Connor
She really does think there’s more to me than I show.
She really actually…cares.
I sat on the front porch of the clubhouse as the night wound down to a close. I’d brought along one of the club bunnies as my plus one, but even before Katie showed up, I just wasn’t feeling it tonight. I had figured before Katie arrived that I’d get hard at some point, maybe if the bunny started shit, but once Katie showed up and I had to deal with her, I was thrown for a whole fucking loop.
By all rights, that girl should have gone the fuck away the second I shoved her back. I didn’t want to get near someone like her, and I couldn’t have said it anymore explicitly. I did not want to hit a woman, but shit, it sure fucking seemed like Katie was not getting the hint.
And yet…
Man.
Was she fucking toying with me?
It sure fucking had parallels to the past. I’d been down that road before. A girl that, at the time, I’d considered above my league hitting on me. Me thinking it was too good to be true. Me going along with it anyway.
Me getting fucking shattered and ruined.
That was when I was weak and a pussy. I wasn’t that anymore. I could recognize a trap from a mile away, and I wasn’t going to go into that.
But, no. It wasn’t a trap. Nothing Katie had done had indicated it was a trap of any degree. She seemed, somehow, utterly sincere about it all. It was kind of remarkable, really.
But boy, if she was fucking with me, if this was all a troll of some kind, then she didn’t need to worry about the Bandits. I’d fucking burn the store down myself.
She’s not, Connor. Take it easy.
There was only one other girl I could recall from before whom I’d let get close to me. We’d never dated, but she was caring to me during my weaker days. She was sweet, affable, and kind, and when she wound up dating one of my friends, I was happy for her.
And then the Bandits wound up gang-raping Rachel Reid.
If the Bandits were already on the trail of Katie…
I took a sip of my drink. I was asking too many questions about one girl that I’d only seen in passing before the past few days. I didn’t need to worry about someone else going through what Rachel had gone through. We had bigger issues to deal with.
Before I could even begin to think about dealing with Katie Lane, I had to destroy Damian and the rest of the fucking Bandits.
* * *
Two Days Later
I drove down Freedom Alley primarily just to relax. The bike was where I found my refuge, my power, my strength. It was impossible to feel like anything other than a motherfucking badass when you were on a bike, and as the club enforcer, it was my job to be that way whenever possible.
The daily bike rides did well for that, especially when speeding down Freedom Alley out toward Albuquerque and then back.
And then, just as the city came into view, I looked down at the notice. I had low fuel.
It almost seemed too perfect. I had not set this up deliberately, but maybe on some unconscious level, I had ignored the low fuel tank so I’d get the chance to refuel at Katie’s store. That was the kind of shit a middle schooler did, not an MC enforcer.
No, it was just a mere coincidence. And it wasn’t like there was a shitload of opportunities to load up on gas between Albuquerque and Santa Maria, anyway. Not like we were talking about the distance from one neighborhood in Los Angeles to another.
As I pulled up to pump six again, I noticed that there was a very beat-up looking bike parked at the front of the store. I knew what Bandit bikes looked like, and that was not it, but I also found it highly implausible that this was someone who just drove for fun. My guard went up, as it had probably too much of a tendency to do.
I walked inside to pay with cash when I saw the fucking damndest thing in my life.
A kid, probably no older than fifteen years old, maybe sixteen if he looked young for his age, was stuffing candy in his pockets. Normally, I would have glared at the kid, giving him a message without causing any further trouble, and that would have been enough. But there were two confounding factors.
One, this kid was the fucking spitting image of Damian, one of the three Bandits assholes I’d vowed to kill years ago.
