Beyond the Horizon (Sons of Templar MC #4)(80)

She obviously hadn’t been to work in the past few days, for obvious reasons. Reasons that hadn’t been shared with the group. Reasons I tried to remind her of with her mind. The slippery slope of addiction was one thing that should have scared her off, this was another. Like she said, she had to eat. Sometimes we didn’t have the luxury of choice.

“Since I’ve been sick,” she enunciated the word as if to remind me. “I’ve obviously been missed. My ass is the only reason that place makes anything. That and my boobs,” she winked.

“So you’re going back?” I repeated with distaste.

“She’s not f*ckin’ setting a toe in that shit hole’s direction,” Lucky growled, his eyes glued to Bex.

She straightened. “I am,” she argued.

Another stare off. This time Bex won.

Lucky sighed and shook his head. “You wanna take your clothes off, show the world that sweet ass, you’ll be doing it at our club. Where I can keep a f*ckin’ eye on that ass,” he declared. “And where no one puts a hand on you trying to sell that ass,” he added roughly.

Bex opened her mouth as if to argue. I knew she was doing it just to argue, the Sons club had a good reputation, and they treated and paid their girls well. No drugs were tolerated on the premises either. She’d talked about moving there before, but couldn’t justify the commute. I had yet to tell her about my mom’s house and the lack of commute. When I did, she would realize that Lucky was solving all her problems. Therein lay the rub.

Bex may be different than me in every other way, but in this, we were the same. We didn’t want these men riding in on their Harleys fixing our problems as if we weren’t capable of living life until they came along. On giving them power. Taking that agency away from us. No matter how decent, how good looking, how much we might care about said men, our lives were not set out to be sorted out for us. We needed this. To be in control of our lives. Or at least grab on to the illusion of control. Without it we had nothing.

“It’s a good idea,” I murmured before she could argue.

I knew how she felt, but I wasn’t going to let her pride take her back there.

She glared at Lucky then glared at me and was silent.

Lucky took this as a yes. “You won’t be swinging your ass around any pole until you’re better. What’s wrong with you? Have you been to the doctor?” he frowned at her, his eyes trailing over her sunken form, her pale skin. He was smart. He wouldn’t stay ignorant for long. Especially, if he was interested in the way I thought he was.

“I’m fine,” she ground out.

His brows furrowed further. “Bitches around here need to stop saying they’re fine when they’re obviously not. Every man worth his salt knows that if uttered by a woman, the word ‘fine’ could signify a f*ckin’ apocalypse,” he muttered.

He got three female glares at his words.

He held his hands up in surrender.

“We haven’t seen the last of them,” Asher ushered the conversation back to the more pressing matter than the semantics of women’s vocabulary. “Carlos knows you’re my Old Lady. For him to authorize this, for them to do that with my bike in the parking lot…?” he paused, hands around me tightening, “they’re not f*ckin’ around.”

“If what they said to me was anything to go by, they most certainly are not,” I said quietly, almost to myself. My stomach dipped. Or more accurately it felt like I’d swallowed razor blades. When it rained, it poured. Then it stopped raining and lightning set everything on fire.

Asher went rigid. “What exactly did they say?” he clipped dangerously.

“That we haven’t seen the last of them,” I paraphrased.

He glared at me. “Don’t get cute, flower, now is not the time. What specifically did they say?”

I scrunched up my nose. “Not something I’d care to repeat,” I hedged. I didn’t need any more alpha released tonight, if someone struck a match this place might explode the air was already so thick with it. Plus, Bex’s state of mind was already delicate, to say the least, I was not letting these lowlifes be the catalyst for something taking away my best friend.

Asher’s silence told me I wouldn’t be able to get away with my own.

“They said when you got tired of our ... snatch, they’d take it for themselves,” I said finally, my nose screwed up.

As expected, alpha anger rose to epic proportions the moment the words left my mouth.

Though I wasn’t focused on that, neither was Rosie. Both of us were focused on Bex and her reaction. She seemed outwardly calm. That didn’t mean much. She’d seemed outwardly normal when she’d been injecting herself with poison for six months. As much as I needed Asher here, I needed him gone. I needed to talk to my friend. Figure out how to get her through this.

Asher had other ideas.

“You’re going to the club,” he declared tightly. “Both of you,” he added.

“No, we’re not,” I replied quickly and firmly.

No matter how much Carlos and his “boys” scared me, I was even more terrified at the prospect of losing Bex. Taking her to a biker clubhouse where no one knew what she was going through, where it was unfamiliar, and who knows what was on offer, had a distinct promise of shattering the precarious road she was on to recovery.