Stockton (A Windy City Wolves MC #12)

Chapter 1

The warehouse in Brighton Park smelled like ammonia and bad decisions.

Stockton killed the engine on his Harley and swung off, boots hitting cracked asphalt while Alpha rolled to a stop beside him.

The building squatted at the end of a dead-end street, brick walls tagged with gang signs that had been sprayed over so many times the surface looked like scar tissue.

Loading dock doors hung crooked on rusted tracks.

Windows blacked out with paint and plywood.

Three years ago, this place had been a meth lab run by a crew from Cicero who thought Back of the Yards was soft territory. The Wolves had disabused them of that notion in ways that still got whispered about in the right bars.

Now someone new had moved in.

"Six bikes out back," Alpha said, pulling off his helmet. The President's patch caught the streetlight as he scanned the building with eyes that had been assessing threats since Kandahar. "Corner kid said they've been cooking again. Different crew."

"Short memories." Stockton rolled his shoulders, feeling the familiar weight settle into them. Twenty years of this. Twenty years since five men on five bikes had decided their neighborhood deserved better than the predators circling it. "They forget what happened to the last batch."

"Then we remind them."

Alpha moved toward the side entrance, and Stockton fell into step beside him.

Not behind—never behind. Founding members walked beside presidents, not in their shadow.

That was the deal they'd made in a garage in Bridgeport two decades ago, blood still drying on their knuckles from their first real fight.

The door was steel, but the frame was rotted wood that gave way with one solid kick from Alpha's boot. They walked through into darkness cut by the glow of chemical lights and the blue flame of a portable burner.

Six men looked up from the cooking operation. Young, hard-eyed, wearing colors Stockton didn't recognize. The leader—shaved head, neck tattoos, prison muscles—reached for the gun tucked in his waistband.

Stockton was faster.

He crossed the space in three strides and slammed the kid against the wall hard enough to crack drywall.

The gun clattered to the floor. Behind him, Alpha's presence alone froze the other five in place, because when the President of the Windy City Wolves walked into a room, men who'd never heard of him still understood they were looking at something lethal.

"This building was cleaned three years ago." Stockton's voice was calm. Unhurried. The voice of a man who'd had this conversation a hundred times and could have it a hundred more without raising his pulse. "I was there. I remember."

"We didn't know—" the kid started.

"You didn't ask." Stockton increased the pressure on the kid's throat. Not enough to kill. Enough to make a point. "That's the problem with your generation. No respect for history. No understanding that some ground's already been claimed."

One of the backup crew shifted, hand moving toward his jacket. Alpha took two steps and put him on the floor with a knee to the spine, twisting an arm up behind his back until something popped and the kid screamed.

"Stay still," Alpha said, like he was commenting on the weather. "Or I'll do the other one."

Stockton waited until the screaming stopped, then focused back on the leader.

Gray at his temples caught the chemical light.

His hands, wrapped around the kid's jacket, showed scars from two decades of pack work—and before that, twenty years of South Side survival.

He'd been doing this since this boy was in diapers.

"You know who we are?"

The kid's eyes finally showed fear. Good. Fear was the beginning of wisdom.

"Wolves."

"And you know what happened to the last crew who cooked in this building?"

A swallow. A nod.

"So you understand what happens now." Stockton released the kid's jacket and stepped back, watching him slide down the wall to sit on the dirty concrete floor.

"You pack up. You leave. You tell whatever crew you're running with that Back of the Yards belongs to us.

Has for twenty years. Will for twenty more. "

"And if we come back?" The kid had balls, Stockton would give him that. Stupid balls, but balls nonetheless.

"Then you don't leave."

Stockton turned his back on the crew—a calculated insult, a demonstration of exactly how little he feared them—and walked toward the door. Alpha followed, releasing the man with the dislocated shoulder, who curled into a ball and whimpered.

They didn't look back.

Outside, the night air hit Stockton's lungs like cold water. April in Chicago, the kind of night where winter hadn't quite released its grip and the lake wind cut through leather like it had personal grudges. He pulled in a breath and let it out slowly, watching his exhale fog in the streetlight.

"You remember the first one?" Alpha asked, mounting his bike.

Stockton knew exactly what he meant. The first building they'd cleaned. The first time five men who'd decided to be wolves had actually hunted.

"Pilsen. That flophouse on 18th." He swung onto his own Harley, feeling the machine settle under his weight like an extension of his body. "Heroin den. Four guys who thought they were tough because they'd shot a kid over a corner."

"Tommy Salazar's kid."

"Yeah." Stockton's jaw tightened. He still remembered the boy's funeral.

Still remembered the mother screaming. Still remembered deciding that night, in a garage that smelled like motor oil and cheap beer, that someone needed to do something about the predators circling Back of the Yards. "That was the night."

"Twenty years ago next month."

"Doesn't feel like twenty years."

Alpha's mouth curved—not quite a smile, but close. "Feels like last week. Also feels like forever."

They rode back to the compound through streets Stockton knew better than his own face.

Past the corner where he'd had his first fight at fourteen.

Past the building where his grandmother had lived until she died.

Past the empty lot where the stockyards used to stand, before they closed and took the neighborhood's heart with them.

Back of the Yards had been dying for decades. First the slaughterhouses closed. Then the factories. Then the mills. The neighborhood bled jobs and hope until the only industry left was the kind that came in plastic bags and glass vials.

That was when the wolves had started circling.

Not his Wolves—the other kind. The vultures who smelled weakness and moved in to feed.

Gangs from Cicero and Garfield Park. Cartels pushing product through the Dan Ryan corridor.

Independent crews who thought a neighborhood without protection was a neighborhood ripe for taking.

Five men had decided otherwise.

The compound materialized out of the industrial shadows—a converted meatpacking plant that still smelled faintly of blood if you knew where to sniff.

Stockton pulled through the gate and parked in his usual spot, near the garage but not blocking the bays.

Some habits were automatic after twenty years.

The clubhouse was quiet for a Thursday night.

A few brothers at the bar, shooting pool, working on bikes in the garage.

Stockton nodded at Fang and Lakeshore as he passed, exchanging the minimal acknowledgment that served as conversation among men who'd bled together enough times that words were redundant.

He didn't stop at the bar. Didn't head to his room. Instead, he walked to the chapel and pushed open the heavy door.

The room was dark except for a single lamp illuminating the table where the brothers sat for church.

Eight chairs around scarred wood. A gavel that had been used more times than Stockton could count.

And on the wall behind the president's seat, in a frame that Alpha's woman had insisted on after years of the thing just hanging there loose—the original charter.

Five signatures. Faded now, the ink bleeding into yellowed paper, but still legible.

Dominic Koval. Alpha.

Thomas Murphy. That was him. Stockton. The name he'd earned because he never forgot that this neighborhood had been built on stockyards and slaughter, and some traditions were worth keeping.

Three other names. Brothers who were gone now—two dead, one doing life in Stateville for a murder he hadn't committed because that was the deal, that was the code, that was what it meant when you signed your name to something bigger than yourself.

Stockton poured whiskey from the bottle Alpha kept in the sideboard and sank into his chair—not the president's seat, never that, but the chair to its right.

Founding member's position. The spot he'd occupied for twenty years, through four presidents if you counted the two who'd died holding the gavel.

He raised the glass to the charter.

"Twenty years," he said to the empty room. "Two decades, and we're still cleaning the same buildings."

His wife would have laughed at that. Ellen.

Four years gone now, taken by cancer that had started in her breast and spread until it owned every part of her.

She used to say he was the most stubborn man in Chicago, that he'd be fighting the same fights when he was eighty because he didn't know how to do anything else.

She'd been right.

He drank the whiskey and poured another. The burn felt appropriate—warm going down, then hollow in his chest where it settled. The same hollow that had lived there since the day Ellen stopped breathing, since he'd held her hand and felt the exact moment she left and he stayed.

The charter hung on the wall, five signatures promising a neighborhood that someone would protect it. Twenty years ago, he'd believed that promise meant something. That they could actually push back the darkness, make Back of the Yards safe again.

Now he knew better. The darkness didn't get pushed back.

It just got managed. Held at bay, one building at a time, one crew at a time, one night at a time.

The wolves he hunted kept being replaced by new wolves, and the only thing that changed was the gray in his hair and the ache in his knees when the weather turned cold.

But he still hunted. That was the deal. That was the code.

That was what he'd signed his name to, twenty years ago, in a garage in Bridgeport with blood drying on his knuckles.

Stockton drank alone, watching the signatures fade in the lamplight, and waited for morning to bring him something new to fight.