Present Day
During his first-ever club sponsored interrogation, Mercy had felt a low beat of disappointment, somewhere in the blackest depths of his soul, when the Carpathian who worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority spilled his guts too soon, unable to withstand the questioning. That night, Mercy had gotten spectacularly drunk, puked in Ghost and Maggie Teague’s bushes, and then knocked on their front door, using the brass knocker that was circled by a wreath of autumn leaves and tied off with a festive brown and gold ribbon. Ghost had given him a flat, impossible to read look and let him sleep on the sofa. The next morning – afternoon, whenever – he’d opened his eyes and found a pair staring back at him. Bright, brown eyes, full of questions and mischief. Ghost’s eight-year-old daughter, Ava.
It had been Walsh – quiet, disinterested, brooding Walsh – who had finally put the question to Mercy. How could he have known Ava at age eight, and want toknowher at age seventeen? There wasn’t a simple answer. He’d always loved her; at some point, that love had taken a dangerous turn, right around the time her curves had bloomed and her adoration for him climbed to new heights, fevered with the danger of that time period, the way they’d been thrust together.
She was the reason he’d left Knoxville, and the reason he almost hadn’t come back. As he braced his elbows on his knees and concentrated on regulating his breathing, getting his arousal under control, he realized how smart he’d been in keeping away. They couldn’t be in the same room together. Not when he could so well remember the gentle heat of her body, its shape pressed against him, the dewy lush curve of her bottom lip between his teeth. Not when he still had dreams about her breath against his throat and her fingers twined in the front of his shirt. He didn’t know how to be her friend or acquaintance. He was incapable of indifference. And tonight, seeing her little douchebag boyfriend with his shiny hair and shinier shoes – he’d had to prove, to the both of them, that she would still come alive at his touch, that it was him she loved, no matter who she allowed to pray at her altar.
What had just happened could never happen again. He was back in Knoxville; he was needed at this chapter. Never again could he allow Ava Teague to jeopardize his place in this club.
It was the club, after all, that had saved his life.
There was a fast knock at the door and then it opened, the din of the party tumbling in and striking him hard in the chest. The bass thump of the music reverberated up through the soles of his boots. It was Walsh who stood framed in the threshold, a bottle of Newcastle in one hand, his eyes narrow, blue, and shrewd.
“You back here with a girl?” Walsh’s gaze asked the real question: You back here with Ava? There was both pity and accusation writ in the shallow lines of his face. He would, Mercy had always thought, be handsome, if he had an ounce of personality.
“Nah.” Mercy stood, and Walsh’s glance lifted and kept pace with his own. “Just beat from the ride up is all.”
Unconvinced, Walsh said, “You can nap later. Ghost wants to do the thing.”
“Coming.”
He stowed Ava where she belonged, in the farthest back corner of his mind.
In New Orleans, the chapel was the heart of the clubhouse, a centerpiece from which all other rooms branched. In Knoxville, it was secreted away down a hard-to-notice hall, kept separate from the revelry, a serious room for serious meetings. The Knoxville chapel, with its heavy, ornate table and balancing furniture, its velvet-cushioned chairs, was where he’d first met Ava, back when she was only eight and only a sweet kid who’d wowed him with her realism.
Brothers were filing in, their steps slow with drink, their conversations snatches of what they’d brought from the common room.
Ares the German Shepherd was curled on his bed; his head lifted as he watched them enter the sacred room. Mercy never stopped loving the idea of a dog guarding the Dogs’ most holy of chambers. He paused to scratch the animal behind his ears on his way to one of the visitor chairs at the end.
“Good boy.”
Ares panted against his wrist, his fluffy tail thumping the floorboards.
“Mercy!” someone bellowed, and Mercy glanced up with a grin for Troy.
The crusty old biker had already settled into his favorite chair halfway down the far side of the long dining table. That way, he could hear what was said at both ends.
A curmudgeon in the truest sense of the word, Troy Timmons lived in the basement suite of his daughter’s sprawling Alcoa home, addicted to the Camels that had ravaged his voice and the Jim Beam that had ruined his marriage decades before. Gnarled with arthritis, at least two inches shorter than he’d been fourteen years ago when Mercy had joined the Knoxville chapter, the old man still rode like a bro, a bandana covering his bald head, his leathery arms and their now-misshapen tattoos displayed with pride beneath a Lean Dogs t-shirt and his weathered cut. He spent little to no time with the boys anymore, only coming in for official votes, making a run now and then when he felt like it. Everything pissed him off; his favorite topic of conversation was the war wound that pained him each time it rained, and if everyone was honest, nobody missed him much when he wasn’t around.
But tonight, they were voting in a new president – and a new member – and he’d come, duty-bound, if not happy about it. “Where the hell you been, boy?” he asked, scowling, as Mercy took his crooked hand gingerly in his own and shook it. “You can’t even see fit to visit?”
“They’ve been keepin’ me busy,” Mercy answered, smiling. “Didn’t you hear? I went to London.”
“London?” Troy’s face puckered. “Why the hell you’d do that for?”
Mercy laughed. “You don’t sit at table much anymore, do ya?”
“Hell no! I ain’t got time to be wasting listening to these kids talk politics.” He gestured to the filling room.
“Yeah,” Aidan said as he plopped in his chair, a dripping bottle of AmberBock in one hand. “Troy’s got important home shopping channel shit to deal with. He doesn’t have time for us.”
“I’ll come around this table,” Troy said, “and beat your ass, son.”
Aidan grinned. “You’d have to catch me first.”
Hound, their other old-timer, probably in his mid-seventies by now, smacked Aidan good-naturedly on the back of the head as he made his slow, bow-legged way to his seat. “No respect for his elders, this one.”
“He lacks my sophistication and poise,” Tango said as he sat next to Aidan.
