Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Monk
The church room stank of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and the kind of tension that made men stupid.
The air was thick with it, pressing down on my shoulders like a hand that meant to keep me there.
Even the dim overhead lights seemed to flicker with the charge in the room, throwing long shadows across the faces of my brothers as they filed in and took their seats around the scarred wooden table that had seen more confessions, confrontations, and ugly decisions than any priest’s booth ever had.
I sat at the long table with my chair tipped back on two legs and my arms crossed over my chest, watching the storm build with the same hard attention I’d give a rattlesnake coiled in my path.
Montana Stone stood at the head of the table like some wrathful god dropped into biker leather, his big frame rigid with barely leashed fury.
He was all righteous anger and cold calculation, the kind of combination that got a man feared as much as respected in the MC world.
His jaw was set, his dark eyes harder than I’d ever seen them, and the muscle ticking in his cheek told me he was holding himself back by nothing but brute force.
Across from him, Kansas sat at the other end of the table with his jaw locked and his knuckles white against the scarred wood, like he was trying to keep himself nailed to reality.
The resemblance between the brothers was obvious, but where Montana burned hot and controlled, Kansas looked like a man being gutted from the inside.
This was going to get ugly, messier than a bar fight with broken bottles and no rules, because one of our own was on the chopping block. One of our brothers. One of our fucking officers.
Pence. Mitchell fucking Travers. VP of the Diamondbacks, second-in-command of the whole outfit, and Kansas’ best friend.
The man who had stood beside him through firefights, turf wars, and every impossible call that came with wearing the president’s patch and carrying the weight of club blood on his shoulders.
They were closer than most real brothers, tied together by loyalty, history, and enough shared scars to drown in.
And he was a goddamn child rapist.
The words tasted like battery acid in my mouth, burning all the way down and settling in my gut like poison.
I’d known Pence for years—since I was a prospect clawing my way toward a patch.
I’d ridden with him on more runs than I could count, bled beside him in alley fights and territorial scraps, trusted him to cover my back when bullets started flying and the whole world turned to shit.
We got drunk together. Celebrated together.
Buried brothers together. And the whole goddamn time, he’d been fucking a kid.
A minor. Some girl named Alice Cavanaugh, barely out of braces, who’d given birth to his now three-year-old son while she was still years away from drinking legally, voting, or doing any of the things grown women got to do.
My stomach churned with a nausea that had nothing to do with the beer I had been nursing before church was called.
I thought about Abigail—my baby sister, with her bright smile and her terrible taste in men.
She was only nine years younger than me, but to me she was still young, still carrying that last fragile piece of innocence the world hadn’t ground out of her yet.
Still vulnerable in all the ways that made my protective instincts go white-hot whenever some asshole looked at her too long.
The thought of a piece of filth like Pence putting his hands on her—violating her, ruining her, twisting something that should’ve been untouched into something rotten—made rage rear up so hard I had to force myself to breathe through it.
I needed my head clear for whatever was coming next.
I knew the second I saw Montana and Reaper roar into the compound an hour earlier—engines rumbling like thunder over cracked asphalt, flanked by two enforcers who looked ready to kill the first man who breathed wrong—that shit hadn’t gone the way Kansas hoped.
The set of Montana’s shoulders, the way Reaper’s hand never left his sidearm, the grim silence trailing them like a funeral procession—it all screamed disaster.
It had been court day for Pence, the sentencing hearing that was supposed to decide whether he spent the next decade or two rotting behind bars.
Kansas had wanted the club there in support, wanted us to make the usual show of solidarity the way we did whenever one of our own got dragged through the system. But this time, every one of us refused.
Every patched brother looked Kansas in the eye and said no.
Not for this. Not for this.
In the end, only Kansas, Montana, and Reaper went—a sorry little showing that said everything about how the club felt about what Pence had done.
All because that motherfucker couldn’t keep his dick in his pants or manage even the bare minimum of human decency.
And judging by the looks on Montana’s and Reaper’s faces when they’d stormed back into the compound, engines still hot and tempers hotter, it had gone bad in a way none of us could walk back.
Whatever happened in that courtroom had been bad, the kind of bad that changed everything.
The second Kansas walked into the clubhouse, boots heavy on the wooden floor and shoulders sagging under an invisible weight, he called for church to discuss what to do next, his voice hoarse and defeated in a way I’d never heard before.
“This is my fucking clubhouse, Montana,” Kansas snarled, his voice cutting through the thick silence. “You don’t have a fucking say here.”
Montana’s expression didn’t change. Cold. Implacable.
“But I do.”
Reaper let his chair drop forward, the front legs striking the floor with a crack that snapped every eye his way.
He leaned against the table, deliberate as hell, and met Kansas’ stare head-on.
“You fucking Stones are going to be the death of me,” he said, shaking his head.
His voice was low and rough, edged with the kind of weariness that only came from years of this shit. “I fucking know it.”
Kansas’ jaw tightened, but he didn’t look away.
Reaper let the silence stretch for a beat. Two. Then he leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table, and spoke the words that would seal Pence’s fate. “But just to be clear here, Kansas. As head of the Biker Federation, my word is final.”
Montana’s eyes flicked to him, a flash of something that might have been approval.
Reaper ignored him. Kept his focus on Kansas.
“You go against me,” he continued, his voice dropping into something darker, something that carried the weight of consequences I could already see barreling toward us, “you go against the Federation.”
Kansas’ face went pale.
“Unless you are intending for the Diamondbacks to go rogue,” Reaper said, each word deliberate, “which would put you in the same league with the Death Dogs and Satan’s Angels. Is that what you are telling me?”
The room went dead silent.
“Because you standing up for him in court looked bad,” Reaper added, his tone flat. “Real bad.”
A chorus of snarls and growls erupted from the brothers lining the walls. Trigger. Whisper. Even Widow, who rarely spoke unless he had something worth saying, was glaring at Kansas with barely restrained fury.
They weren’t with Prez on this one.
Good. Because if Kansas tried to protect Pence, the club would fracture. And a fractured club was a dead club.
Montana sighed, the sound heavy with the kind of exhaustion that came from making impossible decisions over and over again. “Kansas,” he said, his voice softer now, almost gentle. “Listen to me. No matter how you play this, it’s bad.”
Kansas’ hands clenched into fists.
“You have a child rapist as your VP,” Montana continued, his words cutting like a blade.
“As soon as the biker world learns what Pence did, they will come for your club. Say what you want about bikers, but the majority of them don’t play when it comes to kids, and you fucking know that. Think reasonably here. He can’t stay.”
“I KNOW!” Kansas’ roar echoed off the walls, raw and desperate and so full of anguish it made something twist in my chest.
He was caught. Trapped between his loyalty to his best friend and the brutal reality of what Pence had done. Between the man he once respected and the monster that man had become.
I knew that feeling. I had been caught between impossible choices my whole goddamn life.
“But what will you have me do?” Kansas choked out, his voice cracking. “Put a fucking bullet in my best friend’s head?”
“That’s one way,” Malice said, his voice a low rasp. He was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, a cold smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
Sandman huffed in agreement.
“Told you this would come to bite the club in the ass,” Shadow grumbled from his seat. “Told you all that the sins of this club would eventually come to light. Bad timing it was Pence first.”
“Bad timing?” Montana rounded on Shadow, his eyes blazing. “It’s fucking sick. You should have killed him the second you learned the truth!”
Shadow’s expression didn’t change. “We all learned the same time as Kansas. We knew he had a kid, and that the mother was a club whore. We didn’t know her fucking age.”
I watched the exchange, my mind racing.
Shadow had known that Pence was cheating and had a secret kid, but we didn’t do shit because that wasn’t a killing offense.
Now the truth was out, and the consequences were crashing down on all of us.