Chapter One
KNOX
Present Day
Pulling through the gates at the compound, I lift my chin at Easy, who’s manning the gate. He hasn’t been with us for a year yet, but the kid has already won my stamp of approval for the way he handled himself when shit went down at G’s a few months back.
He didn’t need someone telling him to get the girls to safety; he just did. That’s the kind of man I want to work next to me. One that doesn’t need a babysitter to tell him what to do.
This is why I need to talk to Viper about patching him in as a secondary enforcer for the club. There’s no such thing as too much security when it comes to our families.
As we make our way past the clubhouse and down the gravel road, I glance over at the lot. I’m not really surprised that nobody’s there. Everyone is more than likely already at the meeting spot.
Good.
We won’t have to wait on anyone and can get right down to business. That business is the kind where we execute a fuckwad.
More specifically, a fuckwad who tormented the VP’s wife for years.
Yeah, it was time.
“I’m ready to get this shit over with. I know Sparrow had his reasons for dragging this fucker’s misery out as long as he has, but with us being on radar, it’s too dangerous to keep loose ends hanging around,” I admit, quickly glancing over at Thorn.
He snorts. “Hanging around? That’s actually kind of funny.”
I roll my eyes even though I guess it sort of is, considering Sparrow has kept Jeffery Talbot hanging from the rafters for months.
“You ain’t wrong, but with what he did to Sierra…” I can’t say it. I don’t even like to think about it.
We were all wrong about her, and most of us, myself included, still feel like shit for how we treated her when she came home from New York.
I’m not sure that I will ever truly forgive myself for the way I treated the poor girl. Jeffery did unimaginable things to the girl, and she never said a word in order to protect her sister and her son.
Sparrow was fighting his own demons when he went to New York to pick her up, but he saw something in our Prez’s sister-in-law and took her back, no questions asked — even if it meant going against his brothers.
That deserved respect.
“Everyone’s here,” Thorn says, leaning forward to look out the windshield.
“Did Sparrow make that sign?” I laugh, looking at the wooden sign that someone has burned the word GATORTOWN onto.
“Pretty sure Kierra ordered it from Etsy.” I swing my head in his direction and lifted a brow.
“What the fuck do you know about Etsy?” This ought to be good.
“What the fuck do you know about it?” he counters.
I pull past Viper’s truck, back in beside him, kill the motor, then turn back to Thorn and lift a brow. “I asked you first.”
“Fuck off. I have a little girl that is always wanting the kind of shit a mother is supposed to make for their girls.”
Well, shit. I feel like an asshole now. Everyone knows that Thorn will do anything for his little girl, and I should have known learning how to surf Etsy was one of those things.
“Fuck. Sorry, man. I was just busting your balls.”
“It ain’t you. I just hate it for Mila. She’s growing up and sees what she’s missing out on. She has my sister and her wife, but it’s not the same as her mom. Ya know?”
“Yeah.” I did know what he meant. My ex-wife and I shared custody of our boys, and any time she had them, she was bitching about not being able to do what she wanted. I offered to take them off her hands permanently, but she likes my money too much to let me have full custody.
Bitch.
“Come on.” Hopping out, I grab my rusty lawn chair from the back of my truck.
“Beer?” Viper offers as he stands and opens the cooler he’s sitting on.
I lift a brow. “It’s 9:00 in the morning.” I’m not judging, but my days of starting the morning off with booze are long gone in my rearview.
Viper shrugs his shoulders and takes a pull from the bottle in his hands. “Bout to execute a rapist. Felt right to celebrate.”
“Well, when you put it like that. Hand me one of those Millers.”
“Me too,” Thorn says, climbing into the back of my truck.
“You have the better idea,” I admit, picking up my chair and putting it back in the bed of my truck next to his.
“Want to make sure the executioner doesn’t get confused about who’s on the chopping block,” he says.
I laugh at the sound of chairs opening and closing. I turn, looking down the line of trucks, and see that nobody had considered Sparrow’s gator isn’t actually Sparrow’s gator.
Sparrow kept him fat and happy, that was for sure, but he wasn’t a pet. Sparrow claimed he wanted to make sure the big guy didn’t have a reason to want to leave this particular area, seeing as they all had kids who lived on the property.
“George! Where is the fucking thing?” Viper yelled.
George and Dex were fucking crazy. Somehow they’d managed to tag the damn thing so they could track its whereabouts. I didn’t even want to know how one went about getting a tracking tag on an alligator the size of a Cadillac.
“He’s about twenty-five feet from the bank right there,” George yelled back, pointing to the water’s edge.
I followed the line of his arm and saw ripples on the surface of the water. Guess he was ready to be fed. Sparrow had a system, and to my knowledge, the beast waited for him to swing its meal out into the water.
“Did this used to be a checkpoint?” Thorn asked.
“I think it was a weigh station for fishermen,” Viper says, staring out into the water with a scary look on his face.
“What?” I asked him.
“Ready for this fucker to die.” When Viper learned Sierra’s attacker had actually meant to target his wife, he saw things differently. Viper was a crazy fucker on a good day, but when it came to his wife and kids, he scared even me.
On cue, Sparrow’s truck comes barreling up the gravel lane.
I clapped my hands together, feeling the adrenaline starting to flow.
It was go-time.
“Need any help, brother,” I asked, starting to hop out of the truck.
“No.” I watched him for a minute, seeing something dark working behind his eyes. Something I didn’t like seeing.
“You don’t have to do this alone, brother.” I hopped out of my truck. It was my job to take care of the club’s problems. “Let me handle the trash.”
“No!” he growled.
I nodded my head, seeing that he clearly needed this. I got it; it was personal.
I leaned back against the side of my truck with my arms crossed as I watched Sparrow drop his tailgate. He yanked open the tarp and yanked the feet sticking out until the body they were connected to hit the hard, unforgiving ground.
“Ah!” the man cried out. He deserved so much worse for what he’d done to Sierra.
“What’s he doing?” Kidd was sitting on Viper’s tailgate, swinging his legs like he was the happiest shithead in Florida. Jesus, we were all so fucked up in the head. Here we were, about to end a man’s life, and none of us were fazed because we all knew he had it coming.
“He’s going to wrap the rope around his legs, then crank that old boat motor and reel him up that big metal arm. Once he has him dangling like a worm on a hook, he’ll swing that arm out over the water and drop him.” I pointed at the man hog-tied on the ground.
“What about the rope?” Kidd asked quietly, like he was in Sunday service.
I chuckled.
This wasn’t church. There was about to be a whole lot of ruckus.
Still, I answered his question. “That gator is going to sink his razor-sharp teeth into that motherfucker and then thrash until that rope snaps.”
Kidd’s eyes widen comically.
“Exactly,” Thorn whispered intentionally.
Viper snorted. Thorn wasn’t about to let the opportunity to mock a prospect go to waste.
“He wasn’t the only one who…” Kidd swallowed thickly, “What’d happened to Cherry?
” I turned and looked him square in the eye.
After deciding he didn’t have an ounce of remorse for the traitor, I looked to Viper.
It was his decision whether or not a prospect got to know club business.
I didn’t figure he’d care, considering he was letting Kidd see what he was seeing, but protocol.
Viper had heard the questions and gave Kidd his own once over.
Seeing what he needed, he turned to me and shrugged his shoulders. Guess Kidd could be fully trusted.
“I personally hauled her ass halfway across the country with a promise that if she ever came back, she’d find herself left all alone in shark-infested waters.
” I’d wanted to put a bullet in her brain, but Sparrow had given the choice to Sierra.
After everything she’d survived, the poor girl decided she just wanted to put the past behind us all.
She’d granted Cherry mercy, proving that the women of our club were the real saints.
“Nice,” Wrath said darkly. The cold, hard tone of his voice made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
Fuuuuck. I hadn’t heard that tone in a long time. Cautiously, I turned in his direction. Wrath had an uncanny ability to shut off his emotions when the situation called for it. It was when he turned them off that the real fallout happened.
Wrath had seen and done some shit during his time in the service. Officially, Wrath had retired early with an honorable discharge. Unofficially, Wrath had been banned from three major regions in the Middle East.
The thing nobody realized about the unsuspecting brother was that once he went there… the whole world had better hold the fuck on and brace.
“You hear me, motherfucker?” Sparrow roared, drawing my attention back to what he was doing.
I watched as he braced his foot against the old boat motor and gave the cord a few hard rips until it backfired with a bang. He gave it another go, and it finally sputtered to life in a huge cloud of smoke. Thank fuck, I was ready to get the show on the road. It was already hot as fuck.
Sparrow thumbed the throttle, and slowly our soon-to-be ex-prisoner was drug closer to the arm and then up into the air where he hung like bait on a line.
“Watch,” I said, kicking the side of Kidd’s leg.
We all watched as Sparrow pulled on the rope that was secured around Jeffrey’s hands and used his body weight to propel the arm out across the water.
“Now what?” There he went with that whispering again.
Before I could answer, Sparrow hit the lever, and with barely a splash, Jeffery’s bound body dropped into the murky waters. The water barely rippled. We all knew what was coming, but Kidd hadn’t been part of a Gatortown execution before.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” the youngster grumbled.
No sooner had the words left his mouth when the violent thrashing began.
The boat motor whined loudly as it tried to reel in the slack, but it was no match for the monster tugging on the other end.
The metal arm groaned when the gator started thrashing.
If I hadn’t already seen this exact scene play out before, I’d be concerned it’d snap entirely, but I knew better.
“What the fuck?” Kidd mumbled.
The gator was starting to roll when finally a loud snap rented the air as the rope broke free. No more than seconds later, wave after wave of red began to wash onto the small beach. Sparrow’s gator was doing what he was born to do — devour his prey.
We all cringed as the motor came squealing to a stop. I made a mental note to toss it in the back of my truck before we left here and take it to my shop to work on.
“Is that… it?”
Thorn chuckled at the awe on Kidd’s face.
“Yeah, Kidd. That’s it,” Viper answered. He tossed his cooler into his truck before heading for his VP.
It wasn’t just club business for our President and VP. This was our family, and for them, it was a little deeper.
“Come on. I want to grab that motor and get out of here. They could use the space as well,” I said, motioning for Thorn to climb down and help me.
“Yeah, that thing could use an overhaul,” he agreed, jumping out.
We didn’t waste time securing the motor and heading out.
It was Monday, after all, and we had a shop to open.