Shit.
Pulling my Glock out from the waistband of my pants, I pointed my pistol at the man who looked more important, since he was the one who had a gun pointed at the older man on the ground.
“I told you to stay out of my business, Lion.”
Pop!
I squeezed the trigger and he dropped to the ground after my bullet penetrated the side of his head. I hadn’t killed a man before. This was my first time, but something inside of me knew that I needed to save this man today—at any cost. The MC side all whipped out their guns, shooting down the other two men who were with the mafia boss. I stepped closer to the bodies, studying them charily, wishing I could do something. Anything.
“What you thinkin’, son?” the older man, Lion, asks, his attention unrestrainedly on me.
I shrugged. “Just that if these are bad people and if you could, would you want to do more to them?” My eyes found his. “I mean, death is the coward’s way out. The fun should start before they’re dead. Humiliate them. Show them they have no control, not anymore.” The anger I felt inside of me was tipping over the edge of my control, and I didn’t like it. But seeing blood, and bodies on the ground, made me think of Diamond, and how much I would fucking kill to have his mercy pressed to the tip of my gut.
Lion flashed me a prideful grin, displaying his gold tooth. “Mmmm, where did you say you were headed?”
Present
“Yeah, I remember like it was fucking yesterday.” I chuckle, shaking out of my memory. “We burned that whole fucking place to the ground.”
“Which was hard to do, considering that bar had sentimental value to this club.”
That catches me off guard, and I guess that should have been something I asked him a long time ago, but it slipped my mind among all the bodies, blood, and being patched in instantly.
I lean back in my chair, stretching my legs wide. I’m trying to force my thoughts from drifting to Jade asleep upstairs, in my sheets. My cock swells against the zipper of my jeans at the fucking thought of it. “You gonna tell me about that…”
Lion clears his throat, taking a cigar out of his humidor and putting it between his cracked lips. Age hasn’t been kind to the old fucker, but he was definitely a handsome cunt in his better days. “There was a girl.”
We both look at each other and laugh. “Isn’t there always.”
Lion lights the trunk of his cigar. “This one was different.” I never asked him why Bonnie was only his wife and not his old lady. I never asked him about a lot of shit when I think back on it, but the thing with Lion is that if you were to know something about him, you would know because he would tell you. Digging into his life would do nothing but piss him off, and you don’t wanna be pissing him off. Age isn’t the only thing that hasn’t been kind to him, his patience hasn’t either. “She was my old lady.”
I pause, my fingers tensing around my chair. Without filling the silence with unnecessary shit, I keep quiet, waiting for him to continue. He does. “Met her when we were in our early twenties. She was this mysterious witch that I fell in love with instantly. My old man and president at the time warned me off her. His words were… Stay away from girls with dark hair and bright eyes. Their soul will always battle between good and bad.” He shakes his head, running his withered hands over his face, his gold rings clinking. “Should have fucking listened. I didn’t. Fell in love. She ran away from her messed-up family to be with me here, and then one day, she just—” He stops breathing. “Vanishes. Tried waiting for her for years, but she never came back. That day I met you, I had just found out that her family had close fucking ties to the Colombian cartel, and I was ass-deep in trying to find her. Dead ends. Every fucking time.”
He flicks off the ash of his cigar and leans back in his chair, the wood cracking under his weight. He takes a long pull, rolling the brown trunk around in his mouth. “Gave up, found Bonnie and had that little shit Gypsy. Told her she’d never be my old lady, already had one of those.”
It’s true, we only give the honor to one woman, and by the sound of it, she was that for Lion. Even as he speaks about her, I see the clear pain in his eyes, the twitch in his fingers around his cigar from anger, and finally the brittle tone he uses when speaking about her. Every now and then, he’d gaze off into the distance, as if reliving a memory. Or a nightmare. Can’t figure out which is what.