Knox Unleashed (Iron Outlaws MC: Florida #1)

Chapter 1

KNOX

If there’s one thing I hate more than liars, it’s rats. Knowing there’s a rat connected to our club is making all of us itch, and worse, it’s making my men distrust one another.

The air-conditioning unit hums. It might only be June, but the air already dances with the humidity the small town of Gator Flats, Florida, is known for. We don’t usually do church on a random weekday evening at midnight, but as the senior leaders of this club, we need a new plan.

Six weeks without an answer is too long, and I can see the misery of it etched into each of the faces seated at the perfectly round table in the center of the room we use for church.

When I was a kid, I read about how King Arthur had a round table for his knights to symbolize equality, ensuring that no man, regardless of rank, could claim a position of status higher than any other.

So, as soon as I became president of this club seventeen years ago, I threw out the oblong one and brought in this round beauty.

I run my fingers over the smoothed edge of the cool wooden surface that’s been built to last a lifetime.

It’ll be here long after I’m gone.

Sure, I’m the president of this club and protector of Gator Flats, but I’m no better than any of the other men who sit at this table with me.

Austin “North” Fletcher, my vice president, chews on nicotine gum until his jaw aches.

He’s trying to quit smoking, but it’s hard in a place like this.

He favors law and order and manages our strip club.

I’d always assumed my biological brother, Drew, would occupy the seat to my left that North sits in, and I think knowing that is a chip on his shoulder.

Doesn’t help that I once heard him call it the dead man’s chair.

My road captain, Everett “Ridge” Boon, drums his fingers to my right.

His thick dark hair falls in front of his face such that I can’t see his eyes.

There’s grease under his fingernails from a solid day’s work at the garage that the club owns and he runs.

He’s the kind of guy that can be relied on to do what needs to be done, but even he hasn’t found a trail for us… yet.

Agitation has Hayes “Havoc” Doyle fidgeting in his seat.

There are big, fat Viking braids in his thick dirty blond hair.

He’s a man of few words and relies on action.

As my sergeant at arms, he’s no doubt itching for a direction to go attack the trouble.

But the truth is, we have no idea who the rat is.

He’s sitting next to his childhood best friend, the biggest man at the table, Gideon “Vandal” Ward.

He’s six foot seven and is a solid wall of muscle.

Havoc and Vandal are chaos personified and have a terrible habit of not listening to orders.

But I’ll bet my life there are no better fighters than the two of them.

They were born on the same day, April first, which goes a long way in explaining who they are.

Aries. Ram-headed. Charge first and ask questions later.

When they were celebrating their twenty-first birthdays, they stumbled into a tattoo shop and got matching rams with sharply curling horns inked on their ribs.

“Why couldn’t they have just tortured the fuck until he told them who it was?” Vandal has raised this question so often during the last few weeks that even I’m getting sick of it. I’m sure the man is conjuring up the different torture methods he would have used to get an answer.

Five years ago, I asked Jackal, a brother who was a Florida Outlaw at the time and now hangs with the Colorado chapter, to strip a biker called Jonathan “Sidekick” Paltrow of his patches and remove his club ink with a blow torch.

” We no longer call him his road name. It was given to him as part of an honor he is no longer worthy of carrying.

And recently, Paltrow got information about Jackal’s new location and went there in an attempt to kill Jackal’s partners, Shade and Isla.

Thankfully, Jackal and the club found them in time, but what happened next was gnarly.

But it had also revealed an unlikely love story between Jackal and Shade, and the woman they’d invited to join the two of them.

Jackal had privately told me what happened when I saw him two weeks ago for Drew’s milestone birthday memorial. My brother would have been forty, if he’d not been shot like a dog on the side of the highway thirteen years ago by Sheriff Harrison Caldwell.

“Jackal told me the shit that went down in that mine shaft. The club was there. All of them. I’m sure it wasn’t a decision any of them made lightly.

But Paltrow was not prepared to say who told him where Jackal was.

Which, in my mind, says it was someone connected to the club who would be in danger from being found out. ”

“Paltrow wasn’t super close to anybody.” Rowan “Lock” Robinson makes a good point.

The club treasurer makes keeping two sets of books and washing cash for the club look easy.

The guy spent over a decade in the army, a unit supply specialist. He wasn’t the guy kicking in doors, but he was the one who made sure those door kickers had bullets in their mags, fuel in their vehicles, and kits stocked before anyone ran low.

He saw firsthand what happened when the government made cuts, when he couldn’t get his men the things they needed.

“Damn good biker, though, before the whole, ‘he’s a pedophile and was fucking around with his sister’ disaster.

” The comment comes from Lucas “Sunny” Reed, the club’s tail gunner and one of the younger members of the club.

He never thinks before he speaks, and it’s gonna get him killed one day.

But not before every woman in a hundred-mile radius has fallen for his green eyes and dimples.

“Like, he got along with people. Wasn’t an asshole in public. ”

“Wish I could have gotten my hands on him, first,” Gabriel “Reaper” Bennett, the club medic with cheekbones that seem to attract the ladies, says. “Would have sharpened my blades to do a medical castration.”

Reaper got his name in the military, and it carried over. As a combat medic, he’d triage people in a heartbeat, making a life and death decision about who had the chance of survival and who didn’t. And Reaper has no problem being the arbiter if it’s someone’s time to die.

Sunny occasionally makes fun of his road name, given it’s not uncommon in the biker world, but Reaper simply punches him in the face. Sunny’s like the frog in the jar that somehow never remembers he’s not supposed to eat the bee.

Thinking of one of the details I haven’t shared with the men, I decide to tell them. I know Jackal won’t mind. “Didn’t need a medical castration—Jackal cut off Paltrow’s dick and made the asshole choke on it.”

Everyone at the table winces for a second, like any man does when any infliction of pain to the cock is mentioned.

“Fair play, Jackal,” Havoc says.

Ridge nods in appreciation. “Feel better knowing his death wasn’t a peaceful one.”

“Might as well tell you the rest. He made Paltrow take his nine-inch fishing blade up the ass too.”

North mock vomits. “Jesus. Bet that was messy. I’d be throwing that blade away after.”

Vandal shrugs. “I don’t know. Depends on how much I loved the blade. But I’d be giving it a solid decontamination and bleach boil before I ever touched it again.”

I see some of the pressure lift from their faces as they all look to me. “All we know is that Paltrow found out from a woman where Jackal was. Is there anyone left that we haven’t spoken to?”

Reaper shakes his head. “We’ve run through them all. Wives. Club bunnies. Dancers and bartenders at the strip club. House mouses.”

“Wouldn’t it be ‘house mice’? Plural,” North asks.

Lock rolls his eyes. “What are you, the grammar police?”

North shrugs. “House mouses or house mice. I think it’s a good question.”

I slam the gavel. “Let’s stay on topic. If a woman knew, a man told her. Only members of this club know where Jackal is now.”

Havoc leans back in his chair and stretches to rest his hands on the top of his head. The guy’s biceps are bigger than Reaper’s head. “Makes me sick to think some fuck ran to a woman with the intel. It’s causing distrust among the men.”

And that’s the very worst part of it. The idea that everyone is looking at one another a little squirrely, wondering if they could have been the one who almost caused the death of Shade and the woman he and Jackal had brought into their relationship.

“For the record,” I say, placing my elbows on the smooth surface of the table and templing my fingers, “there isn’t a bone in my body that thinks it was any of you.

I’ve spoken to you all privately and trust each of you implicitly.

The tough part is, I’ve got no clue who I trust out there, when I should be trusting them all.

” I point beyond the walls of church to where the rest of the club is hanging out.

“I know some of you are struggling with it. I’ve overheard some of the questions you’ve asked each other.

Can tell there’s underlying frustration.

But you’ve got to trust your brother. We can figure this out together. ”

North shifts in his seat. “We got our heads together last week and made a bit of a log of comings and goings of members, just in case any guilty folks have dropped off or slowed down coming to the clubhouse, but no one has. Whoever it is, they know that the best thing to do, for now, is to behave normally and not alter routine.”

Ridge clears his throat. “If it wasn’t a wife or a dancer or something, maybe it was someone within earshot.

Maybe someone was talking about Jackal being in Colorado near someone either not related to the club or so loosely related that we haven’t considered who it could be.

Like, maybe one of the bars in town, or the burger joint or the liquor store. ”

Reaper nods. “I’m starting to feel like that tracks. The club is built on loyalty. Knox has been prez for as long as he has because people trust him, but because they also know he won’t take any shit from anyone.”

“Then we’ve been asking the wrong questions,” I say.

“Go back through everyone. Tell ‘em we don’t think what happened was deliberate. Ask them where they might have talked about Jackal or Paltrow. Then, let’s take a look at those places.

Let’s not do anything that puts us in the path of Sheriff Caldwell and the other goons in the police squad.

Ask the questions, but don’t threaten. If it was a civilian, I feel less inclined to kill them and more to remind them that what they see and hear when it comes to the club is confidential.

If it’s one of our own, they’ll be stripped of their patches and barred from the club. ”

“You don’t want to kill them?” Vandal asks.

“Yeah. I fucking do, because they should know better.” The steady ache of frustration builds behind my temples. “But I want to make it look like an accident or disappearance, to avoid any fingers pointing back at us.”

“I find out who almost killed Jackal’s family, I’ll want to rip their head off,” Havoc says.

“Don’t disagree,” I say. “But it also doesn’t help us that Caldwell is breathing down our neck, like always.”

Caldwell is a caricature of a built and officious police officer. He believes he’s the king of the town, the keeper of peace, the rational voice of law enforcement. And he’s a fan of police militarization.

Problem is, he lives in Gator Flats, Florida.

Population 897. My guess is that he wants to be the big dog on campus but doesn’t have the balls to go somewhere bigger than here because he doesn’t think he’ll make it.

He’s got some weird kind of Napoleon complex with severe imposter syndrome.

The two shouldn’t coexist, but Caldwell manages it.

And he killed Drew, known as Riggs to the club, but remembered mostly as Drew.

Caldwell was investigated but cleared of wrongdoing.

Drew had a weapon, which in an open carry state shouldn’t be a problem. The body cam footage doesn’t show him raising it, but it does show one on the ground next to him after he was shot dead with four bullets.

Testing showed my brother’s fingerprints on it.

Except, I know for sure my brother didn’t have a weapon on him that night. We’d been out on a run, and Drew killed some fucking gangbanger trying to make meth on the outskirts of town.

Drew’s weapon was thrown into the swamp on the ride home. I asked him if he wanted to take the spare I carried on my bike, as he didn’t have another weapon on him. He said he’d be fine and that he was heading straight home and would get another from his supply once there.

I knew it was planted on him after the fact. But I couldn’t testify to that at the trial, could I?

It’s hard to kill a cop and get away with it. Even harder to kill a cop when the world already suspects you’d be the one to do it.

Havoc has offered to do it for me.

So has Vandal.

Both of them would face the death penalty, if caught.

I refuse to let them fall on their swords for me.

One day, I’ll do it.

So, as we sit and think about avenues we haven’t tried and new approaches we could take to find whoever gave Paltrow Jackal’s address, I daydream about how I’d kill him.

Alligators.

It’d be the easiest cleanup. The truth is, fatalities by alligator are incredibly rare. Out of about four hundred unprovoked alligator attacks in Florida in the last seventy years, only twenty-five resulted in fatality. The truth of it, most of us around here just ignore them, and they ignore us.

So, I’ll abduct the sheriff, drug him, then rile up the alligators. They might kill him, or they might just break his arms and legs. But once they’re finished with him, I’ll put my boot on his head and hold him beneath the surface until that fucker drowns.

“What if we stopped paying dues out?” Sunny asks. “I’d be cool with that if it got us answers.”

“Speak for yourself,” Lock says. “Some of us just bought a new house.”

Havoc shakes his head. “Many of the men out there have full-time jobs, so they won’t hurt if we don’t pay out. Meanwhile, we’d all be fucked.”

I rub my hand over my face. “Don’t believe in withholding what a man already worked for.

” I take a breath. “If I had a magic eight ball, I’d tell you what the answer is, but the only obvious thing I know is that we haven’t leaned on the right person yet.

But when we do, they’ll feel the wrath of this club, I promise. ”