Page 13 of Virago

Wearing snug, faded jeans and a black Harley t-shirt, she was bent over the pool table, lining up her next shot, and Zaxx’s legs almost forgot how to work.

He didn’t know Gia more than to exchange a greeting nod; she’d been away at one college or another for all his time with the club, so he’d seen her only when she was around during breaks. That hadn’t happened much at all for the past few years. Word had gone around that she was about done with grad school—girl was working on a PhD, and yeah, that was intimidating as fuck—and planned to move back home while she wrote her dissertation, so he shouldn’t have been surprised to see her.

He wasn’t surprised. He was just generally awestruck whenever he saw her.

That girl was absolutely fucking gorgeous. Just ... damn. Long, dark hair, thick and straight, with long bangs that framed her beautiful face. Full lips shaped like a kiss. A pert nose and high cheekbones. And blazing gemstone-green eyes that seemed to burn straight through anything she looked at.

She was really tall, like only a few inches shorter than him, and he was tall himself. And her body—holy shit. Firm curves in all the right places: lush ass, great tits, and miles-long legs. The girl clearly worked out—and Zaxx had heard talk that she could really fight. Like her mom.

Actually, in most ways, especially looks, she was like a young version of her mom. Lilli was a serious MILF, though sweet Jesus, Zaxx had never looked at her with that thought in his head. Isaac was jealous as fuck, hard as fuck, and basically a giant, and Zaxx liked his parts where they were.

He was, unfortunately, looking at Isaac’s daughter with some thoughts in his head, and even more unfortunately, Isaac had noticed. Getting a red-alert feeling, he shifted his attention from that perfect ass—Gia took her shot and dropped two stripes in different pockets—and saw her father staring directly at him, arms crossed over his fifty-yard chest. His expression was blank, but his own set of gemstone-green eyes bored into Zaxx with such intensity he could almost feel his skin melting off his bones.

He turned away at once and headed for Badger’s office.

~oOo~

Badger did paperwork every Saturday, so Zaxx figured he’d be at his desk, and he was right. When the club president answered his knock by calling him in, Zaxx entered, asked if they could talk, was waved at the chair beside Badge’s desk, and explained what had happened to Zelda and what Zaxx needed now.

“This cop is a sergeant?” Badger asked when Zaxx was finished with his story.

“Yeah. At the Mo State substation. That can’t put him too high up the chain. The campus beat is mostly crowd and traffic control.”

“Maybe. Or it could mean the opposite: a pretty cush assignment, the kind cops get rewarded with, not punished with—because, like you say, they don’t usually have to deal with serious crime.”

That sounded like Badger meant to talk Zaxx out of retaliating, and Zaxx had no intention of being talked out.

“Don’t tell me I can’t do something about this asshole, Badge. He felt up my sister. And he arrested her on bullshit and actually charged her!”

Badger smoothed a hand down his long, reddish-grey beard as he studied Zaxx. “I’m not telling you anything at this point, Zaxx, except that you need to be smart, and so do we. I know you want to charge out there and make this cop bleed, and I would too, in your place. I want you to get Zelda out of trouble and pay what he did to her back. But as president, I gotta think first about the club, and you as a patch. Charging headlong isn’t the way. We need more information, we need a plan for how to get things done without causing hurt where we don’t want it.”

It made sense; Zaxx could see that. Hell, he could understand it—wasn’t that why he was here now and hadn’t already broken that bastard’s fingers? He knew he had to be smart, and he knew he had to involve the club president so he wouldn’t put the club in trouble they didn’t see coming. There was a kind of phobia among the older patches about ‘falling back into the dark,’ as Showdown put it. The way they talked about those long-ago days, Zaxx was pretty sure they all had some kind of PTSD.

He couldn’t blame them. He was a kid still in grade school back then and hadn’t even heard of the Horde, but he could look at Len, with his eye patch and hands stiff and riddled with scars and understand how bad the bad days had been. If Len wasn’t enough, he could see how stiffly Showdown moved, and remember that time he’d seen him without a shirt on, seen the whipping scars crisscrossing his whole body. Or Isaac—he’d taken a shotgun blast point-blank in the back and had been paralyzed for a long time. He still walked with a hitch in his step. Or Badge’s chest—he’d seen a brief glimpse of that alien terrain only once, when Badger was pulling off a hoodie and his t-shirt came up with it, but holy shit, it was bad.

And then there was Havoc, who hadn’t survived those days. Now Havoc was like the patron saint of the Night Horde. Or maybe he was a ghost haunting the place. Whatever he was, even patches who’d never known him in life felt his presence in the clubhouse.

Stories about those days were both legend and sacrament—well known in the club but never to be asked about, only to be spoken by the men who’d lived them, and only when they chose to speak.

Badger did not mention those days now, but Zaxx saw them living in his eyes. Badger had been a young patch back then, but he was president now, and his prime directive was to keep the club from ever repeating the past. So he would counsel—if not outright order—Zaxx to hold back, be smart.

“We gotta think about the big picture here, Z,” Badger said, as if plucking the thought out of Zaxx’s head. “So let me ask: if you had to choose between getting Zelda clear of these charges or getting payback on the handsy sergeant, what’s your priority?”

Zaxx was naturally wired for impulsivity, but his upbringing had taught him how to control that urge. With parents like his, somebody else had to be the grownup, and he was the only one who could. But every decision to wait, to be smart, to play things out first, went against his nature and caused him physical and psychic pain. He’d lived his whole life with his impulses caged. Meds eased that feeling but couldn’t erase it.

It seriously sucked that everybody in his family but him got to do whatever the fuck they wanted without worrying about the consequences. Because he was there to handle cleanup. In the current situation, payback and saving Zelda were both cleanup, and both important.

“That son of a bitch touched my baby sister, Badge. He had his hands in her underwear, between her legs. I promised Zelda I’d handle it.”

Zaxx saw Badger react to that description, but it was subtle, no more than a tensing around his eyes. Badger had two teenage daughters, Megan and Caroline. The father in him understood the need to correct Danvers. Powerfully.

When he spoke, though, he was all president. “So that’s your priority? Making him pay?”

“You’re saying I’ve got to choose one or the other.”

“Not necessarily. I’m saying you need to prioritize one over the other. If we end up where you can only get one thing, which one would that be? Payback?”

Zaxx stared at his hands. He knew the answer, it was obvious, but equally obvious was the idea that a priority would end up being a choice. Danvers was going to get away with it, and Zelda would lose her fucking mind. She’d have made the opposite choice, but that was because she never considered the consequences.

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