“I may have already come to that conclusion when a group of terrifying men surrounded us this afternoon,” Juneau snorted delicately, straightening the oversized t-shirt she was wearing like it was a fancy ball gown.
“Which wouldn’t have happened if you had just stayed at the house this afternoon like you were told,” Rex muttered darkly.
Doc heaved an exhausted sigh before he nodded at Bat. The tattooed alpha reached over from where he was sitting and gave Rex’s arm a twisting pinch.
“Ow, what the fuck? I was just telling the truth,” Rex rubbed the red spot on his arm, shooting Bat an icy glare.
“You were also not helping,” Doc informed him before turning away from the alpha and continuing.
“The motorcycle club that we used to belong to wasn’t just about riding motorcycles. It also sold weapons and drugs for profit and other illegal activities.”
The room fell silent as we all waited for Juneau’s reaction to the truth. Her expression stayed neutral, but I could see little twitches in her jaw and how her eyes moved back and forth between us as she tried to form an opinion.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” she finally asked, sounding more curious than upset.
Doc grimaced. “That wasn’t our job,” he said as he looked anywhere but at Bat.
The answer was a diplomatic one. The only person sitting in the room who had any experience with death was the tattooed alpha who looked absolutely miserable.
Sometimes it was easy to forget that Bat had been groomed by his father to take over as resident torturer.
“Whose job was it?” Juneau pushed, her eyes serious as she looked from face to face until she landed on Bat.
“Mine, sugar,” Bat finally spoke for the first time since we’d sat down. He clasped his tattooed hands in front of him like he was praying for absolution from the omega in front of him, his brown eyes showing more emotion than I’d ever seen from the alpha before.
Juneau frowned. “Why did you do it?”
Bat shrugged. “You met good old Tug today. Does he look like a man you can say no to? That asshole is my father and he taught me everything he knows about how to eviscerate another human being.”
“Did you like it?” Juneau asked, her face pale.
“Not really. I just did what I needed to do,” Bat’s expression shuttered, all of the emotion draining out of his face.
“Did they deserve it?” was her next question.
“Every last one of them,” Bat said with conviction.
Juneau nodded, her eyebrows pinching together as she tried to digest the information that she just learned. I reached out and smoothed the crease with my thumb, trying to provide at least some level of comfort.
The touch was casual, but I could see the dusky pink blush start to form on her cheeks as her expression shifted from confusion to, well, something else. Juneau’s perfume bloomed between us and I sucked in her sudden arousal and nearly gasped with the sudden potency of it. My own scent rose to meet hers creating a cloying bomb of omega pheromones.
Groans filled the room and I heard Bat curse under his breath as all of the alphas in the room shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
Doc cleared his throat, but the noise was strangled, sounding more like a rattling growl. “Okay you two, separate. We’ve got a whole ass conversation to get through and I’d like to do it without the hurricane of omega pheromones that you are currently throwing off.”
Juneau’s blush darkened and she shifted nearly an entire cushion away from me. I shot Doc a glare and gave our thread of the bond a hard yank for good measure.
‘We’re having a serious conversation, remember?’Doc signed, his jaw set stubbornly.‘Stop making everyone in the room horny and focus.’
His hands were moving too fast for Juneau to keep up, but I got the gist and leaned back into the couch with my arms petulantly crossed over my chest.
“Anyway, we were all a part of the MC. Rex, Bat, and Podcast grew up in the life and Storm and I joined later. The former president of the club was an alpha named Apollo. He wasn’t a saint but he ran things pretty fairly and garnered a lot of respect in the twenty years that he was the Prez,” Doc began to explain, speaking slowly like he was measuring each word for the potential impact it could have on Juneau’s opinion of us.
“He died suddenly four years ago and his son, Orpheus, took over as Prez.” At the mention of Orpheus’s name, more growls filled the room.
“I take it they don’t like this Orpheus person?” She leaned over the cushion to whisper to me.
I shook my head again and opened my notes app to type. ‘HE’S A MONSTER WITH A GOD COMPLEX.’
