Hard Rider

I wanted it to be. I wanted her to be enough. I would have given anything for her to be enough.

But she wasn’t.

I could still see Marty’s body. I could still remember Dutch callin’ me boy, before Sylvia and all this mess. And I started seeing and hearing other things, things that hurt as much as needles in my skin.

“Cross?” Bex could feel it. I knew she could feel it. She could feel everything. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’, beautiful,” I said.

“You’re a liar,” she shot, givin’ me a look.

“Maybe so,” I said. “But you’re tired, and we can talk in the morning.”

“I’m not tired,” she protested, but the very word tired was enough to have her yawning.

“Now who’s the liar?” I teased. She eyed me again.

“The mornin’?”

“The mornin’,” I promised. “Everything in the mornin’.”

“Holding you to it, Cross DuFrane,” she said, closing her eyes again and rolling from my arms. Bex always did like to be the little spoon. But before I lay down beside her, I headed to the bathroom, needin’ it pretty bad. I stared in the mirror for a bit after I was done. And then I did somethin’ very strange. Somethin’ I would never think was somethin’ I would do. I opened the medicine cabinet. Mack had back surgery some years before, and I guess he did some of his recovering there in the cabin, ‘cause there was a bottle of pills gatherin’ dust in his medicine cabinet.

So I took some.

Because I didn’t want to hear or see or remember a goddamn thing, and I knew those pills could do that for me, I took some. Just popped ‘em into my mouth, re-capped the bottle, and put it back. Went and lay down beside Bex, and held her, and let the happiness set in. I forgot everything, all right. This time, it was enough.

Dutch

Dutch fingered the leather quietly, as though considering its quality. The patch was bare except for the bottom rocker: Prospect. Marty’s cut had come back to him with a note.

You wanted a war. You got a war.

“They won’t wait long,” Sylvia said, barely looking up from her nails. “I would think they’ll strike in the morning.”

“What makes you think that?” Dutch snapped. He was beset with a constant unease, his stomach always roiling. This was not going the way he’d imagined it. Sure, he’d managed to do some damage to the Blackhawks, but he’d lost one of his own, too. And more men than he thought had turned on him. The club was almost split even. And from what Soldier reported, while sewing up his own leg, the men who’d followed Blade and Cross weren’t just going to hide out or leave town until was over.

They were fighting back.

Against their own brothers.

“Why would they wait? They think they’ve got it in the bag,” Sylvia said. “They think they’ve got us outnumbered.”

“They do have us outnumbered,” Dutch growled.

“Only in quantity,” Sylvia said, sounding bored. “But three of those old geezers aren’t worth half one of our boys. Can barely shoot straight with their shaking hands and cataracts.”

Dutch was of the opinion that Sylvia was wrong. Those men might be old, but they weren’t useless. And the Blackhawks themselves were nothing to scoff at.

“Besides, we’re going to make them come to us,” Sylvia said. “And we’ve planned for that. We have home field advantage, darling.”

She was right about that, at least. The clubhouse was a fortress. He had men at every window, ready to pick off their enemies like snipers. They’d have to rush the door to do any damage, and by then, the numbers might even out.

“Now, I’d like to talk about her,” Sylvia said, putting down her nail file and leaning forward, elbows on Dutch’s desk. He could see all the way down her low-cut dress, the small, firm breasts that had once seemed so delicious and exotic. Now, he wondered if they were worth all the shit that came with the rest of the package.

Not that it was just the tits. It was her whole being. And it was the drugs. He knew it was the drugs. Which just reminded him that he was sitting in front of another line, waiting there all neat and clean and pretty. It disappeared up his nose and Dutch remembered why he wanted this war. His heart beat hard in his chest. He felt like a king. He was a king. She was his queen, and they were expanding their kingdom. No one could touch them, no one could beat him, he had the strongest army in the world…

“Dutch,” Sylvia’s voice snapped. “The girl. The bitch who betrayed us.”

&n

bsp; “Right,” Dutch said, nodding and sniffling, rising from his seat to pace the room. “What about her?”

“I want her,” Sylvia said. “I know where they’re keeping her, and I want her.”

“How do you know?” Dutch asked, marveling once more at his queen’s endless gifts. She smirked.

“Old man Mack hasn’t filed taxes for years, but last time he did, he claimed a property outside of town, out near the mine,” she said. “A cabin. I checked it out, because I thought it was strange that no one seemed to know anything about this cabin. It’s still there. It’s secluded. It’s the perfect place to hide a bitch.”

“They’re all there,” Dutch guessed, feeling quite brilliant as he did so. Sylvia shrugged.

“Possibly,” she said. “Likely, in fact.”

“So we should storm it! Let’s ride out there and cut those bastards off at the knees…”

Sylvia tsked.

“And leave the clubhouse vulnerable? This is our ace in the hole, Dutch. We want them to come to us, remember, love?”

“Right,” Dutch said. “Right.”

“Even if we killed each and every one of them out in the woods, we would leave ourselves vulnerable to the Blackhawks. What would we do if we returned to find that they’d ambushed us, taken over the clubhouse, using our own home against us?”

“Right,” Dutch growled. “Right. We stay, and we wait for them to come to us.”

“Yes, baby,” Sylvia purred.

“But you can’t go out there alone,” Dutch said.

“Actually, I think going there alone is a brilliant move,” Sylvia said, rising to meet Dutch mid-pace. She closed her arms around his neck, his hands gravitating to her hips. “I’ll go tonight, hide myself in the woods. I’ll be able to tell you the minute they leave, so you can prepare. And when they’re gone…”