Page 72 of Rome
I walked right up to him and punched him in the gut. As he bent over clutching his midsection and wheezing, I threw an uppercut, hitting him square underneath his chin. The blow knocked him on his ass, and his head bounced off the concrete wall of the bar.
“Stop, please, I didn’t do anything wrong.” He was sniveling, laying there on the ground in a puddle of something putrid that had leaked out of the dumpster next to him.
“Yeah, you did, you goddamned motherfucker. You took advantage of a woman you knew was upset and feeling vulnerable. You preyed on her. You used her, then when I showed up, you ran out and left her to face me on her own. I would never hurt that woman, but you had no fuckin’ way to know that. You just ran, like the chickenshit pussy you are.”
“I didn’t mean – “
“Now, here’s what’s gonna happen,” I interrupted him with a snarl. “You’re gonna get the fuck out of Indy, you hear me? I don’t care where you go, but you get the fuck out of this city, because if I ever see your goddamned face again, I’ll kill you, and that’s a fuckin’ promise.”
I kicked him in the ass as he laid on the ground, and he groaned and cried again. Fucking pussy.
“Am I makin’ myself clear, motherfucker?”
“Y…yes,” he stuttered, shaking his head so fast he looked like a damned bobblehead doll.
I turned to stomp back to the parking lot when a thought hit me. I whirled back around, to find him struggling to his knees. I walked back over and grabbed a fistful of his hair, yanking his head back so he had no choice but to look up at me.
“If you even think of telling any-fucking-body about our little chat here, you’re gonna have an entire fuckin’ MC hunting your ass down, and they won’t be as nice as I was. Understood?”
He tried to nod, wincing when the action pulled the hair still fisted in my hand.
“Understood,” he promised.
I peeled off a few hundreds and tossed them at him. “Put that toward your moving expenses,” I sneered, then turned on my heel and headed back around the building to my Tahoe.
Ten minutes later, I drove through the open gate of the clubhouse compound. As I slowly walked into the building, I noticed Jagger’s blue Charger parked near the door.
I didn’t see him in the common room, only Joker, Bodhi, and Buck playing a video game while Skid sat on one of the couches with Misty on his lap. I flexed my hand as I approached the bar, wincing as one of the cuts on my knuckles tore open again. I asked Rodney for a bag of ice. He took one look at my hand, filled a baggie with ice and wrapped it with a bar towel, then handed it over without a word,
I cradled my injured hand against my chest and pressed the ice on it as I made my way to my dad’s office. As I expected, Jag was in there with him.
“Prez,” I greeted him as I flopped down in the chair next to my brother. They both eyed my hand, and Jagger reached over to lift the makeshift icepack so he could inspect the damage.
“First things first. Did you find Abby? Is she OK?”
“I found her. She’s not OK, but she will be.”
King nodded slowly. “Fair enough. Now, what the fuck happened to your hand?”
“I had to teach a lesson to a stupid motherfucker.”
Jagger snorted. King closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose the way he did when he was thinking. “Are you gonna need bail money or a shovel to bury the body?”
Jag snorted again and I flipped him the bird with my good hand.
“Neither. I didn’t kill him, and he thinks that the rest of the MC will come after him if he calls the cops.”
“He thinks that, does he?”
“He had help reaching that conclusion, but yeah.”
Jagger just laughed out loud at that.
“Tell me what happened, Rome. All of it. You look like shit, and I don’t just mean your hand.”
I told them everything, and they both pretended not to notice the way my voice broke as I recounted finding the love of my life just moments after she went down on another man. They were both shocked and expressed concern for Abby acting so out of character.
“You should have seen the look on her face. I fuckin’ broke her inside.”
