Chapter Fifteen: There are Wrong Answers
"I promise," Rosamund gasped as her hands scrabbled on the caps of his shoulders, sliding down to grip the outside of his upper arms as he worked the dense cluster of nerves inside her until her cunt was clutching at his fingers. He chuckled in a way that made her feel more exposed than she was as her pussy flooded his fingers with wetness, milking her pleasure from her with his deeply invasive touch.
"Get dressed," Tig growled as he dropped his face over hers. "Let's go get married," he added, their lips a breath away from touching.
As Tig and Rosamund got back into their clothes and smoothed their hair back from their freshly fucked faces, they went downstairs and sprang the immediate marriage news on Gemma and Juice.
"Now?" Gemma said, nearly choking on her coffee.
The criminal safe house erupted in a flurry of activity and Juice was relegated to searching for the Justice of the Peace or rooting out any kind of holy person to perform the ceremony.
As Rosamund sat down heavily at the kitchen table in one of the mismatched chairs, the weight of everything suddenly catching up to her and landing around her shoulders, back in Gemma's childhood home, Salazar and his murderous entourage pulled to a stop close enough to hit the house with a football thrown from the GOAT that hailed from Michigan.
Clay, Bobby, and the rest of the armed men inside the house didn't have to wait long for Salazar and pals to slither a sociopathic path to flank the house.
As Salazar rolled up to his last supper with twelve disgraced criminal apostles in tow, north at the safe house criminal haven, Juice's lips pulled into a beautiful smile as he ended a call to a nearby MC who had just dispatched one of their ordained members, giving them all a couple of hours to breathe, eat and breathe some more.
"You really want this, don't ya?" Tig asked as he squatted down in front of Rosamund, his knees popping in protest. She dropped her hands over his as he squeezed the outside of her thighs.
"Yes," Rosamund whispered as she danced her fingertips up the outside of his arms and settled her hands on the smooth caps of his shoulders.
The next couple hours passed in diametric opposition to each other for the occupants of the safe house versus Gemma's childhood home.
As Tig began to pace the kitchen and chain smoke in between burning swallows of scotch, Gemma and Rosamund giggled upstairs as they did their hair and makeup. While Juice glanced through the yellowed curtains at random intervals before the ordained club member arrived, at Gemma's childhood home, one of Salazar's junkie, disgraced former club members, picked the lock to the garage door.
In the garage, on the other side of the door, Bobby and Chibs waited with a pair of KG-9's.
As other sets of Salazar's men gathered at the rear sliding glass door and window of the second bedroom, back in the northern safe house, Juice interrupted Tig's pacing and took the half-empty bottle from him before Tig succumbed to alcohol poisoning before he could exchange a single syllable of wedding vows.
As Juice drank quickly from the bottle, eager to find a way to soothe the contagious excitable and building tension in the criminal safe house, back in Gemma's childhood home, gunfire erupted like multiple, pyroclastic volcanoes as Salazar and his belly-crawling friends engaged in a firefight with Clay and the allies from the other MC's.
One such ally had disrupted the phone coverage for the area, knowing the response would be quick with the amount of calls pouring from the neighborhood. The allied MC member from way up north knew his way into surveillance with a skill level on par with the NSA.
Inside the house, Clay took a bullet to his upper thigh that brought him heavily to the ground, another bullet buried itself in the meat of his upper arm. The tip of the bullet fragmented and buried the burning metal into his flesh, calling forth copious blood to soak the floor under him.
"Keep Salazar alive," Clay shouted in a strangled voice to Bobby who had Hector lined up for a headshot.
Bobby grunted and shifted the gun barrel slightly before squeezing the trigger twice. The first bullet shattered Salazar's hip bone and the second buried itself deep in his gut, a nearly guaranteed, albeit slow and agonizing death left untreated.
The bullets continued to rain hellfire in Gemma's childhood home, arteries were severed, hearts stopped, and bodies hit the ground.
The allied, technological guru MC member from the very northern club kept the outgoing phone calls to emergency services stone-walled, hoping it wasn't men he called brothers perishing in the firefight. As he continued to stomp out the calls, squashing them like sparks before they could become brush fires, back at the criminal safe house, Rosamund found it suddenly too suffocating in the room and slipped out when Juice, Tig and Gemma discussed the events happening at the home Nate Maddock had originally purchased.
She slipped up the stairs and opened the window before settling on the edge of the mattress, taking a few deep breaths as downstairs Tig had the stark and gut-twisting realization that Rosamund was gone.
Tig took the stairs two at a time as a sweep on the living room and downstairs bathroom were revealed to be unoccupied.
Tig sighed raggedly as he found Rosamund sitting quietly. She spoke without looking at him. "It was getting a little loud," she admitted sheepishly as Tig pushed the door closed behind him, the lock clicking as it slid into place.
"Hey, uh, thanks,"
Tig rasped from the doorway.
"For what?" Rosamund asked as she sniffed hard and half-turned to look at him.
"For all of this, being here, with me," he said as he closed the distance between them and settled next to her on the mattress, close enough for their hips to touch as he dropped his arm around her and tugged her close to his side.
"I didn't have many options that all ended worse than the one before," she said with a chuckle. All sound died in her throat when Tig lifted a hand to cup her jaw, tracing the rough pad of his thumb around her lips.
"Did you ever plan on taking me back to my uncle?" Rosamund asked on a breathless tone, trapped In his paralyzing gaze, his icy blues sparkling as they memorized her with enough scrutiny to recount how many eyelashes she had.
Tig's lips pulled into a slow smile as he abruptly dropped his hand from her face to grasp and squeeze her left hand. He raised her hand and pressed his lips to the smooth skin of her palm, "no."
As Rosamund waited for Tig to add more, the ordained ally from an allied MC was about an hour out of arriving to the safe house. In the space before Tig spoke, back in Gemma's childhood home, the body count continued to rise on both sides.
In the spacious kitchen, Salazar mewled on the floor, curled into his best fetal imitation as arterial blood spilled from the bullet's rape by gunpowder.
Clay had pulled the oversized fridge to its side and huddled behind it, keeping his injured body safe. Bobby and Chibs were miraculously unscathed after Salazar's men were neutralized. The allied MC members called in to assist and quickly swarmed on the house. They efficiently loaded up the fallen bodies and tore out of town.
Bobby and Chubs flanked Clay and helped the big man to his feet and to where Salazar was propped against the bullet-riddled kitchen wall.
"Hector," Clay grumbled and awkwardly pulled his only cigar that had survived the fall in his pocket and lit the mahogany brown end, exhaling a noxious cloud around Salazar who was on his way to dying of complete exsanguination soon if no one intervened or killed him first.
"Hector, why're ya here?" Clay asked before he filled his lungs with the imported smoke.
"Fuck you," Salazar spit, his blood turning tacky as it pooled underneath him, coagulating as it cooled.
Clay's laugh was deep and spread through his broad chest as he turned his attention briefly to Bobby. "Were there casualties on our side?"
Bobby leaned down so only Clay could hear as he relayed that the only men on their side gone were from other MC's. He said Happy had taken a bullet that shattered his collarbone but was expected to be fine. There were countless minor injuries from broken glass, ricochets and falling objects.
Chibs applied a tourniquet as he dialed Tara. As he waited for the call to connect, Clay grimaced with the sudden pain of the tourniquet being applied and leveled his gaze at Salazar whose face had drained of blood until he was as pale as the soft underbelly of a lizard.
"Hector, you could still feel a lot of pain if you don't start sharing."
Salazar swallowed a mouthful of blood as Bobby raised his gun and shot a bullet into the flesh of Salazar's right calf.
Hector screamed and weakly lifted a hand when Bobby shifted the muzzle up to his left thigh. He couldn't find his words and instead fumbled at his pocket; Bobby raised the gun to the center of Hector's face before the dying man tossed a cell phone to clatter at Clay's feet.
"It's all there …..," Salazar gasped and grunted before vomiting up a lapful of blood and bile, taking a ragged breath before he managed to add. "That rich fuck, Hale, he's looking ….. looking for a card."
Clay picked up the phone as Salazar slumped against the wall, feeling fresh blood flow from his shredded belly. Clay thumbed through just a few of the messages before smiling warmly at Salazar.
"Good job Hector," Clay said before nodding at Bobby who emptied his gun's magazine into Salazar.