SIXTEEN
Lea
Really, what choice did I have?
I couldn’t go by myself. It would be a suicide mission. I would only make it worse. And my contacts in Navesink Bank were limited.
That being said, they were limited to an entire family of fucking loansharks.
I charged into Chaz’s in whatever jeans I found laying on the floor and still in Shane’s tee, hair wild, eyes wild, aura sparking. I stopped inside the door, scanning for a long minute, looking for the familiar faces. I caught sight of a suit and dark hair and charged over.
Ryan’s head turned as if sensing my approach, brows drawn low, light eyes surprised and a bit confused. “Lea, is everything…” he started.
“You need to get your father and brothers here right now. Right. Now,” I emphasized when he paused.
He didn’t ask questions. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell, dialed, and brought it up to his ear. “Mark, call Pops, Hunt, and Eli and get your asses down to Chaz’s. Lea needs us.”
With that, he hung up and motioned to the seat next to him.
I shook my head, crossing my arms over my chest and pacing a bit anxiously.
“Come on,” Ryan said, standing, reaching for my arm and leading me toward the back of the bar and into a large office. “Wanna tell me now or just tell it once?”
I swallowed, knowing how hard it was to share with Shane and he had been inside me. Sharing with people I didn’t know that well was infinitely worse. “I had an abusive ex. He’s been… sending threats…”
“And Shane went to handle it,” Ryan said without even needing to think about it.
“Yeah,” I nodded, glad I didn’t have to go into more detail than that.
“This ex,” Ryan went on, watching me, intense, penetrating. I hadn’t noticed before just how much more he seemed to see because he didn’t speak much. “What kind of bad are we talking about here? Normal guy on a power trip or…”
“President of a heroin-dealing MC in Cali.”
“Shit,” Ryan sighed, nodding.
He let me have my silence then. Or, maybe more accurately, I let him have his. His silence was an active kind. He didn’t move. He didn’t pace like I paced. He sat on the edge of the desk, staring at the wall. But everything about his face, his posture, suggested a lot was going on under the surface.
The door flew open less than five minutes later, bringing in Mark who, I knew, lived the closest. “Sweetheart,” he said, touching my arm and moving into the room, looking at me for a minute then at his brother, seeming to silently communicate something I wasn’t privy to interpreting.
The door opened again another two minutes later, bringing in Eli with Hunter on his heels. They each greeted me, Hunt with a kiss to the temple, and Eli with a hand squeeze. They all moved in, waiting for Charlie. He came in five after that, Helen on his heels, not being the kind of woman to sit at home when shit was going down. She moved in beside me, kicking the door closed, being a support system without having to touch me or even say anything.
I was just about to say something, to fill them all in, trying to ignore the way my guts twisted and my heart pounded. But, thankfully, Ryan saved me.
“Lea has an ex who is the president of a heroin-dealing MC over in California. He did some shit to her,” he said, not knowing what, but something about the way he said it almost said he did know, like he could see through me. The other eyes in the room drifted to me at once, four sets of eyes sparking blue fire. Helen’s arm went around my waist then, as if helping brace me against the impact of their anger. “She obviously left him. But he wasn’t done with her. The threats rolled in. Shane got word. And now Shane’s on the wind.”
“How much of a head start does he have?” Mark asked, looking at me.
“I was asleep. But not more than five or six hours.”
“He’s in his truck?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah.” It was gone when I ran down the stairs to jump in my car.
“It’s a two or three day trip with breaks. There is where we have our advantage,” Ryan said.
“How so?” I asked, looking between them.
Eli looked at me, giving me a small smile, a little comfort. I needed it. “There are five of us to take turns driving and sleeping. We’ll make it in forty hours exactly. Shane would be behind us.”
Oh.
Yeah.
I hadn’t considered that.
“I’m going too,” I said, looking over at Charlie.
“Hon,” he said, shaking his head a little.
“No. You don’t get to tell me no. I came here for help. Not because I wanted you to completely take over. This is my mess. I want to go.”
“Lea…” Ryan tried to reason.
Then it was Helen who saved the day.
“Since when, in this family, do we think women are in any way less capable than the men?” she asked and her sons had the good sense to look down at their feet. “Exactly. Lea can go. She needs to see Shane. You can’t make her wait another two days after you guys get him to get him back to her. She goes. And, Lea honey, when you get there and if shit goes down, that’s when you let them take over. Deal?”
“Deal,” I agreed. “But… Hunter. I really think you should stay with Fee and…”
Hunter snorted. “Please, it took a lot of persuasion to convince her to keep her ass home. I’m going. Accept it.”
“Alright,” Charlie said, clapping his hands. “Mark, you have that giant SUV. We’ll take that. Eli, go raid the kitchen for shit to eat so we don’t have to stop. Helen…” he said, looking at his wife. He made a ‘come here’ jerk of his head and she untangled from me and went to him, putting her hands on his hips as he leaned forward and planted a kiss to her lips. “Hold down the fort.”
“Always do,” she said, giving him a saucy smile before stepping away.
We all filed out then, Ryan at my back like a body guard. I would have thought I would find it oppressive, his commanding aura all around me. But in that moment, in that circumstance, I found it oddly comforting. When we all climbed into he car and he moved into the seat beside me in the far back, I was glad for it. Even though, in general, I got on with Mark best, finding it easy to throw barbs at each other and joke around and the fact that Eli and I had connected on a deeper level, Ryan was who I wanted beside me then. And he somehow sensed that and stayed beside me.
Hunter drove for the first leg, Charlie beside him, awake, while Eli and Mark slept in the next row back. Beside me, Ryan was awake and silent.
The radio was on, somewhat loud, as if to try to drown out the overall tense feeling inside the car. No where was it stronger than in my little seat, knees pulled up to my chest, arms wrapped around them, rocking ever so slightly, too anxious to be sitting still in a car. My skin felt electric. My stomach was tied in a thousand small knots, each with their own worry stitched in- most for Shane, some for the Mallick family as a whole charging into such a dangerous situation, and a few, yeah, for me. For facing my past. For going back where I swore I would never go again. For maybe seeing my family who I now saw in a different light after Shane’s emphatic speech about their behavior with regard to my abuse.
“You’re going to explode out of your skin,” Ryan told me, surprising me after a couple hours of tense silence. When my eyes went to him, I saw actual worry in his eyes. His hand went out, landing on my wrist and squeezing. “Why are you rocking?”
And something about him asking me, someone as stitched up tight about their worries as me, wanting me to share, it made it almost easy. “Rey stabbed my brother,” I told him. “And he killed a friend of mine. After doing some awful things to her.”
“You’re worried about Shane,” he surmised.
“And all of you. And me.”
“Why you?” he asked, his hand still holding my wrist. “I think you know us well enough at this point to know that we won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Not physically,” I agreed.
“Hey, if you’re strong enough to live through whatever he put you through, you’re strong enough to give him the finger from a safe distance. Maybe it will feel like closure.”
I wasn’t sure anything would feel like closure, not while Rey and I shared the same planet.
“Can I ask you a weird, hypothetical question?” Ryan asked, watching me a little thoughtfully.
“Sure.”
“If you were in a room with your ex and you had a gun…” he broke off when I laughed, I think both of us shocked that I was capable of doing that right then. “What?” he asked, shaking his head.
“Shane asked me the exact same question. Is that from the Mallick brothers manual or something?”
His lips tipped up at that, a rare sight for him. And it was something to see, let me tell ya’. “And your answer?”
“I’d shoot him in the dick and then unload the rest of the bullets into his head and heart.”
“So it has to end,” Eli said from the seat in front of us.
To that, I shook my head. “Shane said something like that too. Do you guys have his warehouse wired or something? Do you know my favorite color too?” I teased.
“It’s blue,” Eli said, shrugging. “But I guess we all just think alike in some ways.”
“How did you know it’s blue?” I asked, sure I had never consistently worn the color around them.
“Eli just knows stupid shit like that,” Mark said, getting a glare from his brother for the ‘stupid shit’ comment.
The shift changed an hour later, all of us scooting upward. That put Mark at the wheel with Eli asleep beside him. Charlie and Hunter were now in the far back, passed out. Ryan was still awake beside me, us right behind the front seat then.
“Should we worry about Eli?” Mark asked, looking in the rearview at Ryan.
Ryan didn’t answer for a long minute, staring at the window. Then he looked forward out the dash and gave an answer that was so full of meaning that I felt myself shiver. “Yes.”
Mark nodded, accepting that as an answer. And I let the silence hang for a minute to see if they would elaborate. When they didn’t, I spoke up. “Why should we be worried about Eli?”
“See, sweetheart,” Mark started, eyes on the road, but I watched his face in the mirror. “We are all violent. To some of us, it came naturally. With me and Shane especially. Ryan can tap into it too, in a detached kind of way. But this life was never meant for Hunt and Eli. Hunter got out and stayed out. Eli could never find the balls to do it. The thing is, he was softer than the rest of us. He was always curled up with books and crayons and paint as a kid. He never wanted to do the crazy shit we all got into. He was happy by himself, creating shit while we fell out of trees and came home fresh from fights almost daily. But being too soft, it wasn’t going to get him by in this family. So we all, I guess, ganged up on him, hardened him. Doing that, forcing him to be something he wasn’t, it made him into something the rest of us aren’t.”
“What’s that?”
“Uncontrollable,” Ryan answered.
I glanced over at the sleeping Eli with his shaggy hair, his less pronounced jawline, his deep soul.
“Can’t picture it, can you?” Mark asked, knowing what I was thinking.
“No.”
“It’s freaky as fuck to watch. It’s like he has this well of rage inside that, when he taps into, it fucking explodes outward and overtakes him. He is who Pops sends when he really wants to send a message. He’s the one who flies off the fucking handle when he sees a guy being shitty toward a chick in a bar. He’s the one who gave a concussion to some guy who kicked his dog in public. When he flips, he flips the fuck out. The Eli you think you know, he’s just not there when he’s raging out. It’s a whole different animal. And this,” he said gesturing at the GPS, “this shit will be personal to him. He’s keeping it together now because he doesn’t have a choice. But get him eye-to-eye with your ex, honey, and he will fucking blow.”
“Well, he’s not going to get face-to-face with Rey,” I said with certainty. “That’s why we are going, to stop Shane before he can do anything stupid. We wouldn’t stop Shane and let Eli start trouble.”
“Right,” Mark agreed.
I didn’t know at the time that he was placating me.
I also didn’t know that, in the middle of the second day, when I eventually passed out, my fried nerves making me do so like the dead, that the men in the car all woke up and agreed on something.
That something was that they were going to detour.
And let Shane get there ahead of us.
I was also quite blithely unaware that they had even called Shane and hammered out the details, agreeing to show up and let him try to handle it before they went in. And that I would never be allowed anywhere near the entire situation.
Which was why when I woke up, I woke up in a goddamn hotel room twenty fucking miles from where the entire Mallick family was with no car, no cell, and no shoes.
I was so disoriented for a long time that I scrambled up, heart thumping so hard that it made me feel nauseated, reaching for the remote on the nightstand and clicking on the TV so I could see the date and time. I put a hand to my chest, taking deep breaths and trying to calm down. I couldn’t focus if I was freaking out.
Of course they left me. I really should have even seen that coming.
Maybe they respected women and their ability to be badasses in their own right, but they were strong, alpha males. No way were they going to let a woman follow them into danger if they could prevent it.
The thing that freaked me out the most was that one of them had managed to drag me out of a car, carry me into a hotel room, and tuck me into bed without me so much as gaining consciousness for a second. I knew without being able to know, that it had been Ryan to do it.
And leave it to the freaking Mallick family to get me a goddamn gorgeous hotel room too, not some sleep-and-fuck motel off the highway.
The sun was streaming through the sheers on the windows and I hopped up and made my way over to peel back the blinds and look out. Nothing was immediately familiar, California being huge and the fact that I had been asleep making it hard to tell which part of Cali I was in. I walked over toward the small desk and grabbed the brochure laying there, checking out the address with a small surge of relief.
It wasn’t that far.
They couldn’t be that far ahead of me.
And the crazy thing was, after some sleep to smooth over my frazzled nerves, yeah, I lost all that victim mentality shit.
The fear was gone.
So was the worry.
So was the guilt, the embarrassment, and the willingness to take back seat and let other people handle my problems.
All that was left was a bone-deep kind of anger, the kind that made my blood boil, that made my skin itch.
The kind that maybe Eli tapped into when he raged out.
I was so done being on the run, jumping at shadows, not being able to fall asleep because of the stress.
I was so fucking done.
It was time to face up my demons.
See, the Mallick men didn’t realize one thing. It wasn’t only the MC who I knew in Cali.
I had friends. The kind that were willing to go twenty miles out of their way to see me and give me a bike. The kind who would give me illegal guns and a supply of bullets.
Okay. So they were less friends and more some of my criminal exes. But whatever. In a pinch, you had to do what you had to do.
I sat down on the side of the bed, raking a hand through my crazy hair as I reached for the phone. It was more than a little bit of a miracle that I could remember their numbers.
“The fuck you got yourself into now, you crazy bitch?” the first asked as soon as he heard my voice. “I am not bailing your ass out again because you went streaking with a bunch of random fucks you met at a bar.”
“Nice to talk to you too, Grig,” I said, smiling and shaking my head, time making his attitude funny where it used to rake over me like cat claws. “That’s not the kind of pinch I’m in this time.”
“Alright, I’ll bite,” he said, moving away from the noise around him, surprising me. I swear to all that was holy, when we dated, he refused to ever turn down the fights when they were on, no matter how important what I was saying was. “What kind of pinch are you in then, LeLe?”
God, I hated that nickname.
“So remember the MC?”
“You mean the fucks who wouldn’t let me step foot on the property when I came to pick you up? That MC?”
“Yeah, well. The new president and I had a thing. He…”
“He what?” he prompted, sounding like he expected me to say anything but what I did. When I was finished, there was a long pause. “What do you need from me?”
“From you? A bike and helmet and a pair of boots.”
“You got it. Give me the address and I will be there as soon as possible.”
I gave him the address, hung up, then picked up the phone again, my stomach twisting a little. Grig and I, for all intents and purposes, had a relatively normal relationship, him being a mechanic and small-time underground fighter. I knew, despite what he had said when I first said hello, he’d have come and bailed me out. But me and Leo, yeah, there was some weird history there. A big part of that might have had something to do with the fact that he sold guns to local gangs, a fact he never told me about and then we fought about when I found out on my own. But, being the guy with the guns, he was the guy I needed.
“Leo, it’s Lea.”
There was a pause. “Seriously?” he asked, exhaling hard. I had been the one to dump him. And it had been ugly. “What the fuck could you possibly have to say to me?”
I laid it out quickly, each time telling it somehow making it easier. Like with Grig, there was a long pause. “And the reason you didn’t call me to put a fucking plug in him the first fucking time is…” he said, surprising me. He exhaled again. “Alright. So I’m assuming you’re not calling me because you want me to make you some chili,” he said, and I felt myself smile slightly. He really did make good chili. “So I’m assuming you need guns.”
“You’d be right,” I agreed.
About an hour later, I was opening the hotel room door to see two men standing side-by-side, both looking equally uncomfortable being near each other, but both sets of eyes on me.
Really, I apparently had a type.
Grig and Leo were both tall, built, with tattoos and a certain roughness around their mouths and eyes. While Grig had brown eyes, Leo had green. But aside from that, they were both dark-haired, jean and tee-wearing, badasses.
“That’s a look,” Grig said, and I noticed the boots in his hand, giving me what was an imitation of a smile, him obviously not looking at me quite the same after hearing my story. I noticed the same quality in Leo too, making me painfully aware and wholly thankful that I had found Shane who never looked at me differently.
“Can we get off the street?” Leo said, obviously more anxious about holding illegal guns.
I opened the door and they walked in in unison, sharing a look when they bumped shoulders. Grig eventually waved a hand and Leo walked in first.
I almost wanted to laugh at the exchange.
“Alright, here,” Leo said, obviously not caring about Grig knowing about his business as he pulled a gun from his waistband. “It’s loaded,” he said as I took the big, mean-looking gun from his hand, checking the clip like Rick, the former MC president, had taught me at a very young age. “And here’s an extra. Dunno what you’re going into, but you should always have too many bullets.”
“Thanks, Leo. I appreciate it.”
He shook his head, his face hard. “Don’t thank me. Use it. Get your shit handled. And don’t ever contact me again.”
With that, he gave Grig a chin jerk and moved off toward the door, closing it a bit harder than was necessary.
“He’s charming,” Grig said when we were alone, trying to look amused, and mostly failing. “Tell me the new one isn’t a fuck like that one and the other one,” he said, tossing me the boots he had in his hand.
I felt myself smile a little wistfully. “He’s one of the good ones.”
Grig’s head turned to the side. “You? With a good guy?” he asked, genuinely amused then. “I refuse to believe that.”
“Okay. So he’s a loanshark enforcer,” I confided, smiling and he smiled too.
“That’s more like you, you crazy bitch.”
“Did you bring me a bike?” I asked, wanting to get things moving. There was a time for memory lane, this was not it.
Grig reached into his pocket and produced a key. “It’s strapped down in my truck. I have the ramps but you’ll have to help me get it down. Got a helmet too and it’s all fueled up.”
“Great. I really appreciate this, Grig. You didn’t have to…”
“Yeah I did. You and me might have been oil and water, but no matter what history you have with someone, when they have a situation like you got going on, you help out.”
“Thanks,” I said, meaning it, glad to see that there were people in my past who did give a shit about me. That was a nice thing to know. “So let’s get it done. I have some ground to cover.”
So that put me on a bike riding down the back street toward the compound with a gun nestled in the back waistband of my jeans in a pair of men’s boots two sizes too big, ready to finally do what needed to be done
Put an end to this shit, once and for all.