Chapter One
King
I sat in a chair next to Tank’s bed, waiting for the bastard to wake up so I could chew his ass out. His fucking hero complex almost got him killed this time.
There was a knock on the door a second before it opened, and Cash, my VP and one of my best friends, walked in.
“I’m taking Rose back to the clubhouse. You need anything?”
“No, I’m good. If I do, I’ll call a prospect,” I told him, turning back to watch over the man lying unconscious in the bed. “He still out there?” I asked.
“Yeah. Says he wants to make sure Tank is okay, but I don’t know. From what Rose says, Sinclair doesn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit Sinclair.”
“What do you think his angle is?”
“Haven’t got a clue. I’d like to think because there are so few people in the world with his blood type, that he’s doing this because he may need the same one day.” Cash looked at the closed door. “Though I don’t think that’s it.”
“From what I understand, the location of people with this blood type is guarded pretty heavily. Tank may need his own fucking bodyguard when he wakes up.”
“Jonah’s on his way. Johnny and Archie are watching over Keys.”
I looked at Cash. “Why is Jonah coming up?”
He tilted his head to the side, and I knew what was coming.
“To stand watch outside this fucking door. I’m not leaving my president without a guard.”
I rubbed my hands over my face. “I don’t need a fucking babysitter.”
“Fuck you, Prez.” Cash grinned. “You just said Tank might need his own bodyguard, and with that asshole hanging around, I’m not taking any chances.”
“Who took Grace back?”
“Gunner and Haizley,” he answered.
I nodded. I’d sent Grace back to the clubhouse with the others. She wasn’t happy, but I needed her safe. I couldn’t be worried about her right now. My men would protect her.
“Thanks, brother. For everything,” I said, looking at Cash again.
“Fear no shadow,” Cash said.
“For your brothers stand with you,” I finished. It was something we came up with when we left Arkansas. Something honorable to live by.
Cash slipped out of the room, and I stood up and began to pace. Walking over to the window, I stared outside and wondered what the hell we were doing this shit for. I’d wanted this club to be something different.
Something we could be proud of.
Titan would roll over in his grave if he knew what Steele had turned the club into. I’d tried to stick it out after his death. Tried to guide the son of a bitch back to what his father had created.
Easy money and easy pussy—that was what Steele wanted.
I could admit it was what I’d wanted too. In the beginning. But after Chasm died, I no longer had the stomach for that shit. Getting out became my priority, and at the time, there was only one way out.
Until I made another.
Little Rock, Arkansas, 2019,
Sitting in my president’s office, I faced the man I once admired most aside from my brother Declan, as I struggled to say the words that had been burning in my chest.
“I want my own club.”
It was hard to say the words out loud. I’d expected a weight to lift when I said them. Only, the weight seemed to bear down harder, threatening to flatten me.
Steele leaned back in his chair, his gaze piercing.
His silence was deafening. Steele wasn’t the type of man to be quiet. He had a volatile nature and often kicked off like a powder keg in the back of a buckboard wagon on the Oregon Trail.
None of us ever knew when or why he would explode. There was no rhyme or reason to the man’s temper.
I struggled hard not to fidget in my seat like a kid sent to the principal’s office. Waiting for his punishment to be doled out.
“Why?” he asked, and I knew it was a trap.
The last six months in the club had been tough. Brothers were getting locked up left and right. Wars were brewing with rival clubs. The money we were making no longer felt like a reward. It felt like compensation for death.
“I can’t do this shit anymore. I won’t do this shit anymore.”
“What makes you think having your own chapter will get you any less shit?”
“Plan on being legit,” I answered honestly.
Leaning back, I crossed my arms over my chest in a half-hearted attempt to protect myself as I waited for the explosion.
Steele rose from his chair without a word and walked to the window. His silence freaked me out. It wasn’t natural. Not for him.
I’d met Steele when I was a stupid eighteen-year-old kid.
My older brother Declan, who raised me after a drunk driver killed our parents when I was ten years old, was a cop.
He was twelve when I was born, so he often acted more like my father than my brother.
So, of course, I rebelled against him any chance I had.
Steele was everything my brother wasn’t. He was rough and gritty. He lived life by his own rules and no one else’s. Where Declan was all about law and order, Steele was death and destruction.
Heavy on the death.
Now at thirty-three, I no longer wanted to do stupid shit that risked my life. I had managed to stay out of jail thanks to my older brother. But many of my brothers weren’t so lucky.
I’d buried too many men over the last fifteen years. Men who were closer to me than even my own blood brother.
“How do you plan to make money?”
“Christ, you sound like Dec. We’ve got money put away and plan on pooling it together so...” My words fell off when Steele turned around and glared at me.
“We?” he asked, his voice a low hiss.
Shit, this was where he’d lose it.
“Yea, uh, there are a few of us who’ve talked about doing something different. We love the club, man. We just need a break.”
“How many?” he growled.
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees. My eyes focused on my boots because I couldn’t look him in the eye.
“There’s ten of us,” I admitted.
“Where the fuck are the rest of them? Are they too chickenshit to stand up with you? You want brothers you can’t fucking count on?” he snarled at me.
I expected him to be pissed. I didn’t expect him to shit on men who had been nothing but loyal to him.
Pinning him with a glare of my own, I said, “There isn’t a brother in this club that is chickenshit and you fucking know it.
” Standing from my chair and looking him in the eye, I stated, “I wasn’t asking for your fucking permission.
I was telling you, I’m out. You can give me my own fucking chapter or I take my men and walk. ”
Keeping his desk between us, he slammed his hands on the top and leaned toward me.
“Leaving isn’t a fucking option and you damn well know it.”
“I’m the goddamn road captain. I know where the fucking bodies are buried. Literally.”
“You cocksucking son of a bitch!” he snarled.
“It doesn’t have to be like this. You have almost sixty fucking men here. You don’t need me.”
“Why the fuck are you doing this?” he asked.
I looked him in the eye. With a low growl in my voice, one I had learned from him, I said, “You fucking know why.”
Back then, I’d only had suspicions.
Now I had facts.
I had proof.
I might not have the proof that Steele set Chasm up to die in that warehouse explosion, but I had the proof he’d killed his parents. He and Stone both. Power-hungry assholes who took out the two people who loved them the most. The two people who gave them the life they’d wanted so badly.
I knew why they did it. Titan had seen what his sons had become. He knew that if Steele were president, the club would become something it was never meant to be.
Titan had morals. He had honor. I was proud to serve under him. Titan knew how to stay under the law’s radar, how to protect his men, and how to make us rich while he did it. In a few short years, Steele had taken a lucrative club, one people feared, and turned it into a noose around our necks.
No longer was the Mother Chapter living out a dream. A dream where the Silver Shadows made their own rules and said to hell with the law. Now they were hiding from the law, constantly at war with other clubs. Other organizations in the underworld.
And they’d pulled my club into their shit.
Steele had aligned himself with Skinner. He’d drawn a line in the sand. One he thought I didn’t know about. His day was coming, though. Reaper was right. I needed to make a stand.
When I left, I’d had the votes. I could have stayed in Arkansas and taken over. It was how it was meant to be. Titan had wanted to step down, but his plan was for me to be president.
Chasm would have been my VP.
Steele made sure that would never happen.
He hadn’t counted on my standing up to him. He hadn’t counted on my breaking away. Steele thought he had me in his back pocket, and I’d spent too many years letting him think he’d won.
This war had been a long time coming; a war between brothers. He might think he had the upper hand, but he didn’t know who I had in my back pocket. He had too many men in his club who were loyal to me.
Steele had only one in mine.
One who was dumb as shit and frequently fed information with the specific purpose of getting it back to Steele. Steele thought he was a master at checkers, but the fucker never bothered to learn chess.
War was about strategy. And Steele had none. He’d always believed his brawn would get him where he needed to go. I was his brain. I was the one who held him back from making the wrong decisions.
What Steele didn’t know was that I was still making his decisions for him. Until now. Now he was on his own, and God help him.
I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Steele knew about the attack on our clubhouse. Skinner would have clued him in, if for no other reason than to brag, thinking he’d won.
We lost people in the attack, as did the Gods of Mayhem. Hash, Erebus, and Kharon. They’d joined an MC knowing what could happen. It didn’t make the loss any easier to bear. Jade and Crystal were innocent. They were collateral damage, and that was on me.
Their deaths were on my head.
Their deaths were on Steele.
And he would pay with his life.
Because Grace’s father or not, I was fucking done. I no longer owed my loyalty and my honor to a man who killed his family. A man who didn’t give two shits about his men. He only cared about himself.
Grace deserved better than a father who ignored her. She deserved better than a man who wouldn’t claim her under some misguided sense of loyalty.
But fuck that. Grace was mine now. I was done playing by the rules. It was time I remembered why I joined the fucking club in the beginning.
Tank stirred on the bed, and I moved back to his side. His eyes fluttered behind his closed lids, and I took his hand in mine.
“Come on, brother, time to wake the fuck up so I can kick your ass.”
I watched as his eyelids lifted, and he looked at me. He groaned and reached for his throat. I grabbed the cup of water the nurse had left and held the straw to his lips. After he drank his fill, he looked around the room and croaked, “Fuck, if I’m still alive then he knows.”
“What? Who knows?”
Tank looked at me. “You called Sinclair, didn’t you?”
I narrowed my eyes at Tank. “You know Sinclair shares your blood type?” I asked him. When he nodded, I asked, “How the fuck do you know that?”
“Because he’s my father.”