Bone’s Choice (Grave Prowlers MC: WI & MN #1)

Chapter One

Bone

I opened my eyes and stared at the empty spot beside me. Well, not exactly empty.

A piece of white paper sat on the pillow where a woman had been when I fell asleep. A bright red lipstick kiss was stamped on the bottom corner, and a few words were scribbled across the middle.

Last night was amazing. Give me a call. xo

I stared at the note for a few seconds before reaching over and grabbing it. “Yeah. That’s not happening.” I crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it onto the floor beside the bed.

She’d been hanging around the clubhouse for the better part of the night, drinking with everyone before she’d ended up in my bed. I remembered that part just fine.

The rest? Didn’t matter.

Last night had been last night. Today was today.

I dropped back against my pillow and folded my hands behind my head.

I didn’t do attachment. Never had.

Women knew the deal when they came around the Grave Prowlers.

At least, they should’ve known it. I wasn’t promising anyone breakfast in the morning or a date the next weekend.

I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, an ol’ lady, or whatever the fuck else came along with a woman leaving lipstick notes on my pillow.

I liked women.

I liked sex.

I just didn’t need all the shit that came after it.

My life was already full.

There wasn’t some empty spot beside me that I was waiting for the right woman to fill.

I turned my head and looked at the pillow again. Well, technically there was an empty spot, but I liked it that way.

I chuckled and looked back at the ceiling.

Seven-thirty.

I’d slept later than I normally did, but it was Sunday, and nothing was on fire.

At least, nothing had been on fire when I’d gone to bed.

I reached over to the nightstand and grabbed my phone.

No missed calls.

No emergency texts.

Nothing from Myth telling me I needed to get my ass downstairs.

That was always a good sign.

I dropped the phone onto my chest and started running through what I needed to get done.

First thing was the wood delivery. It was supposed to be here by eight, and I wanted to put eyes on it before it was unloaded. We’d paid a small fucking fortune for this shipment. Black walnut.

Not the shit you bought at a lumberyard to slap together a bookshelf. This was the good stuff. Kiln-dried slabs we’d been waiting months to get our hands on—the kind of wood that would eventually become custom caskets worth more than some people’s cars.

A lot more.

The Grave Prowlers had been building caskets almost as long as we’d been putting people in the ground. It was part of who we were.

The club had started in Virginia back in 1987 with a mortuary and a handful of men who figured out pretty fucking quickly that there was good money to be made in death.

Even better money if you weren’t too concerned about staying on the right side of the law.

Cremations for people who paid enough to guarantee nobody asked questions. Custom coffins. Transportation. Eventually guns.

A coffin was a hell of a good place to move something nobody was supposed to find.

By 1997, the club had grown enough that the original members started spreading out across the country, creating territories that covered two states at a time.

Wisconsin and Minnesota were ours.

Separate chapters. Same club, code, and loyalty.

I was President of Wisconsin.

Shadow had Minnesota.

Neither of us answered to the other, but if one chapter needed the other, we were there.

That was how the Grave Prowlers worked.

Club above everything. The shit wasn’t complicated. People were the ones who liked making things complicated.

I tossed the covers back and sat on the edge of the bed. The crumpled note was on the floor between my feet. Case in point. That note was pure complications.

I kicked it under the bed and stood.

Problem solved.

I grabbed my jeans off the chair in the corner and pulled them on, then headed into the bathroom. A shower would’ve been nice, but the wood was more important. I’d get one after I made sure the delivery wasn’t fucked up.

I turned on the sink and splashed cold water over my face. The man looking back at me in the mirror looked about how I felt. Hair fucked up. Beard needing a trim. Eyes slightly bloodshot.

I grabbed my toothbrush and started brushing. Had the woman from last night been worth losing a little sleep over? Probably not, but whatever.

I stopped brushing and looked down at the running water. What the hell had her name been?

Had it been Ashley? Amanda? Something with an A.

I shook my head and kept brushing. Didn’t matter.

I finished brushing my teeth, ran wet hands through my hair, and went back into the bedroom.

The room wasn’t anything fancy, but it was mine. I’d lived at the clubhouse for years and never saw a reason to change that.

Why the fuck would I? Everything I needed was here.

My brothers, my bike, the casket biz, food, beer, and my bed.

And there was almost always a woman around when I wanted one.

Moving into some house just so I could drive back here every damn day didn’t make any sense.

The clubhouse sat at the end of a long, dead-end road on the outskirts of Marshfield—far enough outside town that nobody gave much of a shit about what we were doing.

Exactly the way we liked it.

The club owned a good chunk of the land around us, which gave us room for the clubhouse and the buildings we used for the casket business.

The shop was where the guys did most of the woodworking and custom orders.

Beyond that was storage for finished caskets, lumber, equipment, and whatever else we didn’t want sitting out in the open.

Some of it was completely legitimate.

Some of it wasn’t. Again, nobody around here asked many questions.

There weren’t many people close enough to ask them anyway. The road from the clubhouse ran about two miles before you hit the nearest houses.

Two of them sat side by side and one belonged to my mother. The other had been empty for a while.

I didn’t know what was happening with that place. Didn’t particularly care, either. The old woman had died, and I’d stopped paying attention after that.

My concern was the house next door. Ma had lived there for years.

I’d tried more than once to get her to move closer to town and she’d told me to fuck off. Not in those exact words, because she was my mother and liked pretending she didn’t swear, but the message had been clear.

She liked her house. She liked the quiet. She liked having the club close enough that she could call whenever she needed something.

Mostly, she liked having me close enough that she could call whenever she needed something. The fact I was the President of an MC apparently didn’t excuse me from changing lightbulbs and moving shit around her garage.

I pulled a black T-shirt over my head.

Once the lumber was unloaded, I’d head over there. She hadn’t called and asked me to come by, which normally meant one of two things: she didn’t need anything, or she absolutely needed something but had decided she wasn’t going to ask.

I’d learned a long time ago it was easier to stop in than wait for the inevitable phone call where she casually mentioned she’d climbed onto a chair to reach something.

The woman was going to put me in an early grave. At least I knew where I could get a good casket and plot.

I snorted and grabbed my socks.

Peace View Cemetery was on the other side of Marshfield, and the Grave Prowlers had owned it for years.

Owning a cemetery made sense when you were in the death business.

Peace View was legitimate. Completely.

All we really had to do was deal with people buying plots, digging graves, and cutting the grass. Bull, Rowdy, and Dealer handled the cemetery for the most part.

The cemetery didn’t need to be dirty to be useful. Sometimes the best business was the kind nobody had to hide.

I pulled on my boots and stood, grabbing my phone from the bed.

My day was simple. Check the wood. Make sure whoever was unloading it didn’t fuck up slabs we’d waited months for, see if Myth needed anything, and then ride up the road and check on Ma.

After that, I’d come back, shower, eat, and see what the rest of the day brought.

Maybe take the bike out. Maybe drink a beer. Maybe do absolutely fucking nothing.

A deep horn suddenly blasted outside.

I glanced toward the window. “About damn time.”

The lumber truck was here.

I grabbed my cut from where I’d thrown it over the back of the chair the night before and shrugged it on. I ran my hands down the front, smoothing it into place, and caught my reflection in the mirror.

GRAVE PROWLERS MC.

WISCONSIN.

Another blast from the semi horn echoed outside.

“Hold your fucking horses.” I grabbed my keys, opened the door, and headed out. Time to get shit done.