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Dex caught Eight’s look, and they shared a moment. Understanding, Dex stepped back to the door, backing Duncan.
Eight turned to Zach. “We need the gun, the loot, and the cash, much of either as is left. Then, the rest is on you.”
What they did here was his. Acting for his brother, his father, and himself, Zach took the lead.
They were his first kills for the club.
~oOo~
Around four the next morning, Eight gave up on the notion of sleep. He was approaching his third day since he’d rested well, and he was way too fucking old to run at full power with so little in his tank, but it was what it was. With JJ in the hospital, and maybe his patch on the line, and Maverick pushing to yank the prospect kutte off his own kid, and the Horde riding in tonight, and the mountain of bullshit about Marcella and Ajax, his brain would not shut the fuck up.
For most of his life, Eight hadn’t had a problem shoving any worries to the side at bedtime. His head hit the pillow and went dark. Even in prison, he’d managed that more nights than not.
Turning off his brain had been easy for him since he was a little kid, when sleep was the only peace he had. He’d never been one to try to stay up past bedtime, like most kids; instead, he’d been in a hurry to reach the end of the day. Nobody fucked with him when he slept.
Eight wasn’t the kind of guy who got comfortable in his own head. If he poked around in there too much, who the fuck knew what kind of creepy crawlies would skitter out. So he didn’t do a lot of thinking, didn’t play over his day, didn’t call up mistakes or achievements and relive them. Life happened, he did what he did, and he moved on.
People thought that meant he didn’t give a shit, and he was perfectly happy to let them think it. That way, they didn’t bother asking him what he thought.
But this past year, man … his head was full of too much shit.
He rubbed his hands over his face, pressing the heels of his palms hard into his eyes until fireworks went off against his eyelids. Trying to shove all his crap back into the dark. He could not have another night like the one he’d just been released from.
They were heading to California the next morning, and there was no way he’d be able to ride all damn day unless he got some sleep. He’d have to hit up Willa or Felicia for an Ambien.
Weed would do the trick, too, but since all the bullshit with the Perros, the thought of taking the shit they’d muled for those psychos, even weed, gave him a twitch.
Kicking the covers off, he got out of bed and stood there, holding onto the headboard, waiting for his bum leg to decide to carry its share of his weight. A lot of years had passed since he’d wiped out, and every morning since he’d been declared as healed as he was going to get, he’d fought with his own limb to get the day going. As he got older, that fight took longer.
There was a decent chance all the pins in there holding the leg together would eventually wear out, and he’d have to let the doc go back in and replace them, and start this bullshit back from square one. Eight was about eighty-percent decided he’d eat his gun before he went back under the knife.
He wasn’t all mopey and suicidal, but there was no point dealing with all the shit again. It wasn’t like his life was worth fighting that fight twice.
When he could trust the leg not to bail on him, he limped through the dark to his bathroom and started the shower, not bothering to turn on a light.
After he got the water hot enough, he stepped in and leaned his head against the shower wall as the spray cascaded over his back. He was hard, because he always got hard in the shower. He jacked off in here almost every day, and after years of that, he had some kind of Pavlovian response to the sound of a running shower.
Lathering up, he got down to it. But as soon as he took hold of his dick, Marcella rose up inside his eyelids. He let go, thinking the sight of her was a turn-off, but he only got harder.
She was so fucking hot, was the problem. All the ways he thought of her hotness pissed her off, but he didn’t know better ways to think about what appealed. Her sleek body, and the color of her skin—whichwaslike caramel, dammit. Her brown eyes, so dark you had to be kissing distance to see her pupils. The shape of her mouth, the angle of her jaw. She was beautiful.
And damn, she’d been fun in the sack. Playful and passionate and game for just about anything. More than a decade, and a whole lot of women, had gone by since he’d been with her, but he remembered it all like it was yesterday.
That she was hot-tempered and willing to get into it was a turn-on, too—or it had been. He loved sarcastic women who didn’t get agitated and offended at his way of talking. When they’d first met, she’d whacked back every barb he’d sent her way, and it was exciting, to be countered rather than chastised. Better than foreplay.
Now, though, she was all anger and resentment, and there was poison on her barbs. That was no fun.
Damn, but she’d pissed him off yesterday. Just about every fucking word out of her mouth had been an insult or a challenge. He was trying as hard as he knew how to be straight with her, to tell her he knew he’d fucked up—he’d said so outright, in so many words, a bunch of times. But she couldn’t get up off her high horse for one goddamn minute and accept that he was fuckingsorry. It was like she meant to see him on all fours, crawling over broken glass. She wouldn’t chill until he saw him fucking broken and bleeding.
All because when she’d turned up pregnant, he’d told her he didn’t want a kid, and that no kid would want him. It wasn’t his fucking fault she’d had the kid anyway.
Seeing that boy, though, those big blue eyes—he saw himself in the boy, andthathad shaken something loose inside him. He’d had an actual pain in his chest since Hal’s. One of the photos he’d seen had been of Marcella and the boy, maybe two years ago, by the look of them, and it had just about flattened him. They’d been hugging. Marcella had her eyes closed and a smile on her face like there wasn’t one more inch left inside her to hold all her happiness, and the boy was kissing her cheek, his arms locked around her neck.
That one photo held more love and happiness than Eight had felt in his entire sorry fucking life.
And Marcella meant to leave him in bloody ribbons before she’d let him even get near it. She held all the cards, she knew full well there was nothing he’d do to force her hand, and she wasn’t about to let him forget it.
He did not want to jack off to the image of the woman currently doing her damnedest to make him feel like a wart on the asshole of the world, so he gave up on the idea and washed instead.
