Page 2 of Tormented By Regret
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” He roared, raising his blade as he ran toward us.
I fired another shot into his leg. I didn’t want to kill him; I just wanted him to stop. He fell to his knees, still trying to crawl towards us. I kicked him in the temple, hard enough to knock him out, and I just stared down at him as Lucy clung to me. It didn’t take long for campus police to come storming through the dorm. I was still in shock, the gun loosely held in my hand. The police shoved me down to the floor and faintly I could make out Lucy’s cries at them to release me. I could hear her sobs as she told them I wasn’t the perpetrator, but they weren’t listening.
I allowed them to handcuff me, owning what I’d done. It didn’t matter what Lucy was saying, I had shot a man and not just any man, my best friend. As they walked me past Sam’s stretcher, he flashed me a sinister smile. What he said next would resonate with me for a long time.
“You go near her again, and I will find her and make you regret it for the rest of your life.”
The crazed look in his eye stayed with me for years. That, and the regret that I couldn’t do more would torment me for the rest of my damn life.
POWERTRAIN
Present Day…
I was seated next to Hoax and Macabre at the table in the Royal Bastard’s Clubhouse. My brother, Goshawk was seated across from me, the look on his face was solemn. Jameson had called for Church and at that point you dropped everything and either called in or showed your ass up. This time around, it got bad. Ripper, the President of our Texas Chapter was asking for Snare’s head and the poor bastard had nowhere to go. Jameson, our Prez, wasn’t having it. “You can curse me as much as you want, but I’m not going to take his life. I don’t run my club with fear and blood, not unless it’s necessary. Remember that Ripper, the next time you decide to keep that tone with me.”
Silence fell among all of us as we waited on his decision. He was a tough President, I dare say he could get scary, but he was fair.
“As of today, Snare is no longer a member of the Royal Bastards. He’s free to choose his own path. But if he does decide to stay In New Orleans, he will always be considered on the run from us.”
I hated that for Snare, he’d been a rising Prospect, a good man to have at your back. He too had gone down for a woman, and I had to respect him for that. As I watched him walk out the door, I got a brief glimpse into the past once more. That past that always came back to haunt me no matter what I did or where I went.
That look on Snare’s face, that feeling of rejection and doubt, I felt it all that night. My scholarship was terminated practically the next day, and I was expelled from the University. My life had crumbled with one stupid decision. I had a restraining order placed against me for bringing a weapon on campus, and even though Lucy tried to reach me, her parents had forced her onto a flight to California to get her as far away from me as possible. I had lost my home, my brother, and the woman I loved all in one night.
Lucy’s confession had put Ron behind bars, he could have gotten out, but he was already too far gone. He’d attempted to take his life right before he was to appear in front of the judge. That only made things worse for him and instead of getting time, he was locked up in a mental institution. I was given a year for what I’d done, but I got out in six months for good behavior.
The memory of Lucy always stayed with me. That burden of regret was suffocating, and I carried it with me every day since I left her behind. I could have easily found her, moved to California to be with her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Call it punishment for what I’d done to Ron, but I couldn’t bear that he was locked up and I was free. He didn’t belong in that place, and I knew he would never accept that she was mine. Ron's threat to harm her if I came near her had been too real to ignore. I knew him. He meant every word he’d said to me. He’d hurt her just to get back at me, and I could never allow that.
In the last few years, I’d kept track of them both. Ronald Hargrove was locked up in the East Louisiana State Hospital, still attempting to commit suicide every few years. Last year he went a step further and tried stabbing an attendee with a plastic spoon. The fact that it was a spoon was irrelevant, it was how he wanted to stab him. He’d managed to use his wrestling skills and hold him down while attempting to dig the spoon into his eyeballs in order to scoop them out of his head. When asked why he’d gone to such extremes, his response was to simply shrug and say, “I wanted to know what he would taste like. The article had unnerved me and left me wondering where the fuck we’d gone wrong and when had I actually lost him.
My Lucy was safe and sound, living in California. She’d graduated, met someone, got married and had two beautiful little girls that looked just like her. I looked in on her from time to time, and I’ll admit that my heart ached knowing that I wasn’t the one to end up in that home, with that family, but in the last twenty years I’d made a new family here in New Orleans. Brothers that were thicker than blood and I’d give my life for any one of them.
My actual brother, Michae, better known to us as Goshawk, was the one who brought me into the Royal Bastards MC. He took me in as soon as I was told my future had been ruined. Goshawk was a few years older, and he didn’t have the opportunities I had been given. Somehow, he’d found the RBMC and he became a Prospect working his way up the ranks and becoming Tail-Gunner for the National Chapter. It wasn’t until I was in it that I realized what he had to go through to earn that title, and he was well-respected for it, which made me proud.
Unfortunately, Goshawk wasn’t as dedicated as I was to school- the problem child, as Ron’s parents liked to call him. After my parents died, he couldn’t deal and would go into self-destruction mode. He was the one who always got in trouble with the law, he cussed too much, drank too much, and hated fucking rules, but he was a good brother. He always looked out for me, and when Ron’s parents turned their back on us, he came back for me and offered me what he could.
Being a part of the Royal Bastards wasn’t easy, but he managed to get me in and I was quickly accepted as one of their own by the President. Bulldog was a good man, fair, loyal, honest, and he’d taken care of us as if we were his own sons. When he needed help, I was there for him, helping him with some business dealings that made us some good money. He watched me as I took the reins of the club’s treasury, helping Cipher out with money runs and collecting bounties.
It didn’t take them long to give me my road name. Powertrain, it was exactly what I was built for in a wrestling match. Barreling guys down like a powertrain. Tick Tock named me after a brawl in a bar over a woman who had one too many drinks and wanted a little action from our Road Captain. Her husband wasn’t as amused, and we had to step in. He was a big guy too and thought he could take me down. I may have been smaller, but I had a lot of power. Jokingly, Tick Tock said I looked like a powertrain when I pinned him down, Goshawk agreed and that’s what the brothers started calling me. Let’s just say, the name stuck.
A few years later, after Cipher retired, Bulldog named me Club Treasurer. The title meant the world to me. It meant he trusted me with everything he had built, and he was asking me to help him with it. But I eventually fucked that up too.
I got involved with some skeezy dealers in the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street goons that had offered a pretty sweet deal at the time and screwed me over in the end. Turns out you didn’t need some title to make money, you just had to be good with numbers, and I was a fucking genius. They’d hired me as their bookkeeper, but the fuckers were lying cheats and they blamed me for their failures. I got out real quick when that shit was just about to bite them in the ass, but it was too late and I took the fall. Imprisoned once again for embezzlement. They were blaming me for generating false financial reports and smudging numbers while the fuckers stole one point six million dollars from the businesses they ran. In the end, they couldn’t prove it, and my sentence went from fifteen years to two.
Right before I went to prison, we’d voted Elrik Jameson, Bulldog’s son, as our new President. By the time I got out of prison, Jameson had been exiled, Rancid, a newer member, had been voted in as President, Bulldog was dead, and Knuckles, our newly named Sergeant at Arms, had been thrown into prison alongside me. He’d given me the back story on what had gone on in the club. He was pissed and was ready to get blood on his hands to back up Jameson. I remember that conversation clearly. Seeing him was both a relief and a shock, and that’s when he’d taken me aside.
“You get outta here and you and your brother get the fuck as far away from Rancid as you can, you hear me.”
“Where is Jameson?”
Knuckles hung his head in defeat. “We don’t know yet. He burned the clubhouse before he left, you know.”
“Did he go crazy or something? What the hell happened?”
Knuckles yanked me by my shirt, hand in a fist aimed at my face. “You call him crazy again and you won’t have a jaw.”
“No, brother. I didn’t mean it that way. You know I respect him, I fucking voted for him. But what do you think happened to him?”
“What I think about him doesn’t matter. He’s my President and the only one I’ll ever call that. He deserves that fucking title. Rancid, on the other hand, is a rattlesnake, and if our members don’t watch out, he’ll steer his venom their way.”