Pagan (The Henchmen MC 8)

It was that simple.

Until the next morning when I got woken up by Reign pounding on my door, dragging my ass out of bed at around ten, about an hour earlier than usual. What can I say, I stay up late. Mornings are for nine-to-fivers.

"Get dressed," he barked. "Boots and cut too. The mother fucking Lebanese pushed up their ship date, and we need to hit the road now to make it. Normally, I'd tell 'em to go fuck themselves, that we had a deal, but this is a big shipment, these guys are a new contact. And we don't have any other buyers for these kinds of weapons. So you, me, Laz, Renny, Duke, and Wolf are hitting the road. Repo and Cash are hanging back to keep things under control here with all the new probies."

"Just out of pure fucking curiosity," I said as I moved toward my dresser to grab jeans, "why the fuck me?"

I mean, technically, Reeve was probably the better choice of probates to bring, next to Laz. Even Edison might have been a better choice, but with his mysterious past, I figured maybe there was a reason Reign didn't pick him. Cy, well, he was better at the compound, keeping the morale up.

Reign shrugged. "Mood would be tense if I didn't throw you or Cy in the mix," he said, and that was true enough. Reign, Wolf, Duke, and Laz were all serious types. Renny was equal parts laid-back and freaky dark and ruthless. It just depended on the situation. Me, I guess I was the mood-elevator. "You'd both be good if shit came down to hand-to-hand, with Cy having his martial arts background, but you're more equipped to handle guns."

"From what I hear," I said, pulling a shirt on, then sitting down to tie my boots, "your woman is doing her damnedest to teach Cy all about guns."

To that, Reign exhaled hard enough to call it a sigh, raking a hand down his face. "That fucking woman," he said, shaking his head, but there was a smile pulling at his lips, a depth of meaning in his eyes. "Has she put any holes in anything?"

I felt my lips twitch as I stuffed my shit into my pockets and grabbed my cut. "Just the side of one of Repo's cars."

"At least it wasn't the side of the building this time," he said with a laugh, like it was some private joke I hadn't been around long enough to be privy to.

After that, we hit the road.

And I didn't have time to call or stop by.

And I was gone for two days.

I had literally just gotten in, had a shower and a square meal, and my next fucking move was to drive down to Kennedy's salon to see if I could catch her working late.

The fact that my chest did this weird as shit thrill thing when I saw the light on inside as I parked, yeah, I had no fucking clue what that shit was about, but I was trying like hell to convince myself it was because I needed my cock buried inside her as soon as possible again.

I walked in to see her standing there in a little black dress and I decided I couldn't wait to get her back to my place or the compound. I was going to fuck her right there in her goddamn shop.

But then she turned.

The bruise caught my eye first, foreign, completely out of place. It was a darkening blue and purple color spreading over the top of her cheekbone and out toward her hairline.

My guts twisted, somehow knowing that it wasn't just something like she had been clumsy and whacked her face off something. And then my eyes drifted. And I saw the mother fucking rip of her dress.

Rage, for me, was familiar.

I lived for it in an odd way.

I thrived on it.

It built up into a heady cocktail that I used to fuel my fights every week.

But because I only fought once a week, it was something that I could outwardly control, could keep up appearances of being collected even when my blood felt like gasoline that caught a spark.

This rage though, the rage in seeing a woman I gave a shit about with a ripped dress, with haunted eyes and bruises? Yeah, it made every other kind I had ever known seem like mild annoyance.

It was a mother fucking wildfire through my system.

It burned through every single inch of me.

But I couldn't flip.

I couldn't rage out.

I needed to keep the fuck calm.

Whatever she had been through, she was barely holding it together, and I needed answers.

When I spoke, my voice was almost foreign to my own ears, firm, but soft at the same time, not wanting to give her any indication of how worked up I was. "Kennedy, what the fuck happened?"