But he was finally free of her, finally back on the road, the only place he’d ever felt he could just . . . breathe.
No, that was a lie. There been one other place, or rather one person, who’d given him that same feeling. Who’d taken away the stifling emptiness with just a simple fucking smile.
It wasn’t the case anymore but way back when, when he still had the woman he loved within his reach, that damn smile . . . it was fucking magic.
Usually when he was on the road this late at night, mostly empty aside from him and the occasional car, he would think about that smile, those eyes, that tiny little nose all covered in freckles. And for just a moment, the emptiness would begin to ease.
He’d think about his favorite memory, the one and only morning he’d ever been able to wake up beside her . . .
**•
“Good morning,” Dorothy had said, stretching her body.
Hawk had already been awake, he was always up with the sun, and had spent the last two hours just staring down at her naked body, watching her sleep.
It had been the first time they’d ever spent the night together. Between taking care of her daughter and her ridiculous relationship with Jase, spending time together wasn’t an easy feat for Dorothy. But for once it was just the two of them; the clubhouse was empty. For the first time what he felt for her, how fucking deep those feelings went, felt real.
“Did you hear me?” She laughed and he loved it. Just hearing her laugh. He fucking loved it. “I said good morning.”
Instead of answering her, he pushed her over and onto her back, looking his fill at her tight little body covered in all that soft, creamy skin. Dorothy immediately tried to cover herself, but he pinned her arms down and quickly rolled on top of her.
Then he had tickled her.
And as she’d squirmed beneath him, howling with laughter, he’d whispered, “Good morning.”
**•
Closing in on his destination, Hawk hit his blinker and turned his bike onto the exit headed for downtown Las Vegas. The memory evaporated and just as quickly the emptiness returned.
Another fifteen minutes later, he pulled up behind an old abandoned shipping warehouse. Hawk shut off his engine and glanced around anxiously at his old stomping grounds. It wasn’t that he disliked coming to Las Vegas; quite the opposite, actually. Whenever Deuce needed one of the boys to make a run to Sin City, he always volunteered. He might look very different from the kid he’d once been, and sound different, but Vegas would always feel like home.
Because technically Vegas was home, and he wasn’t truly who he’d spent the past two and a half decades pretending to be.
Yeah, he was a biker. Just another patch on a totem pole full of patched, leather-wearing bikers living as criminals, not for the money or even for enjoyment but because that was all they knew. It was how they survived, how they paid the bills and cared for their families. It wasn’t about greed or excess, it was about living a certain way, being a certain kind of man who didn’t have to bow down to laws and the government who enforced them. It was a brotherhood, a camaraderie. It was about really, truly living your life the way you wanted to live it.
It was about . . .
Freedom.
But Hawk didn’t have that same freedom. It wasn’t the same for him. And it never would be.
Like a lot of his brothers, Hawk was just another piece of shit Deuce had fished from the gutter. But unlike Cox or Dirty, Hawk hadn’t had a hard life spent living on the streets. At least, not at first. But neither did his upbringing resemble Ripper’s, who’d lived a good, solid life, the American dream, until he’d lost his parents at the age of seventeen.
No, Hawk had been born a spoiled and privileged son of a bitch, his mother a cocaine-addicted burlesque dancer who’d fatally overdosed when he was only three years old, his father an infamous member of the Bratva, a Russian mob boss, the one and only Avgust Polachev of the Polachev cartel.
For eighteen years he’d been a gluttonous whore, reveling in a life of overindulgence, seduction, and sin. Spoiled was putting it mildly. He’d had more money than he could have spent in ten lifetimes, as well as cars, drugs, booze, and women, all at his self-destructive disposal. He’d had it all.
Until he’d lost it all.
The summer he turned eighteen, his father was gunned down inside the man’s own home during an FBI raid. His father had gotten greedy and that greed had made him careless, and that carelessness had landed his father with an undercover federal agent on his crew. Actually, several undercover agents.
After the FBI, fitted in bulletproof vests and armed to the teeth, had broken down their door and stormed their home, they’d informed Hawk’s father of the stack of evidence they had against him. They told him he’d never again see the light of day, and that a lethal injection would be his last memory of life.
Hawk would never forget what happened next. His father, his only family, had turned to him and mouthed one single, solitary word.
Begi.
Run.
Turning back to the agents, his father had reached for his gun, as had every other man in the room. A flurry of bullets had cracked through the air, and Hawk hadn’t waited around to see what was going to happen next. After pulling his own piece, he’d run from the house as fast as he could.
He ran, and because he was a wanted man, not one of his father’s former associates would take him in. He was deadweight. His picture was all over the news and there was a price on his head. So he kept running, living in the shadows for two years until Deuce found him hiding out and digging for his dinner inside a casino dumpster.
Hawk had recognized Deuce and Deuce him, having met each other several times in the past. The Hell’s Horsemen motorcycle club president hadn’t been a friend of his father’s, but a loyal buyer, and because Deuce knew what had transpired in the wake of his father’s greed, he’d taken pity on Hawk and took him in.
Deuce’s connections provided Hawk with a fake birth certificate and driver’s license, giving him a new identity. He’d become James Alexander Young, a New York native who for all intents and purposes was a big, fat nobody. Deuce burned off his fingerprints, gave him a Harley and a haircut, nicknamed him “Hawk,” then took him home to Miles City, Montana, where he’d begun the second chapter of his life.
His Russian accent had been the first thing to go. Luckily it was slight compared to the heavy Slavic intonations of his father and friends, developed only because he’d grown up around it. But even so, his transition from mob prince to homeless grifter had been easy in comparison to his transition from homeless grifter to biker.
Learning to ride a motorcycle hadn’t been the hard part; the most difficult transformation had been learning to live and breathe leather and chrome, to talk the talk and walk the walk. The Hell’s Horsemen, while still a highly profitably criminal organization, were the underbelly of the world Hawk had come from. Whereas his father had once been at the top of the food chain and considered men like Deuce and his boys necessary trash, Hawk was now at the mercy of them. Funny how life worked out sometimes.
As a Hell’s Horsemen prospect he’d kept his head down, stayed quiet, kept to himself, and did what he was told. That diligence and intense survival instinct ensured he acclimated quickly, gained loyal friends among his brothers, and was unanimously voted in a full-fledged Horseman.