Bad to the Bones

  Never ride faster than your guardian angel can fly.

  BAD TO THE BONES

  Book #3 in The Bare Bones MC series

  Layla Wolfe

  Copyright 2014 © Layla Wolfe

  Kobo Edition

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Cover art by Red Poppy Designs

  http://poppyartdesigns.com

  Edited by Carol Adcock

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  Dedication

  I had to write this book in pieces, in between funeral planning, slideshows, obituaries, various things related to my Dad’s death. Writing “Chapter One” was postponed several weeks while I drove back and forth to the hospital. Things kept happening to him, the domino effect, one after the other.

  I had originally planned to have an abusive father in my book. That idea went out the window, since I have no experience with abusive fathers. Not that a writer should live everything she writes about. But it hit too close to home. My dad didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

  So I turned the Bad Guy into a cult leader. That, I have experience with. My mother was deeply involved with a cult in eastern Oregon for several decades, so I just changed around some of the facts, the buzz words, the “therapies.” But we all believe it was some of those “encounter groups” that permanently ruined our childhoods. Marriages were shattered. Couples were devastated. The motto used to be “let it all hang out.” Now we’d prefer if everyone would just sweep that shit back under the rug.

  Rest in peace, Dad. None of us have felt your presence so we know you’ve already moved on. We love you.

  Publisher’s Note: This is Book #3 in the Bare Bones MC series. This book is a stand-alone and can be read out of order. This is not your mother’s contemporary romance. Daring readers will encounter sexual assault, dubious consent, general violence among men, and a HEA. It is not for the faint of heart. It’s a full length novel of 73,000 words with no cliffhanger. Recommended 18+ due to mature content.

  Knoxie Hammett has been The Bare Bones’ tattoo artist for years. He’s just drifted through life, living it large and performing in their Triple Exposure films, recovering from a divorce he never wanted. Suddenly Knoxie has a reason to live and to want to prospect for The Bare Bones outlaw motorcycle club.

  He’ll need their help to rescue the lovely Bellamy Jager from the jaws of the cutthroat, warped cult leader who has been holding her hostage all her adult life. To the neglected, abused Bellamy, living in the desert canyons off stolen food and time, the sanctity of the ashram looked like a safe zone. But her haven turned to hell and she was drugged and abused, ignorant of any other way of life.

  Knoxie will need every one of his Bare Bones brothers and every ounce of bravery he can muster. To save Bellamy and her white slave sister from the twisted swami, he’ll need to pull off the most daring job of his life to prove to the club and the world that he’s…BAD TO THE BONES

  Don’t ride faster than your guardian angel can fly.

  BAD TO THE BONES

  Book #3 in The Bare Bones MC series

  Layla Wolfe

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Publisher’s Note

  One: Bellamy

  Two: Knoxie

  Three: Bellamy

  Four: Knoxie

  Five: Bellamy

  Six: Knoxie

  Seven: Bellamy

  Eight: Knoxie

  Nine: Bellamy

  Ten: Knoxie

  Eleven: Bellamy

  Twelve: Knoxie

  Thirteen: Knoxie

  Fourteen: Bellamy

  Fifteen: Knoxie

  Sixteen: Bellamy

  Seventeen: Knoxie

  Eighteen: Bellamy

  Nineteen: Knoxie

  Twenty: Bellamy

  Epilogue: Knoxie

  About The Author

  More Books from Layla Wolfe

  More Books from Karen Mercury

  CHAPTER ONE

  BELLAMY

  It’s not difficult to slide into another dimension. There are tons of them. Some are inhabited by lunatics only, some by the misbegotten who have never had any parents to love them. Some realities, like the one I spent much of my time in, was peopled by fellow travelers, seekers who had lost their way. A great many people at Bihari were like that, actually. While the vast majority of them were well-off financially—over half of the seekers who lived with me had college degrees of some kind—I still felt they were stumbling, looking but never finding, just scrambling their way through life.

  Like me. Especially now, because I seemed to be running barefoot across a mesa of some kind. I was confused, unable to figure out why I didn’t have my Harley Sportster but was running barefoot. Swami Shakti liked us to “check our footwear and attitude at the door.”

  If I recall correctly, a few of the guards they called daimyo followed us at first, swiping their assault rifles as though we were cockroaches they needed to scatter. They sprayed their bullets just close enough to our flapping hems to scare us, but not cause any bloody damage. That was considerate of them. I looked at my fellow exiles, stumbling with outspread hands like talons. Why had I been thrown in with this bunch?

  In the last dimension I remembered, I had been at my place of worship, the bike garage. I was re-jetting the carburetor on a rebuilt 64 HP engine. It was a favor for a new citizen—only upstanding, close and important disciples were allowed to have their own rides. The rest took the shuttle busses or walked to the cafeteria or their places of worship, to remind them they were no more important than the bugs or the snakes.

  I thought I’d been in one of Shakti’s inner circles of disciples. He’d taken me in seven years ago, when he was just setting up shop here near Pure and Easy, Arizona. I lived with him in Wang Cho House, the spread he’d had built with the indoor swimming pool for his sensitive skin, climate controlled for his allergies. No doubt this was just a test for us. Or some kind of gruesome mistake.

  I’d been shoved into a minivan with eight other homeless men, driven down the canyon to this plateau in the middle of nowhere. “Where are we going?” we all asked each other. I had been taken from my mechanic’s garage, another man whisked from cleaning a street. Another guy had been yanked from digging a well. Another had been helping to build the dairy barn. A couple of them had just been lying around drinking beer.

  “They’re going back on their word,” one guy kept saying. “I knew it. I knew it was too good to be true.”

  The driver and guards of course wouldn’t say a thing. They were close-lipped. I had been witness to some pretty unbelievable events in my time with the ashram, mostly manifestations of the greatness of The Outlaw Prophet. Nothing of the water-into-wine variety, of course not, that would be absurd. But I had seen healings, and women touched eternally who had taken the leap, as I had when I was seventeen. Shakti was a father, lover, guru. Women were his mediums. I figured I must be the most healed woman in the entire ashram, what with all my private sessions with Shakti, my nonstop surrenderings to his purple whirlpool, my proximity to his vibes.

  “We’d never go back on our word,” I protested to the homeless man. He hadn’t change
d his name, hadn’t registered to vote, and was still Brian.

  “What’s this ‘our’ business?” growled Brian. “You’re one of the upper echelon just because you fuck that disgusting pervert.”

  Rage rose in my chest, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I knew it was imperative to protect the Master at all costs. “I’m just a disciple like the rest of you.”

  Brian rolled his eyes. He hadn’t even donned the purple pants and shirt, a kind of universal dashiki that was the great equalizer. No one had a higher status than anyone else when dressed in solid purple clothing. Shakti, however, due to his sensitive skin, wore a velvet shirt and angora cap. “We’re no fucking disciples. We were pulled off the street by you whackos. I’m from Oklahoma City. We picked up Ted here in—where was that, Ted?”

  “Aspen. I was a ski instructor, can you believe that? Now he’s got me melting down gold jewelry to smuggle out—like I know anything about gold. I know about powder and ski wax! It just sounded like a good beginning, the way they described it here. Take all your worries away. No pondering about paying your power bill. Everything done for you. All you have to do is give back.”

  Brian groused. “Peace and serenity, everyone in perfect harmony with nature.”

  Another grizzled man who was not that far into his most recent alcoholic DTs growled too. “Two beers a night. I sold out! For two beers a night I sold my right to vote! We have to vote the way they tell us to! What if I wanted to vote for the white party and not the purple?”

  It was true, disciples had driven all over the country recruiting homeless people to bolster up our voting rolls. These “new friends” would vote as a bloc for our own choice for state rep and mayor. Why not? We needed to stand up to the constant harassment the “whites” were giving us, the “purples.” Shakti had chosen an open-minded corner of Arizona where we thought no one would bother us but we were wrong. The bombardment by residents was daily. We needed our own man in the House of Representatives to stand up for us, to give us a voice.

  I frowned at the alcoholic. “You’re one of us now. Of course you want to vote for our guy.”

  “Forced sterilization!” swore the wino. “Some girl who looked like a zombie told me she was forced onto an operating table and knocked out with knockout drops! When she woke she wasn’t able to bear children anymore!” He kept saying that, “knockout drops,” as though we lived in some forties spy film. Someone would come along and put the drops in someone’s Kool-Aid, like at a retreat in the South American jungle.

  But I started wondering. Why was I, a chosen one, being herded along with these “new friends”? I knew we were starting to consider that our experiment with the addicted, unreliable, and unstable “friends” had in general been a failure. But why had I, one of Shakti’s closest advisors, been rounded up with them?

  I tried to ask the daimyo. This minivan had two of them and their assault rifles had never been more terrifying.

  “Bulsara,” I begged of one armed peacekeeper. “Where are you taking us? Was it an accident? Was I included in this group by accident?”

  “No accident,” was all Bulsara would say. He had been a stockbroker in Cincinnati, handing over his fortune and those of his children’s to come to Bihari.

  I started to panic. “It’s a mistake! I am Asanga. You know me, Bulsara! I live in Wang Cho House with Swami Shakti, the inner sanctum. Why am I being ejected along with these street people?”

  “So you do admit it?” bellowed the juicer. “I knew it, I knew it! Typical big business right-winger procedure! Tolerate the little guy as long as he’s useful and when he’s run his course, bam! Toss him into a mass grave with thirty other bodies! It’s the military-industrial complex, I tell you!”

  It wasn’t exactly a mass grave the daimyo had in mind. But as we pulled off the road, I saw we were converging with two other minivans. They all had a purpose now and drove in tandem as though in a car commercial toward the lip of the canyon. They drove like a formation of slow bombers. Would they drive us over the edge? The whole time the bum kept screaming “Knockout drops!” and “They put it in the beer. They put it in the mashed potatoes!”

  I was truly starting to become terrified. Emotions in general were not my strong point. I was considered the “mellowest” of Shakti’s inner sanctum because I did not feel strong emotions. I had been purged of all past trauma through my constant re-living of them. But as the sterno bum screamed about mashed potatoes and the ski instructor Ted bellowed about freestyling, mogul runs, and slaloming, I really began to panic. That was definitely the edge of a cliff out there. This area west of Slide Rock was a beautiful frothy cake of pink and violet layers of sediment.

  But by the time the three minivans came to a halt, I was actually beginning to feel groggy. It struck me that the alcoholic might be right. I had been inexplicably groggy off and on lately, usually after drinking a beer someone had poured for me. And right before the daimyo had snatched me from my mechanic’s shop, Rhetta had brought me a hand-poured beer. She lived with me at Wang Cho House.

  In fact, I wasn’t really questioning anything by the time Bulsara herded me off the bus. Stumbling, clueless transients came from the other buses, some with their hands held high, as though accustomed to surrendering. This would be a fitting end to my pointless life. It had been too good to be true, finding Shakti after so many years of neglect and abuse by careless parents. I wasn’t good enough for Shakti.

  Purple was the color of the rising sun. But right now a wave of purple was rushing toward the direction of the sunset, which happened to be a drop-off steep enough to kill a whole herd of unwanted disciples like us.

  “The Master is a boat,” chanted Bulsara, waving his rifle at us. “Once the disciple crosses the river, the boat is unnecessary.”

  “I’m totally out of here!” shrilled the street bum. “This shit is batshit crazy!” And he ran.

  He ran toward the road and a couple of daimyo splattered bullets at his heels. This woke up the rest of us bums. Reflexively we ran away from the bullets, toward the cliff. But I was so groggy I ran like a sloth.

  The rest of my bus mates seemed to be running in slow motion, too. Our limbs splayed like frogs, arms flapping like crows. We ran toward the edge, taking ridiculously high steps. Dust from bullets stinging the ground buoyed us up like a cloud toward heaven, but nobody was being hit. It was just a game for the daimyo, a brutal video game to pass the time.

  “Fucking dirtbags!” yelled Brian, the only one running near me now. It seemed as though we ran through solid water, we were so slow. My head felt like a bucket of cement, and I even stopped caring that someone was trying to kill me. My wooden beaded necklace that enshrined a photo of Shakti bounced like a close up shot of a coin toss. Shakti used to tell us the picture wasn’t really of him because he was a vast emptiness that can’t be photographed.

  “They fucking lied, like everything else was a lie,” drawled Brian. Suddenly he was drunk as a skunk, too. “There’s no fucking eternal bliss. That fucker just rides around in his Hummers drinking his hash milkshakes. There’s no democracy, no dialogues. It’s a dictatorship, and he doesn’t care about us.”

  For the first time I understood that. As I fell to the ground—out of sheer stupor, not in a hail of bullets—I felt maybe, maybe just a little bit angry at Shakti. He always said he knew all, saw all. He knew everything going on in the ashram. Well, didn’t that mean he knew that I was being rounded up with average street bums and herded into oblivion?

  The last thought I had as I sank into happy “nothingness” on the sand was He knows. He may have even ordered it. I can never live with that thought.

  I’d rather die.

  CHAPTER TWO

  KNOXIE

  Knoxie Hammett was buried balls-deep inside the pussy of a well-used sweetbutt.

  Courtney—he thought that was her name—was young, and hot when fully made up, but not tight. Knoxie’s mind wandered as he plunged his cock inside her. He knew Courtney had at
least one kid, currently watching them round-eyed from a car seat on the other side of the room. And he’d witnessed her being fucked by at least four co-workers and maybe four more members of The Bare Bones club. So yeah, her pussy fit him more like a worn work glove than an extra-large condom.

  Still, Knoxie’s long, thick cock pulsated as he reamed the young blonde. He was truly enjoying this, something that couldn’t be said every day. He was fully alive today in every sense of the word, and he was crushing it. He knew that his deltoids shimmered with vitality and power as he bucked the skinny woman up the wall. He knew that the toned muscles of his lumbar undulated and flexed with just the proper precision as he nailed her. He knew that his chest piece—a blend of Asian and biomechanical tattoo styles that he’d labored designing for weeks—would have looked especially striking in this lighting, if only it wasn’t plastered up against the silicone of Courtney’s boobs.

  He was killing it today because his divorce papers had been finalized.

  Knoxie was imbued with strength and a lust for more than life. The divorce hadn’t really sunk in until today because he’d been numbing the pain with booze and more than his share of pot from the local Leaves of Grass farm. His fortieth birthday had come and gone in a hilarious haze. He’d been living in an apartment above a downtown biker bar and grill for so long he’d forgotten the beauty of the outlying mesas and buttes, the breathtaking inspiration of the Red Rocks area. The messy apartment was a revolving door for his rough-hewn brothers who sometimes crashed there rather than drive drunk back to their clubhouse on Mescal Mountain, out of town five miles. Some mornings it resembled a battlefield with bodies draped in disagreeable positions. Knoxie had thought about getting a dog just to have something to cuddle, but most dogs freaked at the loud rumble of his bike’s pipes.