fast as I could without running to my Subaru, got in, fired her up and got the hell out of there.
I got lost on my way home.
And I did not meditate when I eventually got there.
Instead, I slammed tequila and fought the urge to call Diesel and Maddox and spill all before I asked them to come up to Denver and take my back.
But they would, in a shot.
Which would put them in danger, which was not okay.
They’d also try to talk me out of doing what I was doing, and they wouldn’t go as gentle (huh) as Rush Allen did.
They might even kidnap me and imprison me in their guestroom, which would mean I’d have to listen to their sexcapades since all three of them (Molly included) were utterly incapable of not going at each other on a more than healthy basis, and I’d already accidentally heard some of that and I barely survived it.
So it was going it alone.
I had Hank (even though he was pissed at me) and Eddie (even though he was livid with me) and Jimmy (even though he wanted to shake some sense into me).
And as an aside, I was now pissed at all of them.
Why hadn’t they told me about Natalie and Camilla and the woman called Reb?
Dammit.
But whatever.
I’d be okay.
I would.
And Diane and Paul and Amy would get what they deserved.
Justice.
The Boy Who Was No Good
Beck
Two months earlier . . .
Beck sat with his “brothers” at their club meeting.
“So it’s official. They’ve yanked our charter. And fuck them,” Web grunted, tossing a letter on the big folding table, which was one of three bunched together that made their club table.
Folding tables.
Total shit.
Okay.
Right.
The mother charter had spoken.
His motorcycle club was no longer Bounty.
They were nothing.
They’d pretty much always been nothing but a bunch of guys who liked to ride and pretend they were badasses.
They could do the first.
They sucked at the last.
“We have to come up with a new club name. And new by-laws. And shit,” Web went on.
The asshole had no idea what he was doing.
Beck studied him and wondered, not for the first time, how he’d let himself get played by these losers.
He liked to ride.
He’d lost his brother in Afghanistan.
He’d loved his brother.
His mother had lost her shit when her favorite boy got dead in the sand and she took that out on Beck.
So he’d done what he’d been doing since he was about two.
Fulfilled her prophecy of That Boy Is No Good, linked his shit to a wannabe one-percenter MC and completely ignored his gut when it fucking screamed at him to cut loose and get free.
Of that fucking club.
Of the grief his brother died way too fucking young, way too far away from people who loved him.
And from his mother.
In his stint with this band of assholes, Beck had learned he understood lemmings.
When everyone around you was going in one direction, running flat-out for that fucker, even if it meant you were going in a dangerous direction, if you didn’t run with them, you got trampled.
He’d run with them.
He still got trampled.
And that was on him.
All on him.
“Throttle, you got any ideas on a name?” Eightball asked him.
Throttle.
His biker name.
He fucking hated that name.
He came into the room and saw all the men’s attention on him.
He’d earned their respect. He was like some elder statesman or something, even if he was one of the younger ones.
And that made the acid in his stomach churn because he’d done this by getting arrested.
Big man.
Badass.
Getting arrested.
Jesus fucking Christ.
He’d also done this by handing Rosalie over to them. His old lady. The woman who’d shared his bed. The beautiful, sweet woman whose love he earned, and he’d pissed it away when he didn’t listen to her concerns about where his club was going, what it was doing to him, to them—him and Rosalie—and then she’d set about doing something about it.
The man in him and the biker in him could not come to terms with the way she’d betrayed him. How she’d used him and informed on his club to another one.
It was not okay.
He understood he’d given her no choice. He hadn’t listened. He hadn’t let her in.
She knew their world though.
So it still was not okay.
Even with that truth, it did not make the bent of his retaliation okay.
He should have told her about his mom. His brother. The shit that fucked with his head.