Wild Heart- Extended Edition (The Wild Heart Series) (21 page)

She turned to face him, “It was Cash. I know it was. He had to have called this shit in last night.”

“What are you gonna do, love? Go beat the information outta him?” Knox chuckled.

How could he find this funny? It wasn’t; their clubhouse had just been raided by the cops and he’s laughing. “Maybe. I can’t just let him get away with it.”

“Before you go starting a war, let’s go inside and talk,” he wrapped his arm around her shoulder as he turned and led her back into the house. “Trust your gut, love. You know that it wasn’t the cop that called this in.”

They made their way back into Knox’s room, working diligently for a few minutes to put the bed back into useable shape. Then Knox gathered the papers that had been strewn across the floor and set them in a messy pile back up on the dresser. Ani could feel the tension in the air, Knox was nervous about telling her the darkest of the secrets the club had. She could tell that it wasn’t nerves that she would leave again, but that she would be ashamed of him.

He found a seat at the end of the bed and pulled her over to him. “Ani, I will tell you anything you want to know. But I need you to know that the choices I have made in my life, they aren’t all my proudest moments.”

“Knox, all I want is your honesty. We can sort the rest out later.”

“Where do you want to start?”

“Tell me why the cops were here looking for guns?” Ani asked.

“Because we are an outlaw motorcycle club, which means we participate in illegal activities.”

“By illegal, you mean drug running? Selling guns? Killing people?”

“You really know how to get to the chase don’t you?” Knox eyed over at her, trying to gauge her level of anxiety. “When we were back in Ireland there was an overturn in the government. People needed help and they weren’t getting it. Taxes were going up, but decent medical care for people and their children was non-existent. Because life was shit, people started to revolt. Guns became a hot commodity, but there weren’t a lot of people willing to go to jail or die for distributing guns to people who were trying to overturn the government.”

Ani sat, listening to the horror they had lived when in Ireland, how Knox’s dad had started the club out of his love for motorcycles, but it had progressed into something more. William had a passion for the revolution. He loved the beauty in a free man standing against a government, who somehow excused all of their actions because they were merely following orders. William struck encouragement in the men and women around him to stand up for themselves and their needs. And because of his strong will for solidarity, he began reaching out to other clubs he’d met in other countries so as to equip anyone who wanted it with the means to protect themself. With a few hair brained ideas, they began importing guns from Germany through their shipping business. It didn’t take long after for the revolution to really come into full force.

It started with Germany and then Russia, followed by Turkey and Africa. They soon showed other clubs that the respecting others out of fear of their reaction was no way to live. The Kings of Karnage M.C. grew by the day and soon developed charters around the world. They didn’t view anarchy as a means of violence, but as a means of freedom. Freedom from the chains they had never realized were there, because they had never made a move before.

“So, how did you end up here in the states?”

“Shit was rough in Ireland, after my mum passed away, I had nothing to lose and I just buried myself deeper into the club life. Ani, I have held the heart of another man in my hand and watched as it stopped beating.” Knox dropped his head into his head, ashamed and full of guilt, “All because they went against the club orders.”

Ani reached her hand in between his arms and lifted Knox’s chin. “Knox, that was in the past.”

“It will always be there though. The anger, the need to protect the oath I gave my father that I would keep my club together and safe.” His steel eyes were dark and rimmed with shame. “We came to the states in hopes that I could get the younger members of the club away from that shit in Ireland. But when you try to find humble work, in hopes of the same pay as you were getting before, it makes it that much harder to keep everything together.” He sat back up and reached for her hand, twisting it up to his mouth and placing a light kiss on the back. “We tried to find a legal game to follow here, but it would always fall through. Before long, the guys were looking for other ways to make ends meat and as a club we decided to get back into the guns and drugs.”

“Do you do drugs?”

“Fuck no,” he stated, feeling more at ease when she looked at him reassuringly. “We haul coke and prescription pills in at the docks along with guns from Ireland. We ship them in vegetable containers to get it past inspection. We have a small charter in North Carolina who distributes the coke and they run the pills to us through a freight service that they’ve cut in on the deal.”

“And the guns? Are they here?”

“No, we don’t work and play in the same place. We have an unmarked warehouse up the road that is registered under a dummy corporation and we store them there. We have members who stay at the warehouse twenty four hours a day to ensure no one who isn’t supposed to, finds it.”

Three hours later they emerged from his bedroom. Ani’s head was spinning with all of the information she had just absorbed. Rival clubs, drug running, illegal guns, and so much more. Knox had given her one last chance when they had gotten into the nitty gritty to jump ship and bail, but she chose to stay. It was almost unnerving how well she had stomached the rest. He’d told her more about the problems they’d had in Ireland and what had been happening since they got to the states.

They hadn’t had many problems with other clubs until three years ago. When the club became hard off for money and couldn’t find legal work they had picked up a protection detail for a state senator, covering his illegal shipments to the next state over. That was when they had their first run in with the Renegades. The Renegades’ M.C. had been around for much longer and they thought they deserved a cut of the deal, considering that the Kings had to go through Gatlinburg; their self-proclaimed turf. However, that didn’t pan out and the Renegades were shut out of the deal altogether, with most of their charter getting slapped with charges of distribution and manufacturing of narcotics.

The majority of the Renegades’ club had only just gotten out of state prison and they now had nothing but retaliation on their hands. They blamed the Kings for their arrest and looked at them as traitors to the life, even though they hadn’t had anything to do with the arrest. That was because of the Renegades’ own stupidity and carelessness. Jail time was part of the outlaw lifestyle. Every biker who ran in that lifestyle knew it.

“You ok, love?” Knox pulled her from her thoughts.

“Yeah, I’m ok.” She leaned up and kissed him gently as she helped him rummage through paperwork.

He had assured her that this sort of thing didn’t happen often, but that it was probably retaliation for their being in Gatlinburg the other weekend. Not to mention, when Knox had left that night, he and Rage had found the closest building that flew the Renegade’s colors and they burned the son of a bitch to the ground. Chief, the president of the Renegades’ M.C., who had been one of the unfortunate members to spend time behind bars, hadn’t been able to make his point in the nightclub and then ended up with a pile of ashes to clean. He’d gotten a shot off at Knox, but in an effort to avoid future jail time, they had split in the middle of the chaos. Ani hoped that this war between the two M.C.’s wouldn’t blow over at her work. She knew Chief came in to make deposits and she could only imagine what he would do now that he knew she was Knox’s old lady.

Ani knew that with time, and a deep level of understanding, that she would eventually become used to the outlaw life that the Kings of Karnage M.C. offered. She knew that there would be days that she would have to make decisions that could hurt others. There would be times when her loyalty would be challenged, but no matter what, she had to stand beside her King.

Life is short, it flies by us so quickly sometimes that we don’t even realize that a day has passed by. So much can happen in a day. We are born in the length of a day, we can die in the length of a day. We can fall out of love within a days’ time, but we can also fall in love within a day too. And Ani had done just that. From the first day she set eyes on Knox her soul had fallen in love with his kind demeanor, his protectiveness. All of the roads along her life had led her right up this point; the point when she realized that nothing else in her life would ever be the same. This was the point when time became two separate entities; all of the things that happened before and now all of the things that were to come.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE LIFE

Over the next few months, Ani learned that one of the hardest decisions in life, is deciding whether to walk away or try harder. Life with the M.C. become routine. But as she got deeper into the outlaw life, she began to pull further away from Cash and everything that had once consumed her.

They hadn’t seen or heard from the Renegades since the raid at the clubhouse and it had almost become a forgotten matter altogether. Work had been hectic and Kate had been out sporadically, battling a head cold that Ani refused to get. Ani spent her time split between being with her father and being with Knox, who had even gone so far as to build a stable for Catori at the M.C. clubhouse. It had been very humorous watching a group of badass bikers trying to figure out what to do with a horse.

Aside from a few accidental run-in’s she hadn’t seen or spoken to Cash since the night she found him drunk. Ani was beginning to learn that love didn’t have to be difficult. Yeah, unexpected shit was always going to happen; and so it was going to happen whether she was with Cash or Knox. But each passing day with Knox began to feel right, like this was where she was supposed to be all along.

Every time she had tried to make things work with Cash they had ended up in flames. Sure, Cash was the first person she’d shared her heart with, but he wasn’t her first true love; that was becoming evident. The love she felt for Knox was incomparable to any feeling she’d ever felt before. It was maddening in the best possible way, like a volcano erupting over and over again. Their souls had entwined so deeply that it became inconceivable to ever image them parting.

Knox had been gone for the past week on a run upstate and Ani couldn’t wait for him to get back. Even when he was physically gone, she knew that there was no amount of time or distance that could keep them apart. He’d become her world over the past few months. She had taken every opportunity to learn every aspect about his past life and she was falling deeper in love with him every day.

Ani walked up the stairs of the cabin toward Knox’s bedroom. It was finally a night that they had the house all to themselves; Kate, Rage, and the rest of the group were heading out to Helen, Georgia for a weekend long bike festival. Ani plopped down onto the bed, she was exhausted. Between work and keeping up with doctor’s appointments with her dad, she could barely keep her eyes open. She had insisted that she stay home with her dad, even offered Knox to come over too. But her dad had practically pushed her out the door. He was happy that she had a man in her life and he adored Knox. He hadn’t had the same hesitancy as she had at his rough and tough exterior; in his opinion, as long as Knox took care of Ani and provided his love, her father was happy.

She glanced around the room, hearing Knox’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. As he came in to the room she noticed the long white box in his hand. He carried it as if it weighed a hundred pounds, though the box could only be a few. He carried it as if he carried a lifetime worth of memories, stories, burned bridges, and truths.

“I want you to see something,” he sat on the bed next to her. He took off his leather cut and laid it onto the bed beside them as he opened the lid.

“What’s this?” Ani reached in and grabbed a picture of a pudgy little boy covered in mud. His hair was long and tousled messily on his head and his smile, that smile that Ani loved so much beaming across his face.

“Forgot I had these. Old pictures, from back home,” he smiled as he grabbed a handful out and spread them across the bed. “Pictures and letters, this box pretty much holds my entire life in it.”

Ani scanned each of them, absorbing every image of Knox. Some of him as a child and some of him as a teenager. He didn’t look much different as a teen as he did now, shorter hair and less facial hair, but still the same badass attitude. He held one of the pictures up, it was of a man who looked similar to him and a beautiful woman with a warm smile.

“Is that your mom?” Ani asked as she sat up onto the bed.

“Aye, she was a beautiful woman.” He handed her the picture.

It was an old black and white photo. They were at a carnival and his dad’s arms were draped around his mother’s waist. She had beautiful long dark hair and the same dark eyes as Knox. At her leg clung a small boy, probably three, with a brilliant smile. He held a stick of cotton candy in his hand as the family posed for the picture.

“She was beautiful, Knox.”

“Aye, she was. She was a wonderful mum. She used to tell me stories of the Lianhan Shee, I remember waitin’ up until she got home from work to hear her stories,” he smiled warmly as he stared down at the picture, “The Lianhan Shee was a love fairy, said to lure men in with her powers. If a man should refuse her, she was forever indebted to him; but if he didn’t, he would forever be her slave. It is said that she was best enjoyed in the afterlife, that all great poets and musicians loved her; so much so that they would wither away as they played their stories to her.”

“She sounds captivating,” Ani laughed.

“Aye, but I think I have found her.” His hand brushed the loose hair from her eyes, “She has already stolen my heart, my mind, and my soul. I may as well be in the afterlife if she were to ever leave me.”