profitable, next to the drugs. “You think she regrets it by now?” Roman asks me, taking a sip from his bottle of beer.

“Do any of them regret fucking the Prez?” I look him dead in the eyes, waiting for his reaction. He doesn’t say anything, which doesn’t surprise me. He knows I am right. The girls just want bragging rights; they want to run around to all the other whores and tell them, “I fucked the Prez!” Well, I let them Run around, bragging about how they fucked my husband.

I bet you they wouldn’t be bragging about the black eye that he gives them or how he punches them so hard in the gut that they couldn’t breathe for a week.

Over the course of the last few hours, the party has dwindled down to almost nothing. I glance around the room and see that there was about five brothers hanging around, and they were all too drunk to know what was going on around them. This is the part of the night that makes me cringe, the part where I know I need to leave soon.

Like clockwork, I hear his laughter before he is even down the stairwell. Rage is awake, very drunk, and not sated whatsoever.

“Roxxxxxxxxyyyyy.” I could hear by the tone of his voice that there is plenty of fight left in him, and call me selfish, but I don’t wanna experience any of that, especially tonight.

Roman and I exchange a glance, his eyes silently warning me to leave, and somehow, I know not to. I should’ve when I had the chance a few minutes ago. When I had the gut feeling to leave – but I didn’t, and here I am, stuck with my reality. If I run, or even tried to leave, it would be so much worse the next time. I could let his need to beat me build up until it was overflowing, and I was in the hospital, or I could take small beatings with a few black eyes.

The footsteps become louder and louder with each step that he takes down the stairs. I could hear the small creak in the wood as he moved. He was moving slower than usual, the liquor obviously impacting his motor function.

“Leave, Rox. Fucking. Leave,” Roman hisses at me. When I don’t move from my stance, he wraps his arms around me, lifting me up into his grasp, and rushes me behind the stairs until I am at the back door. He shuffles quickly in the pocket of his jeans, yanking out the keys to his truck. “You fucking leave right now.”

“If I leave, you know what’ll happen to me,” I argue, searching his eyes for some sort of understanding. Roman is the one who took me to the hospital two months ago after I was left in the clubhouse, halfway dead. He should have understood what would happen.

“Yeah, and you know what’ll happen to that damn kid you have in there if you stay.” He spits out at me, words thick as lead. Shock overtakes my entire body. I try hard to not show my emotions, yet I fail. I only told one person about my pregnancy, and that was Quinn, Roman’s wife, and my only friend in the damn club. I should’ve known she’d share with her own husband.

“Get out before you get that kid killed. I’ll cover for you, now go.”

I don’t waste another moment. I head for the truck, opening the door, and sliding onto his new leather seats. I take one last glance back at the clubhouse and know I’d be safe for the night. I know Roman would keep his word; he’d cover for me.

Roman’s job is to enforce the club – to protect us against all threats. I didn’t realize until today that meant protecting myself and my baby, but not just from Rage, from me as well.