Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4) (34 page)

Trick stared at that black leather and couldn’t move. His stomach churned, and his heart thumped. When he could move, he took a step backward, away from it, and he could feel the shockwave roll over the room.

“Trick?” Connor asked, surprise, hurt, and incipient suspicion edging his tone.

What was he doing? The idea that he didn’t want that kutte had not entered his mind until this moment, when the thought of it on his back made his skin crawl. It didn’t make sense; this club, these people, this was the only place he belonged.

No, no—this was crazy, he was going crazy, and it would be a short trip if he turned his back on that leather in the full sight of the whole club, a couple of hours after he’d been released from weeks of torture meant to make him talk.

He stepped back to Connor, turned, and let his friend lay the weight of the club on his shoulders.

Connor gave his shoulders a quick, affectionate squeeze, and that moment of tension was broken. “Let’s sit, brother. We need to catch you up.”

Bart’s home office was almost as big as Trick’s apartment. About two-thirds of the long space was a seating area of sufficient size to accommodate every patch. They all sat on comfortable sofas and big leather chairs. Jesus.

He picked a leather chair that gave him some space from the others. Then, when they had all sat and there was a beat of quiet, he cleared his throat and said, “I didn’t talk.”

Hoosier turned to him and nodded. “We know, son. And there wasn’t a question about it at this table. Not for one second.”

They weren’t sitting in the Keep, at their table, but the point was the same. Trick nodded, feeling one thread of painful tension loosen from his heart.

“What do you know, T?” Connor asked.

Trick took a breath and cleared his throat again, pulling together the will to have a conversation—any conversation, let alone this one. “Nothing. I never saw anybody but…the ones in charge of me. I don’t think I was in a jail or prison. Nothing regular. They moved me…four times, I think? Or made me think they were moving me, maybe? I don’t know. After a while, things went upside down in my head.”

“What did they do?” Fargo asked.

Fuck, he was already so damn tired of that question. “They treated me like a terrorist. Google it.”

“Fucking hell, Trick,” Sherlock muttered.

He ignored that and turned back to Hoosier. “They want La Zorra. Every interrogation was about La Zorra. I didn’t talk, at all, and they stopped asking questions at some point and just…entertained themselves, I guess. How’d I get free of that? They kept saying they were ‘booking my flight.’ I thought I was going to live the rest of my life like that, in some Saudi prison.”

The question of how he’d gotten free impelled forward the question of how he’d gotten caught at all. He’d been grappling with that question for an eternity, since his life before had ended. Now, finally, he noticed that Jesse was not sitting among his brothers. “Where’s Jess?”

A thunderous quiet fell on the room.

“Jesse did this.” Trick didn’t phrase it as a question. He’d worked out a suspicion, and now he’d gotten a confirmation.

Connor leaned forward, his brow drawn heavily over his eyes. “He got a rat’s end, T. I promise. Him and his Fed friend Titus.”

“Why?” Jesse had worn a patch for more than fifteen years.

Bart picked up the answer. “He was banging a movie producer’s teenage daughter. Not somebody Riley knows, but somebody he’d been talking to about using the club in a movie. And by teenage daughter I mean she’s fourteen. He got caught with her. They dangled prison as a child rapist in front of him, and I guess he didn’t just sing, he wrote them a symphony.”

“We didn’t catch this? Titus was around for months.”

“Titus’s backstory was tight. And there’s nothing on the books for Jess,” Bart answered. “No record of arrest, nothing. We didn’t find anything until we dug in with a jackhammer. They lost anything he was giving them, though, and now they don’t have him or Titus, either. We did the full court press to get you out of this. To get us
all
out of this, and we’re clear. Completely. You still don’t even have a record, brother.”

“How?”

“Dora. It was her people who found you. We thought she’d use that to hurt you, but instead, she moved the pieces to get you out. We’d been trying to find a way to make them charge you so we could get hold of some part of the process and pry you out, but she plowed through all the crap and just grabbed you. She backed DHS off of you, and us, and her. She even served them up a goat for the Cartwright hit. It’s been on the news the past few days that a suspect was killed resisting arrest—a former Navy Seal. The woman is connected absolutely everywhere, and way up high.”

That barrage of information was too much for Trick to process. He pulled the most crucial piece out and examined that. “So I owe Dora my freedom?” God. Was he in deeper with her? What would she want for compensation?

Hoosier answered that, leaning forward and staring straight into Trick’s eyes. “No. The Horde owes Dora your…freedom. She wants to meet with you, but you don’t owe her anything. You have paid, son. Your…ledger is wiped clean.”

Trick laughed. “No, it’s not. Never will be.” He sighed and stared at his empty glass. All that he’d gone through—that was just…erased? Like it had never happened? His control slipped, and his mind started to make noise. The same thing had happened to end his Army career: deeds he’d done and trauma he’d experienced wiped away, leaving him alone and adrift to deal with what couldn’t be washed clean.

“I…I gotta get my head screwed back on.”

“Understood,” said Hoosier, digging into a pocket. “Your bike’s here, in the…driveway. We brought it over.” He threw Trick his keys.

“Thanks.” Keys in hand, he set the glass on the table in front of him and stood up.

“What about your lady, T?” Connor asked. “She stood up tall through all this. She even helped some, gave us insight into the law.”

Trick stared at the lush, patterned carpet under his boots. “We’re clear? She can go home?”

Hoosier, Bart, Connor, Sherlock—they all nodded.

“Then take her home.” He turned and walked away from his brothers and out of Bart’s house.

~oOo~

Once on the bike, he discovered he was too shaky and disoriented to ride long, so he headed back to the apartment. At the gate to the complex, instead of opening it, Trick pulled to the side of the road and dismounted. Taking his helmet off, he walked back to the corner, where Connor had pulled off.

“You don’t need to fucking follow me. I don’t need a minder.”

“What you
need
is not to be alone right now.”

“I don’t want company.”

“Then I’ll just wait and hang close. I’m not leaving, bro. The wife’s working tonight. I got no place better to be.”

“Fuck you.”

Connor gave him a smirk. “Rather not. But hey—you’re my best friend. Whatever you need. Just this once.”

“Asshole.” Trick turned on his heel and went back to his bike. He opened the gate and pulled in. He had no plans to stay long. He just needed to pack some shit.

Other than a musty staleness from so many weeks closed up, his apartment was as he’d left it. Tidy and full of his things. He stood in the living room, surrounded by his books, and felt utterly out of place. This was not his, not anymore. The man who’d lived here didn’t exist.

The first thing he saw in his bedroom, on his bureau, was the little bonsai tree Lucie and Juliana had given him. It had died; little brown leaves littered the bureau and the floor beneath it. A few clung gamely to the sere, twisted branches. It seemed a proof that the life he’d had before was truly over.

And he had nothing to replace it.

He grabbed his backpack and Army duffel from the floor of his closet and shoved some clothes in. Stopping in the bathroom, he tossed in some toiletries. On a whim in the living room, he picked up a stack of books from a side table and dropped them in, too. Then he locked the apartment and went back to his bike. He’d stay at the clubhouse until he figured things out. Or maybe he’d just live there. Connor had lived there for years. So had Lakota. These days, nobody did but Jerry, the Prospect. So he’d have the place basically to himself.

When he got back to his bike, Connor had pulled up just across from the gate. Trick ignored him. He mounted up, pulled out, opened the gate, and drove off.

He heard Connor’s bike roar up as he pulled into the lane behind him. He didn’t care. Connor could do what he wanted.

~oOo~

He hadn’t been in the clubhouse since before. The strong blast of nostalgia and familiarity that hit him as he opened the door to the Hall nearly knocked Trick backward.

There were a few Horde already kicking back in the Hall with some of the girls: Diaz, Keanu, Fargo. A typical weekday night. They were involved in what they were doing and didn’t pay him any attention.

Connor came in right behind him; Trick ignored him.

On his way back to the dorm, he stopped in the empty kitchen for the first aid kit. He took that back with him and locked himself into his room.

He’d never used this room except as a place to bed a girl or crash when he was too drunk to ride. It was his room, but he’d never put any effort into making it reflect that. The walls were bare, the drawers were empty but for the club t-shirts and hoodies that all the rooms contained, and the bedding was whatever was on hand in the storage room.

On this night, Trick felt more comfortable in this Spartan absence than he had since he’d first squinted into sunlight he hadn’t seen for weeks.

He dropped his packs and went into the microscopic bathroom. Each dorm room had one of these ‘three-quarter’ baths: a toilet, sink, and coffin-sized shower. He stripped off his kutte and hung it on the doorknob. Then he pulled off his t-shirt.

His nipple was badly infected, and it had been for weeks. He felt keenly exhausted and vaguely ill, and he was sure it wasn’t only the torture and trauma that had made him so. The swelling and redness radiated around a badly-healed wound, looking a little like a sun, with rays of red stretching out at all points.

The infection was bad, and it was poisoning him.

Inside the first aid kit was a scalpel and a box of blades for it. He put a blade in and stared at himself in the mirror. Hey—couldn’t be the worst pain he’d experienced in the past couple of months, right? No way what he was about to do to himself could come near some of what had been done to him. Right?

Right. But just in case, he grabbed a towel from the shelf on the opposite wall and shoved it into his mouth. Then he sliced through his infected nipple, lancing the wound. Blood and pus seeped lazily out of the cut he’d made. The ooze stank badly.

As pain went, it was up there. Not as bad, perhaps, as the bizarrely protracted pain of having the ring pulled through it, but bad. Still, he didn’t scream.

The ooze had already slowed to almost nothing, though, and he had to get it out. Trick set the scalpel on a piece of gauze he’d laid on the side of the sink. He gripped the sides of the wound in his fingers and squeezed.

Then he screamed.

And then he passed out.

~oOo~

He came foggily awake to the sounds of shouting, and the feel of rough hands on him. And oh, fuck, no. He could not take any more. He thought he’d been saved. God, it had only been a dream. The most vivid, most awful of his worst nightmares: a dream of freedom so real he’d believed it.

He fought, as hard and as viciously as he could, punching and kicking, shouting, “NO! NO! NO!” It was the only word that could escape his panicked mind.

“Trick! Brother, fuck! It’s me, T. It’s me!”

More afraid to fall back into the lie of the dream than to be forced to withstand whatever his tormentors had in store for him, he fought harder. He fought with everything he had. And then something hit his face, and he fell away from knowing anything.

~oOo~

Trick next woke to a sharp pain in his chest. He groaned and lifted his hand, finding another hand at the source of the pain. Confused, he opened his eyes, but that didn’t help; he was too bleary and disoriented to understand what he was seeing.

“Hey, Trick. You’re awake.” A sweet, soft voice.

“Jules…” he muttered, relief and love easing him again into sleep.

“No, sweetie. It’s Maria. You want me to ask somebody to get her?”

That snapped him back to alertness. “No! What? Where?”

Maria patted his shoulder. “Easy, Trick. Let me finish, and I’ll go find Connor. He’s in the shop.”

He looked to see what she needed to finish: she was dressing his wound. It brought his most recent memory back, and he knocked her hand away—noticing then that he was attached to an IV—and lifted the gauze she’d just laid over his chest.

Well, that was ugly. But it looked less red and angry than he remembered. Maria slapped his hand lightly and shooed him away. Neither of them spoke again as she finished taping down the bandage.

“There. You want some water?”