Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(11)

“You know double-keyed locks are more danger than help, right?” he muttered. “What if there’s a fire?”

She ignored him and opened the door, and he stepped around her and into the wedge the door had made. Before he could cross the threshold, he felt her hand on his arm.

“Rad, wait. I’m sorry. I just—I don’t like to talk about my shit to anybody. And I don’t know you.”

He turned back and looked down at her upturned face, into her wide, light eyes—they were neither green nor blue, but rather both, rays of blue and gold on a green field. “No, you don’t. You take it easy, Willa. Rest your leg. Call in the mornin’ about your bike.”

The right thing to do, the thing he meant to do, was to turn and walk out the door. Instead, he brought a hand up and caught her chin on it, and he bent his head to hers and kissed her on the mouth.

Her lips were soft and full and pliant, and she didn’t resist him at all. In fact, she tipped her head back and swayed toward him, and he knew he could turn things around between them by simply following his strongest impulse and pushing his tongue between her parted lips.

He stepped back. “Take care, darlin’.”

She closed the door before he’d stepped off her wraparound porch. He heard her turning all those locks as he strode down her walk to his bike.



oOo



Rad slept for shit that night, his brain throwing all manner of images from the day before at him, and six-thirty came both too slowly, as he stared up at the dim ceiling in his shitty bedroom in his shitty rented house, and too quickly, as his alarm clanged him back to consciousness about forty minutes after he’d finally gone under.

He’d showered the night before, washing away the grime, soot, blood, and general bad vibe of the night, so he shoved his legs into a less-dirty pair of jeans, yanked a t-shirt and a hoodie over his head, pulled his boots and kutte on, and headed out.

There was a little donut shop a couple of blocks down from his place, and he stopped there first for coffee. They hadn’t had decent coffee at the clubhouse on weekday mornings since Charlene had gone and gotten herself married. None of the Bulls could brew for shit, and all the old ladies worked. They needed to find a new sweetbutt with weekday mornings off. Or learn to make a f*cking pot of decent coffee.

Backing his bike into its spot at the clubhouse with two minutes to spare, Rad picked up his step as he headed into and through the party room to church. The place was empty, and Rad knew he was last in. Delaney was an * about being on time. He opened meetings on the dot when he called them, and he fined anybody whose butt wasn’t down when the gavel hit.

Rad’s chair was still moving a bit when Delaney called them to order.

The Brazen Bulls weren’t a large club—only the single charter, with eleven current patched members, including Maverick, who was doing a bid in the state pen, and two prospects—but they were influential in and around Tulsa, and they held some sway on the dark side all around the Great Plains and the Midwest because they had some partners with big reps. The Volkov family, for one.

The Volkovs were a bratva, a brotherhood, the Russian equivalent of the Mafia, and they’d been making noise in the States for the past few years. Headed up by a woman, Irina Volkov, they’d landed in New York and were stirring shit up almost from the first day. Their chief businesses were guns and smack. Drugs was dirty work, so the Bulls steered clear of that, but when Irina’s son and right hand, Kirill, had come west looking for stations to extend the Volkov gun route, the Bulls had been ready.

The Eighties had been hard time in these parts. Oil had made Tulsa at the turn of the century, and for decades, the town had boomed, known as The Oil Capital of the World. Born in ‘55, Rad had come up through those times, where oilfields and cornfields took up the landscape in equal parcels, and most people had enough, if not plenty. But by the late Seventies, the oil had dried up, and the industry had moved south into Texas, leaving Tulsa to shrivel into a husk and Houston to take the Oil Capital mantle.

People had been hurting. The Bulls were from oil families or farm families, and everybody hurt. Men like Delaney and Dane had come home from Vietnam and were still trying to get their civilian legs under them when the home front went to shit. Men like Rad and Ox, with draft numbers but lucky enough to be too young to get called for more than the medical exam before the war was over, had older brothers or cousins not so lucky, who’d come home broken in body or mind—or, like Rad’s brother Chris, had come home in a flag-draped box. The hurt in Tulsa had come from every direction, home and work alike.

The Brazen Bulls had come to power in that crucible. Delaney and Dane had formed the club in 1975, a year or so after they’d been stateside. They’d taken the name from a medieval torture device, where a person was crammed into the hollow belly of a bronze statue of a bull, locked in, and a fire was stoked under the bull’s belly. The screams of the dying came through the mouth of the bull, with the smoke and stench of their cooking flesh.

Rad hadn’t had any idea what a brazen bull was when he’d signed on as their first prospect. He’d just thought the club name was tough as shit. The history of the name was part of what he’d had to learn. As a young pup, he’d learned it and thought it all the tougher.

He’d been a bit older, had felt a bit more of life’s fire himself, before he really understood the complexity of the metaphor. Metaphorical thinking wasn’t exactly his strong suit. Delaney was the poet among them.