Chapter 1

Reality Just Bitch Slapped Me In The Face, And Mandi Helped

Shea

We've been together since we were in high school. War is two years older than me, and began prospecting in my brothers' club when he was 18 and I was 16. I've known him since I was about 12 though. He came from a horrible family and foster situation when the President of our MC, brought him into the club to prospect.  War basically lived at the club and did clean up and errands until he was 18 and old enough to prospect.  He joined my brothers, who were a few years older than him, and they became closer than blood family.  When he became a full member, he was already deep into the family of the Oblivion MC.

Though I was all about War, and knew he was the one, or at least thought I knew, we didn't start dating until I graduated from high school when I was 18. At that point War had finished prospecting and was a full member.

I know that my brothers gave him a hard time about me, told him if he was really interested to wait until I was older, he did, kind of, in a way, wait for me.  While he was 'waiting' he was filling his spare time with quite a few club girls, and he was never single while I was still in high school. Whatever, we weren't dating then, in fact, I dated a few guys at school during that time to try and make him jealous.  I don't think he was jealous, but he did notice and wasn't necessarily pleased, I just had fun dating and doing stupid high school stuff.  I didn't wait for him, he didn't really wait for me, we lived fun lives apart, until we lived our lives together.

But once I graduated, it was just us, no one else, no making the other jealous, no games and no sneaking around behind the other ones back.

Just the love that we had, War and Shea.

We eloped during my last year at university. I earned my teaching credential and I was hired at the elementary school in Crestline, the town we've lived in our entire lives. Everything was perfect, our lives together, our family with my brothers, their wives and kids, the Oblivion club family. Between my teaching job, and Wars job at the garage we were living life on our terms. We had money, we saved enough to buy a small house, we even took a few vacations. Our lives were what we'd always dreamed of. We were even talking about starting a family in a year or two.

I can pin point exactly when our perfect loving lives began to veer off track.  A bright and shiny, needy and manipulative invader moved into our world.  I didn't recognize the threat for what it was, I underestimated my husbands vulnerability, and I definitely didn't see the smart and conniving snakes strength. In hindsight, there were a series of small hints before that I should have taken more seriously. You notice small annoyances, you process them, you even think that you understand and are prepared for them.  But in my ignorance, I dismissed the telltale signs, the truth is, sometimes you have no idea the amount of destruction that is really coming your way.  By the time I truly realized how deep the snake had gotten into Wars head, it was too late.

But to be honest, the fuse that the snake ignited, had always been living in War. He had always seemed to feel that he didn't quite deserve the great life we were creating, that because of his childhood, and the crap parents he came from and the ugly foster experiences he had, he thought that he wasn't good enough for me, or that he even deserved real and true happiness.

In that regard he could not have been more wrong. He was the best man I knew, even better than my two older brothers who raised me after our parents OD'd. He was honest, loving, protective, brilliant, fun, he was everything a girl could ask for. But in the back of his mind he had doubt, and that doubt he had in himself, well, it just played into the hands of our own personal snake, I mean if a snake had hands.

The club has always had an ever-changing collection of club girls. Some are in the clubhouse for weeks, some stay for years. Their jobs are to clean, help cook, and do chores around the club. But their main purpose is to keep the guys happy. However the guys want, wherever they want and whenever they want. Some of the old ladies hate the girls, I get that, and those ladies are usually the ones whose men still dip their dicks into the house girls. I never really cared. I grew up in the club, so they were always around, and I've always treated them nicely, and in turn they did the same to me. I don't look down on them, or try to embarrass them, it was a peaceful coexistence.

If War was going to screw around with anyone behind my back, my issue would be with my husband. Sure I'd be upset with the girl, but he's the one who promised me fidelity and love, not the skank he'd fooled around with.

So when Mandi, a new club girl, set her sights on my husband, I honestly wasn't the least bit bothered or threatened, she wasn't the first girl who had wanted War, and she wasn't going to be the last.  My husband loved me with the same passion and strength I had for him, War had never cheated on me, never even indicated that he noticed or cared about other women. But Mandi was different. She had an agenda, and apparently a carefully thought out plan, that she had started long before I even realized she was a viable threat to our lives.

Looking back, it's all very damn obvious now, but at the time I was so secure in my love with War, and so comfortable with my place in the world, drowning in our little blissful happiness bubble, I honestly didn't even realize that there was a venomous snake in my yard.

Mandi came into the Oblivion club with a mission to land a guy and become an Old Lady. Nothing new there, it happens all the time, the subtle difference that I didn't pay attention to was that Mandi didn't want just any Old Man, she wanted my Old Man, my War, and she was prepared and armed with stealth weapons and she was willing to fight the dirty fight.  A fight I didn't even realize I was in, had landed on my doorstep, and the bombs were already exploding before I saw the enemy for what she was.

My man is a protector, he looks out for me and the other people he loves. He has a soft spot for the vulnerable, because when he was a child, he was the vulnerable taken advantage of child.

Mandi was extremely clever in her pursuit of my husband, she identified and then played to that sweet and protective side of War. He didn't see the manipulations that Mandi was throwing out. My brothers noticed it first, along with their wives. By the time I had clued in that she was a serious threat, Mandi had already developed a "friendship" with War that mostly centered around their shared time in the foster care system. Though they had never been in the same houses nor had they ever met each other, but they both new of the system and some of the same people in it.  She started to need frequent "help" with a broken car, or an old boyfriend who was stalking her, most of the issues were fake, perhaps some were real, it doesn't really matter now.

Me telling War that she was trying to get between us was a mistake, and I played right into Mandi's game. The first time I told War that, he replied with, 'Mandi said you'd be threatened by our friendship, she said because you don't know how it was for us, that you'd feel left out and try to ice her out.'

It felt like the air was knocked out of my lungs when he said that, I was stunned by that statement because it showed me how big of a distance had been created between us. After that we weren't the same. There was a giant vulnerability in our marriage that neither one of us knew how to address. We both felt it, but we both saw the cause differently from the other. Where I very clearly blamed Mandi for her constant injection into our lives, War was protective of her, and saw me as antagonizing and insensitive to his vulnerable friend. My brothers were pissed at War, and he was defensive with them. He'd always felt a little under their thumb, half younger brother, half a little resentful.

I honestly thought that if we kept living our lives right and true, loving each other hard and strong, working our jobs, and moving forward in our lives, that everything would correct itself.

I was so f-ing wrong.

I was a newbie playing a game against a grand master, Mandi was in control of the board the entire time, long before I even realized that there was a game being played.

In the beginning War didn't hide their friendship, when we were at club parties, he'd talk to her a bit, but he was mostly with our friends and me. He didn't talk to her on the phone, or make arrangements to meet her. But there came a turning point, when I told him I didn't like his friendship with her, and he defended Mandi. Then I noticed that there were phone calls between them, my brothers said that he spent a lot of time at the club talking to her. She'd call for help, and he'd leave me, leave our home to go help her.

Everything came to a head at the Labor Day party. I'd been pretty busy the weeks before getting my classroom set up, and putting together the years lesson plans. I noticed that War was busy at work, but he was also distant from me. He'd been making comments to me about one of the guys at the club who he felt had been too friendly and flirty with me. This was absolutely ridiculous, I'd known his club brother Rider my entire life, and there was support coming from him but absolutely no flirtation. Rider agreed with my brothers that Mandi was trying to get with War, and he'd been telling me I needed to deal with it. I foolishly thought that I had been taking care of the situation.

I was so very wrong.

So at the party, where we were all having a great time, hanging around the pool, drinking and dancing. I was sitting at a table with my brothers and their wives along with Rider, Hack and Dog. We'd been laughing and planning a run in the upcoming weeks when Stoner came by and asked what was going on with War, he gestured over to the bar. There we all saw War and Mandi, dancing together, pretty close. War was in a pair of trunks, and Mandi was wearing a bathing suit top that barely covered her nipples, and a bathing suit bottom that truly only partially covered the lips of her pussy, I swear it wasn't 3 inches tall or 2 inches wide.

She was grinding up on Wars leg, nuzzling into his neck. He had one arm around her, the other was holding his drink. When she noticed we were watching she got an evil grin on her face, and she started moaning, "mmmmm, just like that War baby, make me cum again."

My heart dropped, and I thought I was going to faint. The guys jumped up and ran over there, pulling War away. Kayla and Suze both grabbed me and moved me into one of the club bedrooms.

I was sick, shocked, unbelieving of what I'd just seen. My husband was literally almost fucking a club girl in the middle of a party? A family party? No matter what was going on with War and me, that totally wasn't the kind of thing he'd ever do.

Suze was texting with Jax, letting him know where we were. When Jax and Rocky came in with War, it was obvious that something more was going on. War was out of it, on something, and not just alcohol. He was mumbling, not totally coherent, just babbling nonsense. His balance and coordination were off and he stumbled into the room, not really noticing who was here, or even whom he was with. When he finally focused on me, he sneered, "Where's your boyfriend Rider, huh? He waiting for you at his place?"

My brothers lost it. Jax punched him in the jaw, and Rocky started yelling at him about treating me right, and asking what the fuck was up with Mandi.

War just kept mumbling, "Everyone hates her, she's sad she has no friends. Shea took Rider away from her, so she's lonely and sad.  She understands me, she's nice to me and helps me, she gets me!"

At that point I ran into the bathroom and started vomiting. How in the hell did it get this far? As I kneeled on the floor, I could hear the yelling and commotion in the other room, the girls came in to help me clean up. Kay grabbed some clothes for me and I got dressed, by the time I got out of the bathroom the guys had already loaded War up in the car. Rocky drove us back to our house and helped me get him upstairs in bed.

Rocky and I went downstairs where we met everyone else. Hack was pissed, he said that Mandis game was deep and long, that since she'd arrived she'd been planting the seeds in Wars mind that Rider and I had been together, that we were hiding a relationship behind his back. Rider had rejected her early on so she had then latched onto War and was going for it hard. Her goal was to get rid of me, and become Wars Old Lady.

The guys had been watching and trying to talk to War about how sneaky she was, but because she'd made her and War "allies" from the foster system, he felt protective of her. He just couldn't seem to believe that she wasn't his needy, helpless and innocent friend.

They also said he'd been fooling around a bit with some drugs. X and pot and a little coke at the club. I didn't know about the drugs, but I'd definitely seen that his drinking had increased big time.

The guys didn't think that he and Mandi had been together sexually yet. But they weren't sure, and based on what we all saw earlier, if it hadn't happened yet, it probably wasn't too far off.

Stoner had taken a video of War and Mandi dancing, and sent it to Wars phone, so he'd see it in the morning. I asked where Mandi was, and they all said she stayed at the party and was fooling around with some of the girls, acting like nothing was wrong. Acting like my life hadn't just blown up.  She was at the club, MY club, MY home, partying and having fun, while I'm vomiting at home, trying to understand how far off the rails my life had gotten.

At this point I just wanted to go to sleep and forget all that had happened. Everyone left and I went upstairs and took a long hot shower. Trying to wash away the panic, anger and hurt that was bone deep.

Putting on a tank and some of Wars boxer shorts I grabbed two ibuprofen and a glass of water, drinking it all down while I looked at my husband. War was asleep, his face beautiful and peaceful. If I hadn't experienced the past few hours, I'd think I had the perfect husband and marriage.

Damn,  I wish I could go back to the sweet belief I had in my husband just a few months ago, because this reality?  The state of my relationship and marriage tonight, this f-ing sucks.