Expansion didn’t come for free. It has to be earned or taken. In our case – we take, and what Rage doesn’t take, he steals.
“Are you getting any kickback from the Sons of Gods?” Rage asks Sam, our charter Prez who just took over an old Raiders compound in Alabama. The Raiders were a prominent MC across the South and West. Only a few short weeks ago, Rage made deals to patch over numerous small clubs. In the end, that grew our headcount from a little over twenty thousand to around thirty-two thousand members. He decided that the time to act on annihilating the Raiders was now.
He took a strong, established club in the South and turned it into almost nothing. If our intel was right, the Raiders were left with only sixteen clubs on the west coast.
I won’t lie, it seemed smart at the time. But now, I didn’t think it was. Rage though, he didn’t patch over the best of the best – he patched in lowlife scum. He patched over men who were eighty-sixed because of reasons – child molesters, rapists, and the like. To sum it up, Rage would patch over men that other Prez’s refused to patch. There are reasons that others wouldn’t, reasons that Rage turned a blind eye to.
“Zeus is making it difficult for us. If you’re asking me, I think we’re going to have a war on our hands.”
“I didn’t ask your opinion. I asked for the facts,” he snarles out at Sam. I expected it. These men should have known better than to air their personal opinion to Rage of all people.
“The fact is Zeus isn’t happy. We took away one of his biggest allies. He and the Raiders worked together on every business transaction, and now he’s left with nothing, scrambling to use only his men to make his deals. He’s weak, and he knows it. But there’s opportunity here, and a big one at that. We can cripple him with just one move.” Sam looks to Rage, waiting for approval to continue. He learned quickly from his mistake, a lot faster than some of the others have.
“Go on,” Rage tells him. He moves his arm slowly up my leg, stroking it gently. Right now, Sam was pleasing him, giving him some sort of ammunition to use against Zeus, otherwise known as public enemy number one to the Demons of Hell.
“He has a family.”
Sam looks back from Rage to me before he speaks. “Forgive me for my bluntness, but his wife and kids mean more to him than she does to you. He cares about his wife. He loves his daughters more than anything else in this world.” Sam was quiet for a moment, anticipating some sort of backlash from Rage. Even I knew he wouldn’t argue with Sam. It’s cute that Sam thought he’d get berated for saying the truth. “We take them out.”
“No!” I snap out. For a moment, I feel nothing but intense anger. I was ready to claw this man’s face off for wanting to attack this innocent woman and her children. The only crime she’d committed was falling for the wrong man. These were innocents, and Sam wanted to use them to send a message. “You can’t hurt that woman or those fucking kids!” I glare at Sam with all of my might, knowing very well not to even look at my husband.
Rage snakes his hand up around the back of my neck, into my hair, and pulls down hard so my face is right next to his own. I couldn’t move an inch, even if I tried. “Was anyone speaking to you, bitch?”
I didn’t utter a single word. Instead, I remain silent and pray that he would forget about my tiny outburst. I pray to God that he’d forget, even if I knew he wouldn’t.
Sam disregards me completely. “We take them out, we cripple him emotionally. He won’t know what to do, he’ll be so distraught, and we can just slide in and take what’s ours. The Demons of Hell will run Alabama.”
“And how exactly would this be done, Sam, since you have all the answers?” Sam’s eyes light up with excitement. He is happy to be pleasing Rage in any way that he could, and that makes me sick.
“I’ve been watching his wife and kids for the last month. I know everything they do. I know where she drops the kids off at daycare. I know everything about their life. Every move they make, I’ve seen, every security check, every prospect shift change. I’ve seen it all. I know their routine, and I have the perfect opportunity to strike. The wife takes the kids to daycare a little after eight in the morning. This is the only time the prospects don’t follow her inside. I don’t care to know the reason why. I see this for what it is, an opportunity. I paid off three employees inside that daycare center, and I say we strike now, while the iron’s hot, before they change up any part of their routine.”
Rage is silent, internally debating what he is going to do. I know this side of him all too well. He is analyzing, thinking of what could go wrong, what could go right, and how to be successful. He is weighing the options and thinking about the risk. He may have been a monster, but he wasn’t a stupid one.
“Set it up and keep me updated on the progress.”
I wanted to believe that I didn’t just hear what I did. That he didn’t just order the execution of two children and their mother, but he did. He did it without shame, without a care in the world.
I’m just left sitting here wondering how I could forget that I married a monster.
Chapter 3
The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
– infj.feelings.tumblr
Roxy
Rage tells me to get the fuck away from him shortly after my difference of opinion. Given that first opportunity, I slide away from him as quickly as possible. In the back of my mind, I keep thinking that at some point, while I I’m at the party, he is going to come up to me and show me exactly who is in charge – him. I even go as far as to think what he’d do to me, even the things he has done in the past. Over the years, there has been so much that was done to me that nothing truly surprises me anymore.
There are times when I think that maybe I deserved the things that he’s done. I’d told myself that for a long time, and somehow, I still believe that to be true. I know that it wasn’t, but that didn’t take away the feeling, how no matter what – it felt true. I think that in the back of your mind, when something is repeated over and over again, you eventually start to believe it. That’s what happened to me. I started to believe it, even though I knew better.
Rage had caused me so much pain. His name was a warning, and I didn’t listen. I thought I could help heal the broken man that was before me. I didn’t know back then that he was a lost cause. I learned that shortly thereafter. To sum it up, I learned that far too late.
He beat me time and time again, sometimes with his fists, one time with a log he found out behind the clubhouse. There was another time where grabbed a few of the boys, tied my wrists and ankles to where I couldn’t move an inch, and tore my clothes off me with a hunting knife, leaving me completely exposed, telling the brothers to have their fun with me. I remember the look on his face as he left me in that room to be raped over and over again. That was the first day I can truly remember hating him.
After every beating, I found a way to forgive him for his abuse. But that day, the day he destroyed my trust by putting me in a situation where I’d be hurt by others, that was the day that I found a new feeling for him – hatred.
I knew that I was hurt physically by him but allowing others to do that to me was something else. I’d learned so much that day. That my husband truly didn’t love me. That each day my time here was dwindling down to nothing. That everything would change one day soon, I just didn’t know when that would be.