Chapter 2

What if… everything you are going through is preparing you for what you asked for? - Anonymous

Roxy

One thing about the club is that we never miss out on any opportunity to party. We’d celebrate anything. From shooting down our number one competitor in the drug trade, to Bax breaking up with his bitch of a girlfriend, Cynthia, it was how the club rolled. It was how we roll. It has always been a time when everyone could wind down and let out all of their pent-up frustrations.

Me? Well, I didn’t come to every party. I come to the ones I am demanded to be at, the important ones. Tonight, wasn’t important by any means, but Rage wants me there, and who was I to deny him that? The entire ride out here on the back of his Harley, he acts like I am nothing to him.

I know deep down that he views me as nothing. He is probably regretting marrying me. I didn’t blame him. I regret marrying him every damn day. It was odd, to hate the man you slept beside every night – the one you swore in front of God that you’d love until death do you part. I hate him more than I’ve hated anyone in my entire life, and yet, there is that small part of me that still had a shred of love for him too.

I know that one day that sliver of love would turn into nothingness, and I expect that to come sooner rather than later. 

“You don’t look too bad today,” Quinn mentions as she slides onto the bar top next to me. Our clubhouse wasn’t massive, but we make due. It used to be pretty big until Rage kept expanding the club, patching over other MC’s until the Demons have a presence in almost every state. When push came to shove, we had to complete renovations, and that meant the living area was made smaller to accommodate more space for rooms. From where we sit, we could see most of the brothers, we had our eyes over the kingdom so to speak.

I made sure that I was hiding my baby bump well, wearing a loose-fitting tank top with a heavy jacket. It was concealing, and unless you were my doctor, you would have had no idea I was even pregnant. I was barely beginning to show, even with being how far along I am.

“I don’t feel too bad. The morning sickness is finally letting up. It was supposed to get better weeks ago. I’m just finally glad it’s over with,” I tell her, my hand resting right below my stomach. Ever since I found out I was pregnant all I had wanted to do was keep my hand there. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was some motherly reaction, either way, it was comforting to me and to the little man inside my womb.

“I bet you are.” Quinn is silent for a moment. I already know she was thinking, and whenever the woman does that, there is nothing good that comes out of her mouth. “Did you tell him yet?”

My eyes almost burst out of my head. “No.”

Of course I wouldn’t tell him, not yet at least. I haven’t even made up my mind when it came to telling Rage about his son. I’m sure you’re wondering how I hid it from him for so long, but that was easy. For one, I wasn’t beginning to show very much, and secondly, he made a comment about how I was gaining a few pounds the other day. The jerk thinks I’m fat, not pregnant.

“You need to tell him, or you need to just… leave,” she whispers softly so no one around us could hear. Everyone was too busy caught up in their own business to worry about what Rage and Roman’s wives were talking about anyways. She didn’t even have to whisper. “Personally, I think you shouldn’t say a thing and should just get outta here. I’m worried about you, Rox. I’m really fucking scared for you.”

Quinn was right to be worried about me. Fuck, I was worried about me. I knew what my options were, and both were terrifying. I could try to leave and potentially get caught and die, or I could stay and potentially die. I didn’t know what to do. She has no idea what it was like to be in my shoes. No one in the club really did, and for the ones that pitied me, or felt guilty for me being in this situation – they didn’t get a right to judge any decision I make. In the end, I was doing whatever I felt was the best thing. Even if it sometimes wasn’t.

“Baby, get your ass over here.” Rage’s voice echoes through the room. I ignore him at first, thinking he was speaking to one of his club whores, but when I look up to see the anger flashing behind his eyes, I know exactly who he was speaking to – me.

I slide off the bar, careful when I walk to not show an ounce of fear. It was what he wants, and I’d be damned if I showed him that I was scared of his unpredictable behavior, even if we both already knew that I was.

He watches me closely as I make each step towards him. He was seated in a chair in the living area, surrounded by chapter Prez’s from other charters – all here to suck up to him.

“Sit your ass down.” I obey the command he growls out to me, sitting on his lap, looking out to the men surrounding us. Each of them are so different than the others. There was Leon who is built like a tank, next to him sits Richard, and Sam was on their right, and so on, and so on. They may have looked different, but they had one thing in common; their lethality. It was the only reason Rage allowed them to be charter Prez’s. 

Demons of Hell MC had forty-two charters, all spread across the United States. With each day that passes, the MC was growing, and so was our territory. Rage needs to have men that he could count on to do the job right. To make the decisions that he would make. In most cases, they were men that killed first and asked questions later.

Just like my husband.

I know not to speak to any of the men sitting before me, but to listen, to pay attention to whatever was going on around me. Rage knows my strengths. He know how I listen and pick up on the slightest details surrounding us. A few weeks back our Jacksonville charter Prez mentioned he’d been out of town for two weeks on a vacation of sorts. I knew for a fact that was a lie. By the end of the day, I ended up saving the Demons of Hell over two million dollars. One greedy Prez wanting a little too much. We all know where he is now, rotting six feet under, if Rage even bothered to bury his body.

My husband doesn’t love me, or even like me for that matter, but somehow, he has some small inclination of respect for my opinion.

I think, maybe I was somehow useful to him. Maybe that is why I am still around.

I sit with Rage for over two hours listening to the charter updates. We’d acquire two new charters, one just outside of Seattle – expanding our reach to the west coast, and one outside of Raleigh, giving us a greater presence in the south.

Expansion didn’t come for free. It has to be earned or taken. In our case – we take, and what Rage doesn’t take, he steals.

“Are you getting any kickback from the Sons of Gods?” Rage asks Sam, our charter Prez who just took over an old Raiders compound in Alabama. The Raiders were a prominent MC across the South and West. Only a few short weeks ago, Rage made deals to patch over numerous small clubs. In the end, that grew our headcount from a little over twenty thousand to around thirty-two thousand members. He decided that the time to act on annihilating the Raiders was now.

He took a strong, established club in the South and turned it into almost nothing. If our intel was right, the Raiders were left with only sixteen clubs on the west coast.

I won’t lie, it seemed smart at the time. But now, I didn’t think it was. Rage though, he didn’t patch over the best of the best – he patched in lowlife scum. He patched over men who were eighty-sixed because of reasons – child molesters, rapists, and the like. To sum it up, Rage would patch over men that other Prez’s refused to patch. There are reasons that others wouldn’t, reasons that Rage turned a blind eye to.

“Zeus is making it difficult for us. If you’re asking me, I think we’re going to have a war on our hands.”

“I didn’t ask your opinion. I asked for the facts,” he snarles out at Sam. I expected it. These men should have known better than to air their personal opinion to Rage of all people.

“The fact is Zeus isn’t happy. We took away one of his biggest allies. He and the Raiders worked together on every business transaction, and now he’s left with nothing, scrambling to use only his men to make his deals. He’s weak, and he knows it. But there’s opportunity here, and a big one at that. We can cripple him with just one move.” Sam looks to Rage, waiting for approval to continue. He learned quickly from his mistake, a lot faster than some of the others have.

“Go on,” Rage tells him. He moves his arm slowly up my leg, stroking it gently. Right now, Sam was pleasing him, giving him some sort of ammunition to use against Zeus, otherwise known as public enemy number one to the Demons of Hell.

“He has a family.”

Sam looks back from Rage to me before he speaks. “Forgive me for my bluntness, but his wife and kids mean more to him than she does to you. He cares about his wife. He loves his daughters more than anything else in this world.” Sam was quiet for a moment, anticipating some sort of backlash from Rage. Even I knew he wouldn’t argue with Sam. It’s cute that Sam thought he’d get berated for saying the truth. “We take them out.”

“No!” I snap out. For a moment, I feel nothing but intense anger. I was ready to claw this man’s face off for wanting to attack this innocent woman and her children. The only crime she’d committed was falling for the wrong man. These were innocents, and Sam wanted to use them to send a message. “You can’t hurt that woman or those fucking kids!” I glare at Sam with all of my might, knowing very well not to even look at my husband.

Rage snakes his hand up around the back of my neck, into my hair, and pulls down hard so my face is right next to his own. I couldn’t move an inch, even if I tried. “Was anyone speaking to you, bitch?”

I didn’t utter a single word. Instead, I remain silent and pray that he would forget about my tiny outburst. I pray to God that he’d forget, even if I knew he wouldn’t.

Sam disregards me completely. “We take them out, we cripple him emotionally. He won’t know what to do, he’ll be so distraught, and we can just slide in and take what’s ours. The Demons of Hell will run Alabama.”

“And how exactly would this be done, Sam, since you have all the answers?” Sam’s eyes light up with excitement. He is happy to be pleasing Rage in any way that he could, and that makes me sick.

“I’ve been watching his wife and kids for the last month. I know everything they do. I know where she drops the kids off at daycare. I know everything about their life. Every move they make, I’ve seen, every security check, every prospect shift change. I’ve seen it all. I know their routine, and I have the perfect opportunity to strike. The wife takes the kids to daycare a little after eight in the morning. This is the only time the prospects don’t follow her inside. I don’t care to know the reason why. I see this for what it is, an opportunity. I paid off three employees inside that daycare center, and I say we strike now, while the iron’s hot, before they change up any part of their routine.”

Rage is silent, internally debating what he is going to do. I know this side of him all too well. He is analyzing, thinking of what could go wrong, what could go right, and how to be successful. He is weighing the options and thinking about the risk. He may have been a monster, but he wasn’t a stupid one.

“Set it up and keep me updated on the progress.”

I wanted to believe that I didn’t just hear what I did. That he didn’t just order the execution of two children and their mother, but he did. He did it without shame, without a care in the world.

I’m just left sitting here wondering how I could forget that I married a monster.