I’d always liked that guy.
We didn’t find Blue, but I did find her mother’s ring. Or really, Lion found it and paid a buddy to pick it up for me on Vancouver Island and drive it up to Entrance for me. Like hell I was trustin’ the postal service with somethin’ like that.
With nowhere to send it, I’d decided to give it to Grouch Pederson at Evergreen Gas. He hadn’t seemed surprised when I showed up with the package, and he’d made no promises she’d get it, but he promised to try.
At that point, it was all I could ask for. Even if I never saw her again, Blue deserved to have that piece’a her mother back, and I wanted to be the one to give it to her after so many other men had fucked her over.
In the end, King said somethin’ that eased the sharp bite’a longin’ in my chest.
He was good with words like that.
“The kinda love that redefines what it means to be alive is the kinda love that doesn’t come cheap. You gotta earn it, man, and sometimes that means bein’ patient, and sometimes that means fightin’ for it. If you really think Blue’s that woman for you, you gotta trust that you’ll see her again and ’til then gotta live lifeknowin’ she’d want you to be happy. Maybe that’s why she left in the first place.”
Twenty-four-year-old emotional savant.
So I had no answers, but the club had its own shitstorm to weather, and in a way, it was a welcome fuckin’ distraction.
The White Raiders were tryin’ to set up shop on our turf.
It wasn’t the first time another MC had encroached on our territory, but this was different.
The Raiders were here solely ’cause’a bad blood.
Rooster’d got Axe-Man sent down to prison.
Hazard and Cedar, both men in their crew, had gone to war with Axe-Man and Bat. Cedar had helped us with the Seven Song triad, but it only opened up more questions. What the fuck were the Raiders, known racists, doin’ with the Chinese gang? Why the fuck had Cedar helped us when he was flyin’ Raiders colours and Bat had admitted things didn’t end so smooth between them when their second tour ended.
We’d burned down their rathole in Newstone, but now, a month later, Kodiak was tellin’ us in church that he’d caught sight’a Cedar in town and followed him out to a rural farm out near Furry Creek.
“Burn it to the ground,” Zeus declared, almost dispassionately. “Don’t care if they keep croppin’ up, we’ll burn ’em down each time. These motherfuckers will not dig roots in our soil.”
“I gotta ask, why the fuck does Rooster hate you so much?” Shadow asked, and I was glad he did ’cause I’d been wonderin’ the same thing.
Z shared a look with Bat in that secret language they had I’d never been able to crack. It was the same kinda code Curtains and I shared, that I’d seen between Mute and King. The secret language’a soulmates writtin’ on each other’s bones.
“He was one’a the brothers we kicked out after takin’ down Crux,” Zeus admitted, and the silence that followed was toxic with old memories.
It’d been before my time, but lookin’ at the faces’a Buck, Bat, Skell, Smoke, and King around the chapel table, it wasn’t hard to imagine the horror’a that takedown.
Zeus had killed his own uncle, the prez’a the MC in Entrance, ’cause he’d gone so crooked that he started to target his own brothers in the club.
Includin’ Bat.
“Rooster wasn’t excommunicated like some’a the others ’cause we couldn’t find evidence he was involved in Crux’s betrayal,” Bat added, lookin’ down at his scarred hands, the words Hell Bent on each set’a knuckles. “He left himself when Zeus took over.”
“Sore loser,” Z added with a grim smile. “Wanted the seat for himself. Said he deserved it ’cause he’d been Sergeant At Arms to Crux.”
“If anythin’, it means he was probably involved in takin’ out his own club members, too,” King muttered darkly.
“I didn’t know shit, and I was his fuckin’ nephew,” Zeus pointed out with a long look at his son. “Eugene knew even less, and he still cut himself off from this club from the shame’a it. This wound these fuckers are pickin’ at? It´s old, and it’s gnarly as fuck. I want Rooster dead in the fuckin’ ground, and I wanna be the one to put ’im there.”
Axe-Man snarled, an animal expression that made the hairs on the backs’a my hands stand on end.
Zeus inclined his head like the magnanimous biker king he was and allowed, “If Axe-Man doesn’t get there first.”
“I can make him suffer,” Priest offered in that cold, hollow monotone that made most grown man crap their pants. “Better than any’a you.”
Wrath rolled his eyes and shoved Priest with an elbow, braver than any’a the rest’a us who stared at him like he was fuckin’ insane. “You’re not the only one here who knows how to deliver pain.”
