No, I wasn’t sorry. I wasn’t boastful, but I wasn’t sorry. She was literally a once-in-a-decade kind of girl.
“For what, shithead?”
“For getting her pregnant.”
“Oh, how wonderful. Not for fucking getting me hammered so you could sneak away with her. Not for lying to my face about her. Not for taking my fucking sister! But for forgetting to put rubber on. Anything else?”
He was now close enough to strike. I accepted this wasn’t going to be a fight so much as it would be a beatdown. I just hoped that Brock, Steele, and the prospect would pull him away before the damage got too bad.
“No, I—”
And that was when the first strike came, a vicious hook punch that slammed right into the side of my jaw and staggered me backward.
I slammed into the wall of the shop, falling to the ground. My jaw was searing hot, and I was pretty sure a tooth or two had gotten loose.
“Get the fuck up,” Mason said. “Get the fuck up!”
I looked over his shoulder at the other three Black Reapers. They were letting the fight play out. So be it.
I staggered to my feet and looked at Mason, who had hatred and disgust in his eyes. I wasn’t sure that I had ever seen such uncontrolled fire and rage in him before, which was really saying something, considering the only other person who might have had a meaner streak was Connor.
He delivered a crushing punch to my gut, doubling me over, and then grabbed me and slammed a knee to my face, again dropping me to the ground.
“You know what my sister means to me,” Mason said. “The only fucking family I have left. And you got me drunk, so what? You could fuck her and lie about it?”
He punctuated his last words with a strong kick to my sternum that left me gasping for air. I got to all fours, bruised, bleeding, and barely breathing. Mason snickered over me.
“And you had the fucking balls to play along and say that it was a Bandit that had knocked her up,” he said. “Maybe you should go and be a Bandit yourself, pussy. You’d fit right in with this.”
“No,” I gasped.
I was barely coherent, so I wasn’t so much saying no to him as I was to what he was saying. I staggered to my feet. Brock looked surprised that I was still at it, but he shouldn’t have been. Fighting and fucking had always been my two favorite things, after all.
“I’m a Black Reaper,” I said. “And I care about your sister. Say what you want, but I—”
I didn’t get to finish my words because Mason tackled me against the garage. My head slammed into the back of the wall, making me woozy and probably giving me a concussion. He then turned me around and threw me to the ground with shocking ease. He was no Butch, but I’d apparently dramatically underestimated his strength.
“If you fucking cared about my sister, you wouldn’t have knocked her up, you fucking shithead,” Mason spat. “Now she’s got to raise a child as a single mother with no one but me to turn to. Don’t you fucking get it? Don’t you see why I’m so protective of her? It’s because of assholes like you, who think you can just take whatever you want!”
By now, my senses were dulled, and my body was starting to drift into shock. But in the far distance, barely above Mason’s voice, I thought I heard a car approaching. I risked turning my head from Mason and saw…I saw…
I saw Hannah’s car pulling into the lot?
We all stopped to look at her. I stole a glance back at Mason, who seemed stunned that his sister had come here.
“Go home, Hannah!” Mason shouted. “This is my fucking fight!”
“Stop this nonsense!”
I turned to Mason.
“See whose side she’s on?”
That was, apparently, the worst thing to say. Mason walked right up to me, grabbed me by the collar, and flung me back against the garage door. I barely had time to recover before I saw him walk over, cock his fist back, and land a solid punch right to my face that knocked me out cold.
* * *
When I came to, I was no longer outside the garage but inside the clubhouse, away from any of the damage the Bandits had inflicted.
