Reaper's Promise: An MC Romance (Savage Kings MC Book 19) Read online

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  Savage Redemption

  “My life was all about revenge until I met her.”

  I want them destroyed.

  The Anarchists killed my father, haunt me and my brother, and seek to destroy my club, the Savage Kings.

  For years, I have stopped at nothing to annihilate them.

  But for years, I also never forgot her.

  She was everything to me.

  She brought joy to my life.

  And I had to leave her without explanation.

  But a chance encounter has brought her back to me.

  And now, everything has changed.

  My life is now all about having her—and nothing can stop me.

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  Reaper’s Promise

  Carter Steele

  Contents

  1. Zane

  2. Renee

  3. Zane

  4. Renee

  5. Zane

  6. Renee

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  1

  Zane

  A thousand yards didn’t seem to be a long enough distance to describe how far my gaze extended.

  In my actual line of vision, Renee sat on the bed, her high-induced smile fading into something resembling confusion, fear, and hurt. But I didn’t look at her, nor could I really say anything more nuanced than what expression she wore. I couldn’t say anything at all, really.

  But the person on the other end of the line sure could have.

  “Zane… Parker, Brock, Landon… hospital… Owen got them.”

  Petey’s words rang on echo in my head, like some sort of sick song on repeat that I couldn’t shake. The drugs weren’t helping, of course, but the words had sobered me up so much that I didn’t really think I would feel much more different without them. There wasn’t a state of mind I could be in that would change an unalienable fact.

  I had fucked up.

  I had lied to the club to chase some ass.

  And now, it had cost me my standing in the club, the well-being of three of the club members, and who knew what else.

  And that was just from one phone call in the immediate aftermath of what had happened. Who knew what was bound to happen in the coming hours?

  “Zane? Are you there? Zane?”

  I put the phone back up to my ear, not even realizing until I heard Petey’s distant voice I hadn’t actually hung up on him. I’d gotten so in my own world of disaster that I had failed to acknowledge that Petey was still trying to talk to me.

  “Zane!”

  “I’m here,” I said, which was only true in the physical sense of the word.

  “Zane, I thought you were going to go out and hunt Owen tonight. How did he slip by you? Did you see him en route?”

  No, of course I hadn’t. How had he slipped by me? I hadn’t even been looking for him.

  “Zane?”

  “I’ll talk when I get back,” I said.

  This time, I made sure to hang up the phone when I lowered it. I wasn’t about to say anything else that could put me in any more trouble than I was going to be; this wasn’t the time for me to talk. This was the time for me to shut the hell up, get Renee back home, and deal with the consequences of my stupidity when I returned to the clubhouse.

  If there was a clubhouse, that was. Don’t blow it out that far. Owen attacked the clubhouse, he didn’t burn it down.

  You don’t know that.

  Shit…

  “Zane,” Renee said.

  Her voice had gained some of that therapist’s firmness that told me that our little play time had ended before it had ever really gotten started. That would have been true even without the look in her eyes, but this cemented that certainty.

  “What is going on?”

  There were still signs that she had consumed some drugs. The bloodshot eyes, the difficulty focusing her eyes on me; but they didn’t do anything to take away from the fact that she was in enough control for me to try anything stupid.

  Not that I was going to right now, anyways.

  “Something happened at the clubhouse, and I need to head back,” I said. “Let me drive you home.”

  “What happened?”

  I shook my head.

  “Club business.”

  I don’t know what it was about those two words, but those seemed to be the magic buzzwords that completely sobered her up. She sat up from the bed, looked around as if she had just woken up, and visibly shuddered. This was going to bite me in the ass so hard; I didn’t even want to think about what our next session would be like.

  If there even was a next session, that was. The thought of trying to have a normal therapist session after this night was laughable and impossible. I think I would have had better luck trying to have Landon or Parker act as my therapist than to have another session with Renee.

  “Club business, huh,” she said, her voice depressingly chilled. “Should have figured. I can take an Uber home.”

  “And pay a hundred bucks?” I said. “Let me give you a ride back. No games. I’m just going to drop you off. I’d be doing the same if you were my wife.”

  That seemed like an odd thing to say, but then again, this whole situation just felt like an odd spot to be in—and I didn’t mean the fun kind of odd.

  “You say that like I’m poor.”

  “I say that like I’m trying to do you a favor.”

  I went over and tried to help her out, but Renee pulled her arm away. When she looked back at me, fear, not disgust, seemed to fill her eyes. Fear, perhaps, that she would get discovered and have to face up to being out with a patient.

  “I’ll make sure no one sees you. I’ll get you right up to your place, drop you off, and drive off without—”

  “Fine,” she said, standing up. “Drive slow. I’m not feeling well.”

  That would be just what this night needs. For her to throw up all over my cut and my motorcycle. Boy, that would be karma kicking me in the ass as hard as possible, huh?

  I gave her her space, waiting by the door as she tried to collect herself. Eventually, she brushed past me out the door, and I followed her down to my bike. I gave her her helmet, put my own on, and hopped on. I waited until she had done the same to turn my bike on, and noticeably, her arms barely seemed to grab a hold of me.

  Admittedly, I was pretty understanding of her, but the more of this avoidance behavior she gave, the more pissed I got. Was “club business” really so bad as to cause her to suddenly act like a nun, shunning all touch? I knew that she had an absolute disdain for the Savage Kings, but the fact that she was out with me…

  Well, it was hard to stay too mad at her given that the whole reason this was happening was because I had lied to my own club. If I had told the truth—or if I had just picked a different night to go out—I’d be balls deep inside of Renee, and maybe even building toward something more.

  OK, maybe not that much. I was still Zane Williams. But Renee could certainly make me consider the possibility more than anyone else.

  The bike ride back was, aside from the roar of the engine, as silent as a motorcycle ride could get. It seemed impossible to give a ride on a chopper such a description, but once I tuned out the putt-putt-putt of the engine, it was completely true. Traffic was nonexistent; Renee didn’t really say a word to me; and I didn’t laugh at some of my thoughts. It was antithetical to everything that I liked to do on a bike ride.

  It was only when we got to Romara that Renee started to guid
e me back to her place. When I finally pulled up to her apartment, a small part of me wondered if she would finally say something. I know I had promised her—

  But no.

  As soon as she got off the bike, she handed me my helmet, did a one-eighty turn immediately, and left without saying a word. I stayed long enough to make sure that she got inside to her apartment, but otherwise, the last communication Renee and I had had took place at the hotel room.

  Pretty pitiful for what was supposed to be one of my best conquests yet, if I may say so myself.

  With Renee gone, I took a breath and drove forward. I knew what my next destination was, though I didn’t immediately drive toward it. Instead, I just sort of blindly meandered forward, half-hoping that some miraculous phone call would come and save me from having to face my brothers in the hospital. Miracles, though, were as real as unicorns and me falling in monogamous love.

  Eventually, I accepted my fate and headed toward the hospital. I promised myself that while I would tell the unvarnished truth, I would at least first make sure those who were wounded were not in critical condition—or worse.

  The number of bikes outside of the hospital told me that the entire club, more or less, was now there. There would be no avoiding the looks or angry glares from other club members. I didn’t really deserve to dodge them, but I was already in enough of a hell.

  It wasn’t hard to find the crew. We’d been to the hospital enough times to know the layout better than some of the new nurses; it also didn’t hurt that such visits tended to be expected, to some extent, by the medical staff. Petey saw me first and tried to corner me, but I brushed past him.

  “Let me see my brothers,” I said. “Then I’ll explain.”

  I went room by room. The first room was Parker. He was talking shit to one of the nurses, saying something about how as soon as Liza came down, he’d have the perp’s ass in hand and he would take care of himself. Suffice to say, whatever wounds he had suffered weren’t that serious.

  The next was Brock, who was with Heather. He had a bandage on his head, but he looked conscious and seemed to be functioning fine.

  Then came the last one. Landon. My closest friend in the club. I opened the door.

  His eyes were closed, though at least his heartbeat was steady. But he had burns all over his face, and the amount of bandages on his body suggested he had suffered the worst of it.

  Because of me.

  “Landon,” I said, drawing a heavy breath. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  2

  Renee

  What in the actual fuck did I do last night?

  I bolted out of my bed almost the instant that my eyes started to flutter open. By all accounts, my bedroom looked normal. There wasn’t any real sign that I had nearly committed the worst kind of professional sin last night.

  But inside, my head was spinning, my soul was burning, and my heart was pounding in my chest at the guilt of what I had done.

  I just had to lay the facts out. I had gotten on the bike with Zane. I had gotten drugs with Zane. I had gone to a hotel room with Zane. I had let him… touch me.

  And it was something that I liked. It was something that I had welcomed. It was something that I had really wanted to happen in the moment.

  It had taken… something club-related to get him to stop, and I knew that it wasn’t something that he had taken on of his own volition. He wasn’t looking for an excuse to suddenly stop what was about to happen. If anything, he had been the one to push everything up to that point.

  I went to the window, pushed open the blinds, and tried to just take a few deep breaths. I often advised my patients in moments of extreme stress to find nature—whether by being present in it or just by looking out the window—and focus on their breathing. It wouldn’t make the stress go away, but it would ideally go a long way toward mitigating the effects.

  Of course, it was easy to say those things to them when I was in the office, sitting across from them as they lounged in a chair. It was easy to say them when the most stressful thing I’d dealt with in my professional life was wondering how to help some patients overcome their seemingly insurmountable problems. Now, having to deal with it myself, it suddenly seemed so limiting.

  No wonder therapy had a high relapse rate. What worked in the therapist’s lounge didn’t always translate to reality.

  You almost slept with your patient.

  And not just any patient. A patient several years younger than you. One assigned to you by the sheriff.

  Could you have picked a worse patient to have almost done something with?

  I tried to steer my mind away from that, fearing that if I thought of an answer to the question, it would only make me feel worse. But my mind, like a bull that could not be tamed, yanked right back to that thought.

  No, I could not have picked someone worse to have done something with.

  At least I hadn’t actually done anything. I felt like a spouse who had gone to the bedroom of someone else, gotten naked, and then left without ever touching the other person; sure, technically, nothing bad had happened, but in just about every sense of the word, something had. And it was for this reason that I needed to seriously evaluate if I could keep Zane on as a patient.

  I went to my kitchen and poured myself two cups of coffee, needing the extra energy to get through this kind of morning. Granted, I didn’t think there was any amount of coffee that could get my mind to the level it needed to figure out what I needed, but I absolutely knew without that crutch, nothing was going to get done.

  I let my mind go on the spin cycle, the dirty laundry in my head flopping around and around, in theory getting cleaner. Eventually, when it settled down, I knew I had two polar-opposite choices.

  The first was to just be brutally honest. Admit what had happened, tell Sheriff Jones to take me off the case, and see what Zane and I could have. It was difficult to tell if it was fortunate or unfortunate that despite how I felt this morning, I still felt attraction to Zane, though the repulsion to the situation was still strong.

  The second was to pretend like nothing had ever happened. Continue to have a professional relationship with Zane, see him once a week, and not acknowledge what had happened.

  Of course those weren’t the literal only two choices, but those were the two options that my mind kept coming back to. One meant that I would just act like a teenager, one meant that I would admit to potentially a license-removing mistake.

  In the end, the choice was an easy one.

  My career could not die. No matter what, I could not sacrifice my career at the expense of anything else. There would be many other men in the future—albeit probably not in Romara—but a career as a therapist wasn’t like dating. I couldn’t just move on from one job and go to the next. What I did here would carry over to all my other patients.

  I pulled out my phone and found Zane’s number. I had to text him something… but then I had visions of our texting history getting exposed somehow, and me paying the price as a result. To date, we hadn’t said anything crude or sexual over text, but still…

  No chances meant no chances. I had to hope Zane would lead between the lines.

  “Good morning Zane, just a reminder that our next appointment will be next Friday. I am not sure if I made mention of it at the end of our last session, but now you know.”

  How cowardly and weak. How bland. How… how childish to not say a word about what else had happened last night.

  For someone who advocated speaking the truth and letting the chips fall where they may, I sure could look like a pretty big hypocrite at times.

  I hit send, locked my phone, and threw it in my room as I started to make myself breakfast. I tried to resist going back to my phone, but like a powerful magnet, it took an awful lot of willpower and energy on my part to not go back and look at my phone.

  One veggie omelet later, I went back to my room, succumbed to the temptation, and looked at my phone.

  Zane hadn’t said a w
ord. Of course he hadn’t. It was early. He had gone to the hospital after he’d dropped me off. Why did I have any right to be selfish and think that he would immediately respond to me?

  I guess this was my own punishment to live with. This was my own headache to deal with for the time being.

  One thing was for sure. Friday morning sessions were going to be very unlike anything I had ever dealt with before. Sometimes, consequences couldn’t be dealt with; they just had to be endured.

  3

  Zane

  I didn’t wake up until noon, but as soon as I read Renee’s message, I didn’t need anything else to fully waken me.

  I stared at that message, shaking my head. So this was how we were going to play it, huh? We were just going to pretend that last night hadn’t happened? Who the fuck was the young stupid kid now? I may have been the guy in his early twenties, but right now, it sure seemed like Renee was the one more intent on acting like a teenager.

  I had other messages on my phone I needed to attend to, but I spent a good deal of time just writing and rewriting angry replies back to Renee, pissed at how something that could have been fun could now be reduced to her acting like an old lady therapist. The fuck, man.

  Only after I decided I would give her a piece of my mind that Friday did I look at my other text messages, and it was probably a good thing that I did. The most recent one had come from Petey.