Ryder by Jamie Targaet

Ryder (Hounds of Hell MC 4)
Jamie Targaet
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2024 Jamie Targaet

Ryder

The next day Ryder smiled to read the text from Margot Donner.

Margot: If you still think Razor is okay with it, I’ll come see you later today.

They’d become close after her mother’s death. She was the only woman he’d ever kept as a friend for years and never fucked. Yeah, she was a cop, but she was one of his favorite people.

“What are you grinning about?” Beast asked, shifting pillows behind Ryder’s back.

Ryder wasn’t admitting to shit. He had a reputation to maintain. “Just waiting to hear Axel got these fuckers,” Ryder told him, groaning as the bigger biker hauled him up into a sitting position on the bed.

“That’s it, huh?” Beast went over to the desk in Ryder’s room at the clubhouse, lifted off a tray that held his lunch.

Beast’s dark-eyed gaze was filled with humor. His muscular friend, with his wild fringe of dark hair, towered over Ryder in the bed. Once he situated the tray in front of Ryder, his beefy arms folded across the wide expanse of his chest. The face of the dark wolf inked on his friend’s forearm drew his attention with its sinister gaze.

“Maybe,” Ryder said, steadying the tray on his lap, shaking his head. His MC brothers were still feeding him soup and applesauce. “Can I get something solid?”

Beast shook his head. “Nah, you need to heal up.”

Ryder snorted. “I’m full of fucking holes. I’m surprised this shit isn’t running right out of me the minute I eat it.”

The chime of Beast’s phone had him fishing his device out of his pocket. “Yep?”

The deep voice on the other end of the phone sounded like Hero.

Ryder tried hard to listen — he knew his twin brother was handling things, especially with his girl in danger. Still irked him greatly that he couldn’t be there to fight at Axel’s side. To have his back. That had always been the deal between them. To always have each other’s back.

As Beast listened to whatever Hero said, Ryder let his head fall back against the pillows with a deep sigh. Alex, now Axel, had been born first by seven minutes. A fact his twin had never thrown in his face, never used at all. And Axel certainly earned the part of the older brother even though they were identical. Axel could be counted on when Ryder needed him. If he was hung over from a night of partying, Axel let him stay home and took up the slack at work. When he got himself into the occasional fight, Axel tipped the scales if he’d underestimated the other guy. Or came to bail him out.

Ryder also had spent years watching his brother earn everyone’s respect. His brother and Hero made all the business decisions for the garage. When it came to dirty jobs the club needed doing, Axel was among the first approached. Cool-headed and calculating, Axel didn’t miss a damn thing.

Ryder didn’t command the same respect. He wasn’t disrespected. And he got important jobs from the club. Okay, maybe Ryder wasn’t as cool and calculated as his twin. But he was a good shot, a damn good fighter with any weapon or hand-to-hand combat. And when crazy was called for? He could do crazy all day long.

Yes, Ryder was a ladies’ man. Axel took comfort from the occasional sweet butt although not to the extent Ryder did. He liked the ladies and didn’t limit himself to the ones who came to every party fishing for a Hound to claim her as his old lady. He liked his women fast and flashy, like his bikes. Ryder appreciated a nice ride.

Unlike his bikes, he never stayed with any woman more than a few weeks. “Love” was amazing the first few weeks. But as attachment tried to take hold, Ryder felt himself being strangled by those thin vines of commitment.

“It’s done,” Beast told him, ending the call. “Sounds like a fucking free-for-all. Sheriff Sawyer got to the Mafia guys first, then once our guys got there, Axel beat the shit out of his girl’s ex. Probably the same fucker who shot you and killed Elsie and Clyde over at Cowboy Pete’s.”

Ryder smiled. He knew Axel would deal with it.

“The guy dead?” Ryder asked, bracing for regret. It would have been nice to put down the guy who shot him full of holes — or gave the order — himself.

“Nah,” Beast told him. “Sawyer took him in.”

That could spell trouble down the road.

“At least Axel’s old lady is a little safer,” the other biker told him as he wandered out of his room. “Until they let him out.”

Axel’s old lady.

Everyone called her Angel but if he remembered rightly, her name was Sadie. Was she his twin’s old lady?

Yeah, the way it started out, Ryder’d assumed she was some sort of pity thing his brother had taken on. But weeks went by after she decided to hide in Mercy, and his brother stayed close to her all that time. By the time her ex and his men found her, yeah, he had to admit they’d felt like a couple. The young woman looked at his brother like a knight in shining armor. That wasn’t anything new. Ryder had seen that before. His brother had a soft spot for women and kids.

It wasn’t until the party Saturday night when Axel brought her to the clubhouse that it hit Ryder. The way his twin looked at her. Damn. He should have noticed before. His brother had found love, and he knew next to nothing about the woman except she’d been horribly abused by her ex and looked at his brother like he hung the fucking moon.

Shouldn’t he know something about his brother’s girl? If she was in Axel’s life, she’d be in his too. Hell, they’d brought her to the clubhouse a couple of days ago to keep her safe. Ryan heard her hustling around beyond his door. She never popped in to check on him though.

Lying still with the pain bleeding vividly into his awareness, Ryder reached for his pain meds, taking a double dose now that he knew his brother was safe. His brother had saved his girl and beat the fucking bad guy. Axel had to be feeling pretty good about things about now.

Ryder tried to shift on the bed to make himself comfortable, willing the pills to take the pain away sooner rather than later.

He and Axel couldn’t have been further apart in life right now. His brother was the conquering hero, setting things right for his girl and his dumbass twin brother. Ryder went home with a girl, and she got shot in the face, killed. Ryder got shot with her, providing the enemy with a weak board in the fence. They had to take him out of the hospital to keep him safe from the Mafia until Axel resolved it. Didn’t that make him a useless pile of shit?

Before his eyes slid shut, his gaze fell on his phone. He realized he’d never answered Margot, and he wanted to before he crashed. Lifting the phone in his shaking hand, he read back over the conversation.

Margot: If you still think Razor is okay with it, I’ll come see you later today.