Page 12 of Banshee
I knew what she had been through; we all did. And when I found the motherfucker who hurt her, he was a dead man. This son of a bitch had been drugging and raping women for months. Jack’s old lady, Sam, had almost been a victim. She would have been a victim had Jingles not been with her that day.
Aspen shouldn’t be here. She never should have been in Diamond Creek. Where the fuck was her husband?
Yeah, I knew she was married.
Her piece-of-shit dad married her off to someone else when I said no. He’d waited until I moved here with King and the others. Maybe he thought I’d forgotten about her.
That wasn’t happening. I’d thought about her almost every day since the first time I saw her.
Athens, Texas, 2015
“What the hell are we here for?” Dutch asked.
“Picking up the shipment,” I repeated for the third time. Jason ‘Dutch’ Miller was twenty-four years old, and I swear his mother dropped him on his head as a child.
Consistently.
It was like he hadanterograde amnesia. Short-term memory loss. His road name should have been Dopey.
“I hate coming here. Kronos is a scary motherfucker,” LA whispered.
“Then don’t piss him off.”
How I ended up with these two was a mystery. Sometimes I felt like Steele knew exactly who I was and why I was here. It was the only explanation for why I constantly got the shit jobs. Picking up a shipment wasn’t so bad, but these two were morons.
We pulled into the Gods of Mayhem clubhouse early in the morning. It was an understated building from the front. An old warehouse from the twenties. Probably the home of a bootleg operation during Prohibition.
It had two floors and windows all along the front. But in the back was a maze of rooms and hallways you could get lost in. Kronos had built it up over the years, creating a small, enclosed area for his children to play. The building stretched out and around, making a large square with a grassy family area in the middle.
It was actually quite ingenious if you thought about it. The brothers’ families could be outside without the threat of danger. Well, that was how it used to be. Nowadays, we had drones that could fly undetected through the air. Drones that had weapons attached.
When you were the president of a one-percenter club, your family was never really safe. That was why most men didn’t take on an old lady. They were a weakness to be exploited. Kronos had found that out the hard way when his oldest daughter disappeared.
We pulled up in front of the clubhouse and shut down the bikes. I had just swung my leg over the seat when the mostbeautiful woman I had ever seen came rushing out the front door.
“Shug, get your ass back inside!”
“No, I’m meeting my friends.”
She waved to Zeus and blew him a kiss. I hadn’t heard he had taken an old lady. But there was no mistaking the love on his face as he shook his head and smiled at her.
She was gorgeous. Her honey-blonde hair trailed in the wind as she ran to her car. The skirt she wore flowed around her ankles, short enough to see her cowboy boots.
The tank top under her cut spread across her chest as if it was made just for her. I watched her until she climbed into her car and spun out across the gravel lot.
“She’s gonna get herself killed.”
“I didn’t know you’d taken on an old lady,” I said. It took every ounce of control I had not to stare at the taillights as they sped down the road.
“Fuck no. That’s my baby sister.”
“Irene?” I asked, the blood draining from my face. “Isn’t she like ten?”
“Just turned twenty, actually. Feels like just yesterday when my parents brought her home.”
I pushed my helmet, which was still in my hand, against my cock, willing it to go down. If Zeus knew I’d gotten hard from one look at his baby sister, I wouldn’t be leaving here today.
I looked down the driveway again. The dust had settled, and there was no trace of her. Shaking my head, I told myself she was off-limits, not just because she was Kronos’ daughter, but because I was thirty-five fucking years old. Too old for her.
