Carmen Jenner - Welcome to Sugartown

“I won’t breathe a word, brother, I swear it.”

“Don’t know if I’m willing to take that risk, Kick.”

“Come on, man, I just killed our fucking VP—”

“Your VP. I never made patch on account of me being behind bars.”

“You really think I’m gonna rat you out? If it gets out that I killed a brother me and everyone I’ve ever met is as good as fucking dead.”

“You gonna run instead?”

“You gonna let me?”

I shake my head. “You run and they’re gonna know you had something to do with it. The way I see it, you got only one option. Bandidos have a chapter in Byron Bay. Fake an ambush.”

“There’ll be retaliation.”

“Not my problem.”

“You’ll have to knock me around a little, otherwise they’d never believe it.”

“Oh, I’ll knock you around, alright. It’d be my pleasure.”

After checking on Ana—who is still shaken enough to let me help her get dressed and hold her in my arms for a moment before shrugging out of my grip and falling to her hands and knees to throw up—Kick and I work quickly to make the scene look like a set-up.

When it comes time to rough him up, I can feel Ana watching me like a hawk. I hate the fact that she’s seen what she has tonight. I hate that I completely lost control around her and gunned down a man not three feet from her side. But, most of all, I hate that she’s seen this side of me—the side that proves my degeneracy. I also hate that another man has had his fingers inside my woman, and that if I hadn’t acted quickly it could have been so, so much worse.

I turn toward her. She’s studying me like I’m someone she doesn’t know, which I guess is partly true, but still, her eyes volley back and forth between Kick and I like she’s waiting for another fight to break out. I know that isn’t the case. Kick is dead unless we do this, and he knows it, too. “Baby girl, look away.”

I slam my fist into the side of Kick’s face while his attention is still on her. He rocks back on his heels, but I don’t allow him time to recover. I beat him again and again until he lies motionless on the ground. I’m pretty sure I’ve broken his nose, fractured his cheekbone and cracked a few of his ribs, and while I may have relished that first punch as if it would give me back the three years I spent inside after taking the rap for him, I didn’t revel in any of the rest of it.

At one time, Kick had been my only real friend. A part of me missed him. A part of me resented him, but no part of me wanted to do him grievous bodily harm. He had, after all, killed a brother for me, and if the club ever found out what had really gone down here, they’d make him an example. And let me tell you, you don’t ever wanna be the example. You’d pray for the devil himself to take you before the Angels had their way with you.

The nurse gives me an uneasy smile as she leaves the room with a promise to return with more bandages. All our other wounds have been tended to. My fractured forearm would be in a cast for another six weeks, and the cuts on both our foreheads had only been superficial, but the gravel rash on my arm was bleeding like crazy. My jacket had to be cut away because blood had dried and fused my skin to the leather, and I wore a paper hospital gown while the nurse pried the remaining bits of gravel and debris from my skin.

Elijah grabs my hand and squeezes as he mutters for the millionth time since getting off the bike in front of the hospital “I’m so sorry, baby.”

I squeeze his hand back, lifelessly—on account of the painkillers, or the fact that something has broken inside me tonight, I’m not sure. I don’t say anything in return. I don’t want to, and I don’t have time, because the nurse comes back wielding bandages, and begins sluicing more fluid over the wound, and extracting more pieces of road from my arm.

Elijah—no, Ethan, because despite the insanity of what happened on that road, I hadn’t missed the fact that they’d called him that, several times—rises from his seat beside me and says, “I’m just gonna go make a phone call, tell your folks we’re okay.”

He was calling my dad? Was he completely freaking nuts? I give him a horrified look, at least I think it was horrified. The Endone the nurse had given me probably makes me look like a schizophrenic koala bear. Elijah/Ethan/Moose shoots me a meaningful look, smiles at the nurse and clasps my face in his hands. I don’t have time to react, but I think I probably would have pulled away if it weren’t for the drugs clouding my brain. “You must have hit your head harder than you thought, baby girl.”

I think he’s angry I’m putting a chink in the armour of his precious ruse. When we’d hobbled into the emergency room he’d sprung into this story of how we’d been out for a carefree night ride and hit a pothole and come off the bike. He’d made no mention of being run off the road by a group of vicious biker fucks who’d tried to rape me and torture him. He made no mention of the fact that he’d blown a man’s head off and beat another within an inch of his life. The way the lies had rolled off his tongue had made me sick because he was so damn good at it. He’d been lying a long time, it seemed.

As he stares at me, waiting for his words to sink in, I suddenly remember the phone call. How stupid of me to forget. He’s not calling my dad; he’s just calling “the club” with an anonymous tip that one of their boys is broken and bloody and tied to a motorcycle in the middle of nowhere. I smile and nod and play along because I know there’s something off about him right now, as if that isn’t the fudging understatement of the century, and I’m worried that he might not step outside and make that phone call after all and right now I really, really need to be away from him.

“Be right back,” he says to the nurse and shuts the door to my room behind him.

Once I’m certain he’s gone I reach out with a shaking hand and grab the nurse’s hand. I look at her name badge and her friendly, sweet face. “Jane, does that door have a lock on it?”

“No, but I can alert security if you need me to?”

I shake my head. If Elijah can’t get to me through security he’ll likely freak out and start thinking with his fists and, as far as I want to be from him right now, I don’t want him going back to jail. “Do you think we could shift rooms?”

“Are you in danger, Miss Belle?”

I ignore her question and rummage through my bag for my phone. “No. I’d just really rather not see him right now.”

“Do you have someone else to come and pick you up?”

I nod and Jane places a wide sticky bandage over my arm and gently pats it into place. “You’re all set here.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll switch off the lights and tell him you’ve gone in for a CT scan. That’s the most I can do without calling security.”

“Thanks.”

I hit the call button on my phone and after three rings she picks up, sounding breathless. “You had better be calling me with details or the next time I see you I’m going to club you over the head with my battery-operated friend here.”

“Holly, I need you to come pick me up.”

We pull out from the parking lot and head toward the town’s exit. The same road I travelled on with Elijah just a few hours ago. Funny how so much can change in such a short amount of time. After all my paperwork was signed and I was given the hospital’s okay to leave, Jane had snuck both Holly and I out of the service entrance. We’d climbed into Holly’s Peugeot and hightailed it out of there without being seen. Or, at least, I thought we’d gone unnoticed, but if I was correct, the headlight tailing us belonged to Elijah.

“Okay, I don’t want to alarm you but I think we’re being followed,” Holly said glancing between her rear-view and my stoic face.

“I know.”

“Should I pull over? Make him grovel on his knees?”

“Just drive.”

“What the hell happened? Two hours ago you were pledging your love and preparing to hand over your virginity with a big red bow and now you’re avoiding him?”

“We didn’t have an accident.”

“Yeah, I got that much. What’s with the super secret squirrel act?”

“Elijah used to belong to the Hell’s Angels.”

For a moment I think she’s hasn’t heard me properly but then her screech of, “GET THE FUCK OUT!” fills the car and I want to cry, but I think the Endone’s numbed my brain cells, too. Suddenly, all I want to do is sleep away this nightmare and wake up healed and as far as possible from the shit storm Elijah’s dragged me into.

“We were chased and sideswiped, held at gunpoint. One of them tried to rape me.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Are you alright?”

“I wish,” I whisper, and feel tears finally prick my eyes until I’m sobbing again like I was on the side of that road.

“Ana, what should I do?” Holly asks and I almost laugh, because in the fourteen years we’ve known one another I’ve never heard her sound so serious and afraid.

“Just keep driving.”

“You wanna go home?”

“No. Dad will flip if he sees Elijah and I fighting on the front lawn with me looking like this. Take me to your place, please?”

“Of course.” She looks at my shirt, the one Elijah had taken off once my jacket had been cut away and insisted I wear home. I can almost hear the wheels turning in her head. “You said tried? They didn’t, did they?”

“No. Elijah stopped them.”

“Of course he did,” she mutters and then clearly, after she’s thought some more about it she asks, “How?”

I turn and give her a look that pretty much says, “Don’t ask” and she doesn’t.