Page 38 of Mad Max

They both wave as Ruby starts to leave.

“Ruby!” Kooper yells, and I notice Law is no longer at the table. “You still got babysitting duty tonight.”

“Fuck off, Kooper. I’m getting laid. You watch the brats.” She flips him off as she exits.

He curses his ass off as he marches past me and out the door she just left through.

“So….”

I take a good look at Fairy and notice she doesn’t seem any different from any other time I’ve seen her. Think little bugs her, and I kind of like that about her. It also has me wanting to try things just to see if that would set her off. But I’ve had that shit happen to me most my life and hated it. Bet she does too. I’m stoic most of the time, just like her. Might be the perfect match—if I believed in that shit.

She knows.

It’s all I can think right now. She knows we were listening in. She doesn’t know how, but she knows. She’s smart. Wicked smart. Even if Flint hadn’t told me about her past, I would have known that. She sees things that others don’t.

Even that first night, she noticed something on me that most people overlook as a random pattern of freckles and not a prison tattoo. I had it placed to look random, not to draw eyes to it. It’s a tat for me, not for the world. A reminder of where I was and how I got there. A way to keep me from punching any other asshole too many times. Figured if I got it on my hand, I would see it more when I’m holding a guy up and need to stop. Tested it a few times in lockup, and it worked like a charm to keep me on this side of “good behavior.”

Fun fact: Wardens don’t mind overlooking a fight or two depending on whose ass you’re kicking. They sometimes enjoy that certain criminals get knocked down a few more pegs for a crime they did but didn’t get the sentence they deserved for it.

I don’t know why a bit of me feels guilty about this. I agreed to the plan when Flint mentioned it. We all did. But sitting there, hearing it all play out? That shit was rough.

Law was right, Ruby played the part perfectly. She didn’t let shit go, and all we told her was to talk to Cheyanne and see if she’s a problem. She went in blind and acted like her normal self, not even flinching when Cheyanne laid out the buying people part.

Got to admit, I didn’t like being the main topic that led them down the road of relationship issues for everyone to hear. Ain’t ashamed of shit, but I don’t like people knowing every part of my life. Prison was like that. Literally couldn’t take a shit without fifty guys knowing about it. I liked that the fairy and me had something no one else knew about.

But now they all know. Each gave me a side look, and I stared the brothers back down. Not one of them can judge me, since I slept with her before all this went down. There’s not a single part of me that went against the club, or Law. Spoke the truth to him before this. He says jump, I’m all in. But I don’t think he’ll make that call. Not after what we heard.

Fairy wasn’t trying to pump the old ladies for information on the club like a normal person. She wasn’t even looking for a way to gain old lady status like so many before her. She was just trying to fit in, have a normal conversation with some other people. Well, normal for her. Don’t think anyone ever talked about the amount of weight it takes to crush a person over chips and Diet Coke.

Flint was the one to suggest we bug the conversation, but after tonight, I’m pretty sure that’ll be banned, either by him or the two others who got old ladies. No one expected that shit to go down. How could we? They’re women. Who the fuck thought they spoke about that shit? Vamps? Sure. But old ladies? Never thought I would know so much in such a short time.

The conversation was a hot topic, but it was difficult to get hard when you could hear such despair in each of their voices. No one was putting on a front, just having a normal gab session and sharing their problems. Once the night wears off—after each gets their brain fucked out, no doubt—I wonder how long they’ll hold a grudge against their men and the club.

The club is meant to trust them, to have their backs at all times. This is pushing the envelope, even if we didn’t mean for them to be implicated in this. Each of those brothers has done their fair share of groveling to get their woman, but I think it’ll be the club that has to pay the price for this one. We all agreed. Not one of us thought it could go south.

And it did.

Some will probably argue it worked out for the better. Everyone will have an opinion on the matter, since we weren’t the only ones listening. Atom and Jumper, who were covering Flint’s office, will know. And the other brothers, like Kooper and Casper, sitting close to our table would have heard. And about every damn person stopped to listen when Flint went off on his girl for thinking he was cheating.

Yeah, everyone will have their own opinion. But the truth is, we fucked up. Should never have used the old ladies. I should never have let it get this far. Fairy ain’t the deceiving type. I get that we all got pasts that shape how we see things, but there’s nothing on her that’s bad. She might say the wrong thing at the wrong time, even make a fucked-up a decision like going to buy girls from an unknown person without backup or a gun, but she ain’t evil. You got to be a low level of scum to think selling a person to another isn’t a problem.

“Was it on the table or on one of the girls?” She doesn’t even bother to ask how we knew, just wants to know the location of the listening device.

“Ruby had it in her purse.”

She nods as she looks to where it had been in the center of the table the whole time she sat across from her. “I’m guessing they didn’t know.”

I shake my head, then give it an extra shake to the left to push my hair back. It’s not too long, but I don’t want it covering my eyes as I look down at her. She’s hot as fuck in her off-the-shoulder purple shirt. Don’t think she’s wearing a bra. She’s got her long black hair parted and flowing down the front of her shirt to cover her tits, but I swear to Christ, I can see her nipples pointing through.

Fuck, I got it bad for this chick. Each moment I’m with her, I see how fucked I really am. Right now, and all I can think is how fucking perfect she looks sitting at the old ladies’ table. How she got along with them, and they didn’t even seem to bat an eye at her odd ways of trying to help ease Mama Bear’s insecurities with the pregnancy weight. Don’t know what she’s complaining about—she still looks sexy as fuck. Not that I’m dumb enough to voice that out loud. Don’t need my throat slit by a brother. And she might be hot, but she doesn’t do it for me. Not like the fairy.

“So now what?”

Ain’t that the million-dollar question.

Chapter 17 – Cheyanne

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