Madeline Sheehan - Unbeloved

“Prez,” Hawk continued. “I wasn’t so sure before that takin’ him out was the best way to go, but . . . he ain’t ZZ no more. The man is cold, Prez, through and through, and a walkin’ fuckin’ time bomb.”

Ripper stepped forward while Deuce remained frozen. But even in his stillness the man was literally vibrating with rage, his nostrils flaring as the exposed skin on his forearms rippled, his muscles twitching with barely restrained fury.

“Did he say anything?” Ripper asked, and Hawk could hear the unspoken words. After all, ZZ had assumed Ripper had stolen Danny from him. And Ripper was now married to her.

“Don’t think you gotta worry about Danny,” Hawk said. “He’s hung up on this shit, that much I could tell, but he ain’t stupid enough to come anywhere near Miles City. Not with the club and the law gunnin’ for him.”

“I’ll fuckin’ kill him,” Ripper said darkly.

Deuce’s head swung around, Ripper’s words breaking his trance-like state. “I will fuckin’ kill him,” Deuce gritted out. “You hear me? Me. I will fuckin’ kill him.”

Each of Deuce’s words was fiercely punctuated with a verbal venom that Hawk had only ever heard twice before. The first, when Eva had been taken by her now-dead first husband, Frankie, and the last, when Danny had been kidnapped by Mama V, a notorious hit woman from one of the Cali gangs the Horsemen had some trouble with a while back.

But even more surprising than Deuce’s unholy anger was Ripper. Having never before openly defied Deuce’s orders, Ripper was staring his prez down, silently refusing to give up this kill.

“You wanna go runnin’ after the fuckin’ Russians?” Deuce ground out. “You wanna end up shark meat and leave my baby girl and granddaughter without you? ’Cause that’s what’s gonna happen if you take off, guns blazin’, trying to take out an asshole protected by one of the biggest cartels in the fuckin’ world.”

“If I’m protectin’ my family and the club,” Ripper said, “I don’t give a fuck if I gotta die doin’ it.”

All at once the anger that had taken root in Deuce seemed to evaporate. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, sighing as he turned away from Ripper. “But I ain’t gonna let you, so reel your fuckin’ shit in before I reel it in for you.”

Ripper’s face gave Hawk the impression that shit was about to go south real quick. In order to avoid watching Ripper get a beat down from Deuce, Hawk cleared his throat, gaining the attention of both men, and addressed Deuce.

“You got your shit in place with the Russians?”

Deuce nodded briskly. “Got two clubs lined up, eager for the business. All we can do now is hope they ain’t too mad when Yenny goes down, and take what we’re offering.”

Hawk didn’t think there was going to be a problem. The Bratva might be greedy, but just like every other criminal organization out there, they didn’t like going to war. War meant losing bodies, and losing bodies meant losing money and resources. War was a lose-lose for everyone involved.

“I think for once the law is gonna be on our side,” Hawk said, feeling the weight of those words fall heavily upon him. His chest tightened, his breathing quickened, and he gripped the blanket beneath him hard enough that the soft fabric began to tear.

Get it together, he commanded himself. Get your shit together.

Only he didn’t see how he could. If Deuce’s actions were anything to go by, once the rest of the boys found out their plans and once Dorothy knew what he had to do, the next few weeks were going to be hell on his emotions.

Goddamn, he didn’t want to hurt that woman, not again. She’d been hurt her entire life by nearly everyone in it.

“I’m sorry,” Deuce said quietly.

Still gripping the blanket, Hawk swallowed hard and shook his head. “No,” he gritted out through clenched teeth. “Nothin’ to be sorry for. If it weren’t for you, I never would’ve made it this long.” Looking Deuce directly in the eye, he stared hard at the man. “Never would’ve met Dorothy, and never would’ve had my boy. Never woulda had nothin’ worth havin’.”

Deuce’s eyes narrowed, and his face contorted with angry lines. “I didn’t do it for you,” he spat, suddenly sounding as angry as he looked. “Didn’t do it for Cox or for Ripper.” He turned, pinning Ripper with a glare before turning back to Hawk.

“Didn’t do it for Dirty either, didn’t do it for any of you. Picked your sorry asses up off the street, gave you a place to stay, put food in your bellies and clothes on your backs . . . I did all that fuckin’ shit for me.

“I did that shit for me,” he repeated forcefully, slapping his hand onto his chest. “My old man had a club full of mean old bastards just like him, that’s what that motherfucker left me with. I had to clean fuckin’ house, bring in boys I knew would be loyal to me and only to me, and who better to be loyal than a piece of shit like you, eatin’ out of the fuckin’ garbage can, wanted by the fuckin’ law. I knew if I saved you . . .”

Deuce glared at him through red-rimmed eyes flashing with emotion. Behind him, Ripper was staring at their prez, looking shocked. That made two of them. Never before had anyone seen this sort of show of emotion from Deuce. But at the same time, Hawk was grateful for the unexpected outburst, as it caused his own emotions to even out somewhat, allowing him to loosen his death grip on the poor, mutilated blanket and unclench his teeth. For some reason, he’d always been more apt to remain calm while others unraveled, and this was no different.

“I knew if I saved you,” Deuce continued, “you piece of shit, that you’d be willin’ to lay down and die for me and this fuckin’ club! This shit is my fault, you fuckin’ feel me? My fault!”

“Prez,” Hawk said quietly. “This ain’t your burden to bear. It’s mine, always has been. Fact is, no matter your reasons, you gave me a life I never woulda had, and whether you want to accept it or not, I’m thankin’ you for that. Now, the club comes before anything else, always has, always will, and I’ll do my part because I’m a Horseman first, and we do what we gotta do to keep the club goin’. No matter what.”

His words didn’t have the calming effect on Deuce that he hoped they would have; if anything, they seemed to agitate him further. No longer still, Deuce was shifting from foot to foot, his brow furrowed, his features pinched.

Hawk didn’t know what to do, what to say, so he did and said nothing at all, planning to just wait out the tumultuous storm that was Deuce West. But no storm came, and surprisingly enough Deuce seemed to be able to get himself under control before the impending explosion could happen. Shoving his hands into the pockets of his leathers, Deuce schooled his expression. Although his body remained rigid, not a trace of anger could be found in his features.

Odd, Hawk thought, that so much had changed in such a short period of time. Looked like he wasn’t the only one who had done some growing up recently.

“I’ll get Christopher here,” Deuce said shortly. “I’ll send Tegen and Cage tomorrow. Ain’t like they got shit better to do than slap each other around anyway.”

And with that, he left. Just turned and marched across the room, shoving Ripper out of his way, and then he was gone, leaving Hawk staring after him.

As Ripper and Hawk turned to look at each other, Hawk found the man looking him over, his expression rather sad.

“Prez told you?”

Ripper nodded. “Cornered him, made him tell me what the fuck was goin’ on with you.”

“You still pissed?” Hawk asked.

Ripper shrugged. “No.” A couple of silent seconds followed, then, “Wanna play video games?”

“Brother,” Hawk said. “If you can get the TV up here, I’m fuckin’ down. I’ve been stuck readin’ Tegen’s damn books.”

“Say no more,” Ripper said, grimacing.

When Ripper disappeared into the hallway, Hawk sank back down into his pillows and closed his eyes. Blowing out a deep, noisy breath, he willed himself not to be a pussy. After all, he’d spent the second half of his life expecting this day to someday come, waiting for it even.

He just hadn’t expected it to come after he’d finally gotten everything he’d always wanted. That, more than anything else, really fucking sucked.

“You forget how to chop wood, son?”

Jase glared at his father.

No, he hadn’t fucking forgotten how to chop wood; he’d fucking forgotten how to function without some sort of liquor coursing through his veins.

After sleeping off his hangover, he’d woken up in need of a drink only to find that the remaining liquor in Cage’s truck had mysteriously disappeared, as had his keys. At first he’d been pissed off, storming through his parents’ house, wildly searching through the cupboards and ransacking the closets. And then he’d been desperate, even going as far as to look under beds and in his parents’ dresser drawers for a bottle of anything. Any-fucking-thing. Only to come up empty. Not only that, he’d ended up with his father’s meaty fist slamming into his face.

While lying on the floor, his vision going in and out, he’d thought he’d heard his father calling him a goddamn drunk and his mother arguing that he wasn’t, but was only in need of a good cleanup.

After that, everything grew a little fuzzy. The next thing he knew he was in his old bed, hanging over the side, puking up whatever was left in his empty stomach into a small trash can his poor mother held beneath his head.

He spent the next few days either in bed sleeping away the physical misery his body was enduring or pacing his room, trying to walk off the constant nausea and the need to make a liquor store run. Which he would have if his father hadn’t been standing guard outside his bedroom with a .22 rifle cradled in his arms. Even Jase’s oldest brother, Daniel, had joined the party, and was taking turns with their father to babysit him.

It was both humiliating and sobering, pun fucking intended.

And now that he could walk without shaking and speak without retching, his father had a list of chores for him to do. But instead of calling them chores, his dear old dad was fondly referring to them as necessary punishments for being such a dumbass.

Shoveling the driveway and sidewalk had been first on his list of dumbassery punishments, followed by cleaning the windows from the inside, scraping the grime off the old claw-foot tub upstairs, straightening up the holy mess that was the attic, mending a broken log in the backyard fence, and now, God help him, he was chopping wood in the snow. Had been at it all day because, for reasons unknown to him, his parents had a deep-rooted love of wood-burning stoves.

Then, to make already shitty circumstances even worse, his other brother had shown up this morning with his wife and two little kids in tow. One girl, one boy, dressed in the obligatory blue and pink, both cherub-faced, well-behaved little fuckers who adored their parents and only served to agitate Jase when everyone else was fawning over them. In fact, he almost preferred being outside, freezing his ass off, turning his hands into blister-ridden messes to being cooped up inside the house with the happy fucking family.

Over and over again he’d continuously asked himself why he’d come here, and he’d still be asking himself at that very moment if he hadn’t already figured out the answer.

As usual, his old man had been right about him. He was a drunk. He’d started drinking heavily the moment he’d found out the baby Dorothy had given birth to wasn’t his, that Hawk had betrayed the bonds of brotherhood, and to top it all off, Dorothy didn’t even remember him and subsequently wanted nothing to do with him.

So he’d kept drinking all through Chrissy’s trial, and throughout the years that followed. He struggled to be a father, but instead ended up as a nuisance to his girls, a motherfucking embarrassment too caught up in his own bullshit to be able to pay any attention to them.

And then even later, after Dorothy’s memories had returned and he kept trying to speak to her, each time getting rejected, he turned time and time again to the bottle to stave off the pain she caused him with every word she wouldn’t speak, every look she wouldn’t give, every touch she withheld from him.

As the years rolled by, he continued throwing drinks back until drinking had become a part of his daily routine. He could function better with alcohol in his system than he could without it.

But truth be told, hindsight was 20/20. After the surprisingly awful bout of withdrawal he’d just endured, he’d come to the conclusion that his old man, as fucking usual, was right.