Hawke Read online

  My brows came together. Something was very wrong.

  And then it occurred to me…

  “Cockroach said you’re going to prison,” I blurted out, blinking back the emotion behind my eyes.

  Hawke didn’t reply.

  “Are you going to prison, Hawke? Is that why you stopped caring?”

  He rubbed at the scruff on his face and sighed. “Honestly, Tyler, prison is made for people like me.”

  “People like what?”

  “You know what kind of person I am.”

  “You’re a good person.”

  His eyes twinkled with amusement. “Good?”

  “You helped me when Dad died.”

  “He died exactly a year ago today.”

  I swallowed thickly and nodded.

  “And that’s why you were alone today.”

  “Yeah,” I barely pushed out.

  He nodded once, and his face went flat. “I’m sorry you went through that, Tyler.”

  “It’s not your fault. Cowards did him in when he was alone, and now I’m scared something bad will happen to you.”

  “It’s not for you to worry about me going to prison. You need to worry about yourself, darlin’.”

  “But is it true?”

  He paused, as if debating whether to tell me or not. Then he said quietly, “There’s a warrant for my arrest. They’re on to me about somethin’.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “It’s not somethin’ I can get out of.”

  I wiped away the tears falling from my eyes. “You’re going to go away, aren’t you? That’s why you did what you did to Cockroach, because you don’t care anymore.”

  He frowned, turning his head to the entrance window, looking out in thought. “That bastard was hurting the girls, and he was lookin’ for one driving up and down that road. I would have handled him either way. But…yeah, I’m goin’ away.”

  “So leave. Find a place to escape to. Run away.”

  “No point runnin’. I’m tired, Tyler. I got the grim reaper looking over me, waiting. I got blood on my hands everywhere I go. Maybe…maybe this is what I need, what I deserve for all the things I’ve done.”

  No. No. No.

  I felt raw and panicked all of a sudden. This wasn’t happening. My life couldn’t endure another loss. No, my wounds were too fresh.

  I sucked in a breath. “When will you be back?”

  He glanced at me, a sad smile forming. “Darlin’, you’ll have grandbabies by the time I ever see daylight. Best thing you can do is forget me.”

  three

  Tyler

  That night was uneventful. Hawke didn’t spend it with girls, or with his brother, or with any of the guys. It was like they had no clue about the warrant, and later I’d find out they didn’t.

  He spent it alone outside the clubhouse, drinking a beer in a patio chair and staring up at the night sky. I couldn’t stay back and let him have his peace. I went to him and joined him in the empty seat beside him. He didn’t seem bothered by my presence.

  “Can I have a sip?” I asked him.

  He looked at me for a long moment, considering my question, and then he passed the bottle to me. I took a big swig, bigger than I should have, and it ended up going down the wrong hole. I coughed and sputtered, some of it dribbling out of my mouth.

  He chuckled. “Fuckin’ hell, Tyler. Too young for this shit.”

  I handed him back the beer. “Yeah, I’ll give it a go in a couple more years.”

  “You’re too sweet for this poison.” He finished the bottle and threw it on the ground and suddenly laughed deep in his chest. “I’m twenty-four, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life behind bars. It’s justice in a way, isn’t it? I’m the bad guy in all of this. They’re going to paint me as the devil, and I’m gonna go to prison filled with my enemies.”

  “You won’t be safe?”

  “I’m a capable guy.”

  My heart hurt. “Hawke –”

  “This club is a ticking time bomb,” he interrupted. “It’s going to collapse one of these days, like all the others before us. I don’t know how they’re going to carry on without me looking after things, and I can’t trust they’ll keep you away from the dirty side of things. I wish you’d leave. Go to your mom or something.”

  “She’ll just ignore me and I’ll spend my days alone.”

  “This is fucked up, though, Tyler. Doesn’t she care you’re here and not with her?”

  “No, she cares about her second daughter Tequila. Says it keeps her stomach warm.”

  “That shit will kill her.”

  “She’s more dead to me than Dad is.”

  “Maybe she’ll change.” He couldn’t even hide his scepticism.

  I looked blankly ahead. “Mr Cosway in English says we try and adapt to our surroundings and we change along with it. It’s a survival mechanism. Most change doesn’t come deliberately, but by force. Mom’s surroundings will never change. She’ll stay sitting in her fancy house Dad bought her and drink until her kidneys stop working.”

  He let out another laugh, but it was dry as a bone. “When did you get so wise? You were always so carefree. Last year fucked you up, didn’t it? His death stole your innocence.”

  “The cowards stole my father.” I looked down at my hands, feeling emptier than ever. “And now the law’s going to steal you.”

  His lips flattened. “I would have liked to have seen you grow, Tyler. Something tells me it would have been worth watching.”

  I would have liked it too. Hawke had been the spark during a really dark time in my life. I wasn’t sure I’d have functioned at all without him there to guide me. And I cared deeply for him.

  “You’ve been my good little sidekick, haven’t you? Learned all there is to know about cars too, huh?”

  “And how to shoot a gun,” I replied, my chest warming at the memories.

  “Your father would be proud how far you’ve come in just a year,” Hawke said. “He loved you, you know that? He never said it but he did.”

  “Yeah.”

  He turned to the cooler beside his chair and pulled out another bottle. He was going to get roaring drunk, which was a very rare sight when it came to him. Being president, he was always in control.

  It would be the first and last time I’d ever see him drink so hard.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked him, trying to bring light to the conversation.

  “Honestly?” he replied, craning his head up to the night sky. “I just wanna look at the stars one last time.”

  Dazedly, I watched him neck bottle after bottle, until his face couldn’t hide the tension buried inside him. His chest moved slower and he curled his hands into fists, but he never reacted to whatever anger he felt just then.

  Hawke was so good at bottling it in.

  My heart stirred something awful. Devastation had rocked our club one year ago when my father was killed, and now it would never be the same without Hawke. I waited until he was so drunk he could barely move. Then I stood up and crawled into his lap, catching him by surprise.

  “Distance, Ty,” he slurred.

  “Shut up,” I retorted, resting my head against his chest, breathing him in. “Let me enjoy this, Hawke.”

  He exhaled and wrapped an arm around me, and I sighed in content, shutting my eyes as he gently ran his fingers through my hair. His woodsy scent wafted into my nose, giving me comfort. It was a scent I would always associate with safety.

  “You take care of yourself,” he whispered. “Ignore the club when they’re throwing parties. Don’t join in on the drugs, and don’t let any pencil dick pressure you to get into your pants, alright? I’ll order a hit on him from prison, I swear it. You save yourself until you’re ready.”

  I smiled. “Don’t worry.”

  Even drunk, he managed to carry me inside hours later. I remember being put down on a bed – his bed – before he meandered back out. I remember opening my eyes and watching him leave, hi
s face grave, his body slow and tight.

  I didn’t know it then, but this was the last time I would see Hawke in person for two years.

  *

  He got arrested the next morning by the feds and was charged with first degree murder of some gangbanger that’d caused the club grief. The evidence was circumstantial, until the murder of Helinsky suddenly surfaced, and Hawke was charged with another murder. The sad part was he might have gotten away with the first, but the evidence for Helinsky was piled so high you couldn’t look anywhere without hitting it – the one crucial bit being a video of Hawke riding away from the site Helinsky’s body was dumped in.

  The process was long and gruelling, but it was shorter than most cases with prosecutors aiming for a speedy trial. It took a year and a half for it all to be over, and then he was sentenced to prison for life, no parole.

  The newspapers called Hawke a murderous outlaw who lacked compassion. To the world he was a monster; a sick, vile being, and the streets were safer without him. The Warlords rose to notoriety over the case, and business had to be done quietly.

  It was a rough time for me. Hector had me staying at my mother’s for most of the year just so the drug enforcement cockroaches that sat along the street out front of the clubhouse wouldn’t have surveillance of an underage girl living with a group of bikers. Hector had to keep things running clean. Deals were far and few, and the clubhouse was spotless.

  Mostly, he was trying to navigate the world being president, and it didn’t come natural to him. He spent most of his time trying to figure out why Hawke had gone to prison in the first place when so many people had been on the payroll. He would soon discover someone had sold his brother out, but he never found out who.

  Worse yet, Hawke wasn’t safe in prison. He was surrounded by his enemies, and Hector was stressing. He’d bought a few guards off, and they’d created reasons to put Hawke in solitary to keep him out of reach of those with murderous intent, but it was always a temporary fix. Plus, it was maddening for Hawke. Solitary confinement was a prison within a prison and it tested someone’s sanity, no matter how strong you were.

  I didn’t know that the entire time Hawke was in prison, Hector was conspiring to bust him out.

  Until one morning he came bursting through the door and said, “Tyler, get the fuck up. We’re going for a drive.”

  four

  Hawke

  “You want pussy?” the voice asked.

  This was fucking ridiculous. Hawke stiffened and glared up at his brother. Did he seriously just ask that fucking question?

  He had just vomited his body weight, his skin was slick with sweat, he was missing a finger and was still bleeding profusely seven hours after he had been broken out of a prison he had spent a year rotting in. So he was a fugitive too, which was fan-fucking-tastic. His brother deserved the “stupidest fucking brother of the year” reward for this grand fuck-up.

  Hawke glanced around the room – a hovel motel room in some no hope part of a town he didn’t even know the name of – and felt his rage levels climb.

  “No, Hector,” he hissed, meeting his brother’s eye with a cold look. “I don’t want pussy. I don’t care about pussy. I don’t want some nameless twat sitting on my lap. What I want is my fucking life back, and you destroyed every goddamn chance of that happening by pulling what you did.”

  Hector ripped his gaze away from his older brother. He moved to the stained chair opposite of him and collapsed into it. His entire body gave out and he let out a long exhale as he stared up at the ceiling.

  “What was I supposed to do, Hawke?” he asked harshly. “You were surrounded by enemies and there was a price on your head. You were going to get killed in there. Everyone wanted you dead! You expected me to just let that happen? Do you know the devastation this club would feel if you died? It would have killed all of us.”

  Hawke didn’t reply. Frankly, he was too delirious to. His hand was pulsing like a motherfucker; the pain was so acute, it was debilitating. Instead, he sank back into the nasty twin mattress and held his hand to his chest, shaking. He was bare chested, his lower half in baggy sweats. The man that busted him out was a crazy motherfucker, insisting on making him leave his jumpsuit behind to make the scene look like a grizzly attack in the middle of the wilderness. Authorities would soon find nothing but blood, his mangled prison outfit, and his fucking finger (and he wanted his fucking finger back with a passion because having nine fingers was already a pain in the ass).

  Personally, Hawke didn’t think it would work, but the bastard blew his finger away without even giving him the opportunity to speak. After that, he passed out, and the timeline from that van to this nasty motel room was murky. All he remembered was waking up to this shithole and staring holes at his pretty boy brother wearing a cut with the word PRESIDENT on the front – a word that he had proudly owned for years before the entire world decided it wanted to take a giant shit on him.

  “Where’s the guy you hired?” he asked, his voice weak.

  “Why?” Hector smirked. “You wanna kill him?”

  “No, I want to thank the sadistic fuck for busting me out.”

  Hector’s smirk fell from his face. “I’m the one that hired him, and he’s already gotten his payment and left.”

  “What the fuck is his name?”

  “Marcus Borden, and that name’s getting more and more known as we speak.”

  “He’d be useful to the club.”

  Hector chuckled dryly. “He wouldn’t be interested.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “There’s a lot to catch you up on. The year you’ve been in there, a lot has changed. The powers in New Raven have shifted, the gangs have been put to ground, and I know this Borden guy has something to do with it. He’s rising, and he’s got a fucking past that’s interesting and scary to say the least. I knew he’d get the job done and frankly, I wouldn’t want a guy like him in the club at a time like this anyway.”

  Hawke sucked in a breath as a wave of pain hit him. His eyes briefly shut. “Keep him in our pocket, then.”

  “We will. Now get some sleep, man. You look like shit.”

  Hawke didn’t want to sleep. His mind wouldn’t let him, and his body was fighting the pain hard.

  He tried to console himself that it was better than being back there, in a shithole, staring at four walls for so many hours, until he lost his damn mind and they started talking to him.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” he asked sometime later. He could hear how tormented he sounded, and it didn’t fit him. Not at all. He was a tough motherfucker, but this…this changed everything.

  Hector shrugged. “Lay low until the heat is gone.”

  Feeling scornful, Hawke scoffed. “The heat will never be gone. You know the shit I’ve done. If the cockroaches even suspect I’m alive, they’ll be crawling all over Warlord territory for eternity to cuff me all over again.”

  “Then you gotta be dead, Hawke.”

  Hawke frowned. “A dead man has no purpose,” he whispered, more to himself than anyone.

  It was one thing having no purpose in prison, but out of it too? No, that was unfathomable. Without purpose he was a fucking nobody. What would he do? Where would he go? What was the purpose to his life without his bike and club?

  Another wave of pain spread throughout his large body. He broke into sweat and turned to his side, cradling his mangled hand to his chest. His teeth clenched tightly and his entire body went rigid as he rode it out through heavy breaths.

  “When does the doctor get here?” he rasped out.

  “On his way,” Hector assured him.

  The club had their very own surgeon on call. Gecko wasn’t from town. He was completely off the grid and had no relations to the criminal underworld in the slightest. He was practically a ghost. He’d come around, put you back together again, and went on his own way thousands of dollars heavier. He was a master with his hands, so the money was worth it, but at the moment he was fucking
late, and Hawke needed him hours ago.

  The room began to spin. Hawke scrambled to the edge of the bed and dry heaved. An acidic taste invaded his mouth, and he spat it out on the green carpet below. He groaned, waiting for the pain to dwindle. When it did, he pressed his forehead against the mattress and gulped in deep breaths. Sometime later, the faint sound of a door opening caught his attention.

  “Please tell me that’s him,” he grumbled. He needed some morphine. And sleeping pills. And a new fucking finger. Yeah, he needed a lot of fucking things right now.

  “Hawke?” a soft voice sounded out. “Oh, my God.”

  He recognized the voice.

  My god, it was the sweetest voice he’d ever heard.

  His entire body stilled and then sagged into the mattress. “Tyler,” he replied, steadily. “What are you doin’ here, darlin’?”

  “The club’s throwing a party to get the cockroaches off our back,” Hector cut in before she could respond. “You told me never to let her around a party at the clubhouse. She’s been waiting in the car this whole time, and that’s where I told her to stay.” His words were laced with disapproval. “I never gave her permission to get out of it, either.”

  “It’s too hot out there and the air conditioner isn’t working,” Hawke heard her snap back. “You left me to bake in there. I was going to die.”

  “You weren’t going to die.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Hawke would have smiled if his lips were working. Ty had a sharp tongue on her. Almost two years apart hadn’t changed her a bit, and fuck, he liked that.

  Quiet footsteps approached. He tried to move his body to face her, but breathing alone was hard enough. He felt the mattress behind him sink only a little bit. A little bit because Tyler was tiny, and quiet too. God, she could be so quiet when she wanted to be. He’d found her under tables, or hiding in closets, eavesdropping in conversations and events she shouldn’t have witnessed over the years since she was five years old. Now she was what, fifteen? A decade of this shit and she still hadn’t learned her lesson, and what had she seen in the time he had been gone? Who had she spent most of her time with? He hoped it wasn’t Hector. Fucking hell, if it was Hector then she was fucked. He was not the kind of role model to have around an impressionable chick.