“Yeah,” I replied through gritted teeth. My fists were clenching and unclenching at my sides. Balling up tightly, ready to deliver pain and punishment to anything and anyone in my way. And right then, Goliath was in my motherfucking way.
He looked back over his shoulder, his dark gaze moving over his friends. They chuckled lightly, as if this was nothing. But I saw the tension around their eyes, and the hard set of their jaws. They were waiting, just like I was.
Each man wore a dark leather cut, and different patches were sewn on each of them. At the back of my mind I knew that represented something—probably something I didn’t want to be getting mixed up in. Yet there I was, mixing shit up.
Goliath looked back at me, blinking slowly as if the whole thing was boring him so much he was going to fall asleep. The woman he was with gave a soft giggle, her tits jiggling in her low-cut top as she ran her tongue across her painted red lips.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, kid.”
“I told you not to call me k—”
*
Her screams filled my ears. Blood-curdling and chilling, they dragged me back from the abyss and vomited me back out into the unforgiving night. My cheek was pressed against something hard. Something hard and wet. Fuck, what was that?
My eyes sluggishly opened, the screams dying out and making way for Bob Dylan singing about needing shelter from the storm. Don’t we all, brother? Don’t we motherfucking all.
“He’s waking up, Bull.” A woman’s soft voice slurred from next to me and I tried to turn my head toward her. She sounded familiar—or maybe I just wished she was. I could have really done with someone familiar right then. I was sure as hell hoping it was her hand running up and down my thigh too.
Something grabbed the back of my tee and dragged me upwards. I groaned as my world spun and twisted in one huge vicious circle that threatened to make me spill my whiskey-soaked insides onto the table. I squeezed my eyes closed, begging for my head to stop spinning, and thank fuck the gods listened, because when I opened them again, everything was as it had been before I’d—
“I knocked you the fuck out,” Goliath said. “Thought you needed a time-out to consider your options before you did or said something you might regret later on.” He pushed a drink toward me—beer, not whiskey—and I shook my head, ignoring the chuckle he let out. “Oh yeah, you’re a whiskey boy, right?”
“Right,” I replied. I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth, tasting blood on my teeth.
He reached over and grabbed a glass from one of the other men sitting around the table. I expected him to argue or yell about it, but the other man only smirked and continued to run his hand up the leg of the woman that was draped over him.
“Name’s, Bull,” the Goliath lookalike said, sliding the drink over to me. “Don’t worry about Jack.”
My gaze flitted back to the guy whose drink he just took, but he was too busy burying his face in the woman’s neck, his hand fisting in her hair like he was about to fuck her right here on the table in front of a packed-out bar.
I took the drink, my shaking fingers wrapping around the glass and automatically feeling better for having the security of it there. Bull’s hand slammed down on my wrist as I started to lift the glass up toward my mouth, slamming it back down and almost spilling its contents over the sticky wooden surface of the old table.
My head snapped to face Bull, my lips pulling back like a pit bull ready to attack. He held my arm in place, his gaze steady and revealing nothing but dark benevolence toward me.
“I don’t take too kindly to someone coming over tomytable, inmybar, when I’m withmybrothers, and making idle threats against me.”
If looks could kill, Bull would be ninety feet under already. As it were, all my glaring was getting me was his grip tightening on my arm.
“Who said my threat was idle?” I snapped back, once again trying to lift my arm, but he pressed down harder. Hard enough to make me think he was going to snap my arm at any moment. Wouldn’t be the first time it had happened to me.
“You’re young, angry, desperate for violence.” He talked like he knew me, and my brow furrowed, hating that everything was so obvious to see. “I got a place in my crew for someone like you, if you’re willing to take orders and pay your dues.”
He let go of my arm and sat back in the booth. He picked up his beer and downed half of it in one gulp before slamming it back down on the table, his gaze never leaving mine.
I had no desire to be a part of anything. In fact, it was the opposite of what I wanted. What I needed was to be as far away from people as I could get. What I needed was to wash the blood from my hands, my body, and my mind. What I needed was to be done with this world and all of its bullshit.
“You got wheels?” he asked, as if I’d already agreed to join him and his crew. He drank the remaining beer in his glass, his gaze still on me. “You don’t want in? That’s cool. Drink your drink, get up, and walk away. But make sure never to show your face around here again.”
“And if I do?”
“Show your face around here or join me and my brothers? Because each answer has very fucking different outcomes, kid,” he chuckled darkly.
“Join you.”
I looked around, wondering who the hell had spoken, because it couldn’t have been me. But there was no one around but a bar full of drunk people and me. And who the fuck was I?
An orphan.
