Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3) (19 page)

"The other night?" he said, his voice getting lower, almost scary.

"Yeah, when you didn't come home. It's cool. I mean... you weren't getting any from me. And I mean... we aren't like
together
or anything. It's... whatever. I'm just trying to make a point."

"Then make it," he growled.

"That I'm not some slut you can hit and quit like the others."

"I've had women before."

"Obviously," I said, shrugging.

"Not apologizing for that."

"I wasn't asking you to."

"But no one since you."

Well, that was one way to shut me up. Unfortunately for me, he was angry and in the mood to fight about it if his posture and the way his eyes were tossing daggers at me were anything to go off of. "Well, how the hell was I supposed to know that!" It was a question, but it came out like an accusation. "You don't fucking talk to me, Wolf."

"Talking to you right now."

"But saying as little as possible."

"Can't change me, Janie," he shrugged in a very 'take it or leave it' way.

"I'm not trying to change you. I'm trying to figure out where I stand with you because right now it feels like I have to constantly keep one foot out the door."

"Step in or step out," he said, waving a hand toward the actual door.

"I was being figurative," I spat.

"I ain't stupid," he shot back.

"God, we both suck at this!" I groaned, raking a hand through my hair, feeling the tangles get caught on my fingers. I must have looked just
wonderful
right then.

"You wanted to talk."

"Talk, not argue," I clarified.

"Ain't arguing."

"Oh my god, we so are."

"Janie..." my name trailed off like he was trying to grab my attention.

"What?" I asked, sounding surly.

"Fucking spit it out."

"That's rich coming from you."

"What do you want from me?" he asked in an almost... sad tone.

And well, he wasn't using that to guilt me into letting it go. No way, no sir.

I jumped off the bed, crossing the room toward him. "Give me
something,
Wolf! Give me
anything.
I refuse to fall in love with a padlock heart. I am not the kind of woman who will spend her life sifting through boxes of forgotten keys, praying she finds the one that will unlock you. So let me in... or let me go!"

On a choked sound that sounded a bit too much like a sob, I face planted into his chest, trying to pull it together. I shouldn't have been emotional, but I was. It had been a weird fucking week and a half. In a short amount of time, he had come to mean a lot to me. And I wanted him to let me in. I wanted to know him the way he knew me, into all the dark, skeleton-filled closets. He just had to... let me.

It felt like forever before his arms closed around me, pulling me until my body was flush against his, his mass a familiar and comforting thing. I felt his chin lower down until it was resting on the top of my head. "You're in," he said with a squeeze. "You've always been in."

FIFTEEN

Wolf

If there was one quality you both had to respect and loathe about Janie, it was her tenacity. I guess it came from years of being overlooked because of her size and sex in the male-centric Hailstorm. And even though Lo ran a tight ship and would flip shit if she saw any blatant sexism going on at her camp, that didn't mean the women didn't feel the pressure. So when Janie needed to prove a point or she needed to get something she wanted, she was a dog after a bone.

What she wanted?

To get to know me.

I'd never been one for sharing. First, because I didn't need to air shit to understand how I felt about it. Second, because none of my stories were pretty. And third, because men didn't, as a rule, do that shit.

I ain't never kept a woman around long enough for her to want to learn my secrets. The club bitches knew better. They were around for a good suck or fuck. Maybe if they got one of the men pussy-whipped, they could end up with his name on her back. But it was rare and they knew it. So none of them pushed.

Janie, yeah, she wasn't a club bitch.

But she sure as fuck was a pusher.

If you'd ask me why she was different, I wouldn't have a good answer. I liked Janie. I had always liked Janie from the first time we met her and she and Reign went toe-to-toe, the tiny slip of a girl holding her own against the most fierce biker in the region. Shit was sexy. Seeing her charge in when the shit was hitting the fan when we were trying to save Summer, toting guns, fearless as any hardened criminal I had ever met, yeah that was even sexier.

But seeing her on the side of that road, burned and battling her demons in the dirt... it became more than an attraction.

It wasn't something fresh and new that I wanted to protect women who needed it. That shit came from my mother's apron strings when I was too young to do more than ankle bite. I'd lent a hand more than once before when the situation called for it. But I'd never invited a woman to my place. Fuck, I'd never invited anyone to my place before. Reign and Cash and Repo sometimes invited themselves, but as a rule, I liked my solitude. No, I didn't just like it; I demanded it. I'd go to the club; I'd spend time with the men on the road. But then I needed to go home and get lost in the woods. I needed to hunt and fish and get away from it all.

So wanting Janie there, yeah, that was out of character.

What was even more out of character? That I didn't want her to leave. Even though half of what she did was badger me.

So if the only way to get her to stick around was to tell her some things about me that I never told anyone, well, it seemed like a small price to pay.

--

My memories of my mother are bright, full Technicolor detail. She was light and warmth. She was homemade cookies after a bad day at school. She was bedtime stories and trips to the beach.

My memories of my father are highly contrasted black and white. He was the door slamming after coming home late from the compound, smelling like whiskey and perfume. He was a raised voice, a raised hand, a short fuse.

"What's the problem now?" he would growl at my mother who was already cowering away from him, a badass former biker groupie who never took shit from no one, shrinking away from the man she promised her life to. "Five words or less, bitch," he added, as he always did.

Five words.

If we couldn't get our points across in that, he didn't want to hear it.

"There's this kid at school that Wolf keeps..."

The rest of that sentence would never be heard because his fist knocked them out of her mouth. "What fucking part of 'five words or less' is so fucking hard for you to understand, you stupid cunt?"

Such was almost every conversation between my mother and father.

There wasn't a merciful or sympathetic bone in my father's body. Reign's father would never allow that kind of weakness from his men. The problem being that training your men to think no different than animals, meant they acted no better. For Pops, life was a constant battle of reminding his pack that he was the top dog. His pack? Me and my mother. When I was little, I needed very little reminding. But as I got older, I got bigger and I became a threat. And threats, well, they needed to be neutralized. So at twelve years old, I was telling the guidance counselor in school that I just got into a lot of fists fights to explain perpetually blackened eyes and bruised arms and busted ribs.

As I waxed, Pops waned, getting older, frailer, less threatening. His strength soon was nothing against my late adolescent brawn. So he did what any weak man did, he took it out on the only person weaker than him.

The screams my mother would make would wake me up from a dead sleep, my body buzzing with adrenaline, hands curled into fists so hard my nails drew blood from my palms. It's a source of shame how many nights I would lie there and do nothing. It was a thought that would break me if I let myself think about it, think about how she was suffering from my inaction.

It happened one week shy of my eighteenth birthday.

I learned my shooting, my fishing, my hunting from my Pops. He'd take me out into the woods behind our property and he'd show me all the ways he thought a man needed to be a man.

We were sitting in a tree stand, waiting for a deer to step into sight, bows at the ready. Then the stupid son of a bitch opened his mouth and started talking. About my mother. Stupid, stupid move. Also, his last. I reached instinctively for the hatchet at my belt as the rage tore through my system like a poison, like something that replaced all the blood in my veins with pure, undiluted hate.

It wasn't that I wasn't aware what I was doing while I was doing it. I never blacked out, my consciousness never fully went away. But the part of me that was normal, was human, became like a spectator as the beast took over and swung, sliced, hacked.

When Reign and his father came looking for me the next morning after a frantic call from my mother when we didn't return home the night before, they walked into a horror movie. My father was in bloody pieces all over the forest floor. An arm here, guts there, his head rolled into a pile of brambles.

Reign visibly paled, younger than me, insulated from the nastier parts of The Henchmen lifestyle and, therefore, still rather innocent of the butchery. His old man, however, took a long minute, looking around the scene, rocking back on his heels, his hands in his pockets. Then he threw his head back and laughed.

"Guess you're the man of the family now," he said, whacking me hard enough on the back to make huge, hulking me stumble forward a foot.

My consciousness had come back to me sometime around sunup, when the full reality of what I had done weighed on me, making me wretch into the bushes until there was nothing left inside to throw up. I was covered in blood, head to toe, every inch saturated. My hands had the worst of it, stained bright red from the tips of my fingers to my wrists, and I got the vivid image of reaching into my already dead father's chest after hacking open his ribcage, and pulling out his lifeless heart.

"Well come on," Reign's old man said, clapping his hands together loudly, making both of us start. "Gotta get this shit cleaned up."

'This shit' being my father. Even as horrified as I felt in my actions, I found that fitting.

And from that day on, in the prez's eyes, I was the man of the house. Just like he had said. I was patched in as soon as I aged up. I was given jobs, usually the bloodier of the bunch. I provided money for my mother. Then after the turf war that brought down Reign's old man, Reign stepped into his place. He named his brother vice. He made me road captain. I stopped having to be a butcher for a job.

But there were still occasions when the beast overtook me.

Cue walking into one of Lex Keith's safe houses, breaking the neck of the first guard, beating the second half to death before ending it completely, then making a beeline for Lex himself, cowering in a corner like the cowardly fuck he was.

I didn't try to control the beast.

I didn't want to.

I wanted to unleash him.

I wanted to watch as I pulled Lex's insides out.

I wanted to see his skin peel away at my hands.

So that's what I did.

I made him scream.

And I could sleep like a baby knowing that because of me, Janie would never have to worry about his hands getting a hold of her again.

--

It took the better part of two days to share all of this with her, my upbringing still making it too hard to put too many words together at one time.

But I did it.

I gave her what she needed from me.

I let her know me.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked when I finally got the last of it out. Her head was cocked to the side, her dark brows drawn together.

"Like what?" I asked, reaching out for her hips and pulling her across the bed.

"Like you're half expecting me to run screaming. Do I seem like the kind of girl who blanches at a little violence?"

"It's dark."

"My past isn't all sunshine and rainbows either," she said, giving me one of those small smiles that wasn't really a smile, just a turning up of the lips.

"Happened
to
you."

"So just because I wasn't the one doing the slicing and dicing doesn't mean I can't handle that you were? It was a long time ago, Wolf."

"It was days," I reminded her.

She gave me a small shrug. "Do you rage out over normal, everyday stuff?"

"No."

"Then I don't think I have anything to worry about," she said, settling down beside my body.

"Never," I said, firmly. She never had anything to worry about at my hands.