Highest Sins: Mountain Misfits MC Book 2 Page 6

  It’s not fair to her.

  “See you in the war room?” she asks.

  “Yeah, we’ll be back by then.”

  Hopefully back with a plan. I’m going to show her that it doesn’t have to be this way. I’m going to show her that things are going to change.

  I’m gonna start with her brother, the man I’ve called my best friend my entire life. He’ll smooth it over with her.

  And as far as her father goes, well, I’m going to do right by Esther, even if it means that I have to kill him.

  I take one last look at her as I walk out of the bedroom, her eyes sad and distant. I slam the door so hard that I scare the cat.

  15

  Fifteen Years Ago

  Esther:

  On the way back from the gas station, I figure I might as well celebrate my eighteenth birthday the only way I know how.

  Sure, I’ve been drinking since I was twelve. I’ve had my share of cigarettes. But the first legal puff of tobacco feels like heaven to me. Instantly, I’m calm. I feel so cool. I feel like an adult. I only stole one of them from my Aunt Mary’s pack, but I debate whether I should go back and buy my own. Oh well, it’ll give me an excuse to get out of the house again later.

  I see my dad’s motorcycle from the end of the block and my heart begins to beat faster. I know this guy sent me away and I should hate him for it, but I’m sure he had his reasons, and I’m so excited to see him I toss my cigarette and begin sprinting down the road.

  There are a few cars in my Aunt Mary’s driveway, none of which I recognize immediately. I know she said she had a birthday surprise for me. Maybe she invited over some of my friends from school. As nice as that sounds, to be around some people my own age for the first time in months, there’s really only one person I want to see. I scan the vehicles, hoping that maybe I’m just overlooking his bike. Maybe he parked down the block. Maybe him and Gavin are going to really surprise me.

  “Daddy!” I squeal as I walk through the doorway. He’s sitting on Aunt Mary’s ugly, floral, plastic-covered couch, nervously twiddling his thumbs. I run to hug him, but he doesn’t stand up; he just looks up at me from where he’s sitting and I think his eyes look watery, like he’s crying.

  “Dad?” I ask. “What’s wrong? Did someone die?”

  “No, no, everything is ok, Esther.” He sighs and takes a swig from his bottle of beer. “You want one?” he asks.

  Great.

  I have a feeling this isn’t a celebratory beer.

  “Moses, quit dragging your feet, son,” my Aunt Mary shouts from the other room. “Don’t be so dramatic. Bring her in here.”

  “Esther,” he says to me, his voice low, his brown eyes darkening. “You would do anything for the club, right?”

  “Of course, Dad.”

  “Then I’m going to need you to be strong for me. There are some men in the other room…” he trails off.

  I don’t know what he’s implying. I’ve been around all sorts of men my entire life. Really bad men. I’ve seen things that no teenage girl should see, but I never felt endangered because I always had the club to take care of me.

  “They are willing to pay good money for you, Esther. Money that the club really needs right now. We lost our biggest supplier and things are really rough for everyone.”

  I can’t understand what he’s trying to say. “You’re going to sell me? Like a slave laborer?”

  “No, no, no.” He half chuckles, but I think he’s just doing that out of kindness. “They think you’re a very beautiful girl. They’ve been watching you for some time now. Your virginity is worth a lot of money, you know.”

  I shudder. He wants to sell my virginity? Is it really that big of a deal? I don’t want the first time I have sex to be with some random stranger who has been ‘watching me.’ That’s sick.

  “I’m not a virgin, Dad,” I lie through my teeth. “Haven’t been for a long time.”

  He grabs me by the throat faster than I can blink.

  “Are you sure about that?” His hand squeezes tighter and tighter. I’m gasping for air, sputtering.

  “Moses!” my Aunt Mary shouts, running into the living room. “They’re not gonna want her if she’s all covered in your handprints. What the hell are you thinking, son?”

  I close my eyes, tears flowing from them, wishing he would just squeeze my throat so hard that he would kill me. These men might not want me with handprints, but the only way I’ll feel safe right now is if I’m dead.

  He lets me go and I reel backwards, gasping for air, bawling, throwing myself to the ground.

  “She says she’s not a virgin,” my dad tells her.

  “She’s lying,” my Aunt Mary assures him. “And if she’s not lying, she’s gonna learn how to lie real well real fast here, aren’t ya?” she asks. She reaches her hand out to me, helping me off the floor. “Do you understand who you are, Esther? Do you understand how powerful you are? You have something that no man in the club has. You have something that every man your father does business with wants.”

  “A hole?” I yell. “There are a ton of dirty birds for that. They’d probably pay those guys to fuck ’em.”

  “No,” my Aunt Mary says. “Every man who does business with the club wants an opportunity to hurt your father.”

  “So you’re going to let them hurt me instead?” I ask, shaking my head, backing away from the two of them with my hands in the air.

  “They’re not going to hurt you, Esther. You’re going to hurt them. You’re going to use your body to take away their power. You’re going to use your feminine mystique to take whatever you want from them, whatever you need, whatever will make life better for you and your club,” she says.

  “Like a spy?” I ask.

  “Sure,” she assures me. “Now go fix your make-up dear, and maybe put on something a little less frumpy.”

  “Like a spy,” I just keep repeating to myself over and over, reminding myself that this club is my life and I have to do the right thing. I know my family would do whatever they have to to keep me safe.

  My dad won’t let these men hurt me.

  I take a deep breath and walk up the stairs into my bedroom, looking back at them over my shoulder, my Aunt Mary smiling up at me and my dad just staring at the wall, his face stoic. It’s a face I’m going to need to learn for future reference.

  It’s a face that comes along with being a Misfit.

  16

  Present Day

  It’s hard to drag myself out of bed and put on my ‘business as usual face,’ but I know the longer I stay here in my room, curled up under my covers, the smell of him all around me, like dirt from the earth and trees in the breeze, the more I’m going to go into a darker place. A deeper depression of what ifs and self loathing. I slide out with a sigh, bundling up my blankets and sheets so I can throw them in the washing machine. Destroy all the evidence.

  There’s a knock on my front door. I look out my bedroom window and see a yellow jeep in my driveway. Olive won’t care if I just throw on my bathrobe.

  “Hey, sweetie,” she says, throwing the door open. This girl has quickly become one of my best friends over the last few years. She runs the bar we have downtown, The Bucktail Saloon, with my brother. She’s shorter than I am, bleached blonde hair currently with streaks of bright purple throughout, and she’s wearing a strappy bralette and shorts that come up past her bellybutton. She’s a cute thing, fierce, and she’s never compromised her authority at the bar for a man. I wish all our employees were like her. I wish all my friends were like her. Hell, I wish I was like her.

  “I brought you brownies,” she giggles. “I’m not sure which ones are the good ones. I tried to make one batch of plain and one batch with pot, but I ate too much batter and now it’s like playing roulette.” She sets the Tupperware container on my kitchen table and begins digging through my cupboards. “Do you have coffee?”

  “Sure, Olive,” I laugh. “Make yourself at home.” She always does. This gir
l moves through a room like she owns the place, never afraid to go through your closet or ask the kind of questions that everyone else is too afraid to.

  “Your dad said you weren’t coming to work for the rest of the week. He said girl stuff. I figured I’d stop by and cheer you up. Especially when you didn’t answer your phone all night or today.”

  “Ollie, I don’t even know where my phone is. I’m sorry. Thank you though. I’m actually really glad you’re here.”

  Maybe brownie roulette IS the best possible way for me to spend my afternoon. Better than worrying about something that is already done, something out of my control. I start a pot of coffee and we sit down at the table. I can tell by the way she’s staring at me, I’m a sight to behold.

  “I need to talk to you about Saturday. Fight night at the Bucktail. I need to borrow some of your employees from up here. It’s gonna be nuts.”

  “Shit,” I stutter. “I keep forgetting that’s this weekend. I have to go out of town.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  I roll my eyes at her.

  “You know you’re my friend and I support any decision that you make, right?” she asks.

  “I know that. That’s why you’re so awesome.”

  “Then why don’t you make your own damn decisions? Why do you let your dad control your life, Esther? Why do you let this club turn you into someone you’re not. I know you make a killing at the bar. I know it’s not a money thing. What is it then?”

  I know she’s trying to be helpful, but she’s an outsider.

  She’ll never be a patched member of the club, and she wasn’t born into this life like I was. She doesn’t understand that the club doesn’t turn me into someone who I’m not, but that I would do whatever it takes to protect that patch, protect my men, no matter what I have to do. The club IS who I am.

  “I’m sorry. That sounds really rude of me. I’m making assumptions. I hope you don’t think I’m judging you. I’m not. Hell, what you do is admirable. But there’s gotta be a point where you just want to settle down and have a normal life with a normal man and not have to worry about this shit.”

  “Ollie,” I say as my coffee pot beeps. I stand up to pour us some. I feel like I’m hungover, even though I didn’t drink a drop last night, my body sore from his on top of mine, my head spinning with more questions than answers. “Your heart is in the right place.” Her heart is in the right place, and she’s totally correct about what I want. But what I want is not what I get as long as I have my club.

  “I hope so,” she giggles. “Lord knows I’ve had enough work on my chest. I hope they didn’t reach in there and move my organs around.” This girl and her boobs. I swear she’s obsessed.

  “You’re really in love with those things, aren’t ya?” I smile, setting a cup of coffee down in front of her.

  She picks up a brownie from the container and examines it, shrugs, and shoves a bite into her mouth.

  “Some people buy books for college with their high school graduation money. I made the smarter investment for my life trajectory.”

  “You’re awful,” I laugh. “Honest, but awful.”

  17

  Brooks:

  I’m not very talkative today, and Gavin picked up on that pretty quickly. It’s not that I’m embarrassed about what happened last night with Esther, it’s not that I don’t want to tell the world that I finally got the girl I’ve been chasing after my whole life.

  It’s that I don’t have her. I had her. And those are two very different things. And it’s pissing me off. Something so close but just out of my reach.

  “Why are you so fun today?” he asks, breaking the silence as we drive his truck down the muddy dirt road to the site of our first still. “Did you get in a fight with your left hand last night?”

  I just turn up the radio. Looking at his face is irritating me. Hearing his voice is irritating me. Being near him, knowing he’s ok with letting Esther prostitute herself for the club, makes me want to punch him. I hate him right now almost as much as I hate myself. I let this happen to her as much as he did.

  The goal for the day is to just make sure the stills are clean and functional and that the winter hasn’t done much damage to anything we didn’t pack up and put in storage. We drive down the rutted up old fire road, the branches of oak trees overgrown, scraping at the windows. We get out of the truck and pull back the tarp on the first still. I notice a hole in the side of the big metal drum that wasn’t there before, and I kick it with my boot.

  “Motherfucker,” I bark, kicking it over and over. “I don’t know why we didn’t put this in the garage last fall like I said we should. Probably cuz you were so busy playing house that you wanted to half ass everything.”

  “Dude, calm down,” he says. “We can patch it up. It’ll take four seconds. What the hell is your deal? If you got something to say, you need to fucking say it. I’m not a mind reader. You’ve been an asshole for the last two days.”

  “I’m in love with your sister,” I blurt out in my blind rage. It feels so strange coming out of my mouth even though it’s been on my mind for my whole life. I want to yell it over and over again.

  “You don’t think I know that? I’ve always known that. Everybody’s always known that.”

  “We both let her down. Why didn’t we protect her when she needed us? Why didn’t we do the right thing?”

  “We were kids, Brooks. We didn’t have any choice. That whole arrangement was my dad’s deal, and there was nothing we could do at that point in our lives to make it stop. I always hoped when she got older something would just change, but it just gets worse all the time. He has her convinced that if she doesn’t keep on whoring herself for the club that the club will stop existing. And for whatever fucked-up reason, she wants to keep us all safe and happy. She’s more loyal than anyone we’ve patched in.”

  I pop the top off the still, and it looks like some critters used it as a hideout for the winter. It’s full of hay and fur.

  “Yuck,” Gavin says, reaching for a shovel.

  “Better than rattlesnakes.”

  “What even happened?” I ask.

  “Well, some dipshit took my advice and left this thing out to rot all winter long,” he grins wickedly. I swear this guy gets a serious kick out of himself. Maybe that’s why we get along so well. Still, I want answers, not slapstick humor.

  “I mean with Esther. All I remember is she was here with us one day and then she wasn’t. Went off to live with your Aunt Mary. When she came back, she moved into that trailer and everything was just different. She wasn’t the girl we grew up with. You never told me what happened. You always avoid it. I need to know, Gavin. I need to know so I can make it right.”

  “I don’t know how to make it right. And I don’t even know what happened. I know my freshman year of college she showed up at my dorm room looking like she’d been half beat to death. I asked her what happened and she wouldn’t tell me. She said she got in a fight, that I shouldn’t worry about it, that she just needed a good night’s sleep. She begged me not to call Dad. I tried to get her to stay with me until I could get shit figured out, but she disappeared again while I was in class the next day.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Gavin? Why didn’t you call me?” I yell, grabbing him by the arm, enraged that he would hold back such a major detail from me.

  “Because we were kids. You were finally getting your life back together after your old man died and I was trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to be when I grew up. There’s nothing we could’ve done that wouldn’t have made things worse for all of us.”

  “You’re a selfish pig,” I say, my hands trembling, my face inches from his.

  “She told me not to call you. She made me promise not to tell you. She didn’t want to see you ever again. You might be my brother by the patch, but she’s my real sister. It wasn’t my move to make. You think I don’t regret that shit? I regret everything about that point in my life. I regret ever leavi
ng here and letting Moses fuck up my brothers and sister. But I was a selfish kid. I had to take care of me.”

  I let go of his arm, this bittersweet sadness that I’ve held inside of me since the day that she left finally making sense. Finally I’m getting some answers, even if they aren’t the ones I want.

  “We’re not kids anymore, Gavin,” I tell him. “We basically run a powerful motorcycle club.”

  “Sort of,” he says.

  “Fuck your dad. This is his fault anyway. It’s our turn to clean up the mess.”

  “How do you propose we do that?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. But if all these stills look as shitty as this one, we’re gonna have a nice long time in the woods together to think about it.”

  “Good thing I brought some thinking sticks,” he says, pulling a joint out of the pack of cigarettes he keeps in the pocket of his cut for when we go out in the woods. Sloan would murder him if she knew he smoked, but what happens at camp is none of her business.

  I fire it up with a long hard drag, letting the smoke fill my lungs.

  18

  Esther:

  The war room is dimly lit and filled with smoke. Everyone is in fairly decent spirits as of late. No real trauma or drama, which is kind of unusual, considering what kind of man our president, my father, is.

  There’s only one looming situation we have to deal with right now, the fact that we need more ARs faster than we can pay for them. To stay established as the go-to guys in the weapons game, sometimes we run into supply and demand issues. There’s a man who can solve our problems. A man who is rich and powerful, albeit disgusting and weird and everything I hate about my job. And I have a date with him this weekend.

  I take my seat next to my father. It’s completely unprecedented to have a woman in the war room. I don’t have a cut. I don’t hold an office. I don’t know what my patch would say even if I did. Anything but whore.