Chapter 24
Being Vice President of an outlaw motorcycle club would be a hell of a lot easier if life had the decency to only come at me one problem at a time.
Instead, by nine-thirty on a Thursday night, I’ve got one brother waiting on me to sign off on a route change, another asking whether we want to shift bodies for a pickup two counties over, Logan staring at me like he’s trying to decide if I’m actually listening or just standing here in a cut with dead eyes, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, I can hear Kya yelling from the kitchen because Dom apparently bought “the wrong orange juice” and is now on trial for crimes against pregnant women.
So yeah. Business as usual.
Only tonight, I’m one bad second away from losing my whole damn mind, and the worst part is I can’t even blame club business for it.
Church smells like coffee, leather, and old wood, the long table scarred up from years of fists, bottles, elbows, and decisions that shaped more lives than anybody outside these walls will ever understand.
The room has always felt solid to me. Predictable, in its own way.
Even when the subject matter is messy, the structure isn’t.
We sit down. We talk. We make the call. We protect our people. We move.
Simple. Or at least it usually is.
Tonight, I’m sitting two chairs down from Logan with a legal pad in front of me and hearing every third word like it’s arriving through water.
Landon is going over inventory numbers from one of the lockups, voice steady, organized, his handwriting neat enough to piss off half the room on principle.
Cain is leaning back in his chair with one boot braced against the floor, arms crossed, expression unreadable in the way his always gets when he’s paying attention to six things at once and pretending it’s only one.
Shadow, Blaze, Cobra, and Hammer are all in here too because they’ve earned enough trust to sit in on more than surface-level business now, and because if Logan is going to eventually fold them fully into this chapter, they need to understand how things actually run.
We don’t sit around pretending to be saints in here.
Everybody at this table knows exactly what this club is and what it isn’t.
We do runs. We move product. We move pieces. We move things that make money and keep the machine turning.
Guns. Weed. Cash. Parts. Whatever needs to get from one place to another without the kind of paperwork polite society likes to pretend makes everything cleaner.
But there are lines.
Always have been.
No kids. No women. No trafficking. No hard shit that turns lives inside out and leaves bodies in ditches for profit.
There’s enough ugly in the world already. We don’t build our table on that.
That’s why the club still stands.
That’s why the old timers still have enough peace in their eyes to sit on the porch with their wives and watch grandkids run through the yard like this life didn’t cost them blood to build.
Logan taps the legal pad in front of him with one knuckle. “We’re moving the route south on the Friday night run.”
That should register.
Instead, my brain is still snagged on the fact that Allison has a date tomorrow.
Friday.
The word has been stalking me for two days like it’s got teeth.
Logan says my name. Once. Then again, sharper. “Jimmy.”
I blink and look up.
Every eye at the table is on me.
Fantastic.
“What?”
Blaze, because he is a prick who enjoys living, mutters, “Inspiring leadership.”
“Shut up.”
That gets a low snort out of Cobra.
Logan leans back in his chair and just looks at me.
That’s the thing about him. He doesn’t always need volume to get his point across.
Half the time, the quieter he gets, the more dangerous the room feels.
“I said,” he replies evenly, “we’re moving the route south on Friday.
Sheriff’s office has been making more noise near the old line than I like. You got an issue with that?”
No. No, I do not have an issue with that because it is the correct call and one I would’ve made myself if I were currently functioning at the level expected of the club’s goddamn VP.
But since my brain has apparently been hijacked by a five-foot-something brunette with too much history wrapped around her and a cop trying to take her to dinner tomorrow night, I just say, “No.”
Logan keeps looking at me. Not suspicious. Not yet.
But clocking.
Cain’s gaze flicks my way too, slower, more assessing. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. Cain has always had a way of seeing the fractures in a room before anybody else even notices the glass has shifted.
Landon, still sitting to my right, says, “You want me to move the drop point over too, or leave the original lockup as backup?”
That one I can answer. “Leave the backup. If weather turns or there’s heat on the south route, I don’t want us scrambling last minute.”
“Done.” He writes it down, and for a few blissful seconds I almost feel like myself again.
Club business is muscle memory. Responsibility. Structure. A system I know how to move inside.
It should be enough to drag me out of my own head. It almost is.
Until Blaze says, “What about the weekend handoff?”
And Logan says, “Jimmy’s handling it.”
That should be easy too.
I’ve done a hundred versions of this. I know the players. The timing. The risks. What to watch for. How to read a situation before it becomes a problem.
But the second Logan says it, my stomach drops because Friday night means I’m going to be doing club business while Allison is out with Drew again.
And that thought lands so hard it takes me a second too long to answer.
Again.
Shadow notices this time.
He’s sitting back with his arms folded, looking like he’s not particularly invested in anything except staying awake, but his eyes cut to me for one sharp second and stay there just a beat too long. “Need me on backup?” he asks casually.
It’s a real question. A practical one. And still, I hear the undercurrent anyway.
You good?
I hate that.
Not because he’s wrong. Because he’s right.
“Yeah,” I say. “You and Blaze both. Keep it light. I don’t expect trouble, but I don’t like assumptions.”
There.
Competent. Normal. Useful.
Logan nods once and moves on.
For the next twenty minutes, I force myself to stay present.
Routes. Schedules. Storage. Cash movement. Who’s on what. Who’s handling pickup. What backup looks like if something shifts.
All of it familiar. All of it grounding. All of it the kind of thing that should make me feel solid in my own skin.
And still, underneath every damn word, there’s Allison.
The memory of her face the other night when she looked across the room and saw Tasha in my lap.
The way she went blank. The way she left.
The way I knew immediately, with zero room for delusion, that I’d just taken a bad situation and made it uglier for absolutely no reason except my own cowardice and jealousy.
I should’ve fixed it. I know that. Instead, I’ve done what I always do.
Nothing useful.
By the time church breaks, I feel like I’ve been skinned alive and then expected to hold a normal conversation about scheduling.
The brothers scatter fast. Some toward the garage. Some toward the kitchen. Some toward the porch.
Logan catches my arm before I make it to the door. “Walk with me.” Not optional.
I follow him out into the hallway, already tired.
He doesn’t say anything until we hit the side room off the stairs where the noise drops enough to make conversation private. Then he turns and leans one shoulder against the wall. “You gonna tell me what the hell’s wrong with you?”
I should’ve known he’d come straight at it.
I shrug once. “Nothing.”
Logan’s expression doesn’t change at all. “Try again.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
He just stares. President stare. Brother stare. The kind that says he has known me too long to accept bullshit this lazy. “Jimmy.”
I drag a hand over my face and look anywhere but at him. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re distracted.”
“Still doing my job.”
“Barely.”
That one hits. Not because he says it cruelly. Because he says it honestly.
And Logan doesn’t throw words around unless he means them.
I straighten a little. “I’m handling it.”
“For now.” The pause after that is worse than if he’d just kept talking.
Because what he’s really saying is I don’t need my VP distracted and emotionally compromised when we’ve got shit moving and people depending on us.
And he’s right.
Again.
Everybody’s right lately. That’s part of what’s pissing me off.
“It’s not club-related,” I say finally.
Logan’s eyes narrow a fraction. “No?”
“No.”
He studies me for one more beat, and I can practically see the moment he decides whether or not to push harder.
Apparently tonight I get lucky.
“Then get your head straight,” he says. “Whatever it is.”
I nod once. “Yeah.”
He pushes off the wall. “Because if I gotta ask again, I’m gonna get pissed off.”
“Noted.”
He claps my shoulder once and heads upstairs, probably back to wherever Mac has decided he’s allowed to exist tonight.
I stand there for another second, breathing through the lingering irritation and shame and restless energy chewing at my ribs.
Then I head for the kitchen.
That’s where life in this club always ends up anyway.
The kitchen is bright and loud and exactly the kind of lived-in chaos that has never once felt strange to me.
Brooke is perched on one of the stools with her feet tucked up and a bowl of cut fruit in front of her like she’s guarding it from the entire male population of the state of Alabama.
Carter is standing beside her with one hand braced on the counter and the expression of a man who’s trying very hard to say the right thing and failing in real time.
“I’m just saying,” he tells her, “if you wanted pineapple, you should’ve said pineapple.”
“I said tropical.”
“That could mean anything.”
“It means not melon.”
“How was I supposed to know melon isn’t tropical enough?”