Strip You Bare (20 page)

Sophie chose that moment to walk back in from the storeroom. “He’s an asshole,” she said.

“I know.”

“He killed your father,” Sophie said.

“I don’t think he had a choice.”

Sophie frowned. “Yeah, if you can defend that, I know you’ve got it bad.”

“I do. It’s just a shame he doesn’t.”

One thing she was finding out was true. She didn’t curl in on herself and lay down to die when things went south. Debutante Sarah didn’t, and neither did this new Sarah, who wasn’t quite a biker bitch, in spite of what she’d said to Micah, but wasn’t quite the polished-society-miss she’d been, either. The strength, apparently, hadn’t been entirely false, and that was a welcome surprise.

“You need any help around this place?” Sarah asked.

Sophie shrugged, then picked up a rag from the surface of the bar, tossing it to her. “Sure.”

“So, you’re leaving?”

Ajax didn’t even turn when Micah entered the courtyard. It was early. He hadn’t gone back to the mansion last night. He’d dragged his sorry ass to the Hotel Monteleon, figuring he’d rather sleep with potential ghosts than encounter Sarah again.

He wouldn’t have the resolve to turn her down again.

“Yeah,” Micah responded. “I told you at the end I would. And you agreed to let me. No cutting tats off my back.”

“Sure.”

“And keep an eye on Sarah. She has it in her head she’s going to start associating with you assholes and . . . she’s not like Sophie, Ajax. She doesn’t know this world.”

Then Ajax did turn. “She can make her own choices, right?”

“She is,” he said. “If I made her choices, she’d be taking herself back to her place and going back to the business of planning luncheons, or whatever the hell she was doing when she wasn’t planning the Christmas party.”

Ajax shoved his hands in his pockets. “Yeah. Sure. I’ll look out for her. Got a lot of potential recruits sniffing around. Maybe one of them will be interested in taking on some property.”

“Hell no,” Micah said, violently rejecting the idea. “That is not what I meant by protecting her.”

“Is your patch on her back, Prince? I don’t think it is. You haven’t even worn your cut since you got here. She’s not your property. You’re not one of us. If you want to change that? Then you can have some say in what she does. But you’re leaving.”

“I did what you asked. Are you really going to be a prick now?” Micah asked through clenched teeth.

Ajax ignored his comment. “Tell me something, Prince.”

“I might.”

“What are you going to do when you run out of people to pretend to be? When you came to the Deacons, you were just a skinny little bitch running drugs. I remember that pretty well. Then you grew a bit, but you were never like the rest of us. You never dropped your guard. Never really joined in. And why? What the fuck is the point? Being part of the MC is about brotherhood. About freedom. But you never fully embraced either of those things. Then after Priest sent us away, you . . . do whatever it is you do. In a fucking suit. By choice. So what will you do next?”

“There is no next,” Micah said. “That’s my life.”

“Fuck, Prince, that’s depressing.”

“There’s nothing depressing about my life, Ajax. I have a career. Money. I have everything I ever wanted. That’s why you all used to call me Prince, right? Because I wanted all the shiny shit I could get.”

“And because you really were nothing but a skinny little bitch from the streets of the Quarter, and you demanded respect like you deserved it,” Ajax said, his voice hard. “So we, I, had no choice but to give it to you. I feel a lot less of it now.”

“I won’t lose any sleep over that. You don’t want me here anyway. You’re starting over. I might mess it up again. Like I did the first time. What makes you think I won’t break all this apart again?”

Ajax rubbed a hand over his chin. “It wasn’t just you, Prince. We were all there.”

“So what? You didn’t push him over the balcony. I did.”

“We all went in together. We all left together. We all got paid together. We got banished together. It was all of us. That’s the way this works. That’s the way a brotherhood works. And I get that you don’t understand that because I feel like you never really have.”

Micah gritted his teeth. “I don’t,” he said. “You’re right about that.”

“I spent a lot of years riding alone. Riding with your brothers beats it every time.”

“Don’t go getting profound on me, Ajax. I’ll start thinking Sophie cut your balls off and stuck them in a whiskey bottle.”

Ajax chuckled. “She does some pretty great things with my balls, but so far she hasn’t removed them from my body. Though, I wonder where yours are. I thought that it seemed like Sarah brought them back. Guess I was wrong.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about my balls.”

“I don’t. Mostly.”

“You don’t want me to stay,” Micah said. “I know you don’t.”

Micah looked at Ajax, the man who had been an integral part of the only real family he’d ever had. Even though he’d felt like he was slightly on the outside, it had been the first place he’d found some manner of acceptance.

Before he’d lost it again.

If none of that had happened, he wondered what might have been. He wondered who he would be now . . .

“If you’re looking for affirmation, you came to the wrong guy. Fuck right back off to San Francisco if you want. You want to hear this door will always be open for you? It won’t be. Shit moves on. You want to make a place for yourself? Make it. But the club . . . Sarah . . . it’ll all move on to some other bastard. Go home.”

Ajax turned away and walked out of the courtyard, leaving Micah alone.

Micah said nothing, ignoring the intense, cutting feeling that sliced deep into his chest. He didn’t turn back. He didn’t stop walking.

For the second time in twenty-four hours he walked away from someone extending their hand.

San Francisco would be easy. Wouldn’t be so exposing.

It wasn’t the biker life he hated, not really. It was how exposed it made him feel. No one in the MC kept anything from each other. They called each other out when there was a problem, punched each other in the face, then fucked some bitches in front of each other in the clubhouse.

It was a kind of lifestyle that required honesty.

Honesty had never served him well.

It cost too much.

It hurt too much when, in the end, the inevitable rejection hit. It was better to walk away now. To put the suit back on. Put the mask back on.

If he stayed here, he would have to drop it. Worse, he would have to be himself. And all he had ever accomplished was destruction.

Micah was the mask. Prince was the man.

He was better off with the mask.

He walked out of the courtyard, through the empty bar, and out onto the streets. They were abandoned in the pink-tinged hours of morning, the hours after the debauched revelers had gone to bed, before the tourists were up and about.

He wouldn’t come back here. If he left now, he wasn’t coming back. He knew that as sure as he knew anything else. He walked farther away from the Priory, headed back to the hotel. It was a long walk, but he could use it.

Maybe by the time he reached the hotel his head would be clear. Maybe by then he would have left the madness behind. The howling beast inside him that was clawing for release. Had been ever since he’d arrived.

And for a while . . . with Sarah . . . he’d let it out. Unleashed the beast. Let it devour her. Let it devour them both.

It had felt good. It had felt right. And for a while he’d imagined it could always be like that.

But he was nothing more than a killer. And she deserved more.

He walked into the hotel, moving quickly through the gleaming, marble lobby, barely giving the opulence a second look as he made his way to his room.

He opened the closet, took his clothes out, and began shoving them into the suitcase. And that was when he saw it. His cut.

He hadn’t put it on once since his return. Had taken it off ten years ago and only touched it again to place it in his suitcase and bring it with him here. He’d thought he might wear it. He hadn’t.

Strange that he’d brought it. Strange he hadn’t gotten rid of it in the decade since he’d left. Just like the tattoos, it was telling.

He’d never let go.

He’d had one foot in real life. One foot in the biker life. The biker life deep inside him.

Because it’s who you are.

Who you are is wrong
.

She doesn’t think so.

He picked up the vest and held it out, looking at the worn leather. He turned it, looking at the patch on the back.

T
HE
D
EACONS OF
B
OURBON
S
TREET,
N
EW
O
RLEANS,
LA
,
a skull, a dead man, centered between the words.

He walked to the window and looked out at the streets below. New Orleans. Swirling below. A mix of saints and sinners. Every vice, every bit of debauchery, available for the taking on Bourbon, with Jesus’s outstretched arms waiting in view. Witnessing it all. Never altering his stance. Never flinching as he saw the worst of the worst playing out before him.

Because it was a statue. That was all.

He closed his eyes, pain washing through him as he thought back to standing in the Priory with Sarah.

“I have a soul. I’m still breathing, aren’t I? It doesn’t mean it’s one worth saving.”

“But I love it already. I don’t need you changed. I don’t need you saved. I love you already. And I’ll leave all of it behind for you. Every last thing.”

A strange thing to think of, staring at the cut. To think of the love Sarah offered to him, even without salvation, so to speak.

Maybe it made more sense than he thought.

Come as you are. Forgiveness of sin.
Wasn’t that what the statue represented? It was right there, overlooking the Quarter all this time.

He had looked at it for years. And he’d missed that.

He took a breath and put the cut on over his T-shirt. This wasn’t what he’d come back here to do. He was supposed to put on the suit.

He was supposed to get ready to go back to his life.

But something shifted deep inside him the moment he put the cut on. A sense of peace he hadn’t felt since he’d left New Orleans the first time.

You’re back. Really back. You can stay.

All of a sudden, he could barely breathe. He wouldn’t be sent away again. He didn’t have to leave if he didn’t want to.

The family had splintered, but it wasn’t destroyed.

He turned and looked in the mirror and everything fit. Everything matched. Inside and out. He was the boy from the streets made good. A man who loved a woman he wasn’t even half worthy of. A man who had escaped the life he’d felt trapped in, only to find out it wasn’t New Orleans that had trapped him. It was his own body. His own broken soul.

He’d never fit anywhere, because he didn’t know who he was. Walking around like he thought he was too good for every damn thing, when in reality he’d always feared he could never be good enough.

Not for the MC. Not for Sarah.

But he was determined to be different now. To make the change. Because she’d locked together all those broken pieces that hadn’t seemed to have a hope in hell of fitting with each other.

She had been the missing piece, all this time. And now he saw himself—bad and good—more clearly than he ever had.

He was Prince.

He was a motherfucking Deacon of Bourbon Street. And for the first time he truly felt like he was home.

Sophie had put Sarah to work right away. This morning she found herself putting test strips into bleach water to make sure the rags Sophie wiped the tables down with were soaked in water that had the correct ratio of chemicals.

After that, she was supposed to fold bar towels. Neat and small. Stacked just so.

The Priory was a biker bar, but Sophie ran a tight ship. It was becoming pretty clear to Sarah that the women in this culture were strong. Not only that, they had quite a bit of their own power, and they wielded it well.

Ajax was the scariest man Sarah had ever met, and it was clear Sophie knew just what to do with him. Not to say the man was whipped, not by half. But no matter that Sophie wore a
P
ROPERTY OF
A
JAX
patch on her back, it was clear they were much more equal than an outsider would guess from the words on her vest.

Sarah walked out from the back, a basket of unfolded rags in her arms. When she looked up, she stopped cold.

Silhouetted in the doorway was Micah. She knew it was him, even without seeing his features. Recognized his broad shoulders, narrow waist, and slim hips. His muscular forearms, his thighs . . .

More than that, her body just knew.

He took a step in, and her heart stopped. He was wearing jeans, a tight black T-shirt . . . and a leather vest.

She’d never seen him in leather. Even when he was casual, he didn’t dress like a biker.

But he was pure biker now. Walking into the Priory like he belonged, like he was part of it, where before he’d always seemed separate.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, her heart in her throat.

“I’m back,” he said, his voice rough. “Or maybe, I’m here for the first time.”

“What do you mean?”

He moved closer, and she saw something in his eyes she couldn’t name. Something she’d never seen there before.

Peace.

“I’m Prince,” he said. “I’m one of the Deacons. And we own the whole fucking Quarter. And your mansion.”

“That’s what I hear,” she said, her throat tightening. She could barely speak. Could barely breathe. “But you introduced yourself differently then.”

“I was different then.”

“What changed?” she asked.

“You changed me,” he said. “You wanted me before I figured out who I was. Before I could accept who I was. I thought I broke everything. Ruined everything. But the Deacons are still here. Ready to take me back, no matter what. You’re still here. I don’t deserve either of those things. I don’t deserve forgiveness. Atonement. Acceptance. Love. But I seem to have it. And I would be a fool not to take it.”

“Damn straight you would be,” she said, launching herself at him, wrapping her arms around him, kissing his neck. “Oh, Prince, I love you.”

“I love you too, Sarah,” he said, his voice tight, strained. “I love you.”

“Are you back?” she asked, pulling away slightly so she could look at him.

“Yes,” he said. “This is my home.” He looked around the Priory. “This is where I belong.”

“Me too,” she said. “And I belong to you.”

He gripped her chin, dark eyes meeting hers. “You want to wear my patch?”

She felt a smile curve her lips. “Yes. Has any other bitch been Property of Prince?”