Poet (17 page)

“We have company – don’t know who the fuck it is,” Mrs. Norma called from the door, peering outside. “Got a cut on, but no patches I can see from here.”

Instantly the lights inside, and outside, went out, leaving them in pitch darkness. Poet froze for a moment before dread coursed through her and she sprinted for the door, trusting her gut, and yelling for Norma to move at the same time. But she was too late. Gunshots rang out and glass shattered, throwing the older lady to the ground on her back. She threw herself down beside her, covering her body with hers as the sound continued, giving no reprieve.

Distantly she heard echoing popping from around her, Titan and Eugene returning fire, but she couldn’t move yet.
Please be okay. God damn it, be okay. You have to be okay.

“I’m okay, dear girl, except that you’re crushing me,” Mrs. Norma wheezed from beneath her. Poet hadn’t realized she’d been speaking aloud, but as she lifted off her old friend, she watched her pull the button from her blouse aside.

“A vest,” she breathed gratefully, relieved that Mrs. Norma hadn’t died because she’d lead the asshole straight to their door. Poet was swimming in enough guilt – the guilt of losing the woman who was more like a grandmother to her than anything would have been too much.

“Go help the boys,” Mrs. Norma shooed her away, sitting up, and she nodded, taking her place beside Titan.

“What do we have?”

“Fucking fire from every direction – but I only see one bike, shit isn’t making sense.”

“There’s two! I can see the other cocksucker’s movement,” Genie called from the other side, the curse sounding odd coming from the usually calm-tempered man. He must’ve felt her eyes on him because he turned and winked before gazing out the window again.

“This is ridiculous,” she muttered before raising her voice. “Hey, asshole! Confront me like a damned man – you clearly have some unresolved fucking issue with me, so why don’t you show yourself and talk.”

“Are you crazy, Poet? Get your ass down!” Titan demanded but she ignored him, standing and moving toward the door, her Beretta in hand. She was done cowering and hiding like a pathetic worm. The fact that she’d allowed herself to do that for almost the entire week, fooling herself into believing it was better to lay low, only made her resolve more solid.

This was going to end, and it was going to end tonight. If that meant she’d be on the pavement, bleeding out, then so fucking be it. But she wasn’t going to go down without taking him or them down with her.

Chapter Fifteen
 

“If it isn’t Poet Butler, President of Hells Redemption,” a masculine voice called from the darkness, still hiding amongst the shadows as she stepped through what used to be the door to the restaurant.

“Be nice if I had a name to go with the prick behind it,” she answered back, her filter broken. A small part of her brain told her she’d probably get further if she wasn’t such a bitch, but she didn’t have the patience to hear any of it.

The man laughed, his chuckle echoing loudly through the deserted parking lot. “Good to know you’ve found your balls, so to speak.”

There was something familiar about the voice, but she couldn’t place it. Her mind was running a mile a minute, trying to figure out where she’d heard him, or where. Behind her, Titan was talking to Eugene, but his words were too low for her to catch. She turned toward the two of them.

“Whatever the fuck you two are planning, you can stop. This shit ends, and I don’t need either of you thinking I need a knight in shining armor,” she said softly, sending a hard look in the direction she knew Titan was perched. It was in his nature, to protect, and she knew he wanted to charge out and start shooting, but she was a big girl. She’d somehow caused this mess, and only she could finish it.

“I’ve found a lot of things,” she called back to the unknown attacker.

“So I can see … including finding your way into the bed of a Bishop,” he spat back, clearly unhappy with her sexual choices.

“Jealous?” Poet asked, before she could stop herself.
Great, Poet. Let’s piss him off even more. No, you just can’t play the hot girly blonde, for once, can you? Nope. Instead you have to have balls the size of fucking Texas.

“Can’t be jealous of something you’ve already had … more than once.”

The blood drained out her body as her heart sunk. Despite her age, the list of men she’d slept with wasn’t all that long – she could count the lovers she’d had on one hand, with only a little help of the second.

Footsteps sounded before the man appeared about ten feet in front of her. Poet stared at him, waiting for her eyes to adjust to give her some sort of inclination of who he was. Tall, dark hair, strong face. In the dark she couldn’t make out eye color or much else, but when he smirked, realization dawned on her.

“Braeden? Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell is this?”

“Oh, Poet. Naïve, yet beautiful, Poet,” he said, shaking his head.

“I don’t understand,” she murmured, truly confused. They’d never had anything serious; she’d kept her club and private life as far from him as possible. As much as she’d known, he didn’t have a clue what she even did when she wasn’t sharing his bed. The same was said for him. She didn’t know how he spent his days, how he earned money, or anything else. Only sex had been between them, a mutual itch to be scratched when the need arose – no strings, no complications, it had been simple.

“It was all too easy, beautiful girl. You see, when we met, I knew immediately how to deal with you,” he said, the tone of his voice making her stomach churn. “No strings, no personal details, nothing to raise suspicion, right?

“I knew who you were the moment I saw you. How could I not? You’re infamous, the only female club member, let alone President, in the history of the world. People who don’t even live in this Podunk town would know who you are. But, the roots go even deeper with us, Poet. It hurts that you didn’t remember me, though it gave me the perfect in to get back in your life. And the sex was better than ever, even decades later.”

Oh shit,
she groaned mentally, knowing exactly who ‘Braeden’ was. And he was right, she was naïve as fuck. The hair had changed, tattoos removed, but she should have noticed. Had she been so desperate for even the smallest bit of companionship that she let herself be blind to what was right in front of her?

“Roman,” she breathed, needing to say it aloud. From behind her, Titan shifted, his immediate anger at the man’s name filling the room, becoming palpable.

“Ah, now she’s got it,” her former lover, the man who made her swear off bikers for life, said, smiling broadly. “I’m glad you remember me, even if you didn’t know the real me when we were making love.”

“We were fucking, never making love. Not recently and not decades ago,” Poet said stiffly, anger and old hurts surfacing. She hadn’t heard from him since the day he’d ridden from her life, her club, and had never wanted to. “So what the hell do you want?”

“Well, at first, I wanted you. After all, you were the best bitch to ever ride on the back of my bike. The hottest ass I ever had,” he said, taking a step toward her.

It took every inch of self-taught self-control she had to not back up, allowing him to get closer to her, her gun held at her side. If it wasn’t for Genie having seen a partner, who she still couldn’t see, she would’ve shot the bastard already. Hell, if she’d known Braeden was Roman months ago, she would have put two slugs in him merely for breathing the same New Mexico air.

“And now?” she asked, biting her lip to keep from telling him he’d never have her again. That he’d had her again at all was a fluke, a flaw in the master plan of the world, and if she could she’d take a shower with bleach to remove any and all remnants of him.

“Now, I just want you dead. You ruined everything – I was on my way to great things in HR, but your dumb bitch ass got that all taken from me. I was stripped of my cut and patches, stripped of everything I wanted.”

“Roman,” she said with a sigh, “that was years ago. Why is that even coming into play now? I mean, Jesus, we fucked several times over the last year – so what changed in the last week or so?”

“I got an offer I couldn’t refuse. You see, Poet, you piss off an awful lot of men, not just me. And your tight pussy just can’t make up for it all,” he told her, advancing even closer. “So when I finish with you, I’ll be after the Bishop as well – who’s conveniently behind that wall there.”

Pieces of the puzzle started coming together, falling into place like magic. Dirk, Titan’s son and VP, trying to screw her out of the drug deal without higher consent, his attitude toward women. The blue prospect patch.

“You’re the one who jumped me,” she told him, a statement not a question. “Dirk’s going to patch you in if you kill me and Titan.”

“Ding ding ding, we have a fucking winner. You’re a lot smarter than you look, Poet, I’ll give you that. And strong, though not as strong as I thought. Didn’t expect you to lay low after I beat the fuck out of you at the clubhouse – thought for sure you’d be riding the poker run.”

“And you didn’t have the fucking balls to try to carry out the hit yourself, huh? So instead you hire a fucking Diablo to do it for you?”

“Well, I was thinking terms of the bigger picture. After all, we didn’t want a war with HR once I’m a Bishop. If DH took your hot ass out, our clubs would band together to take the dirty fucks out. It was win-win,” Roman told her, his voice sure.

“Too fucking late, you twat waffle,” Poet seethed, beyond angry. “You have a serious fucking flaw in your plan – the fact that Shakespeare’s a fucking god when it comes to intel and security. We had your
blue
prospect patch before we had you, asshole.”

“Either way, war or not, you’ll be dead,” he said, raising his Glock level with her face. “Goodbye, Poet. Wish I could say it was fun, but it wasn’t. Though, no pussy will ever be as sweet as yours.”

Time seemed to slow around her as his finger slowly pulled at the trigger. She raised her own Beretta but knew she wouldn’t have time to shoot before he did. Just as the gun sounded, something heavy hit her, leaving her sprawling across the pavement, pain radiating up her arm where she landed. Another shot sounded, followed by a loud thumping, and Poet mentally surveyed herself, trying to find the hit.

Poet couldn’t find anything, other than the scrapings on her arm as she sat up. When she looked beside her, she found where the slug had gone and what had hit her. There, on the ground, his free arm clutching at his ribs and his breathing heavy, lay Titan. Looking beyond him, she saw Roman, unmoving, his gun no longer in his hand and his face slack.

“Norma! Genie! Help me move him!” she yelled loudly, flinching as her voice echoed several times. She stood and put her arms underneath Titan’s, trying to tug him away, but he didn’t move. She pulled again, this time with Eugene’s help, and inch by slow inch they got him back inside the restaurant and laid him down on the tile.

“Get me some towels,” she demanded, lifting the blood-soaked shirt to see the wound. There, at the bottom of his rib cage, was a clean entrance wound, circular and gushing more of the red liquid. Mrs. Norma wasn’t moving fast enough. Poet slipped her cut off and shrugged out of her holster, pulling her T-shirt over her head and pressing it against the hole.

“Babe,” Titan rasped and tears filled her eyes. She blinked to clear them so she could see him, but more followed, trailing down her face. “Babe. You’re still not safe. My son,” he continued coughing, the sound an inhuman-like gurgle from his chest. “He’s still out there.”

“Shhhh, Titan, don’t worry about him or anything other than breathing right now,” she tried to soothe him, pressing harder on the wound and ignoring the blood covering her hands.

“I’m so sorry,” he told her, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “I didn’t know. I’d never hurt you.”

“Then you need to just keep fucking breathing.” Every word he uttered was like a knife twisting in her stomach. She wanted to scream and yell, to do anything to stop the wrongness of sound in his chest. Poet wasn’t a doctor, but even she could tell Roman had hit his lung, and blood was filling it. If she didn’t get him help soon, he was going to die.

“I called for help – an ambulance is coming,” Mrs. Norma said, handing her a stack of white linen napkins, which she added to her shirt, never letting up the pressure.

“See, baby, help is coming. I just need you to focus on breathing, keep your heart beating.” Her free hand caressed his cheek and pet his hair, pushing it off his forehead and away from his face.

“I would have loved you, Madeline. I wish I could have gotten that chance.”

Hearing Titan call her by her given name, one she hadn’t heard since long before her dad died, forced heavy sobs to rack her shoulders. She cried, praying prayers she hadn’t said in years, prayers to someone she wasn’t even sure looked over people like them. In her life, she’d taken many lives, but never had she been so desperate for one to be saved.

“Eugene,” she called, steeling herself and forcing her voice calm. “Come hold the pressure until the EMTs get here.”

Leaning over him, she kissed his lips, ignoring the blood that had formed at the corners of his mouth. A tear fell on his cheek and she wiped it away before whispering, “You hold on, damn it. I could love you, too.”

Titan’s lips curled into a weak smile and she kissed him again before allowing Eugene to take over. Standing, she picked her cut up from where she’d dropped it and walked back toward the door, anger fueling her every step.

“All right, Dirk! I’m unarmed. You want me, come and get me,” she yelled, not caring if he shot her without giving her the opportunity to talk. But, knowing men like he and Roman, they wanted their minute in the spotlight, to relish in the deeds they had done and accomplished. And, true to what she though, he appeared, his face dirty and bloodstained, a dark Ruger in his hands.

“So my dick father took the slug meant for you? Seems you have a lot of men willing to do that lately,” he said dryly, his nonchalance regarding his father bleeding out only feet behind her pissing her off even more.

“Think you’re a fucking big shot,
VP
? Such a big man you hire a shitty lackey to take me out? Why not just do it your damn self?”

“Because, dear old Dad has had a thing for you for years. Years. He didn’t even give a damn when my mother was shot five years ago –”

“She was a crack whore who got in a fight over a drug deal, Dirk. Besides, everyone knows they split up long before that. Titan was a fucking kid when the bitch got pregnant with you, all of eighteen. She knew he was on his way up in the club at the point, thought he’d be a hot ride in the sack and free drugs. Hooker didn’t realize most clubs don’t consume what they fucking sell.”

“Don’t you dare talk about my mother that way!” Dirk demanded, leveling the gun at her again, his face contorted in anger. Poet half expected the man to stomp his foot like a child, the image bringing a small smirk to her face, regardless of the circumstances.