“Now, wait a minute,” she said, getting ready to defend Delainey’s choice in spite of her initial misgivings. “There was a time when if anyone had known about us, they would’ve given me the same advice and they would’ve been wrong. I trust Delainey. She’s not stupid and I think she’s in love with him.”
“Then contrary to what you believe, your friend isn’t very bright,” Hunter retorted.
“You take that back. You don’t know her and you don’t have the right to judge her like that. She’s always had my back and I’m going to have hers right now. Did you know that she was the one who encouraged me to honor my feelings for you two when I was too afraid of what people might say? Yeah, it was Delainey who gave me the courage to say, screw the haters, I’m grabbing onto what makes me happy. And if it weren’t for Delainey, we wouldn’t have that precious baby boy to call our own because I would’ve listened to that little voice of fear telling me that it would never work between us. So, you just hush up and listen to what I have to say.”
Hunter, still unhappy but visibly taken aback by her little speech, fell into his recliner with a scowl. “Fine. Talk. But we know things about Bronx that you don’t and likely your friend doesn’t know either.”
“Fair enough but I think it’s safe to assume that you and Jax didn’t live pristine lives before you met me. People can change if they have the right reason and maybe Dee is Bronx’s reason to change.”
Jax rolled his eyes. “You’re placing too much faith in a man who has no morals or sense of fair play. We, at the very least, had a semi-functioning moral compass.”
“Says you. We can all judge. But let’s put that aside for just a minute and look at the bigger picture. There are kids in danger in that house. You know terrible things happened there. And no one has stepped forward yet. That means kids are still being abused. We have to find a way to stop them.” To her surprise Jax and Hunter shared a look that immediately made her question. She gestured between them. “What was that? That look…do you know something that could help?”
Jax spoke first. “Yeah. We have something. But it’s…private.”
“What do you mean?”
Hunter shook his head, his face flushed. “Fuck. Do you even still have it?” he asked Jax in a low tone.
“Yeah, I have it.”
Exasperated, she asked, “Have what?”
Hunter nodded to Jax, giving him permission. “We were in that house. We saw what was happening and we knew from past experience what that fucker would want from us at some point. We fit the profile of the kids he selected for his special times, he called them. No family looking out for us, bonafide troublemakers, and just the right age. And we weren’t going to let that fucker get us. So we made a plan and carried it out.”
A chill chased her blood. “What was the plan?”
“We hid a video camera in the room that he liked to use for his fun. And we caught him doing his thing to one of the boys. We didn’t tell anyone what we were doing. Just got the footage and hid the tape. Then, just as we expected, the fucker came for us. It was late, always late at night, and when he told us to drop our pants, we told him to go fuck himself. Mother Millie as she liked to be called, was ready to beat us with the soap bag, but that’s when we let the bomb drop — we told them about the footage we had and if they so much as laid a finger on either of us, we’d go to the cops. They might not believe our word but they’d have to believe what they saw on camera.”
“What’d they do?”
“At first they just stared at us. I don’t think they knew what to think. Then they told us to go back to our rooms. We didn’t wait to see if our threat would hold. We bugged out of there the following day and never went back.”
“Do you still have that footage? And who was the kid?”
“His name was Gage.”
“What happened to the kid?”
Jax and Hunter shook their heads, admitting they didn’t know.
“Look, the fact that the three of you had a bad experience in that house…I think that’s worth taking the complaint to the cops.”
“Maybe we don’t want to open that door,” Jax said quietly and she understood why. It had to be horrible to have that secret in your mental theater but all the more reason that they had to go public…for the kids in that house right now.
Zoe went to Jax and curled her arm around his neck, lifting on her toes to kiss him tenderly. “What if our son was in that house? Wouldn’t you want someone to do anything in their power to help him if we couldn’t?”
At the mention of their child, Jax stiffened and his gaze turned feral. “I would rip those fuckers apart with my bare hands if they dared to touch him like that,” he said with a viciousness she didn’t question but he saw her point even if he didn’t want to. He looked to Hunter. “Find the tape.”
Hunter didn’t argue. Her point had punctured their last defense. Now she just one more hurdle. “We should meet with Bronx…compare notes. There’s strength in numbers and I know you hate that idea but this is really bigger than your beef with the man.”
Hunter swore under his breath, agreeing but only after tacking on a terse stipulation of his own, “I’m not fucking sitting down to dinner with him and that’s final.”
Okay. Fair enough. She’d work on that. For now, she’d take what she could get. She smiled at Hunter and pulled him into her embrace, sealing the agreement with the sweetest weapon in her feminine arsenal. “You’re a good man,” she murmured, even as her hand cupped
his cock nestled within his jeans. “But so tense…maybe a little something to relax you is in order…”
And then she practically led them both by their cocks straight to the bedroom.
-13-
Pyro flicked his lighter, watching the flame dance as the small stream flared before he snapped the lid shut, extinguishing the heat, only to flick it again. Fire was beautiful, simple in its ability to give life or take it. He loved watching it burn and in fact, his fingers bore the scars of one too many close encounters but he didn’t care. Chicks dig scars, right? Speaking of chicks, Randy flopped into the chair opposite him with a grin, saying, “I heard you were tearing it up last night…poor Donna’s never gonna be the same, yeah?”
He ignored Randy’s leer until the man dropped it with an apologetic mumble and then watching the crowd filter in and out of the dive bar, kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. The thing was, someone had a taste for blood and it was up to him to figure out who. He owed Bronx a peculiar debt but one he honored with every breath in his body. As luck would have it, Randy was feeling chatty.
“So…uh, yeah, word out there is that Bronx is alive. Crazy, huh? Our fearless leader must be bullet proof,” Randy said, signaling the busty waitress, Peaches, for a beer. Peaches, an older woman who was hard as nails and could land a punch that would rattle your incisors, was nothing like her name implied but Pyro liked her. He respected women who didn’t take no shit. Plus Peaches had been around for as long as he could remember. Peaches approached, wiping her hands on her dirty apron, her flinty gaze going to Randy with obvious annoyance when he had the stupidity to pinch her broad backside with a wink. “Hey there, big mama…how about something to wet my whistle?”
Peaches smiled and leaned forward so that her tits practically smothered Randy and said, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself with a chainsaw?”