Twisted Steel: An MC Anthology: Second Edition by Elizabeth Knox (top 5 ebook reader txt) 📕

my bullshit. But then again, she always was. I shut the door to Rett’s room without looking back and grabbed my shit from the locked cabinet next to the front door.

In a haze, I rode through town toward the only place I knew wouldn’t feel empty. Why that even mattered, I didn’t have the time or inclination to think about. There was a time when all I wanted was quiet, when I used to sneak out back after Rett fell asleep as a baby, just to have a few seconds all to myself. But after Rett grew up, even slightly, I couldn’t focus when it was quiet. I needed his chaos to have even the smallest sense of normalcy in my life.

On the outskirts of Birch, far enough away from town that no one cared what we did, sat the bar my father built after he got out of the military. For thirty years, it’d stood against the weather, the times, and everyone who wanted to see it torn down.

A black skull decorated the front door, shining like a beacon to those who knew the meaning. A reminder of the cost of service, the cost so many refused to see. One I knew… all too well.

“Hey, Deacon!” Cherry, the bartender, greeted loudly from her place on the bar. “What are you doing back here?” She stood there in a pair of yoga pants and a t-shirt that hung off her small frame, holding a broom. Her bright-red curls, the reason we’d nicknamed her Cherry, stood out from her head in every direction, and she grunted while she ignored me in favor of whatever she was doing.

For whatever reason, she was alone in the main area of the bar, which was probably the reason she was climbing on top of shit in the first place.

Who the fuck was I trying to kid? Cherry did whatever she wanted, and I let her because she ran the bar like a well-oiled machine and made it so that neither Pops nor I had to do a single thing.

I ran a hand over my forehead, trying and failing to stay nonchalant. “What the fuck are you doing on the bar, Cherry?” It was a mistake to go back to the bar, I knew it, but I’d still gone. “Get down from there before you break your neck. I don’t wanna have to bury you.”

She snorted and continued to reach toward the ceiling with the broom in her hand, waving it toward something I couldn’t quite see. “You wouldn’t bury me. You’d set me on fire like a proper witch, and you know it.” There was a grunt, followed by a girlish scream, and she dropped the broom on the ground. “Fuckin’ right!” I watched her jump down and throw her fist in the air. “I made that spider my bitch.”

“Do I even want to know?” I stepped behind the bar to grab the amber liquid that would keep me company through the night.

“A spider.” Cherry shrugged and handed me a glass from the other side of the bar. “I woulda left it but it was a black widow so I had to kill him.” She grabbed a glass for herself and poured a soda into it, while I shook my head at her.

Cherry didn’t drink. She hated the taste of alcohol. Which made her choice to run my bar even stranger than everything else I knew about her.

“What are you doing back?” She cocked her hip and stared at me, waiting for an answer to her first question. The one I’d ignored. “Pops went home, and the guys went out back for the fire. I figured we wouldn’t see you for the fun.”

I thought about lying, but there wasn’t a reason to. I was the president of the MC. I didn’t owe anyone an answer. “Rett’s with my sister. The house is too quiet.”

She nodded in understanding. “I hate the quiet too. Well.” Cherry motioned to the door. “You won’t get a single bit of silence tonight. Just… try not to kill anyone this week?”

With a wink, she walked away, no doubt savoring the first victory she’d had over me since we were in high school.

Ignoring the obvious jab, true though it might be, I threw a piece of ice across the room at her. “Try not to fall into bed with Raptor this week.” Mocking her tone like I’d done our entire lives, I barely held back a laugh when I saw her spine straighten.

I thought for sure she’d leave, right up until the moment she turned her head and stared at me with dead eyes.

“Keep it up, Deac.” Her words carried through the room, even though she hadn’t raised her voice, and I knew I’d crossed the line when I saw a brief flash of pain in her eyes. “You know that’s never gonna happen.”

Fuck.

I should have kept my mouth shut.

Cherry had a crush on him, ever since he beat up her prom date for trying to cop a feel. Unfortunately, Raptor never saw her. Something I’d thought he’d grow out of when we got out of the service. He didn’t. And I shouldn’t have used it as ammo in my verbal war against her.

Before I could say anything else or try to salvage the situation, the door to the bar slammed open.

Glass shattered as a picture frame fell from the wall, landing behind the door, drawing both mine and Cherry’s attention.

“Shit,” a woman cried out. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

I watched a pajama-clad woman drop to her knees and start picking up glass with her bare hands. I couldn’t see her face, but dark-brown hair hung almost to the ground while she rushed to pick up her mess.

When the first shot rang out, I’d barely made it to her side to help her up and clean up the mess myself.

But when the second shot screamed by and buried itself into the wall next to my head, all hell broke loose.