Wild Rider (Bad Boy Bikers Book 2) (5 page)

No, it was only because he still had healing to do, and she’d make it easier.

“Lie down,” said Helen.

He turned. She had been behind him, at his head. Slowly, he began to get up.

“You’re going to pop your stitches. You pop ‘em, you can sew ‘em back on yourself.”

He doubted that. Helen had a kind heart. But he remained still.

“How does a woman as fine as you end up as a nurse, anyway?”

“I suppose it would be dumb to ask how a man as cruel as you ends up living in an abandoned warehouse?”

Ribs groaned and his body ached as he laughed. Worth it, though.

He sat up further, hearing voices. One was Ace. The other...

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“Someone came in. Another biker. One of yours, I guess. He and Ace have been yelling for a while now. Saying your name. I think they’re mad at you.”

“It’s Ivan,” said Locke, eyes still closed. “Can smell him from a mile away. Dunno if any other Furnace came with him. Gotta assume so. Tank took off outside when they arrived. He didn't want to start a fight.”

Beretta nodded. Smart of Tank. His grudges died hard. He didn't like Tank very much, but he could damn sure respect the man. Couldn't say the same very much for Locke. He
appreciated
many things about Locke—his initiative, his wit, his willingness to fight—but Locke's looseness with his women always struck him the wrong way.

Beretta was more of a one-woman sort of man. Problem was, he wouldn't ever let that woman get close to him.

“You’re awake?” Helen asked Locke.

“You found a nice girl here, Beretta.” Locke yawned. “I think I’ll keep her. I feel right as rain.”

“That’s the morphine drip,” she said.

Locke snickered. “Don’t call me a drip, honey. I just complimented you.”

Ivan was the President of the Furnace MC in Stockland. They were another Texan gang that had decided to move in on Stockland only a few months before the Wrecking Crew did. Outlaws could smell weakness, vulnerability, and woe to those who showed it.

There was nothing weak about Rattler on paper. But he was insane, and he was getting too muscle-heavy for his own good. Anybody that looked close enough could make the connection that his time was close to up. Didn’t mean Rattler knew, though, or that he’d make it easy.

If Ivan was there, that meant news had spread about the bloodbath in the alley. That was good. That was the idea, after all. Let the Copperheads know their boss wasn’t invulnerable. Just that knowledge alone would do about half of the Wrecking Crew’s work for them.

But mad at Beretta? Ivan and Ace?

Fuck them if they were.

He'd done what Ace hadn't dared to do, and what Ivan hadn't done in all the years he'd had a gang in Stockland—he'd come
this
close to offing Rattler.

And now they were talking behind his back?

Not gonna let that happen.

His stubbornness was absolute. Beretta had followed his plan. He wasn't wrong.

A limp affected him as he stood up and walked. Drawing his legs out for a full stride made something in his midsection catch. Probably his stitches.

Ace and Ivan argued with each other in the office at the front of the warehouse. It was, compared to the rest of the space, rather small, but there was plenty of space for a couch and a big cabinet which they had filled with liquor and from which the two had pulled a bottle. Empty glasses sat in front of them, and Ace was refilling for both as Beretta walked in.

“You’re up and about?” asked Ace. “What I tell you, Ivan. The woman knows her stuff.”

“It’s what she knows that’s got me worried. You want a drink, Beretta?”

Beretta shook his head. He didn’t drink, and Ivan knew it from way back when. He and Ivan had a history.

Beretta didn’t do any of that stuff anymore. It was rough, being sober as an outlaw, but it was better than the alternative.

As was his norm, Ivan was dressed head to toe in camo—pants, shirt, boots—with only his riding vest breaking up the blend. Beretta didn’t know what he was sneaking up on, camouflaged while riding a Harley Davidson around, but he wasn’t the man’s boss.

Ivan was a thick man. He’d had an affinity for power-lifting as a younger man and had held the state record in dead lift for a number of years. That was how he looked. Short arms, short legs, stout body, all of it thick with muscle. His heritage was a mixture of Eastern European and Hispanic, his skin deeply tanned and his hair thick around the sides but thinning on top.

“You did good, fucking up Rattler's men in that alley,” said Ivan. “Didn’t kill him, though.”

Beretta nodded. “Not for lack of trying. What were you saying about the woman? What do you want with her?”

“We don’t want anything with her,” said Ivan. “That’s the problem. She’s seen you folks here. Only reason Rattler hasn’t wiped you out already is he doesn’t know where you’re at. His eyes and ears are all over, trust me. What if she goes running to the cops? What if
he
gets his hands on her? Better you all do her in yourselves before that psychopath rapes her to death.”

Now he understood. They may have been mad about Beretta, but Beretta wasn't a loose end. Helen was.

That clawed at his insides worse than any wound to his side, because he knew what Ivan and Ace were discussing then. Their logic, cold and severe, clashed immediately with every bone in Beretta's body.

Helen would stay alive. This girl would not die because of him. Not because of something he needed. There was just no way.

“That won’t happen,” said Beretta. His entire body clenched at the thought, and the pain forced his brain even more awake than it was.

“And why not?” said Ivan. “What, ‘cause she helped you out, that won’t happen? That’s not how the world works. We ain’t living in some land of karmic transactions, friends. This is America, and people pay for what they know.”

Ace shook his head. “I ain’t happy about it either, Beretta. But he’s got a damn good point.”

“He ain’t even in our fucking MC.” Beretta looked at Ivan, staring a hole in his forehead. “Why don’t you come over here and tell me what you want us to do again, motherfucker?”

Barely standing, stitches ready to burst open at the first hit, Beretta was still ready for a fight.

Ivan held up his hands, setting his drink down. “You know what? You’re right. I crossed a line. I’m bowing out. Just offering my advice, is all. You men’ll do best. You’ve done right by yourselves so far.”

Ace had put a hand on Beretta to keep him in place. It stayed there until Ivan left the office, his bike and the bikes of his men smoking off into the distance.

Ace turned to him then, dark eyes full of sympathy for his brother.

“He’s right, Beretta. I know you care about her. I know she was something to you, and I told you I didn't like that you picked her up. But this ain't about that. That woman can’t live if we're going to survive here.”

––––––––

“I
said,
fuck you
.”

Helen watched as Beretta slammed the door shut behind him, limping with authority back over to her. His heavy torso was bandaged, but still she could see every inch of his muscle tone, his animalistic strength in motion.

Ace followed after him, glowering. “You’re forgetting your place, Hancock.”

“No, fuck you. You come here.”

Helen stood next to Locke. She had been changing his bandages. His bleeding had slowed almost to a crawl; that was good news for him.

Beretta pulled a gun out from underneath his mattress and shoved it into Ace’s hand. Then, taking Ace's wrist, he pointed the gun at Helen. He pressed the barrel against her skull.

She didn't scream. Everything inside of her was screaming. How was she not screaming out loud? Her atoms were letting out blood curling wails, and yet somehow Helen remained dead silent. She could feel tears streaming down her cheeks but she had no idea how they got there or when they started.

“You fucking do it, then. You fucking kill an innocent woman. You go to hell by yourself. Don’t bring the rest of us into this. Because you know I want her alive.”

You have
, thought Helen,
a sincerely fucking twisted way of showing that!

Oh sure, of course, he wanted her alive. That’s why he put a gun in the hand of the man who apparently wanted to kill her and told him to pull the trigger while the barrel was against her skull.

Her whole body shook. Locke, on his bed, sat up and put his hands in the air.

“I’d just like to throw my vote in and say that I’d really prefer not to have her brains all over me,” said Locke. “Plus she fixed me up real nice. So...I’m against this.”

Tank started to speak too, and Ace cut him off.

“It’s not a democracy,” he said sharply. “We are at war and we are on our own. This is my command, and what I say goes.”

“A medic is awfully useful in a war,” said Locke. “I think you’d probably know.”

Ace looked at Locke, at Tank, at Beretta and Helen. Then he shoved the gun back into Beretta’s chest.

“Everybody’s so goddamn noble,” he said. “We’ll see how noble you are when we’ve got Copperheads crawling up our asses because she went snitching.”

He stormed back toward the office. Beretta put the gun away under his mattress and shot Helen a wink. She only stared, stunned.

In the hospital, life and death were always in precarious balance. Obviously for patients, but even for nurses. A few months back, she’d watched a good friend and shift mate, Jackie Malls, nearly strangled to death by a meth head who didn’t want to have a catheter inserted. Security saved Jackie before the damage was permanent, but she didn’t take night shifts anymore after that and Helen couldn’t blame her.

Helen knew that it could have easily been herself who was underneath that meth head, all his crazy disease-infested drool dripping down on her, his cooked brain deciding that somehow she was a threat.

And even so, knowing that danger was around was still a far cry from having an actual gun pointed at—no,
pressing into
—her skull.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” said Ace, standing in the doorway of the office, “we all gotta get going to meet Gallows out at the new lab. We can decide what to do with her then.”

A day of living. That was all she had.

That was all she had to figure out how to escape from these maniacs and get back to her life.

––––––––

B
eretta took her with him into one of the curtain-covered “rooms” of the warehouse, drawing the shade closed around the cardboard that passed for walls. It wasn’t much, but it was what they had.

They had about a ten-by-ten space to walk in. She paced from one end of to the next, staring at him, fuming, glaring death into his eyes. His side ached and his muscles were sore, but that wasn't on his mind.

All he could think of was how goddamn pretty she looked. She was a
Problem
, capital P and italicized. She wasn't part of the plan, but that didn't mean she deserved to die.

As he looked at her, his cock began to harden in his pants. Before, he’d been worried—about Locke, about Ace, about keeping her alive. But now he had started to form a new plan, even if it wasn’t a very good one.

He sat down on the bed, groaning as his wounds strained. From underneath the bed he pulled out a small box and grabbed a packet of little chocolate malt balls. They crunched as he munched them down, eating too quickly to savor the rich taste. For him, it was more about consuming the treat—controlling the feeling of his fullness—than it was about actually tasting anything for very long.

Sobriety was a tough road; chocolate made it a little easier. In his early days of cleaning himself up, he'd found out that candy was a great way to fight the cravings for booze—something to do with the way that the body processed the sugars of a piece of chocolate the same way it processed alcohol. The habit had stuck with him.

What he needed, really, was a good painkiller and about thirty hours of sleep. But he couldn’t take any of the good painkillers without throwing his sobriety away, and he couldn’t have thirty hours of sleep unless he wanted to throw Helen’s life away too.

So there were other needs to focus on.

“You’re upset,” he said, wiping off his hands and tossing the empty wrapper of the candy away. He should have offered her some; he took it as a good sign that he didn't think to be polite to her.

“You fucking think?”

“You don’t have to be upset.”

She looked shocked. “The fu—what the hell is wrong with you? You kidnap me, right? You bring me to the nastiest warehouse this side of the Mississippi. You tell me to stitch you and your man up,
or else
, and give me the most meager possible supplies to do it with, yeah? And now because I’ve done
everything you’ve said
, you’re going to kill me. And even if none of that was true? I made it
clear
I didn't want to see you again already. So yeah, I think I have to be upset.”

An impulse took him. She was fuming, angry, rage taking her.

But she was passionate too—and goddamn, but he had loved her passion.

He took her by the chin, holding her in place. “It's good to see you again, Helen.”

Then he drew her in for a quick, forceful kiss, silencing any protests with his lips. Her warmth filled him, and he could feel her body opening to him slowly, her breaths slow and sweet. There was chocolate on his breath still, and he knew she could taste it.

For a moment, she seemed to enjoy it—but then she pushed him away, slapping him on the face.

“Fuck you.” She wiped her mouth. “You don't have any right to do that to me.”

That's what you think
.
Wait until you hear how you're going to stay alive. Then I'll have every right with you that I want.

“You don’t have to be upset,” he said again, smiling small and rubbing his face. She could hit plenty hard. He patted the mattress next to him. “Sit here. Listen.”

She didn’t want to, that was clear. But he was offering her a lifeline and she wasn’t so stupid to believe that she didn’t need it.