Prologue
HAMMER
Eighteen Years Ago . . .
Nausea churns in my stomach. I swallow the bile back down as I take in the room soaked in blood.
My big brother and sister-in-law’s blood coated the floor.
Hayden, my nephew, their son is the only one left here.
The men who did this took my niece. I know who is responsible for this carnage.
The police tried to keep me from seeing, but there was no stopping me from entering the house.
Closing my eyes, I lower my head and try to control the anger flaring up withinside me.
My nephew doesn’t need to see that right now.
Not after the nightmare he’s survived. I need to think of him at the moment and of trying to find my niece.
They’re all I have left now: that and a grandmother who lives in Virginia that I barely speak to.
Fuck.
How am I gonna raise Hayden?
My brother had taken the President patch naming me his VP after our father decided to step down due to him having lung cancer and its progression. Now shit’s changing, and I don’t know what the fuck to do.
I open my eyes and take one last look around and then turn to leave.
I step outside, and my gaze immediately lands on Hayden.
His clothes are coated in his mother’s blood.
I need to get him out of here and clean him up.
At seven, he shouldn’t have had to worry about something this horrific. It kills me he has had too.
Making my way to him, I guide him over to my truck. When I got the call asking me to come to my brother’s after one of the cops we have in our pocket told me of their deaths, I didn’t worry about my bike, figuring I’d have both kids with me. Instead, I learned the news of Ally being taken.
“I’m sorry, son, we’ll make things right,” I mutter, lifting Hayden into the passenger seat.
“Can’t make it right when they’re no longer here,” Hayden mumbles. For seven, he’s a smart kid and will tell it like it is.
“You’re right, Hayden. But I swear to you now, I won’t stop until we find your sister and I kill those motherfuckers for taken your parents from you,” I declare, not holding anything back from my nephew. He’s been to the club plenty of times to know we’re not choir boys.
Nodding his head, Hayden closes his eyes. “If you don’t find them before I grow up and join the club, it’ll be my hands they die from.”
His words sear into my brain, and I know without a doubt right then and there my nephew’s heart has solidified. He’s lost everything in one night, leaving him with a feeling of burning rage. And in this very moment, he earns his name, Hades.
At the clubhouse, I call an emergency church meeting. Telling my brothers, the men I’ve been with since I patched in at nineteen, isn’t easy.
It sucked the order of business that we had no choice but to handle, and each of them all voted me into the President’s seat. They said it’s what my brother would have wanted. Fuck, at twenty-five, I didn’t expect to get voted into this seat, but I’m gonna make damn sure I don’t fail my brothers.
Once we finished church, I did the only thing I could do. I make arrangements to send Hayden to my grandmother’s up in Virginia after the funeral and ask Stoney, the Prez of the national charter, watch over him.
Until I get rid of the ‘The Delivers’, I can’t have him here.
It’s for his own safety that I do this. If not for his sanity.
I keep him here with me; he’ll only harden even more.
I say this as I lock down my own emotions.
I won’t do as my brother did. He had a weakness, and that was his ol’ lady, the woman he fell in love with and did what he had to do to get her out of the life she’d endured.
By being with her, he knew what could possibly happen and that left my nephew and me both now without our family.
I won’t allow the same thing to happen to me. Closing my heart to anything and anyone is for the best. Emotions get in the way, and I’d prefer to be a coldhearted bastard than a man who has a weakness.
From here on out, I’ll live and breathe for this club. Taking care of my brothers is my number one priority now, and I’ll be damned if I lose anyone else.