Chapter 1 #2
Ridge was the sort of man you only went to when you wanted someone taken apart piece by piece.
He liked the violence and appreciated the human body in ways that weren’t exactly wholesome.
Confessor was a grumbly old bastard who had been with the club for longer than I could remember being alive.
He was an old-timer that kept his hands in the club at all times and he kept every man in their place, stopping them from losing their goddamn minds at times.
The past couple of years, he’d been going wherever Ridge went, and I knew that was on purpose so he could keep Ridge in check.
In my peripheral, I felt the stare of men from other tables. Not hostile, but not welcoming either. Just measuring, and learning their place in the food chain.
I wasn’t in the slightest bit worried. I’d been measured before and I usually came out fine, but I also didn’t want to fuck up the bar, so I kept my eyes on my own table. I was more than willing to get into it if needed, though.
“Appreciate you coming back,” JD said, leaning forward, forearms braced on the table. He looked tired. Not weak. Just worn down in a way presidents got when they were trying to hold too many pieces together at once.
“Didn’t give me much choice,” I said, taking another sip of whiskey. “You said it was urgent.”
“It is.” JD scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “We’ve had incidents.”
“Incidents,” I repeated. “That the official term?”
“Call it what you want. I like to call it sabotage. Someone messing with our shipments. Someone messing with our business.” His voice dropped. “Someone messing with our people.”
I felt the shift in the air. The men at the table went still, waiting.
“Our people?” I asked.
JD nodded. “Your brothers. This town—its people.”
I didn’t like that one bit.
“Internal?” I asked, appreciating that we were getting straight to business.
JD hesitated, and that told me everything I needed.
“Don’t know yet,” he said, his mouth tight. “But it’s getting worse. I need someone steady who can root out what the fuck is going on.”
Someone who wouldn’t take sides and someone who wouldn’t be afraid to call bullshit on whoever needed it.
“Who’d they get to?”
Bear leaned forward. “I was taking a shipment to the supplier and got jumped.”
I looked at him, noticing the fading bruises and scabbed-over cuts on the side of his face and knuckles.
“Got in some hits of your own?” I asked, quickly assessing my other brothers for anything and noting they were all clean of injuries.
“Of course, what do you take me for?” Bear laughed. “Took one of their fuckin’ eyes out though, brother. Gauged it out myself.”
Ridge made a noise in the back of his throat, and I raised an eyebrow but he stayed silent. Jealousy for the violence, Jesus Christ.
“This sick fucker was carrying it around in a baggie for a week. Checking the hospitals for anyone it might match,” Confessor said with a shake of his head.
Bear held up his hands. “What? I thought that whoever had jumped me would have to go to the hospital at some point. It was a valid point.”
“So what happened?” I asked, drinking the last of my whiskey. Goddamn, but that was good. Bartender hadn’t given me the cheap tourist shit. He’d given me the top-shelf homegrown stuff and I’d be sure to keep his bar intact for it.
Moose leaned in, resting his elbows on the table. “Cops found him. He was buried in a shallow grave half a mile away from our clubhouse.”
I whistled low, recognizing the warning for what it was.
“Had the cops crawling around the clubhouse for a week afterwards trying to pin us for something, but luckily Bear and the prospects had already dropped the shipment off,” Prez said, and raised his glass to Bear, who clinked his bottle against JD’s.
“Couldn’t pin anything on us and eventually had to move on. But it interrupted business.”
I looked at Bear. “You finished the drop after being jumped?”
Bear laughed. “Fuck yeah, I did. With that dipshit’s eyeball in my pocket and soaking through my jeans the whole time. Fucking disgusting.”
We all laughed, barring Ridge, who scowled and still looked pissed off that he’d missed out on some eye gauging.
“This stays between the seven of us for now. I trust you men with my life—not that I don’t trust the others, but someone is feeding information out and we need to know who.” JD picked up his beer and drank half of it down in one long swallow.
Bear, Ridge, Swampy, Moose, Confessor, and I all nodded in agreement.
“All right. I’ll look around. See what shakes loose. One last question,” I said, glancing over and catching a waitress's eye and gesturing for a round of drinks for the table. “Did the cops ID the corpse?”
JD shook his head. “Man was stripped bare. No clothes, no ID, no tattoos, nothing. Teeth had been removed, fingerprints burned off. All while he was still alive, going off the autopsy report.”
“Fuck,” I replied, “that’s some serious shit. Someone is covering their tracks.”
“They’re definitely trying to,” Swampy said, his expression hard.
JD exhaled like he’d been holding that breath for days. “Well, I have feelers out with our contacts for anything unusual. But right now, business is stopped while we figure it out. Customers aren’t happy, of course, so it’s affecting the club, but I’m not risking any of you.”
“Aww, you really care,” Moose mocked.
JD rolled his eyes at him. “We’ll start work tomorrow. Tonight, just settle back in.”
I wouldn’t fully settle in, though. I couldn’t. Not with the weight of the chapter’s tension pressing in from all sides.
And definitely not with Rowan Hale somewhere behind me, her presence like a tug on a thread I didn’t want pulled.
I wasn’t shy to admit that women and whiskey were my weaknesses, and maybe it was the thrill of the chase that had me intrigued: JD stating how much she hated bikers only colored me more intrigued.
I finally let myself glance back toward the pool table.
She wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was chalking her cue, talking to a friend, like I hadn’t even registered on her radar. Yet I could feel the tension coming off of her even from here.
JD leaned back in his seat, a tired smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “First, let’s get some whiskey in you and then you get some sleep. You look like hell.”
I huffed out a laugh. “Nah, nothing a belly full of food won’t cure.”
“Well get your fill,” he said, “because tomorrow you need to ride out to the Hale Ranch and see what you can find.”
My stomach tightened. “Hale,” I repeated. “As in—”
“Rowan Hale,” JD confirmed with a shit-eating grin. “Yeah. That one. Which is exactly why I said to leave well alone. The woman already hates our guts after the shit that’s been going down, and I don’t need you fucking it up even worse.” He nodded toward the woman I’d been staring at moments ago.
I didn’t react. Not outwardly. But something low and unwelcome stirred in my chest.
We fell silent as a waitress came over with a tray of beer and whiskey, placing the drinks down in the center of the table before leaving.
“Thanks, darlin’,” Moose said after her.
I dove straight back into business.
“What’s this got to do with the woman?” I asked, leaning forward.
“Because whatever’s happening to us,” JD said quietly, “is happening to her too. She just don’t realize that she’s in the middle of it yet.”
“Whatever it is,” Moose grumbled. “Everyone speculating when they don’t know shit about shit.”
JD cut his gaze to Moose, his eyes narrowing. “We know enough to say that none of this is a coincidence, brother.”
Swampy slapped Moose on the back, his gaze on me. “Moose here don’t think any of the Kings would turn on their own, but he ain’t been around long enough to know betrayal like we do.”
I sat back, the whiskey suddenly tasting sharper. Most of us who had been around long enough knew what Swampy was talking about. We’d heard stories, at least, but none of us had lived through it. It pained me to think that we might be now.
“So this shits stickin’ to civilians too,” I grumbled, and JD pursed his lips and nodded.
So the cowgirl wasn’t just trouble wrapped up in a tight body and a pretty smile. She was already in the middle of the storm I’d been brought back to help fix.
“That explains why she’s been eyeballing me since I walked in, at least,” I replied smoothly.
The men at the table chuckled. “You could say that,” Swampy said from across the table. Like JD, I knew Swampy from when we were kids.
“It’s why we’re here tonight,” JD continued, “it’s why she’s here.
She put in a call to the cops. Seems her ranch is being targeted by someone, and she got it into her head that it was us.
I went to speak to her and told her it had nothing to do with us and I said I was bringing in someone to look into it.
She asked to see who it was. No idea why, but I felt like I couldn’t say no to her.
The woman has a way of wrapping men around her finger. ”
“Reckon it’s to do with her fine ass,” Swampy said with a wink. “I can never say no to a fine ass.”
JD laughed. “Probably. Anyway, Carter is looking into the situation for us.”
“Carter still on the payroll for us?” I asked, “I thought his wife said she wanted him out?”
Carter was a deputy with the Rocky Pines police department and had been on our payroll for a few years. He wasn’t a good guy, but he was good to have on the books.
Bear laughed. “Yeah, she did, then he found her sleeping with his brother when he got off shift early one day.”
“Wow, I bet that went down well,” I chuckled, taking a sip of whisky.
“Well, she left him for the brother and they moved out of town. Carter ain’t got much going for him right now, which serves us well enough,” JD said.
He scratched a hand through his short beard and shook his head.
“Poor bastard. Anyway, Rowan didn’t want to be a part of this meeting, but she wanted to see that we were dealing with whatever was going on. Hence the bar meet.”
I glanced across at her again, seeing the tension in her body as she watched us.
“Like I said,” JD continued, sitting back on the bench, “Rowan ain’t a fan of the Kings. And all the shit that’s been going down recently ain’t helped much either.”
I turned to look at her again, watching as she bent low over the pool table to take a shot. A shot that she hit with enough accuracy to color me impressed.
“She works at the ranch? Is it her parents’, or…”
“No, brother,” Bear replied, throwing his whiskey to the back of his throat. “She’s the boss lady of it. Her parents died and she took it over. From what I can tell, she works hard and doesn’t play around. Like at all. So, if you’re thinking—”
“I’m not thinking anything,” I cut him off, “just surprised I don’t already know her. Hale Ranch is big. How the hell does she run that on her own?”
“She has help, but she’s wound the place down smaller over the past year.
Land the ranch is on is endless, though, bought real cheap twenty-something years ago when there was that big recession.
She won’t talk to any of us about it, but I know you have a way of getting people to talk. ” JD cocked an eyebrow at me.
I felt the smirk rise on my face. “Brother, there’s only two ways I can get people to talk, and I don’t think either of those tactics will work on a woman like her.” I chanced another look over to her. “But I do love a challenge.”
The table erupted into laughter, drawing her attention once again. She looked at me, her expression somewhere between a snarl and disdain. If she could have bared her teeth at me, she would have.
“Well, if you think the view over by the pool table is pretty, just wait until you see her ranch,” Bear said, sipping on his whisky. “It’s a place a man could retire that’s for sure.”
“Like you’re anywhere near retiring,” Confessor snapped.
Bear held his hands up in defence. “I could retire if I had the money.”
Confessor grumbled and picked up his beer. “Like shit you could. You ain’t put in the years yet.”
“And you couldn’t give up the life,” Moose said with a smile, “could any of us? I mean, without this, what is there?”
Confessor shook his head and took a healthy swallow of beer. “What is there? There’s watching the sunset, there’s taking a good woman to bed, there’s not feeling like your bones are going to snap from riding your bike too long.”
“I take plenty of women to bed and I don’t have time to watch fuckin’ sunsets, brother,” Moose laughed and Swampy joined in. “Watching fuckin’ sunsets.”
I grinned but shrugged. “I don’t know. That sounds pretty sweet to me, Confessor.”
“Jesus, don’t you start,” JD said with a roll of his eyes.
I turned to watch Rowan again. She was still playing pool and she potted another ball and laughed with her friend before picking up her bottle of beer and taking a long swig of it.
Her gaze went my way as she did and our eyes connected for several long seconds, her stare never looking away.
Almost like she was daring me to look away first.
That wasn’t going to happen.
The tension in the air was palpable, and eventually she rolled her eyes and looked away, and I felt a flare of pride.
Round one to me…on a game I hadn’t known I was going to play.
Something inside my chest loosened. A lock twitching. A hatch creaking open.
Fuck, this woman wasn’t going to be just trouble, she was going to be the death of me. I could already feel it in my bones.