Page 122 of Filthy Love

And then his fucking belly hit his shoes, bile hurtled into his throat like it was gonna win first place in a race.

“Colton, baby, I need ….” The female voice purred, making him murderous.

Everything chilled over. Bones, nervous system, his fucking bloodstream all turned to icebergs. Hawk felt his throat lock up, struggling to even swallow even though his mouth was Sahara dry.

He didn’t know his free hand had fisted until he rested it to the brick wall.

“Fuck you,” he hissed, venom pouring through him in an alarming rate. “Seriously, go fucking die.”

He hung up and immediately blocked the number.

A scream raced across the landscape of his mind.

Without thought, his head hissing too loudly with voices and dark whispers and a sickening homicidal taste coating the back of his throat, he cocked back his fist, repeatedly punched the brick.

Teeth clenched.

He hammered the wall until his bones begged for him to stop, blood oozing from the broken skin.

Huffing like a monster, he felt all his deranged self as he paced four feet one way and then back again. Repeating it on a loop, cursing to himself like an animal would in the wild if it were afforded a human voice.

It was murky, unhinged, inaudible mutterings.

Answering to inner thoughts that should have been long gone, but no fucker would ever let him forget. Her fucking voice. It grated like broken glass.

Taking a huge gulp of air, he knew he’d been outside too long when people fell out of the bar laughing. He straightened from the wall, used the front of his shirt to mop up what he could of the blood, only now feeling the tug of pain on his hand, he zipped his jacket masking the stain and shoved both hands inside the pockets before striding inside.

Both Rider and Charlie were standing prepared to leave.

“Everything sorted?” He managed to ask around the bolder of crap in his throat.

The cop looked at him probingly as if he could see down to Hawk’s guts and he didn’t want any person knowing what was down there, so he scowled like a degenerate at the innocent guy. He knew what he saw when people looked at him, if they got past his scary demeanor. His face was a constant canvas of inscrutability and that’s how he liked it. He didn’t want no one in his face let alone his head.

“Seems to be. So, you’re in, right? This makes sense for both of us, Charlie.” Rider asked the guy. And Charlie nodded reluctantly. “Just … fuck, just try not to get ya ass in my cells okay? Not much I can do for you if you’re on a rap sheet. I’ll do what I can on my end. This ends well without fatalities, you got it?”

Hawk and Rider left first, retracing their steps back to the bikes.

Rider kept right on yapping his gums, but Hawk heard none of it.

Left and right the sickness slopped in his belly.

It was nebulously fucking depressing that at thirty-seven he was still dealing with shit he couldn’t drop off the edge of the earth. That the kind of person he was with several wires not working real good meant he had coping mechanisms that screamed to be utilized to dull the noise as he threw a leg over his bike. He could only think of pouring his fury into someone until they gathered all his pain and he’d be blessedly empty again.

“You fuckin’ listenin’ to me?” He caught, and he switched his gaze to find Rider’s eyes on Hawk’s hand around the bike gears. “The fuck happened there?”

“Yeah, I’m listening.” He lied.

“Asked you a question, Hawk. The fuck happened? Who called you?”

Hawk cocked a brow. “You wanna climb down off my dick? It was nothing.”

“A busted hand is nothing? You either killed some fucker in those ten minutes you were gone, or you’ve taken to scraping your hands on the floor like a gorilla.”

Any other time he might have cracked a partial grin.

Twitching his jaw, he revved the engine, kicked off the foot stand.

“You good, man?” Asked Rider in that concerned voice of his that any decent man had in him somewhere. Hawk hated pity. He’d rather have his fucking head chewed off by a cobra than have someone’s pity and not his best friend’s.

---