ZACK: Southside Skulls Motorcycle Club (Southside Skulls MC Romance Book 4) Read online

  “Quiet down!” Skid said. Although Stone commanded a lot of respect, he wasn’t as disciplined as Skid was. The room fell completely silent and their vice president went on to say, “This new alliance with the Defenders is still on shaky ground.” Zack felt like Skid looked right at him when he said that. Zack had pissed them off by knocking out a guy named Spider in the parking lot of a Memphis bar. Stone had ordered him to apologize but instead he had gone to the aid of Spider’s girlfriend and baby son after Spider got wasted and threatened to kill her and take the baby if she didn’t agree to take him back. She had a bruise on her face and a cut on her lip and blood on her shirt that undoubtedly came from her nose. Zack wanted to kill him, but he knew not only he but his club would pay dearly for that. He smiled at what he and the few brothers he trusted to keep their mouths shut had done to him instead. By the time the piece of shit woke up on the riverbank, nude and probably freezing his tiny dick off, Nicole and Liam and Nicole’s friend and babysitter had been packed up and moved into two of the apartments owned by the club. If it were up to Zack she would have gone far away from Memphis, but Nicole was holding firm that she wasn’t ready to give up her job and leave town. She had spent the night at the clubhouse with him, in his bed, while he slept on the floor. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Between his aching cock and the fussing baby, he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep, but the second he took her to her new place and dropped her off the next day, he’d missed her presence.

  Nicole had let him help her that night but for the past two weeks she’d been refusing any help he offered her and had even taken to leaving a twenty, or once even a fifty, on his table when he came in to the bakery…to “pay him back.” No matter how much he objected, she wouldn’t concede that she didn’t owe him anything, so he finally just started taking the money to make her feel better, but saving it for her for when she was ready to finally leave. Zack reluctantly put away his thoughts of Nicole and tuned his ears back into what Skid was saying:

  “Friday night, we’ll need six men to follow the van and six more to stand by while they unload it…” Zack stood up. Skid looked at him like the only thing keeping him from taking out his piece and shooting him were witnesses. “What?” he said.

  “With all due respect,” he said, looking from Skid to Stone and over to Stone’s favorite sergeant at arms and one of Zack’s best friends, Justin. “Why the fuck are we aligning ourselves with these assholes? We don’t need them. We sure as hell don’t need to get back into a business that we worked hard to get out of.” The Invaders, Zack’s club, had spent years as the biggest arms and drug dealers in the south before Stone’s son was killed in a shoot-out with the cops. After that, the despondent president had eased his soul by trying to bring the club from being one of the few one percenters in the south, to…if not legitimacy…something close enough to keep most of them alive and out of prison. Zack honestly didn’t understand why, just when they seemed to be turning a corner, the executive board seemed to want to take them back in the wrong direction.

  “I believe we’ve discussed this with you already, Zack. The executives voted on this alliance and since you are not an executive in this club, you don’t get a say in that…you just do what you’re told.”

  “Oh, so now this club is being run like, say…the Head Hunters? You fucking do what I tell you and you do it blindly? Since when do we not get a say in what goes on around here? Did that change when I was gone for nine months, trying to scare up some alliances that would really do this club some good and not get us all fucking dead?”

  Zack knew he was pushing the limits, but he was confused and pissed off. He left his home, his family, and everything he knew three years ago to get away from his asshole father and the shit that went on in that club. Zack felt a twinge of…something, at the thought of his father. A fresh memory of watching Swinger’s chest explode just before he hit the ground, and the wailing of his mother when he’d told her he was dead, flashed across his mind. The world was a better place without Swinger walking it, Zack knew that rationally, but sometimes the little boy that still lived in his heart wanted to argue the point. He put those thoughts away and focused again on what was happening in the room. Rumbles of conversation had begun to roll through the seats of the men who, like Zack, hadn’t been given any choice in this alliance. His directness seemed to spark confidence in some of them and soon there were a dozen or more on their feet wanting the same answers that Zack did…what were they going to get out of this and how was it going to benefit the club in the long run?

  Skid was banging the gavel and as the room began to quiet down, Stone’s hard stare was focused on Zack’s face. Zack hated that his president, a man that he greatly respected and admired, felt betrayed by him…but he had lived blind to what was going on in his father’s club for far too long to ever let it happen again. “One at a time,” Skid said, loudly. “Patch, what is your question?”

  “The same as Zack’s,” the biker who wore a patch over his left eye said. Patch’s left eye had been a casualty of his time in prison. He was arrested at eighteen for killing a rival gang member and sentenced to twenty years. He got paroled at thirty-five and he’d gone right back to the club he’d remained loyal to for all those years. He was usually quiet and reserved…but deadly when he had to be. Speaking out at church was new, and Zack was grateful to the man for having his back.

  Skid had to bang the gavel again to get the rest of the men vocally agreeing with Patch to quiet down. Zack saw him look at Stone. Stone gave him a nod and Skid turned to their treasurer, a man that went by the name of Comrade. Comrade looked out at the room through a pair of oddly light green eyes that from a distance almost seemed devoid of color. He ran a hand through his shaggy brown hair that grew up instead of down his back, and said:

  “The Defenders will be paying us a lot of money monthly to escort them from Memphis to a warehouse outside of Clarksville, where they have recently begun to store their merchandise.” In real English, everyone in the room knew that the warehouse was a virtual armory and the Defenders didn’t want any of the street gangs they did business with following them out there. The last time they’d been followed to their warehouse in Memphis had resulted in a bloody mess where they lost five men and all their “merchandise.” They were still at war with that gang, a deadly spinoff of the Mexican Mafia known as Los Bandidos. Basically, they wanted the Invaders to be their bodyguards, and that didn’t sit well with Zack, or a lot of the men in the room. “We need that money,” Comrade said, flatly.

  “Why?” Zack asked. “Are we in some kind of financial straits?”

  “I’ll take that one,” Stone said. Zack could see the sad look in his president’s eyes all the way from the back of the room. “I’ve tried hard to turn this club around. We’ve made some solid investments on the apartment buildings and bars we’ve bought around town. But look around you. We’re supporting hundreds of people. By cutting our ties with the cartels and refusing to push their poison out to our community, we’ve cut our income drastically. Without the relationship with the cartels, we haven’t been able to get the quality of guns we were getting before, so the Defenders have moved in to do what we couldn’t. To be fair, that club is strong enough that instead of choosing to ally with us, they could have chosen to go to war and simply rid themselves of us for good. This alliance will benefit us financially and keep us out of a war.” Zack couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Stone sounded defeated. It was unlike him and far from what their club had always stood for. As the room began to rumble again, and Skid banged the gavel, Stone got up from his chair behind the table at the center of it and walked out. Zack got up and was about to follow him when his phone vibrated in his pocket. He stepped out the door into the almost blinding sunlight and made the mistake of answering it without checking the caller ID. It was his mother.

  “Zachary, tomorrow evening is your father’s memorial.” He could tell by the sound of her voice that she’d been crying…again.
He’d talked to her more in the past two weeks than he had in three years and each time he did, she turned on the waterworks. He’d missed his father’s burial, but despite his mother’s attempts at guilting him, he slept just fine at night.

  “Yeah, and?” he said, forcing himself not to give into her dramatics.

  She sucked in a loud sob and said, “You need to be here. You let them put your father in the ground without paying your respects; you need to do it at the memorial. The club expects you to be here. I need you here…Please, Zack! It’s all falling apart. Randall is back and he’s taken over. I’m going to end up homeless and destitute!” Her wailing started then. To Zack it was akin to the sound of nails on a chalkboard. If he thought it was geared toward anything other than manipulating him, he might feel sorry for her. As it was, he was just pissed at himself for answering the phone.

  “I’m in Tennessee, Mona. I won’t make it to Texas overnight, so it’s too late even if I wanted to be there, which I don’t. Why would I pay respects to a dead man that I didn’t respect in life?”

  He had to listen to her sob for another full minute before she said, “He was your father, Zachary, and all he ever wanted, whether you believe it or not, was what was best for you.” Her voice went from high and screechy to soft and infused with as much fake motherly love as she could muster, “Please, baby, do this for me. I’m all alone. I’m broken and scared. You could fly out and be here by morning. Please.”

  Fuck. Zack hated the human part of him that wanted to buy into the idea that since she gave birth to him, he somehow owed her something.

  3

  Spider reached for Nicole, and the first thing she did was put Liam back into the bassinette and get between the man and the baby. As Spider grabbed at her, she opened her mouth to scream but he jerked her toward him and covered her mouth with his hand so quickly that she barely squeaked out a sound. Then he put the other arm around her neck and picked her up off her feet. Panic swelled inside of her and made her feel like her chest might burst as Liam’s screams pierced the room and she struggled for breath. Spider looked down at the baby and over at his brother, who was holding Stacey from behind with his hand clamped down over her mouth as well. Stacey’s eyes communicated the panic Nicole was feeling. She hated herself for getting her friend involved in this mess. Spider’s hot breath permeated her ear as he pressed his mouth against it and said, “I’m gonna let you go, but if you scream, I’ll knock out every one of your teeth. Do you understand me?” He was holding onto her neck so tightly that she could barely move, but she managed a small nod. Relief filled her veins as he dropped her back down into the chair. She started to reach for her crying baby, and he shoved her back and picked Liam up himself. Liam screamed louder, and tears streamed down Nicole’s face as she pleaded for Spider to give him to her. “Shut the hell up!” Spider told Nicole. He stared down at the baby for a few seconds longer, not even trying to calm him down, and then he looked over where Stacey was being held and said, “Take him in the bedroom and calm him down.” The other biker let go of Stacey and she rushed over and took Liam. Nicole gave her a grateful and apologetic look. As Stacey opened the door to the bedroom Spider told the other biker, “Go with her. I don’t want the bitch doing anything stupid like using her phone.”

  Stacey, Liam, and the greasy, high-looking biker that Nicole already despised, disappeared into the bedroom. Nicole was trying to control her breathing but her chest was rising and falling so quickly that she was in danger of hyperventilating and her heart was slamming against it so hard that she was afraid it might explode. Spider dropped down to his knees in front of her and he put his hand back on her neck and pulled her face in close to his. As he began to speak again, her stomach rolled – he smelled like old booze and cigarettes, and his wide pupils told her he had ingested more than that since he saw her earlier that morning. “Nicky, Nicky, Nicky…I’m so disappointed. I had the feeling that you weren’t listening to me earlier at the bakery, when we talked. See, I told you that I was giving you one more chance to come home. But I just had a feeling you weren’t going to show up, so I followed you. I’ve been sitting outside, trying to calm myself down because the last thing I want to do is hurt you.” He squeezed her neck tighter as he said that. “I’m taking you and the boy home tonight and this shit is going to be over, do you understand me?”

  Chaos ruled in Nicole’s head. She wanted so badly to tell him to fuck off, but the look in his eyes was different today. He looked like he almost wanted an excuse to snap her neck. If not for Liam she might let him put her out of her misery but she couldn’t let Spider take her baby…at least not without her there to protect him. “Okay, Spider. I’ll go with you. Please tell Vinnie not to hurt Stacey.”

  “What kind of animals do you think we are?” She didn’t answer that; she knew what they were capable of. Spider let go of her neck and licked his lips. “I knew you’d see things my way. You belong with me, Nicky, and my boy, he belongs with his daddy.” Spider never called Liam by his name. Sometimes Nicole wondered if he even knew it. Suddenly his hands were on her waist and he was staring at her breasts and licking his lips again. She tried to tell herself that he wouldn’t rape her right there with Stacey and his friend in the other room, but she knew differently. Spider did what he wanted, when he wanted to do it, and it would probably turn him on for them to hear her screams. His eyes traveled from her breasts up to her neck and then to her eyes. She tried to hide the loathing for him that she knew had to be there, but when he leaned in for a kiss, all bets were off. As soon as his lips covered hers, she opened her mouth so that he could slide his tongue inside…and then she bit down as hard as she could. Spider was trying to pull back, but she held on, gagging on the blood that filled her mouth. He finally brought his fist up and slammed it into the side of her head, causing her to lose her grip. As soon as she did, he fell back and covered his mouth with both of his hands. Blood was pouring out of his mouth and he was making sounds like a wild animal. Nicole glanced around her and saw the heavy, ceramic pot that Stacey’s prized houseplant lived in. Without hesitating, she grabbed it with both hands and slammed it down into his face. She thought she might have heard his nose crunch as she did, but he wasn’t awake to complain. She jumped up off the couch and rolled him over. Taking the gun out of the back of his jeans, she went over and knocked on the bedroom door.

  She tried to keep her voice from shaking as she said, “Vinnie, Spider needs you.” The door was pulled open and before the biker could react, Nicole pressed the gun into his chest. He looked down at it like he was considering just taking it out of her hands. She had the trigger covered with her finger and said, “Think about it, Vinnie, and I blow your chest wide open.” She was shaking, but it would be a big risk for him to try. “Stace, get Liam out of here.”

  “Nick…”

  “Go!” Vinnie kept his dark eyes pinned to Nicole’s face as Stacey pushed past him with Liam. “Take him to my place. I’ll be there soon.” Vinnie smiled then and said:

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “Go, Stacey!” Stacey held Liam tight to her chest. He was still screaming, but Nicole knew her friend would take care of him, even if she didn’t make it out of there alive. Stacey grabbed her purse next to the door and ran out, leaving the door open behind her.

  “Spider was right, you are a crazy bitch. He’s going to kill you for this, and he’s going to make it hurt.”

  “Fuck Spider and fuck you.” Nicole never thought she had murder in her, anywhere. But at that moment, she was willing to kill both men in the room, get her baby, and disappear forever. She was sweating as she pressed on the trigger, but when it didn’t do anything she could tell by the look on Vinnie’s face, she’d be the one dead before the night was over. He reached up and took the gun out of her hands and then grabbed both of her arms and turned her away from him as he twisted them up behind her back.

  “You’re not just crazy, you’re stupid. I guess Spider never showed you how to take off th
e safety…and I understand why.”

  “You’re breaking my fucking arms.”

  “I’m about to break a lot more than that, sweetheart.” Nicole couldn’t see him but with both of his hands on her arms, she knew that meant the gun was likely not directly pointed at her. She was dead either way once Spider woke up, so she decided to make a desperate move. Summoning all her strength by picturing her sweet baby in the arms of his monster father, she screamed out wildly, threw her body forward, and brought her leg up backwards as hard and fast as she could. Her arms felt like they were being torn from the sockets, but the satisfying crunch of her balls was like anesthesia to the pain she was feeling. Vinnie let go of her arms to grab for his crotch. He was still gripping the gun, but it was pointed at the floor and she hoped that he was in too much pain for his aim to be deadly when she ran for the open door.

  Zack had only meant to go for a ride and clear his head. He found himself in Memphis without any clear memory of getting there. He told himself then that as long as he was in town, he should check on Nicole and Liam. He drove past her apartment building first. When he didn’t see her little beat-up car in its spot, he continued down the road to the building where they had moved her friend, Stacey. He was at the stoplight just before the entrance to the parking lot when he saw the bikes: two shiny Harleys parked almost all the way up on the small cement porch of the tiny apartment. The light was still red, but ignoring it and the honks of the swerving cars, he raced toward the apartment. He’d just stopped the bike and jumped off it when he saw Nicole race out the front door like the place was on fire. The second thing he noticed was that she didn’t have Liam in her arms. He ran toward her, intercepting her before she even realized it was him. She began to scream and slap at him.