I obsessed with dominating every inch of her life. I wanted to bend her with my hands, break her into beautiful pieces with my cock and then glue her back together with my mouth. Cut through the thicket of dangerous thorns surrounding her gorgeous, one-of-a-kind heart, so that I could hold the tender, fragile bud in my hand and watch it grow. Dominate her mind, body and soul until every molecule of her person was imprinted with my name.
I wasn’t sure when it had happened, when I’d tipped over from a familial protector into the more dangerous role of forbidden lover, but it could have been the night she spied on me jacking off when she was sixteen. It was as if a flip switched in my bestial brain, and she was suddenly a woman, ripe with curves and sultry with sexual intent aimed at me.
I’d honed my moral code against the corruption of my father’s greed-driven influence and against the thugs I’d taken down for petty crimes that led to despicable consequences yet it still wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the allure of a teenage Harleigh Rose with all that streaky hair.
I thought of that hair now, as it had looked drying over my pillow, how it felt between my fingers as I combed through it while she slept, and I hoped like hell that she could find it in herself to forgive me for raiding her club’s cargo tonight.
Grease lifted a fist at the front of our convoy and peeled off exit 78 to wait behind sparse shrubbery for The Fallen to ride by. It was a good place to ambush them, our bikes concealed, this stretch of highway 99 filled with steeply curving lines that meant the rival gang wouldn’t have time to react and pull away when we descended upon them.
Still, my cop’s intuition was scratching at the back of my neck, insistent and annoying. I scanned our surroundings as I swung off my bike and quietly pulled it into the vegetation off the side of the road with the others. It was a partly cloudy night, the light grainy and dark grey over the sheer cliffs at our back and the expanse of dully shining metallic ocean on the other side of the pavement. Perfect light to hide dark and dangerous things.
“Gonna fuckin’ stick those mother fuckers,” Mutt said to my left, his leg bouncing with restless energy, his eyes slick like an oil spill in the moonlight, filled with insanity. “Gonna taste their blood.”
I had enough on Mutt to incarcerate him for life already. He was a sick fuck without much care for subtlety and I’d watched him beat a man to death in the back of a bar one-night last fall. No one in the club reported the incident or narked on the biker when the police finally showed up. Berserkers were a well-known Vancouver menace, no one spoke out against them unless they wanted to die.
Of course, I’d witnessed the beating, how Mutt lost his shit at a man because he accidently bumped into him and spilled some of his beer, how Mutt then used the heavy stein to beat the man over the head until he dropped to the floor and then proceeded to kick him until his spleen ruptured and he died of internal bleeding. I told my senior officer in the joint task force even though I had also been wearing a recording device at my crotch and he told his superior in the RCMP.
We did nothing.
It was the hardest part of policing, the idea that one part was not a worthy substitute for the whole. If we started picking off individual bikers for their transgressions, it would tip off the MC to a greater police presence in their lives, and make it nearly impossible to get close enough to take out the entire club. The goal was the entire beast, not just cutting off one of its many heads.
So, we waited.
I was the first officer in British Columbian history to become a fully patched member of an outlaw MC despite multiple efforts throughout the years and the RCMP was not going to waste that opportunity.
Three years, dozens of transgressions on my soul for the sake of the greatergood, and countless lonely nights, going home to a house that held my dog and nothing else. It was a life without real friends, with only occasional, risky nights spent in a hotel with Diana, and telephone conversations with a father I hated and a mother who was growing more and more absent because of her dementia.
All for the greater good.
It was a phrase I repeated to myself every day, sometimes multiple times a day.
I was doing the right thing.
But I was tired to my fucking soul and having Harleigh Rose suddenly in my life blazing like a comet across my dark universe, the creeping doubt that I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live came rushing back.