Page 7 of Ride Long
Chapter 3
Chaser
Deluca and Rocketdragged me through the garage, through the compound, and into Butcher’sroom.
Sloane was gone, I was back in my revolving-door nightmare, and the game had begun. The game to takeFortitude.
Could she do it? Without adoubt.
Was it dangerous? Without adoubt.
“Did you get a look at her?” Delucadeclared.
“That’s Marini’s daughter?” Rocket asked before letting out a slowwhistle.
I shoved down my jealousy and sat heavily, my ass hitting the chair with a dull thud. Sloane and I had been on the road together for almost two weeks, and it was safe to say I’d gotten used to having her all to myself. Other men were going to look at her. Of course they fucking were because she was hot as sin with legs for days. I just wasn’t ready for how deep my jealousy cut. Now I couldn’t touch or even pretend to like her. I was so sick and tired of suffering for another man’sgreed.
“What happened out there?” Deluca asked as I unbuttoned myjeans.
“Shut your pie holes,” a booming voice declared behind me. “He ain’t gonna tell you shitsnothin’.”
Butcher appeared in my peripheral vision. Like a lot of the guys around here, he was built like a tank. The boys called him the gray giant, but the name he took when he joined Fortitude was much moreaccurate.
Everyone around here had a story filled with varying degrees of shit and piss. Some chose to share, others—like me—didn’t. Butcher shared because it got him status in his new life at the club. There was a reason for his name, and it had everything to do with his past life as a paramedic. His reckless behavior—slicing and dicing and manhandling violent sons of bitches—had gotten him banned from his profession, and his underlying violent tendencies led him to a life of patching up the scum that he now called hisbrothers.
“What is it this time?” Butcher asked. “Bullet, knife,burn…”
Since I’d been here, he’d patched me up more times than I cared to remember…when I couldn’t do it myself. I’d had just about every kind of injury I could thinkof.
“Knife,” I replied, still aware that Deluca and Rocket hadn’t left theroom.
“She do it?” Butcher gave me a look, his silvery eyes full ofsuspicion.
I shook my head. “One ofthem.”
Butcher glared at the two bikers and jabbed his finger at the door. “Quit your lollygagging. Get outtahere.”
Rocket snorted and strode out of the room with Deluca on his heels. I got that some of these guys wanted to be on the in, but there was a hierarchy for a reason. Loose trigger fingers didn’t get the final revenge. They perpetuated the continuing cycle ofbullshit.
I lifted my ass off the chair and dropped my jeans, wincing as the material peeled away from my thigh. Back on the train, I’d wrapped myself up in a pair of Sloane’s tights, and now Butcher could see the makeshifttourniquet.
He raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He just grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the material away from my leg. The moment the pressure was relieved, blood oozed from the stabwound.
“If the fucker cut an artery, you’d be dead by now,” the big man mused. “But it should’ve stopped bleeding by now. Howlong?”
“Tenhours.”
Butcher grunted and slapped a wad of gauze over the hole. Grabbing my hand, he pressed in over the top. “Holdthat.”
My mind wandered as he rattled around in his drawers and opened the autoclave. It was a better setup than the one I had in that motel room. Sewing up my own arm in a moldy bathroom with nothing but a bottle of rubbing alcohol to sterilize the needle was a necessary risk. Butcher’s rooms weren’t exactly ER standards, but they weren’t halfbad.
“Don’t scream,” Butcher said with a smirk. He shoved my hand away from my thigh and poured antiseptic on thewound.
I gritted my teeth, but the bastard knew I wouldn’t make a sound. I never showedweakness.
“I’d ask you if you wanted a local anesthetic, but…” He shrugged. I alwaysdeclined.
Staring across the room as he got to work, my thoughts zeroed in on Sloane. She would be standing before her father right now, saying God knew what. It wasn’t any of my business, but I still wanted to know. Was he going to lock her up and throw away the key? Was he going to sell her off to the highest bidder? Now he had her back, was he going to use her to bait the HollowMen?
