Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1) (3 page)

Coco took my hand and led me to one of the many rooms upstairs. She took control immediately by pushing me against the wall, her mouth already planted just under my Adam’s apple. Her hands hand found their way under my sweater, touching skin, rubbing and teasing.

“How do you want it?” she asked, and moved in for a kiss.

I jerked my head back, appalled by the gesture. She should know better. You don’t kiss whores, and even if you do, you don’t kiss whores whom you know have been with more than five men in the span of two hours. Coco was beautiful, a beautiful paid whore in a room filled with thugs and dealers who had enough money to foot the bill for her.

I kiss her and I would be kissing every motherfucker in the place.

Coco forgot the teasing and touching and dropped to her knees and unzipped my pants. Maybe the same fog I had fallen under downstairs had also moved over her head too. Just maybe, for the briefest of moments, she had looked at me as a man she liked and wanted to have sex with. She had touched me as such, and in return I had treated her like a whore.

We assumed our roles now. I was the man paying her, and she was the woman giving me what I paid for.

I bit open a condom. “Hold up a sec.”

Coco reached for the condom, and again, I was appalled at the gesture. The man always put his own condom on. Who knew how bitter a whore could be? Who knew if they would purposely damage a condom to give you something so she could get back at the world through you?

The two mistakes she’d made melted away my relief. Again, here was the pain I had tried to elude. This time I took it like a man and reflected on the years I had spent with Lulina, the stolen moments I had been in my brother’s wife’s arms.

Crying is for dummies, and today I seem to be dumb as they come.

But this time not one tear got shed. No time for it, because the window erupted beside me. It happened too fast for me to react, and the whore didn’t even get a moment to scream. I pushed her off me. Coco hit the bed, toppled over the side, and disappeared. I couldn’t even push my dick back in my pants before I was being shouted at to get my hands up.

“Get your fucking hands up. FBI! Motherfucker!”

The agent had a gun to my face with the mounted flashlight, and I couldn’t see anything past the bright light, but I knew damn well the gun’s safety was on.

We’ll see if I’m wrong in a second.

There were more screams down below. I realized now the music had been shut off, and I was hearing more windows shatter, more angry voices and bodies hitting the ground. Two seconds later my mind caught up with itself. This was a raid, and I was in the middle in of it. I had no idea where Zander was. Eddie was caught for sure and this was bad. Three Rogues in one place was a great score for the good guys and a fucking hard blow for the bad apples.

The agent reached out to shove me to the ground, and it was a bad move. I grabbed his hand, singled out one finger, and broke it between my grasp. He yelped, then made another wrong move and dropped the gun to lunge for me. Coco was somewhere in the room screaming, but I was too preoccupied with the agent. He was much bigger than me and well trained, but the shock of my assault on him had given me an edge that was gonna cost him the fight.

I mounted him and slammed my fists into his face. I could feel my knuckles tearing from his teeth. My bottom lip was tightly pinched between my teeth as I bit away the pain and continued punching the man. I could hear bones cracking as my knuckles punched through to his jaw.

Behind me the door burst open. The agent underneath me was out cold, and I’d spent the last few seconds only mangling what was left of his face. I lunged for his gun that had fallen to the floor before the scuffle, flipped to my back, and aimed at whoever walked into the room.

Zander hit the ground and skidded. His mouth was bleeding, but he was only down for a moment. Another agent stumbled in after him with his gun at his side and forgotten as he chased Zander’s sliding body. Coco stood and screamed even louder. The blood-curling hooker’s scream stopped the agent in mid-lunge This, too, cost him the fight. Zander erupted with a vicious blow that snapped the agent’s head to the right, and his body followed as he fell to the ground.

Downstairs were more shouts, more doors bursting somewhere close. My dick was still hard, and Coco’s spit was still slipping off it. The cold air blowing on it from the busted window snapped me out of the haze of what the hell had just happened and what we needed to do now.

“Get their clothes!” I shouted.

There was no time to explain what I was thinking, and thankfully, Zander was hip to what I was saying. He yanked Coco by the arm. She was still screaming as he shoved her into a closet. She didn’t fight it, and that was the first thing she’d gotten right since she stepped into the room. Zander took the agent that I had fought since the guy was bigger and closer to his size. I ripped the wool mask off the face of the agent that Zander knocked out and put it on.

Zander snatched off his clothes and jerked on the agent’s pants. “I hope this shit works.”

We took the broken window for our escape. Cars were everywhere, but everyone was inside somewhere cuffing and ruining an already shitty night. I was the first to hit the ground and get to my feet. Zander landed right behind me as I took the wheel of the first cop car we saw.

“Turn the headlights off,” Zander commanded, and I’d already flicked them off even before he got the words completely out of his mouth.

Even before I could let up on the brake for a slow backup out of this hell, two FBI agents dragged Eddie out from inside. Eddie was cuffed, with his arms pinned behind him, but he still gave a fight. Where his arms couldn’t reach, he used his legs to kick at the agents. The burly one of the two took grip of the situation. He yanked Eddie up by his back of his shirt and slammed him against the hood of another unmarked police car.

“My father,” Zander shrieked, and the panic in his voice answered a long-age question: Did he even care about his screwup daddy?

Yes. Yes he does.

I hopped out of the car even before I knew what I was doing. I smelled the blood off the mask from the cop knocked out inside with Coco still screaming in the closet.

The smaller cop saw me first. “That motherfucker bit me!” he yelled, and I was sure he didn’t even know it. “Can you believe it?”  

I shut him up by smashing the butt of the agent’s gun into his mouth. I heard something break under his mask before he hit the ground. The cop with his knee smashed into Eddie’s back was too slow to realize the turn of events. I kicked him in the back of one knee, which made him buckle, and snaked the gun around his neck and yanked him up.

“Car,” was all I said, and Eddie was off toward the car with Zander.

The agent struggled in my arms, but he wasn’t prepared, and his strength was all too easy to overpower. I kept choking him until he went limp in my arms. He wasn’t dead, but that was more hope than anything. Finally, the night seemed to have fallen silent, and that scared me the most.

“Let’s go, man!” Zander hissed from the dark.

The staggering moment I was about to take might cost me my freedom if another agent came out dragging another cuffed man, but I froze. I looked at Eddie’s club with the hideous blue neon lighting. I considered the broken barred windows, the trash of broken bottles, and used cigarette butts on the gravel ground. Zander and I shouldn’t have been here tonight, but we were. We’d been desperate enough to come, just like we’d been desperate enough to consider picking up a street hooker.

I understood now that desperation was no one’s friend; it caused unnecessary trouble. I also understood that we
were
desperate. Too busy running on empty and not looking ahead. Too busy to see that we were headed straight for a brick wall.

Consequences for choices I don’t even remember making…

Ally answered the door on my third knock. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail and fell down in waves gainst her back. Her eyes were a deep green, beautiful, almost alluring and always filled with a sense of avidity no matter the hour or circumstance. She was still that young kind of pretty but had a hint of a wiser beauty just hanging under the surface. She wore her pajamas, which consisted of tiny shorts and shirt. She yawned and wiped the sleep from her eyes. She knew it was me and still was able to muscle up a smile at almost five in the morning.

Ally was barely a good eighteen years old but finally legal. Her parents worked bone breaking overnight jobs that paid too little. Two jobs, two paychecks, and they still lived in a shit hole where they could barely afford the things they needed and never the things they wanted. The plus side to their long overnight hours was that it made it much easier for me to sneak in for a night of bliss with their only daughter on nights like this. Tonight had been a fail, a ball of bullshit that just wouldn’t stop stinking no matter how long I tried to hold my breath. Between cutting up Lulina’s boyfriend and Eddie’s raid which we narrowly missed being sucked up in, I had reached my limit. Now I just wanted something soft, something with a smile that held no extra motives behind it.

“My mom is starting to wonder why I’m so sleepy in the morning,” she says after losing another battle to a yawn.

“I promise to make this quick then.”

Ally leaned up against the door and the sleep drained away from her face. She attempted to sound grown up, enticing, sexy, when she responded: “I don’t want you to.”

I stepped inside.

Immediately I pinned her against the door and helped her close it. My mouth was on her neck and I felt her pulse under my tongue and she shuddered against me. She was already moaning and I liked it so much I felt light headed.

Ally said, “Tristan, you’re drunk.”

I rolled my eyes as I continued to drag my tongue over her neck.

She knows this; I’m always drunk.

If I wasn’t drunk then I would know better than to fuck my neighbor’s young daughter. I licked and nibbled on her jaw line to get her head swimming and off my obvious drinking ways and dragged her off to her tiny bedroom. It’s a typical teenage girl’s bedroom with ruffles and a few posters of rock bands I would never listen to. I managed to get her clothes off and into bed. She looked at me in the dark room and I could feel her eyes as I undressed.

We had been at this for two years now. She was a virgin when I met her, and I did her the favor of fucking every hole God’s ever given her. My soul will burn for it – it will burn for a lot of things – but I just wanted to feel special to someone, wanted to be always remembered.

I don’t do foreplay. I don’t make love in any fashion.

If you’re too sweet then you’re causing problems that will bite you in the ass later on.

The feel of her breasts against my chest unlocked a moan that I had spent the night repressing. Caught in the moment, I leaned down and took her bottom lip gently into my mouth. I felt her nails dig into my back at my weak moment of tenderness. She inched her legs up my sides – the feel of her soft, hairless legs caused another eruption of moans on my behalf.

When we first started this, Ally was horrible at having sex. She’s a woman now and can prove it, yet time isn’t on my side when I know in two hours her parents will be home barely awake, bone tired and exhausted from another day of making absolutely nothing. So, her new learned tricks will have to wait. I took a firm, erect nipple into my mouth and sucked slowly on it; my tongue touching it, tasting it and circling it. Ally was already breathing heavy, and for the first time tonight, I feel alive and wanted and handsome.

Sex is so common and so much a part of my life that I move on autopilot.

Again, I’m angry at myself for having come here. Things are already complicated enough and fucking a girl who just reached eighteen don’t make it any better.

Better me than Zander.

With me she could just receive heartbreak and nothing more. With him, she could be crushed and pregnant. The man never remembered to keep condoms on him.

Not me, though.

I keep condoms stuffed in my pocket like a sex addict should and I helped Ally get on the pill. Of course her parents don’t know a damned thing about it. She was not safe with me. Not at all, but she was in less danger in my arms than Zander’s.

Ally took two of my fingers and put them in her mouth – another trick she’s learned over the years. Her tongue swirled over it, wetting them.

“I really missed you inside of me, Tristan,” she whispered, which this time and to my relief, she remembered to momentarily take my fingers out of her mouth to talk dirty.

No matter what, I know I can always take what Ally says at face value. She is too young to be able to say such things and it be a lie.

With her other hand, she located my dick and hovered it over her opening. Her eyes found mine and I wanted to look away from the intensity of her stare.

I know what’s coming even before she can take the breath to say it. “I love you, Tristan.”

I say what I always say when she says this. “You shouldn’t.”

She moved me inside and my mind is swimming, I’m drowning in pleasure. Finally I’m peeking at the
completeness
I’m addicted to – the entire reason why I screw whore after whore to find. I loved every moment with Ally, but I don’t confuse it with love.

This was sex not love.

She moaned in the dark and I quieted her with my mouth. I don’t kiss but I know she expects it so I give to her, after all that I had taken from her.

It’s the least I can do.

***

My father glared at me through the haze of his cigar smoke. He was a big man, worked out every day of his life so his body was lean and firm for a fifty-eight year old man. With gray at only the temples, he had a thick mane of wavy black hair that looked combed to perfection at this ungodly hour of eight o’clock in the morning – and I was still fighting a hangover and could barely blink without it burning.

At the mere presence of my father was enough to make any man carefully consider their words around him. He was a man who didn’t have to lift a finger to demand respect but received it because of his cold, dark stare: a man who had seen it all and still kept his eyes open for more.

“Eddie said he caught a guy in his place that didn’t look like he should be there. That same guy was the one who ended up arresting him at first,” he stated and tapped his cigar, shaking loose a few coils of ashes into a gold ashtray.

Eddie had gracefully pulled what happened last night in his favor. He hadn’t spotted the white guy in the black trench coat. He hadn’t known he had been scoped and watched as his unrurely customers did their drug deals and gambled illegally, or while his prosititutes tended to the needs of his hornier customers, which included his’ screwed up son and newphew.

I closed my eyes and breathed. “Did he also say that he dressed as one of the Agents and rescued himself from being manhandled?”

My father laughed then stopped abruptly like a record skipping after someone bumped it. It was apparent that the laugh was unexpected and he hated to laugh when business was being discussed. Still, the tension in the air had eased a bit.

My father loosened two buttons on his jacket. “Have a seat, Tristan.”

I sat and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. My father and I’s relationship wasn’t as sad as Eddie and Zander’s but that didn’t mean it wasn’t screwed up and misconstrued to the point that I sometimes wonder if he hates me so much that he loves me or vice versa. Growing up under him had been war filled with slaps and punches, kicks and flying objects. Hugs were rarely given – every inch had to be earned and placated with. It wasn’t hard to notice in his eyes everytime he looked at me that he hadn’t wanted me. At the time of my conception, he had been caring for his dying wife who suffered breast cancer and losing the battle. Ricardo Rogue had gotten too close to his black maid whom he sought out for comfort because his wife couldn’t give it to him.

In a way I think he hated me because my birth had soiled his wife’s memory. I stank of infidelity – a husband who hadn’t been faithful to a wife who had seen the ugly in him and still loved him. And, if my father hadn’t hated me like I assumed he did, I knew my two brothers did for that very reason. I was the black spot – no pun intended – in their mother and father’s relationship.

My father eased another cigar between his lips and lit it. He tested a few puffs before feeling satisfied and sat back to smoke. Papa was here too, sitting in his own designated chair, not too far but far enough, from my father’s desk which used to be his.

Papa always looked like old money; nice, tailored suits, and always sported sunglasses no matter if it was sunny outside or raining, day or night. He was a racist bastard and was mean about his digust with other races. Papa was truly a Rogue man. He loved his family and took pride in the name and the blood and the power. His reputation was as important to him as his life. Me being here, a man born of a black woman had placed a well size dent in Jarred Rogue, a man more brutal than a normal criminal would ever dreamed to be.

Papa wasn’t much of a smoker – a cigar here and there, depending on the mood - but a heavy drinker. A brandy was attached to his hand already despite that it was only eight in the morning.

Papa leaned back, looked at me for a moment, sizing me up and took a sip of his drink. “You pulled my son out of some shit last night, Tristan. You were the thinker; you thought on your feet and got the Rogue men out before the Feds swooped in.”

I counted down to the racial slur that was surely coming.

“Good to know that nigger blood ain’t overpowering the good Italian in you.”

My father loosened another button on his jacket and Papa quickly massaged at his temples as if a headache was creeping up. It was a debate among the men if the Rogue boss and his father ever slept. I sometimes wondered if there was simply enough time to sleep. My father and Grandfather’s eyes were sharper than most dangerous crinimals, but there was something off about two Rogue men, like this life just cost too much than both was willing to pay. My father was only Fifty-eight years old; my Papa seventy-nine – both healthy looking men but tired men. A crime boss was the hardest working man I could ever picture. Papa had gotten out easy. My father had been the ideal candidate to carry the business when Eddie had struck out in the campaign a little too early.

Could it be Johnny next?

I shuddered at the thought of that fool running things. Johnny was the oldest at thirty-six years old but still a child. Lulina, kissing fifty in the next three years, had him so pussy whipped that even I wondered if it had of been better if he had been gay. She was domineering and a walking manipulation in every shape and form. Still even if I knew she was pure fire, I liked getting burned. As for my brother Ralph, age thrity-three, he was power hungy and very sloppy; him running the Rogue business was an out. As for me, twenty-four years old, going on twelve, I couldn’t handle a bag of popcorn from the microwave to my ratty couch without searing my fingertips.

I was nothing more than a walking disaster… Anything less destructive wouldn’t do…

My father took a healthy pull on his cigar. He blinked slowly. I wondered if he felt the noose tightening around his neck. He was getting older. It would be time to pick his predesscor and the picking was too slim.

“Let’s keep this on track, Tristan,” he began, “Eddie’s on vacation at a safehouse and will be out for a while until this dies down.”

“What’s our contact in the Bearu saying?” I asked.

My father gave a rare smile that creased his skin in the corner of his eyes. “It was a hush hush raid that our source didn’t get wind of until it was over and had gone wrong.”

Papa had caught the smile my father had given me and looked like he was two hiccups away from puking. “My youngest son won’t be without his consequences,” he said.

It had been evident that Eddie’s slip up had started the shit downhill and now it was time for everyone to get their share of it.

“And what about me?” I asked.

Thankfully, my father answered the question. “The water’s hot but not boiling. Depending on how this conversation goes will determine how hot the water will get. Did anyone get a good look at you?”

“The Agent I fought with put a full fledge flashlight in my face. I don’t see how he didn’t.”

“What about Zander?”

“You’ll have to ask him,” I told him.

“I’m asking you!” My father barked loudly.

It was a comforting bark, one I knew and was used to. I jumped anyway so he could feel like he rattled me.

“Zander must have got caught with his pants at his ankles too. They fought and ended up in the room with me. I’m sure the Agent saw and could identify both of us if need be, but the scuffle was big and not even I could tell you what fully happened.”

The cigar in my father’s mouth was still burning but it was apparent the pleasant taste of an illegal Cuban was no longer important. The facts were gained and now my father placated the next move. Papa looked like he was ready to throw himself in the mix of this by giving swift orders: Eddie get his vacation and put on a leash – or maybe shot because he brought Feds to the Rogue doorstep, a noose for me and a chain around Zander’s neck with a roaring truck ready to pull him to an ugly death. Papa was a vicous man who had respected the order of things and the bloodshed the
family
came with.