Unbeautifully

CHAPTER TWENTY

Ripper pushed open the door to Deuce’s office where he found his prez sitting behind his desk, Cox was perched on the side of it, and across the room Mick and ZZ were at opposite ends of a leather sofa.

His stomach firmly lodged in his throat, Ripper closed the door behind him and crossed his arms over his chest.

Deuce’s eyes fixed on him. “Freebird said you needed to talk to me?”

He nodded, feeling like an asshole for what he was about to do to Deuce and the club. But he didn’t have much of a choice.

He’d given it a shitload of thought. Sat on the bathroom floor for twelve straight hours, just smoking and thinking.

This needed to be done.

For Danny’s sake.

For Danny’s future’s sake.

Eventually she’d get over it, without him hanging around like a dark cloud, reminding her every other second that she’d killed a woman. Because of him. She’d grow to hate him and the thought of those icy blue eyes looking at him with anything but love in them made him sick to his stomach.

Clearing his throat, he said, “This ain’t fuckin’ easy for me, Prez. Known you since I was seventeen, been with the club a long time now—”

Cox shot to his feet. “What the fuck you doin’, Ripper?”

He looked at his friend. His brother.

“I gotta go,” he said quietly.

“Fuck that!” Cox yelled. “You tell me why you gotta go, ’cause I ain’t seein’ it!”

As if he’d been kicked in the balls, his breath caught, nausea powered through him and his vision swam. Christ, Cox wasn’t going to let him go easy. There was too much history, they’d been friends too long, fucked a lot of shit up together…hell, they’d fucked a lot of girls together too. Cox wasn’t just his brother, Cox was his best friend, for fuck’s sake.

“Prez,” he gritted out through clenched teeth, ignoring Cox. “I can’t do my fuckin’ job, I’m not right in the fuckin’ head, and… I gotta go. I gotta get my shit under control.”

“Ripper,” Mick said, leaning forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “You haven’t exactly been right since Frankie fucked you up. Why are you decidin’ this now?”

He didn’t say anything. What could he say? He couldn’t tell them about being with Danny; Deuce would kill him on the spot, and no one but Cox knew about Nikki. Either way, if anyone found out about either, it wouldn’t take them very long to realize the events were related and he could absolutely not let that happen. He would not let that shit fall on Danny in any way. This shit was on him, all of it; just another fucking check mark on his long list of sins.

The through and through on his side burning like a motherfucker, Ripper grunted in pain as he gently set Danny down on his bed. He knelt in front of her and she looked up at him with tears in her eyes.

“I…I…I killed her,” she whispered hoarsely, her eyes wide, her expression a mixture of utter disbelief and horror.

“No!” he yelled, grabbing her arms. “No, you did not! This shit was my fault, baby! I shoulda ended shit with her a long time ago. Me bein’ stupid killed her! Do you understand me?”

She shook her head. “No…I shot her…she—”

“No!” he roared. “Fuckin’ listen to me! I. Killed. Her. Me. Not you.”

She didn’t say anything, just stared at him, violently trembling.

Cursing, he got to his feet and grabbed his cell phone off the nightstand.

Cox answered immediately.

“Got a problem,” he said.

“Got one of my own,” Cox said and Ripper could hear Kami yelling nonsense in the background.

“Cox, brother, I wouldn’t ask but I got a dead Nikki on my bedroom floor and a hole in my side.”

Silence.

Then, “Gimme an hour and I’ll be there. You need Z?”

ZZ, the only brother who could sew them up nice and neat when shit got ugly.

“Naw, it’s just a flesh wound.”

“And Nikki? Two-man job?”

“Yeah…and, Cox?”

“Yeah?”

“You know what you gotta bring, yeah?”

“Don’t worry, I got you covered. Ain’t nothin’ about that bitch will be left to find.”

No shit. He was not going to allow one shred of evidence to remain that could in any way, shape, or form be traced back to Danny.

Ripper blinked back to the present as Deuce stood up, placed his palms on his desk, and leaned forward. “This is my club, you’re my boy, and that makes you a part of my motherfuckin’ family. So this is how shit’s gonna go down. Frankie Deluva is done fuckin’ up my family. So, yeah, you take some’ time, ride it out, and then you get your ass back here where you belong.”

Ripper lowered his eyes. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t thinking about what Frankie had done to him. In fact, he hadn’t been thinking about Frankie at all lately.

“SHUT UP!” Cox roared, startling everyone in the room. To everyone’s astonishment, Cox bent over the desk and shoved his face up in Deuce’s personal space.

“I get why you’re lettin’ him go, but if you let him go and some shit goes down and we’re not there for him, then what the fuck is gonna happen?”

Fuck him. As if this wasn’t hard enough.

His expression sad, Deuce lifted his arm and grabbed the side of Cox’s face. “Say good-bye to your boy,” he said quietly, giving Cox’s cheek a soft slap. “Then go home to your family.”

Family.

Ripper’s throat closed up. He was leaving the only family he had.

Before he broke down, he shrugged off his cut, pulled his dagger from its sheath on his boot, and started slicing through the stitches that held his sergeant-at-arms patch on the vest. By the time he was finished, all eyes were on him. Stalking forward, he slammed his patch down on Deuce’s desk and with a sinking feeling in his stomach, turned to leave.

“Ripper,” Deuce growled.

Reluctantly, he turned back around.

“This is still your club, brother. This will always be your club and you are still my boy, ain’t no shit ever gonna change that. You get your shit together, you come back, your patch will be waitin’ on you, you feel me?”

Jesus Christ, he had to get out of this room.

“Yeah,” he muttered and left the office. A handful of brothers playing pool all stopped to watch him walk away. He quickened his pace, headed for the door.

“Ripper,” Cox said, grabbing his arm.

He closed his eyes and let out a frustrated breath. Brother wasn’t going to make this easy on him.

“Don’t do this,” Cox said quietly. “Don’t run just ’cause shit went down bad with Nikki. I ain’t gonna say a word and you know, sure as shit, she ain’t never gonna be found. Not after what we did.”

He wasn’t running away and he couldn’t give two shits about Nikki. Nikki had been fill-in, like an old pillow he’d only kept around just because it was there, had been for a long time, and what the fuck, it was a pillow, he needed a pillow and she’d fit the bill.

Until Danny.

And like everything else in his life, that had gone to shit real fucking quick.

If Ripper had learned anything in his thirty-something years of life, it was that dark roads only get darker if you stay on them, and his road was pretty damn dark.

So he was giving Danny the only good thing he could give her, what he couldn’t give her if he stayed here. The sooner he left, the sooner she could go back to being a normal girl, having a normal life, one without his inner demons and his dead girlfriends. A life without a man who could kill without a second thought. Yeah, his girl deserved better and so better was what he was going to give her.

“Brother,” he choked out. “Right now me and the road, we got some reconnecting to do, yeah?”

Cox stared at him, his dark eyes narrowing.

“I need to go,” he said firmly.

Shaking his head, Cox released him.

And he left.

Left his brothers.

Left the club.

Left Miles City.

Left Montana.

Left…Danny.