Page 101 of Rescue (Brazen Bulls Birthright 2)

He grinned and held up his mug. “I’d love some.”

~oOo~

Kelsey had the whole weekend off, and so did Dex. After breakfast, they cleaned up the kitchen together, and then she packed a bag for her and one for Mr. D, and she and her dog followed him back to his place.

They spent the weekend in a snug domesticity Dex had never before experienced in his life. Aside from a trip to the market for groceries, they buttoned up in his house for three solid days. They played with the dogs. They made meals and ate them together. They watched movies. They spent a lot of time in bed.

It was, hands down, the best three days of his life. By Sunday night, he’d discarded all doubts and hesitations about his feelings for this remarkable woman. He was in love with her, and that was a good thing.

Monday morning, while Kelsey was showering—he’d tried to get in there with her but she’d refused him on the grounds that she had a full day and couldn’t be late—Dex got the call he’d known was coming.

~oOo~

The day was cold but clear, so Dex donned his winter riding suit and rode his Breakout out to the field—a parcel of land, a couple hundred acres, that had been in the Bulls’ hands for far longer than Dex had worn the patch. Eight held the deed now, but it had once been Becker’s family farm. The corpse of a farmhouse sat decaying in the middle, but the farm hadn’t produced a crop for decades, and now it was a densely overgrown wilderness.

The perfect place to plant their own kind of crop. There were about a dozen bodies buried here that Dex knew about, because he’d participated in making them. He wasn’t sure how many more were out here—but once, when Duncan and JJ were still prospects, they’d dug a hole for one body only to find the remains of another—nothing but bone.

The Bulls had been sowing this field for a long time. They took all conceivable precautions, and nothing was planted in this earth but the lowest scum, but if the time ever came when law searched this property, really turned it over, every fucking man alive who’d ever worn a Bull on his back would very likely die in prison.

This property was more than the place they buried their bodies. It was also the most common place they made them.

There was a wet room in the basement of their clubhouse, and occasionally they used it, but only when time or other factors made it impossible to bring their target out here. Leaning on somebody, or killing them, in the clubhouse made for a lot of risk and a lot of work to get out from under that risk. Including transporting a body sixty miles to the field.

It was far safer—for the Bulls, at least—to do this kind of work away from the city and on the same site they’d bury the evidence of their work.

Under a sun the kind of bright only a cold January noon could conjure, Dex pulled up to the old barn. It had a seedy, neglected look about it. The once-red paint showed only in fading strips, and the boards were cracked and beginning to curl up in places, but that was by design. A bright shiny barn on this property would be just as good as a red flag to anyone who happened to be, say, flying low, scanning the countryside for possible trouble.

Under that decaying façade, they kept the barn in fairly decent repair. It was their real wet room.

When Dex pulled up before it, the club van was already there. Eight and Mav’s bikes as well. It made sense that he was the last one in; he hadn’t been on collection detail.

He sat on his bike for a few minutes, staring at the barn, getting his head where it needed to be so he could do the work that was expected of him. His demons had been kicking up considerably more fuss than usual lately, and he could not lose time in front of his brothers.

Kelsey wanted him to go back into regular therapy and get back on meds. For the past several years, he’d been doing pretty okay without either, and fuck, he didn’t want something like that to cause a problem for him with the club.

She couldn’t believe that it would, but she didn’t understand as much about the Bulls as she thought she did.

Losing time in front of them, of course, would be the worst case in this scenario, but he wasn’t sure how much better it would go if he told Eight he was talking to a shrink once a week.

That, however, was not a problem he could deal with right this second. Right this second, he had to go into the barn and spend the next several hours hurting the three men his brothers had collected this morning.

And then he had to kill them.

---