Lazarus (The Henchmen MC 7)

Sunny, unlike his father and brother, was a big guy. He had the typical gym-rat build, all shoulders and chest with neglected legs, giving him a triangular shape that was laughable to anyone who knew anything about fighting. And to me who knew just about everything about it, it was fucking hysterical.

There was no way he could take me even though he had a solid extra thirty pounds of muscle more than me.

He was top heavy and easy to knock over.

And as it always went in a fight, if you were the first on the floor, you were going to fucking lose.

I curled low and struck up toward his midsection, landing a painful blow to his spleen that sent him back a step. But he didn't hiss or curse in pain. It was the sheer impact that moved him, not the agony he should have been in.

When my next hook caught him on the jaw and sent him flying and there was still nothing from him- no cursing, no hesitation as he moved upward again, my gaze slid momentarily toward Edison and Pagan, all of us knowing exactly what was going on in the same moment.

Sunny Andrews was one of those freaks who didn't feel pain.

No wonder he got off inflicting it.

He had no idea what it felt like.

To say that, because of that little fact, the fight got ugly, would be a gross understatement.

By the time he was finally out cold, the entire floor of his small main room was streaked in blood, pretty much every last drop from him- the only solid strike he got on me causing my nose to bleed for a short moment before clotting up.

My hands, so accustomed to fighting, so used to the damage that it was hard to even break the skin anymore, actually fucking hurt as I looked down at the twisted, unconscious body of Sunny Andrews.

I curled and uncurled them, making sure I hadn't broken anything as we all moved back out and climbed silently into the car and turned toward home- Edison at the wheel because I had just walked toward the passenger instinctively, not trusting myself to drive.

"Know how much that fucker could have made in the ring?" Pagan broke the silence, shaking his head as he lit another cigarette, acknowledging that the idiot could have made the same amount of dough if he had not used it for evil.

It would be told late the next morning that Reign got the call.

Sunny Andrews hadn't made it through the night.

By the time paramedics had arrived, called by his father, he had stupidly tried to reset his own ribs and had punctured a lung, filled with blood, and suffocated to death.

It wasn't a painful end for such an evil fuck since he didn't feel it.

But it was fitting.

I wasn't a man who took lives.

But just that once, I was more than okay with it.SIXTEENBethanyHe said nothing as he looked down at me.

Everything about him was unreadable for a long minute.

It was nothing like how he was when he came out of the ring at Hex where the fight was just a fight- just a way to please his boss and make some extra money. This was the kind of fight that obviously took a bit out of him. You could see the tension in the square set to his shoulders, in the muscle ticking in his jaw.

Or maybe I was projecting my own tension onto him based on the sheer amount of blood he had all up his jeans, across his white shirt, on his hands, his cheeks, dried in his hair.

My mouth felt weird and I swallowed hard to try to alleviate the sensation. "Shower?" I offered, my voice a little oddly wobbly.

He nodded at that and started toward the bathroom door, reaching inside to turn the light on before turning back to me. "You want to join?" he asked and his warm little smile was pulling at his lips.

"How about you wash off ninety-nine percent of that and I will take you up on the offer?"

Because right then and there I realized- it didn't change anything. It didn't change how I felt for him if he had gone out and beat or killed the men who hurt me. It didn't, in my eyes, make him any lesser of a person, any worse of a man.

There was a different set of rules, it seemed, to this biker lifestyle. I had learned earlier what had happened to a man named Lex Keith when Wolf found out what he had done to Janie when she was just a girl. I learned about the damage Cash had done to Lo's abusive ex. I got the painful, ugly details of what Duke had done to the men who carved into Penny's back.

They didn't live inside of normal society.