Unrequited (Fallen Aces MC #1) (18 page)

“I hope this is okay.” I pass her the Twix, dropping the crumpled slip of paper at the same time. “I wasn’t sure what you’d like.”

King watches me intently as I glance his way and flick my gaze between him and the paper twice. If he’s cottoned on to what I’m trying to say, he’s hiding it well, because even I’m certain he’s missed the point.

Sully jams my bottle of Dr. Pepper roughly in my grasp, and then takes hold of my elbow to pull me toward the car. “Enough fucking around.”

I stumble blindly after him toward the vehicle and scowl as he releases me to pull his keys out and unlock the Escalade. Maria climbs in to the back seat beside me, and I hazard a look toward King. He stoops to pick up the paper.
Thank God.
Sully shuts the door behind us then rounds the car and gets in, starting the engine. I immediately lower the window, my gaze locked on the stitched picture that makes me think I won’t have to wait for King much longer.

The Fallen Aces patch, with the top and bottom rockers stating his club and chapter adorns his back as he straightens up and looks our way.

The man’s a prospect no more.

TWENTY-ONE

King

“Drink up. You’re supposed to be celebrating!” Hooch drops on to the sofa beside me, the shredded cover spitting out a few more spots of foam stuffing onto the floor. He bobs his head to the rock song blasting out of the speakers.

I should be celebrating—I got woken up this morning with a boot to the head and told to get my ass downstairs in a hurry. I expected to find the place robbed, rival MCs on our territory, or in the very least a fire.

Instead, I was presented with a fifth of Jack, a slap to the head, and a joint to celebrate being voted in as a patched member. Apparently Apex wanted it done before we hit the road today, hence the early morning wake up call.

Believe me, I’m over the moon. I’m honored beyond belief. But seeing Elena, seeing her fear, and seeing her get dragged off by one of Carlos’s men has kind of killed my mood.

I’ve been wondering how she is every fucking day, wondering why she never called. Guess her message kind of explains that. Progress being slow as it is around here, I had to push the thoughts of her down and bury them under my duties as a prospect just to keep my fucking head. She’s his—Carlos’s—and there ain’t a fucking thing I can do to change that until our club stops working for him.

We’d parted ways after disagreeing where our future was headed. I’d made peace with that, with my choice to stay loyal to the club’s best interests. And then we hooked up at the roadhouse.
Fuck.
I still get hard when I think about how risky that was. She got back under my skin and made herself at home there for the past three months. I’ve been going out of my head wondering how she is. Going crazy without any way to get in touch with her. And then I bumped into her at random, and I got a way to contact her. If that isn’t the universe giving me a sign, what is?

“I think I might hit the hay early,” I tell Hooch.

He pulls his head back and looks at me as though I told him I’m signing up for the police recruits. “You sure?”

“Yeah.” We rode all afternoon to get to Fort Worth, ready for our next run for Carlos.
Fucking asshole that he is.
“I’m tired, man.”

He grunts and nods. “If these fucks find out you bailed on them, you know what that means, hey?”

I shake my head at him. The Forth Worth chapter operates a little different to ours—a little rougher. Fair to say that when we come to visit, things get a little wilder.

“You’ll be expected to catch up with what they’ve drunk when you get dragged back out here.”

I rub a hand over the top of my head, ruffling the overgrown lengths. “Might just take a walk around the compound then. Technically I haven’t bailed if I don’t fully leave the party.”

“Now you’re thinkin’.” Hooch tips his drink my way and then stands. “Cheer up, though. Whatever it is, it can’t be as bad as this next run will be.”

He’s dead right there. Next week is a big one. We’re moving one hundred kilos between Carlos’s distribution warehouse and a big-time buyer. It’s too much to take on the bikes alone, so we’re using the crash wagon to move most of it, and the bikes as back up.

I cut a path through the main living room and step out the back onto the lawn. The music is still loud, and the chatter too much. I need to think, and all this noise is doing my head in. I pull my cigarettes out and shake one from the pack, illuminating the night with my lighter. Yeah, quitting ain’t going so well.

The space between the old house they’ve converted to clubrooms and the garage is usually inhabited by couples looking for somewhere a little more private to fuck at these kinds of get-togethers, so I hook a right and head down the dark yard toward the broken-down shed at the back of the property. The lull of somebody speaking drifts on the gentle night breeze as I approach. I turn to leave, but the gravelly sound of a particular person has me ducking down to sit behind a bushy tree mere yards from the shed.

“What can you promise?” Apex asks.

I can’t hear anybody else, so he must be on the phone. But why down here? Why now when he’s supposed to be co-hosting a party?

“I need more.”

More what?

“These fuckers aren’t going to agree to that.” He sighs. “Yeah, I guess. Look, I just want assurance that we’ll get paid. I don’t really care who we piss off, to be fuckin’ honest.” A longer pause. “Pro rata. We renegotiate after each run.”

What the fuck is he setting up? I take a pull on my smoke, frowning as I listen to him wrap up his call.

“We get these next two out of the way and then you give me the dirt on Denver. After you come through with that and I’m fuckin’ satisfied it’s legit,
then
I’ll tell you what I want next.”
He’s fucking negotiating with Carlos for more.
“Yeah, I’ll call you then.”

What happened to dead man walking?

I scramble to the back wall of the shed, cloaked in the shadows as Apex’s boots pound the dry grass toward the clubhouse. Our fucking president just negotiated a deal with the devil that I don’t think any of our officers know a thing about.

He’s supposed to be our leader—a man of the club, for the club.

And he’s just fucked the club over.

***

“Are you sure you heard him right?” Twig adds a dash of Coke to his bourbon.

“Positive.” I spin my pack of smokes between my hands. “I feel shit enough havin’ to come nark to you about it. I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t certain of what I heard.”

He blows out a heavy breath and takes a seat on an armchair. We managed to find an empty bedroom to use for some quiet and privacy while I spill what I heard. The party still thunders below us, the rest of the club oblivious to what’s unfolding on what should be a night to celebrate my new status.

Instead, I’m sitting on the edge of somebody’s unmade bed, telling my VP our president is running this club like a fucking dictatorship, not the democracy it’s supposed to be.

“Well, your assumptions are right. He hasn’t said a fuckin’ thing to me.”

Twig’s his second-in-command, the guy who’s supposed to know everything, to be able to run the club in Apex’s absence. How the fuck is he supposed to do that when Prez keeps him in the dark?

“I need to talk to Beefy about this.” As sergeant-at-arms, Beefy will be the one responsible for sorting this mess out however he decides to see fit. “Apex must have a fuckin’ good reason for it all.” Twig scrubs a hand over his face and then takes a swig of bourbon. “I hope he does, anyway.”

“What happens to me?” I eavesdropped, and then I ratted on him. No way he could ever look at that favorably.

“Nothing. You went about this exactly how you’re supposed to.”

“Still don’t feel right.”

“That’s because there ain’t nothing right about what he’s doin’.” He gestures for my pack and I toss it over. “He state anything specific?”

“No, only what I told you. That he said after the fourth run he wants info on Denver, and then he wants to pro rata for other stuff.”

Twig pulls out a smoke and lights up, puffing into the room. “I wonder what he’s plannin’.”

“What other grief do we have that he’d want details on?” I catch the pack and pull out a cigarette for myself.

“None. That’s exactly it. We don’t have any problems he needs to sort out. He’s up to somethin’.”

“Doesn’t look all that good, does it?”

“Not really. No.”

TWENTY-TWO

Elena

“Feel any better yet?” I cross my arms and frown at Carlos.

He stands with his hands hanging at his sides, his chest heaving. “A little.”

“Go on, have another go. Might as well finish what you started.”

He picks up another hardback book and flips it open, tearing at the pages and sending them raining down around him like leaves in fall. He continues, teeth bared, shredding the book until all that’s left is the vinyl cover, which he then throws at my head.

I duck, picking it up from where it landed against the wall, and hurl it back at him. “What is your fucking problem?”

“I said you could go shopping, and you bring back books. Fucking books.”

“So fucking what?”

“Books,” he shouts. “I expected clothes, shoes, jewelry—something fucking useful.”

“Books are useful!”

“How?” he screams at me, heaving a thick edition my way.

“Because if I can read, I’ll be able to escape the fact I fucking live with you!” I kick the book aside after it lands with a heavy thud and storm from the room.

Fuck him. I spent more than an hour picking those books out, classics at that, and he’s just ripped most of them to pieces. His feet hammer the floor behind me at a quick pace, and I spin in time to see him lunge a hand out to catch hold of me.

“Where the fuck are you going?”

“Away from you.” I yank my arm, but his hold doesn’t let up. His grip aches, the throb from the pressure of his fingers intensifying.

“You got a mess to clean up in there.”

“I’ll be sure to let Maria know.”

He chuckles, his grip getting tighter.
How is that even possible?
“Oh, she’ll be helping you, but you brought that shit here, you can fucking well get rid of it.”

“What’s the big deal, Carlos? The library is empty. So what if I bought a few books to fill the shelves?”

“Because I don’t like having books in there, that’s why.” He releases me with a jerk and barges past, knocking me off-balance.

“Why?” I holler after him, not expecting an answer.

When he does, it pulls the wind from my sails. “Because my first wife loved books, and I loved
her
before I shot her.”

***

“Do you know much about Carlos’s first wife?” I ask Maria.

We’re both on our knees, collecting pages and shoving them into a box to be taken to the furnace.

“Only what I’ve heard.” She sits back on her heels and reads over a page, a frown pulling her eyebrows together.

“What is it?”

“I was thinking it’s such a shame. I’d hoped to sneak a book or two out to practice my English.”

“You speak it fine,” I reassure her.

“Yes, but I’ve learnt by listening and copying,” she explains. “I can’t read it very well.”

“So I’ll teach you.” I push off the floor and pick up a few of the untouched copies. “Take these and keep them somewhere safe.”

She accepts the books I pass her and crosses the room to place them beside the door. “Thank you. I will.”

I go back to picking up the pages, sad at the pointless destruction. He could have asked me to take them away again. He didn’t have to shred the damn things.

“Carlos’s first wife was pretty,” Maria kneels beside me. “One of the grounds men worked here when they first moved in. Said she would walk through the gardens often with their boy.”

A strange sense of excitement blooms hearing something personal about Carlos. Perhaps if I learn more I can use it against him when the time comes, or at the very least, understand why he’s so bitter a little better. “Have you met his son?”

“No.” She shakes her head and drops a handful of paper into the box before absently squashing it all down. “He left before I started here.”

“I’ve heard he’s just as crazy.”

“
Sí.
I’ve heard that too.”

Shuffling the pages in my hands, I stare down at the torn edges. “It all sounds so sad.”

“Most people’s lives usually are,” Maria answers. She drags the box to a new area. “Some people just hide it better than others.”

I nod at her observation, pushing to my feet to cross to the box so I can dump my handful when my leg vibrates. I ditch the pages and scramble to pull my phone out. I swapped the sim cards last night, removing the number Carlos gave me—and most likely monitors—and putting in the one I bought with the chocolate.

“What does it say?”

Maria flat-out refused to help me with this mess unless I told her who the man was I spoke to outside the corner store. I could have lied, but for whatever reason I felt compelled to tell her the truth. I told her about King.

I glance down at the mess of numbers on the screen and shrug. “I don’t know.”

She places her pages down and scoots closer, peering over my shoulder. I swipe the message open.

Haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. Got so many questions.

I look across at Maria, delighted by the excitement on her face as she rereads the message.

“What are you going to say?”

I don’t know. What can I say? Nibbling on my left thumbnail, I hover my right thumb over the phone.

“Tell him you’ve been thinking of him too.” Maria clutches her hands before her chest, wriggling in her seated position.

And I want to answer them all, but how can I see you? When are you next in town?

I hesitate before hitting send. What if I’m wrong and Carlos can still see what I’m messaging somehow?
It’s too unlikely.
I send the message and wait. The steady beat of our breaths fills the silence until the buzz of the phone vibrating has us both scrambling to tap the screen to wake it.

When you want me to be?

“Do you think
Señor
will let you go out alone?” Maria’s gaze sweeps over the few pages that still litter the floor amongst the empty shells of the books. “He might send one of his guards to keep watch.”

“I guess I just have to hope for the best.”

Day after tomorrow?

We sit for a moment, watching the phone before Maria sighs and scoots over to pick up the last of the pages.

Same place?

I’ll let you know.

Meeting him there is probably unlikely given I’ll need somewhere believable for Sully to drop me off. 

“How do I tell him what’s happened?”

Maria lifts her head at my question and places the paper from her hands into the box. “One word after another.”

“I don’t know what to say.” I slump back on my heels, absently watching her as she finishes up with the last of the covers and pushes the box to the door. “I’m scared I’ll lose what remains of us, that he’ll decide I’m not worth it any more.”

She stands and places her hands on her lower back, stretching. “Speak from the heart. Tell him the truth, no prettying it up, no skimming details. If you lie to him now, you’ll forever lose his trust.” She offers a small smile. “Whatever was meant to be will be.”