AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"That's true. And one thing off the list of shit to worry about until all this is handled once and for all."
"Gotta say, man, you seem pretty chill about it all."
"Says the guy who just got blown up."
"Your sister gave me an Oxy," I admitted, shrugging.
"Of course she did. Come on. Come inside. We got some talking to do."
So talk we did.
Until Teddy showed up to take Huck back to the scene of the explosion.
Seeley came a while later, depositing all the bags, the boxes of pizza, the trays of drinks, accepting the money I handed him, then leaving a paper with his number on it.
"Need something, call. I don't have shit going on," he added, making his way out the door.
"If those motherfuckers killed my cat," Remy said into the tense silence in the room, "There's going to be a lot of pain involved when I find them."
Luckily enough for him, and those motherfuckers, when Huck and Teddy came back, Huck had Ozzy in his hands. Aside from a slightly singed tail, he's made it out alright.
"How'd it go?" I asked, trying to gauge Huck's reaction, but he could be a closed book when he wanted to.
"It went. And it's over. It's time to talk theories. And plans. Life is going to be very different from here on in."
He wasn't wrong.
In fact, I ended up being the only one who was wrong that night.
In thinking a lockdown would keep Auggie safe.
As it turned out, that couldn't have been further from the truth.TWELVEGusExplosions weren't a good thing.
The new clubhouse, though?
Leaps and bounds better than the old one.
So, I guess you could say there are silver linings to every bad situation if you waited long enough.
It hadn't even been that long.
I had to say something for these Henchmen dudes—they got shit done.
Before the guys could even get a good night's sleep, Reign and his people had sent Huck a list of new locations they thought would be better than the old one.
The only downfall in my opinion was none of them were in the same town. Actually, this enigmatic biker president dude had decided that getting out of the busy area of Miami in general was the best decision.
I will admit I had thrown a bit of a fit when I heard that. We'd lived there our entire lives, for better or for worse.
Sure, this new place, Golden Glades, was only about twenty minutes further. And, yes, I understood that getting a somewhat larger piece of property was a good thing from a security standpoint.
What can I say?
It felt like the end of an era.
And it bothered me more than I cared to admit not to have them all just down the street anymore. There would be no more dropping in on my way home or sleeping over when we'd had too much fun.
Nope.
Visiting my brother and his men would take actual forethought. Which likely meant it would not be happening nearly as often.
But, hey, Golden Glades was a pretty low-key, more industrial area. Which meant the guys would likely be crashing at my place sometimes when they wanted to visit Miami Beach and have some fun.
That was a small bit of consolation.
And, hey, if someone showed me this clubhouse, and said I could have it on an interest-free loan until my insurance money paid out? Yeah, I probably would have jumped on it too.
Huck and the guys were moving on up in the world.
The building was set on about an acre of property, all low, already fenced with eight-foot chain-link.
The building itself was sand-colored stucco with two floors and an attic area that could be finished. The guys wouldn't all have their own apartments anymore, but they'd each have a room with a bathroom, plus a giant main space they could use for hanging out and partying.
Sure, it needed some sprucing up, but so had the old place, and that had never bothered the guys. The carpeting was grey, industrial. The walls had fist holes. The kitchen sported linoleum so worn that it was impossible to make out what the original pattern—or color—was.
I figured that since I was being forced to spend most of my time with them, I would throw in a little spring cleaning, slap some paint on the walls, make West do the linoleum.
"You should paint," I told West, sitting up in bed.
"I can't paint," he told me, tone hesitant, and it took me a long moment to realize why.
He couldn't paint.
Because he couldn't stay.
Because there was a timer on his presence here.
That was a reality that was making me feel sicker and sicker by the day. Sometimes, I would be in the middle of something completely random—cooking dinner, doing the laundry, placing an online grocery pick-up order—my mind wandering to some random point in the future, of doing something with West, only to realize he wouldn't be there to share it with me. And the pain of that reality nearly brought me to my knees.
