Biker’s Collar: Property of Scrap (Rebel Barbarians MC #6)

Chapter 3 – Darragh

Then

She passes out after a glass of water and I wait, like a fucking idiot, for over forty-five minutes for Michelle. Where the fuck is she? I text her. Then I call Michelle, but she doesn’t answer. The boat isn’t that fucking big. I text my girlfriend again, my annoyance growing as my slow crawl towards sobriety heightens my awareness of my boxing injury.

Ugh. My eye feels like shit. My face feels like shit. A tiny snort from the bed takes my eyes off my phone for a second. This girl Kamari scares the crap out of me. The things she says, the way she acts like there are no consequences for anything…

Her brother is right to be so damn protective of her. Without someone looking after her, Kamari’s the type of woman to keep diving headfirst into trouble. She’s always in way over her head, especially tonight. I glance over at Kamari sleeping on the bed, sprawled out like a toddler napping on the couch at a family barbecue.

It’s weird that I miss her dorky glasses and even her buck teeth, but the college girl I found shaking her ass on a mobster looks beautiful. Her brother should hire spies to keep an eye on her at college because she’s… something.

I don’t have feelings for Kamari, don’t get me wrong. She’s black, so it’s not like I think she compares to Michelle. I believe what I’ve been taught. Irish women first. Always. But Kamari has her own charms despite her skin color. It’s a pale copper color that can seem dark and bronzed in the summer, but brighter than a new penny in the winter.

She’s always had thick, long curls that she dyes a dark maroon color. The hair matches the red undertones in her skin and right now she has so much of that skin exposed. Heat prickles around my neck, so I attempt to turn my attention back to my phone without success.

“Kamari,” I call out to her, hoping my voice will wake her up. It doesn’t. I’d better find Michelle and then find Tavarius to take care of this.

There’s no way I can win tonight. I push the door open and look back at her to see if she’s stirred at all before I lock her in. She’s unconscious and utterly vulnerable with her top pulled up over her navel to expose that smooth light copper skin. Her breasts bulged from her chest with hard nipples sticking out visible for anyone who walked into that room to see. Somewhat reluctantly, I close the door and lock it.

There would be a war if anything happened to her. The blacks around here might not get into mob business, but their families run deep and they protect their own when necessary, especially from the likes of us. You fuck with the wrong family, and you could lose all your teeth.

We’re not the only predators out here, and her brother has been in the boxing world for so long that he’s a danger to any asshole who decides to touch her. No one will get the chance tonight.

I stop by the bar to grab a bottle of Wild Turkey whiskey from the bartender. I live for whiskey, and the pain in my head is getting too extreme to handle without some more alcohol. There’s loud dancing above deck and everyone seems to be enjoying the party. I don’t think Michelle would be there looking for Tavarius. She would have already found him.

I step up to the top deck and search around. There aren’t so many people that I wouldn’t be able to easily pick out a black guy and a very blond white girl with eyes like the summer sky. Neither of them are there. They could be in the living quarter’s downstairs.

Once we dock, my closest friends are staying on the boat overnight for another day of partying and getting away from the bullshit back in the city. We have money, champagne, music, drugs and women. Everything you need for a good time. I’m officially retired which means I get to stop treating my body like a fucking experiment. I’m living the fucking life.

I wander downstairs, still drunk enough to stumble into the walls for support, when I hear loud moaning from a bedroom at the end of the hallway, one floor down from the room where Kamari lies passed out from her foolish drunken escapades. The moaning gets louder as I approach the furthest room at the end of the hall and the moans sound familiar. That must be why I move closer to the door. Is that her…? I don’t want to fucking believe it.

And it’s the craziest fucking reaction, but I have to know if it’s even possible. Sorry to the sad motherfuckers I walk in on if I misplaced the sound.

I push open the first door and my stomach drops. There’s my girlfriend, on her back, with Seamus on his knees between her legs.

Her pale thighs are spread wide and she doesn’t notice me at first. She doesn’t hear the door clicking open. Neither of them hear a fucking thing until after I’ve reached for my gun, taken it out of my pants, and rack the slide of the pistol. It’s a Murray party, of course I’m armed. Michelle hears the gun click and looks up from her position on the bed. Everyone in her family is in this life, so she recognizes the noise.

She shrieks once she sees me, but I already have the gun leveled at the bastard’s head. I try not to look at her, but I fail of course. She has his spit on her thighs. That perfect, blonde hair is in a scraggly mess. Her eyes are terrified.

“D, don’t shoot him! It’s not what it looks like!”

It looks like Seamus Doyle had his tongue in her cunt. I can handle this. I won’t be reckless.

If I fire a gunshot, everyone on this ship will know. There will be witnesses, Michelle will be a witness, and then there’s Kamari upstairs. Who knows what will happen to her if I fire a gun and cause pandemonium. I’m angry. So fucking angry, I could just pull the trigger. My chest heaves as I try to keep my hand off the trigger with all my morals. All my training. I was born without Aiden’s self-control so they put me in the boxing ring so I could have a place for my rage. I don’t need a gun to do what I need to do. I point it at Michelle.

“Get in the fucking closet, Michelle.”

Seamus is too smart or maybe too fucking stupid to do anything. He kneels there frozen, his cheeks red. He exchanges a worried glance with Michelle which only pisses me the fuck off. There’s something going on between them and it’s either happened tonight for the first time, or it’s been happening right under my fucking nose. I can’t take it.

“I said get in the fucking closet!” I scream at her. Michelle’s face crinkles and reddens with the tension building in her. I put my hand on the trigger and she yelps loudly.

“I’m going!” she yells. “Fuck, D, don’t kill him. Please…”

“Quiet,” I scream at her. “Shut the fuck up and go into the closet before I blow both of your brains out.”

My finger trembles on the trigger and I’m very fucking tempted to make my threats a reality. The room smells like sex. Michelle’s familiar scent makes me ill now.

I could shoot him. I could shoot him right now and who would give a fuck about him? I’m Darragh Murray and this humiliation is more than I fucking need right now.

I take the bottle of Wild Turkey and throw it at the wall as Michelle screams and crawls into the closet with her bare cunt and ass exposed. I’m so fucking mad I could hit her. Obviously I don’t, but I can barely get a grip on my anger right now.

The boat sloshes and Michelle nearly loses her balance as she shuts the closet door and continues whimpering loudly.

She has a tattoo above her ass of my name. Darragh. Seeing it bare turns my stomach completely. I can’t even fucking look at her. Once she’s in the closet, Seamus balls up his fists like he’s going to fight me. Like he could. I’ve won every boxing match I’ve ever entered. But boxing matches have rules about going too far. There’s nothing holding me back from splitting his jaw open. Or killing him.

I put my gun in my pocket and take a swing at that motherfucker’s ugly fucking face. Michelle shrieks as the noise from my fist connecting with his face fills the room. He falls to the bed unconscious from one hit. I don’t want him to live.

I hear Michelle scream.

“Don’t hurt him!”

I tune her voice out and I punch the guy’s face in until he stops moving and his blood soaks the bed. My fists are covered in blood. I know I’ve gone too far. The guy could be dead.

“Michelle, get out of the closet.”

She heaves and sobs loudly. “No,” she says. “I’m not coming out there for you to kill me. I’m not.”

I can hear her breathing. I want to drag her out of the fucking closet and punish her, but I can’t hurt a woman. This… What Seamus did violates every rule of the Irish mob. He may not be a part of our literal family, but he’s a part of the mob. The family.

You never touch another person’s woman unless you want to die. For him to do this to one of our own means I automatically have my father’s permission to kill him.

“I’m not gonna kill you. Now get out here.”

I can hear her sobbing. I don’t care. I grab the handle of the tiny closet and drag Michelle out as she screams. When she sees Seamus lying on the bed soaked in his own blood and the white sheets scarlet, she runs to him and screams his name. She grabs his body and screams, calling me a monster and every name in the book.

I want to feel something for her, but I feel nothing. I put my gun to the back of Michelle’s head.

“Get up,” I say to her calmly. “You’re going for a swim, princess.”

There’s no sound except for Michelle’s whimpering.

I open the door and drag Michelle to the lowest possible deck and tell her to jump. She stands trembling at the edge as the Boston air whips around her.

I don’t feel anything as I watch her standing at the railing, refusing to look at me.

“You aren’t fucking serious, Murray,” she says, gripping the railing tightly. Her fingers are ice sheets. The water will be even colder. I don’t care if she survives or not.

“You know who I am, Michelle. I’m Padraig Murray’s son. You know what that name means in our community. You chose to betray me. Humiliate me…”

I can’t continue because she lets out an irritating sob. She didn’t look so sorry when I found her. I push the image out of my head.

“Jump,” I command her. “If you don’t jump, I’ll throw you over. You have a better chance of surviving if you do it yourself.”

“You’re a bastard,” she whimpers through loud sobs. I wait for her to climb over the railing and she curses me one more time as she jumps. I wait until I hear a splash and I walk away as she screams. One step away from the railing is all it takes for the noise of the boat to drown her out.

I don’t know if she’ll make it back to shore. She can swim but… it’s Boston. It’s always cold here. I return below deck to the hallway where I found her to clean up, and solve the mystery of the noise at the end of the hall. Tavarius pushes the door open, his eyes wide and his body dripping with sweat.

“Yo, were you making all that noise?” I ask him, peering behind him, but discovering nothing.

If there was a woman back there with him, he doesn’t drag her out. Tavarius looks me up and down and then looks at the blood on my hands.

“Did you find Kamari?” he asks. Kamari.

I should have been with her tonight. If only that weren’t fucking impossible.