Page 4 of Gunner

Tyrant will never be his father, I can say that. He’s good shit and I don’t want to give him a hard time or make him worry.

In my past life, I became conditioned to survive. You controlled your face or it got you killed. You carried out orders. You obeyed. You lost the fear of dying. You learned there was nothing you couldn’t stomach. I’ve been living that way for most of my life. I’m thirty-four, but I feel like an old man.

My Prez’s eyes trace my bare skin where I have my sleeve rolled up. No one in this club has seen me without a shirt off and most of the time, I’m in a Henley or long sleeves. I have tattoos where my skin could be tattooed, but a large portion of my chest and arms are twisted, mangled flesh. I pulled my old Don out of a fiery wreck and got myself a nice promotion for my troubles and scars.

“For fuck’s sake, man. Wait.” He snatches a pair of black nitrile gloves from the medical kit and snaps them on. “Let me do that before you look like Frankenstein.”

“The monster, you mean. That bastard was the doctor. I think I might already be beyond redemption in the beast area.”

He chuckles. “You might scare the shit out of other people, but you’re a true brother, you feel me?”

I’m not sure if Tyrant’s stitched anything before, let alone human flesh. He hesitates. I’m an asshole, sure, but I do have a sense of humor somewhere. I load an instructional video for him on my cellphone.

“Have at it, boss.”

He shakes his head, but he does start, gaze flicking from the video and back down to my arm. This would be far easier if I did it myself, crooked as fuck or not.

“There isn’t a man here who doubts that you’d die for any one of us. We have your back.”

“I don’t need help.” I don’t need anything but a place to hide and live. This is good cover.

Fuck, maybe it’s more.

I couldn’t help myself five years ago and I’m not much for resistance now.

After leaving my criminal family behind, and fleeing the country, stalking the woman I’d saved and become obsessed with her like a pathetic fucking douchebag, I gravitated naturally to wanting that same connection.

I was here for a few months, watching over Diletta from a distance, before I couldn’t stand it anymore. The town didn’t have much crime because there was a motorcycle club that had eradicated most of it in favor of a monopoly of their own. That kind of club attracted certain kinds of men, and I had the skillset to be one of them.

When I first started hanging around the club, I was like a shadow. I did that for a few weeks, making it obvious what I wanted, before I hounded anyone and everyone here about prospecting. Honestly, at first Zale Grand didn’t like the look of me and said as much without holding anything back, but when I was insistent, he finally gave in.

Said I was trouble, but the loyal kind, and you couldn’t beat that. I proved that loyalty, time and again during that year I prospected, by taking the jobs the other guys wanted and getting them done better than anyone else ever could. I was quiet and most of the guys thought I was weird, but I could be trusted to get my hands dirty. I could take a beating or hand one out. I could pull guard duty for a week in a row without sleeping. I didn’t mind dealing with prospective buyers and I had good intel on where decent weapons could be sourced. It was clear I had a past, but like most men in the club, it was forgotten when I patched in. From that day, I was a brother of the club, nothing more and nothing less. I’ve found a place for myself in this town, I own the tattoo parlor which gives me some income—I boughtit with the money Luciano gave me as thanks for saving his daughter—I’m not an artist, I hire guys for that, but in the five and a half years I’ve been in Hart the club has been my life.

The only trouble I’ve brought to this club is my own stupidity. After years, I’ve fucked this up. It’s ironic, in a way, that Tyrant is the one stitching me up when Diletta was a nurse. I close my eyes and imagine her soft hands, even though I don’t want to. She’s not for me.

Never. For. Me.

My mind conjures her touch anyway. Gentle fingertips tracing down my arm, her other hand bracing it from below. She’d look at the scars questioningly. Trace a few of them up to where the flesh really gets mangled.

Take your shirt off. Let me see.

I hate being touched. I hate people looking at me. Diletta is so beautiful. Pure. Kind. I’d do it for her, just to scare her away from the monster. Beauty and the fucking token beast. But she wouldn’t look away. She’d breathe out in horror and in broken pity and I’d hate that, but then her soft lips would kiss the long-healed wounds and the anguish and anxiety would vanish.

You’ll always be beautiful to me.

My little fantasy plays out in my head, and I give a snort of laughter, jerking my arm so the needle goes wonky. Tyrant stops abruptly, green eyes tracing my face.

This man is our president for a reason. He’s smart. Wise. Has this fucking well of kindness that most people lack and that doesn’t make him a pussy. He’s not afraid of staring right into your soul and drawing you out. He’s not scared in theleast of doing it to me right now, whereas most men would shit themselves.

Most men who looked at me that way, questioning me, searching for answers I don’t want to give would get their eyes gouged out and fed to them.

Tyrant goes back to stitching. He finishes up and claps me on the shoulder, far more affectionately than I can usually stand. My skin doesn’t even crawl. I’m too distracted trying to figure out how the fuck I’m going to fix what I did tonight.

How am I supposed to keep watch now that I have nowhere to do that properly?

Finding a new spot isn’t the only choice I have.

I’ve followed her before.

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