TRIGGER: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel (4 page)

Steel looked back at the
hulking, swaying man, who tugged at the rope again. This time, he tugged hard
enough that the figure crouched behind him fell to the side, onto her knees,
long flaxen hair falling into her face, covering it.

“Pop, you can’t…Jennie…” she
said, her voice high but thick, full of sobbing and sorrow. Damn, I almost shot
the guy right then and there. I instinctively moved forward, meaning to help
the poor thing to her feet, but Steel clicked his tongue, and I drew back,
unsettled. This whole scene was unfolding in just about the worst way I could possibly
imagine.

And then it got a little bit
worse.

The girl turned her head,
falling over slightly so that one hip rested on the ground. Her hair fell away
from her face.

“Cass,” I said, my voice
leaden with surprise. I recognized her immediately; of course I did. How could
I ever forget those sweet blue eyes, those blushing cheeks? Her eyes drifted up
to me, watery and wet and older than her body by a thousand years. She made a
soft moaning sound, a pathetic “oh”, and then dropped her face back down to the
floor in surrender.

“You fucking bastard,” I
said, now lunging forward, unable to be reigned back by Steel’s clicking
tongue. The man dropped the rope, swayed backwards, stumbling against another
table. My fist hit his jaw with a satisfying pop.

“That’ll do, Trig,” Steel
said behind me, and I heard the sound of a switchblade opening. It was the only
thing that could have held me back at that point, and I paced backwards,
simmering and seething. “You know this girl?”

I looked back at Steel, his
face cold, inhuman. I nodded.

“She went to school with
me,” I said, thickly. Steel nodded, pointed to the girl with the blade.

“Why don’t you help the poor
thing up, then, buddy?”

Oh, thank God, Steel has a fuckin’ heart,
I thought,
and rushing forward I grabbed a hold of
Cass’
elbow.
She yanked it back, terrified.

“It’ll be okay, Cass, I
won’t let them hurt you,” I said.

Her face turned up to mine
again. She looked pale, sickly, out of sorts. I wondered what her father could
have done to her to give her lively, colorful face this drawn, ailing look. She
looked too thin, too; I’d always thought the girl was best described as
voluptuous,
even though I knew most of
the girls in our school just called her fat. But most of the girls in our
school were moronic, waif-thin, rich bitches. Cass was different. I’d known
that from the first moment we’d sat down together. Her smile…it was just…

Well, that smile was gone
now. She looked at me for a long moment, not moving.

“I promise, I won’t let
them,” I said again. It didn’t even register to me, what I’d just said. I’d
promised.

And I always kept my
promises.

Slowly, she let me pull her
up, swaying on her feet. She was wearing a white dress, something so light and
ethereal as to seem like some angel’s robe, even though it showed plenty of
flesh. I wondered if her sicko father had dressed her up like that, and the
thought made me want to vomit. I stroked, softly, the flesh of her arm as she
stood before Steel, eyes lowered, hair running across her face.

“Look up, little girl,”
Steel said in a soft, cooing sort of voice that I’d never heard him use before.
She sniffled and obeyed, raising her chin. Steel smiled.

But it wasn’t any sort of
smile that could put a girl at ease, that’s for sure.

And it didn’t put me at
ease, either.

I promise,
the memory of my own words rang in my head. My blood
turned cold. Behind us, her father was kneeled over and blubbering. Steel
extended his arm forward, and beckoned her closer. I didn’t know what to do; I
let her go. She dragged herself towards him, her body almost like a zombie.
When she got close to the table where he sat, he rose up and moved around it,
taking hold of her arm, her flesh so pale against his weathered old skin. He
stroked it; she shuddered and pulled away.

“Please,” I heard her
whisper. “I want to go home. My sister…”

“You can go home,” Steel
said. Somehow, though, I knew that there’d be a catch. I knew from the way he
was looking at her. He must have seen the same beauty I always had, because he
was looking at her the way the witch in the gingerbread house must have looked
at Hansel and Gretel. Like some delicious, sweet treat had just walked right
into his arms.

“I want…thank you…please…”
she murmured, not seeing what I was seeing, not knowing Steel the way I knew
Steel. My stomach was churning up a violent storm, a seasick anger flushing
through me.

“We’ll just pay off Daddy’s
debt and…” Steel said, raising his hand to caress a lock of her hair. She
shuddered, turned her cheek, tried to walk away, but he grabbed the front of
her dress and yanked her forward, his hands moving to the little spaghetti
straps that held up the flimsy garment.

“No! Please!” Cass yelled as
the dress fell to the floor, and I stepped forward, unable to control myself
anymore. I wasn’t about to watch
anyone
force
this poor girl to do
anything
– not
Steel, not anyone. As I moved forward, his mouth fell over hers, silencing her
cry, and his hands cupped her chest roughly. All I could think was how bad he
smelled, how much he smoked, his dirty hands…

“Fuck off her, Steel,” I
growled as I approached. He pulled away and looked at me, eyes sparkling. He
almost cackled as he responded.

“Oh, c’mon, Trig, you know
I’ll let you have your chance, too. But there’s a pecking order, you know,
especially with these sorts of things,” as he spoke, his hands fell to her ass,
covered only in thin white panties, and clutched her forward.

He was leaning against the
table, and spread his knees so that she moved in between them, tears streaming
down her face. As though finally getting some strength back, she pushed against
his chest, flailing her arms and beating her little fists against him. He only
held her tighter, his hands kneading now, his hungry eyes looking up at her, a
rotten smile on his face.

“I’m not fucking around,
Steel, get off her, she doesn’t want it, it’s not right,” I said, laying my
hand on his shoulder. I was so close to her now, her exposed breasts so close I
could have reached out and touched them, but I wanted nothing less in the
world.

She was beautiful, and I’d
had my share of dreams about that body of hers, but not like this. Never, ever
like this. My hand was firm on Steel’s bicep. He felt it, looked over at me,
his gaze all cold, no longer pretending affection for me, no longer playing the
role of doting mentor. That sunken eye of his was suddenly all the more
gruesome.

“I’m not fucking around
either, kid,” he snarled. He brought one hand around to the front of his jeans,
vulgarly grabbing his crotch through the denim. “I
gotta
stiffie
here that needs servicing, and I think she’s
gonna
be the one to service it. What’s fair is fair, and I
gotta
get paid. Now you back the fuck off, or I’m
gonna
have to do something I’ll regret.”

She was shivering, wailing
now, head thrown back, arms beating uselessly, snot running down her face.
Steel reached up, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and shook her hard.

“Stop
makin
’
such a big fuckin’ deal of it, you little paddy whore,” he growled.

That was it. I wasn’t going
to let him do this – any of it. Before I could even think of what I was doing,
my fist was slamming into Steel’s nose, bright red blood erupting in a cruel
blossom between us.

“Fuck!” Steel screamed,
releasing his grip on Cass. Stunned, she just stood there, tears rolling, body
quaking. Steel stumbled back against the tables and chairs, finally falling
into one of chairs with a heavy thud. His good eye was venomous as it turned up
towards me.

“Fuckin’ idiot kid,” he
screeched. “Fuckin’ broke my fuckin’ nose!”

Beside me, Cass was
hurriedly getting dressed, her body still shivering like a leaf.

“I told you to stop,” I
said, my own voice lower than I could ever remember it. I sounded like my
brother. I sounded like a man. “It’s not right. You’re fucked if you think that
was right.”

“I’m fucked? I’M FUCKED?
I’ll tell
ya
what’s fucked, sonny boy, it’s takin’ in
a little shit-eating nobody like YOU and
treatin
’ him
like the goddam king of Siam and then he goes and fuckin’ sucker-punches you
right in the fucking face!” Steel yelled, his hands still clamped around his
bloody nose.

Then something shifted, in
his one good eye.

The moment I saw
that,
I knew what was coming.

And I knew what I’d have to
do.

My fingers closed around the
handle of my
Glock
.

Steel was too busy being mad
to see.

“You know what happens when
boys like you act up?” he
spit
, voice gravelly and
low, eye narrowed to a slit. “You know what happens?”

“What,” I said through
gritted teeth, knowing
exactly
what
he thought he was going to do.

“They get buried,” he said,
and moved towards his own holster. But his fingers never got to close around
the handle, never got to feel blindly for the trigger. My own gun fired, the
sound deafening in the silent bar. Steel stared at me, mouth open in shock.
Then, he smiled.

Then, he laughed.

The sound filled the room.
First, it was a dry cackle, loud and hearty.

Then, it got
wet.

And then it wasn’t laughter
anymore, it was the sound of choking, the sound of gargling, and red liquid
bubbled up out of his mouth, stained the spaced between his teeth, ran across
his lips.

And then he looked at me.
One more time. He sputtered a little bit, a bubble of blood popping. It looked
like he was smiling at me.

And although it was the last
thing I felt like doing, although I didn’t think my mouth muscles could ever
possibly move that way again, somehow, I managed to smile back.

“So that’s when the First Five-Year Plan was implemented. And that really
started a lot of the perversion of Leninism…”

“I just don’t get it,” Thomas said, shaking his head slowly.

“Oh…um…well, see, right, now the government was forcing people to give up
their farms and…”

“No, no, I get it. But why did people let it happen? I mean, people
aren’t dumb. And this was a people who’d already undergone so much bloodshed
and shit to get what they wanted – to get a more, you know, equal and comradely
society. So why did they just start letting themselves get pushed around
again?”

“Well, I suppose you could ask the same thing about Nazi Germany, too. Or
even Korea, or Venezuela, or Mexico.”

There was a pause as Thomas seemed to think this over. Then, he leaned
forward, capturing
Cass’
eyes in his and making her
lean forward too, instinctively mimicking him.

“Well, right, maybe this is the thing. So, in Germany, right, everyone
had been starving for, like, years, right? Like didn’t that happen, after World
War One, there was all that bullshit in the treaty of whatever, that made it so
that Germany got super poor and everyone was just starving and cold all the
time? So then here comes Hitler, and he says he’s got the solution, and people
already aren’t thinking right because of how hard shit is, and they’re just
willing to do whatever someone says if that person promises things will get
better. And stuff does get better, for a while.

So maybe in Russia, or, you know, the Soviet Union, it was like: we tried
really hard, and a lot of us died, and there were wars and famines and misery
everywhere, all so we could have this. So, like, even if people started
thinking ‘maybe this isn’t right’, they still had to be like ‘well it’s what we
want’, or else it would be more war, and all that they’d already been through
wouldn’t have meant anything anymore. So everyone, like, lied to themselves,
you know? Maybe? Oh, I don’t know. You’re smarter than me. Can you just give me
the answer?”

He’d been poking at the desk, using his hands and fingers to elaborate
certain points, and Cass had been nodding along. Now, he seemed ashamed, cheeks
turning red. He leaned back and crossed his arms across his chest.

“No, I think you’re right. Or, I mean, there’s no right answer to that
but…but I think you’ve got it pretty right. Thomas, you’re not stupid. Why do
you always call yourself stupid? That was…that was, like, really smart.”

“Nah, just the bullshit I think about when I’m not thinking about
riding,” he said with a smile. “You’re the smart one. I mean, what the hell
does Korea have to do with any of this? Or Venezuela or Mexico?”

She laughed.

“That’s a whole different unit altogether. You’ll probably learn about
them next year. Or maybe not until college, actually.”

He scoffed.

“College? Yeah fuckin’ right. Waste of money,” he said. “Can you imagine
me some college boy? Joining a frat or whatever? Nah, once I graduate from this
garbage can, I’m
gonna
make me some money.”

“Oh yeah? How’re you
gonna
do that?” Cass said,
playing along. His eyes flashed, a wicked smile coming across his face.

“I got high friends in places,” he said. “And that’s all I have to say in
the matter. But, hey, maybe I’ll come visit you wherever you end up going to
college. I bet you could get in anywhere.”

Cass felt her cheeks flaming up, her heartbeat quickening
. Don’t
read too far into that, Cass, he’s just being nice because I’m helping him out,
she thought to herself. But the feeling
that swept through her was exciting. And the image that suddenly burst into her
brain…well, that was exciting too. She imagined, in a vision that flickered on
and off quick as a
lightbulb
on the fritz, was being
held close to his chest, his face lowering down, their lips meeting…

“You’re cute when you blush,” he said, ignorant of the full reason for
that blush. “But I mean it. You got brains, you got beauty, you’ll be wearing
matching pastel sweater sets with the Kappa Alpha
Whatevers
in no time.”

“I’m not beautiful,” Cass mumbled, still reeling from the fantasy that
invaded her mind. A mind that she took great lengths to keep free from such
fantasies. She had always reasoned that thinking about something you’d never
have was a waste of time, and a
surefire
way to feel
worse about yourself than you really needed to.

“
Psh
, who told you that? You got it all, girl,”
Thomas said. When she managed to look him in the eye, her heart stopped in its
tracks.

“Thanks,” she said, praying that he couldn’t see what was happening
behind her blue eyes. He shrugged and leaned forward over the open textbook
once more.

“So, anyway, the First Five-Year Plan…” he said. Cass mentally shook
herself of the persistent idea of Thomas’ lips closing over her own and pulled
her eyes back to the textbook, as well.

“Right, so…”