“No shit?” His brow shot up, and he scraped his chair closer. “Pull it up on your phone. I wanna see that shit.”
“What are we, women?” I asked even though I did as he asked and pulled up the specs I’d worked out with the jeweller in Vancouver.
Zeus snorted. “Got a good eye for the pretty stuff. Hell, just look at my wife.”
We both laughed at the same time in the same way, heads thrown back to chuckle at the heavens. Nova appeared upside down in my vision, followed by Curtains and Boner.
Nova grinned his pretty boy grin and dipped his head over my shoulder to look at the phone screen. He let out a low whistle. “Jesus, brother, that’s for Cress?”
“Fuckin’ finally,” Boner hooted, slammin’ his hand on the table. “Seriously, dude, I was like one second away from sweeping her away from you.”
“Only person, fictional or not, Cress would leave me for is Satan from Paradise Lost.” I scraped my eyes over Boner and clicked my tongue. “Don’t think I got anythin’ to worry about as far’s you’re concerned.”
Boner cupped his prolific bulge in retaliation and winked. “What I lack in looks and smarts, I more than make up for in size. Just ask any’a the biker bitches hangin’ ’round here.”
Nova hit him on the side of the head. “Don’t think I’ve ever escaped a conversation with you where ya didn’t mention your huge ass cock.”
“If you got it, flaunt it,” he replied with a one-shouldered shrug.
“Bunch’a idiots,” Zeus muttered, but he couldn’t keep the smile from his voice.
More brothers started to file into the room and take their places around the table, readyin’ themselves for the biker version of Church we held there every Sunday and otherwise, when there was news to share.
“Shit, boy, that’s some ring,” Buck, our VP and one of the older members of our chapter, said as he clamped a hand down on my shoulder. “Maja’s been on me for info ’bout you gettin’ your head outta your ass and askin’ Cress to marry ya, so thank fuck you’re finally doin’ it. Got good news to report to the Old Lady, so she’ll be hankering to give me somethin’ good herself.”
There were a few chuckles and whistles at his comment, but it was Priest who took a seat beside me and leaned over to look at the photo of the emerald ring before saying, “Fallen colours, classic cut, pricey as fuck…decent ring, brother.”
I smirked at the club’s enforcer, a man of few words who would rather cut a man to pieces than gossip with the rest of the guys. “I can die happy with your approval then.”
“When’re you askin’ her?” Curtains asked as he flopped his ginger ass into the chair at the other end of the table and pulled out his deluxe laptop. “You want, I can get that shit on tape with my new drone? I’ve been dyin’ to test it out on somethin’ other than surveillance.”
“Bought you that fancy ass drone so you would use it for the grow-ops, not on spyin’ on a private moment ’tween King and his woman,” Zeus reminded him. “Now, let’s shut the fuck up about King’s business and focus on the club. We got a problem.”
“Don’t we always,” Nova muttered, makin’ Boner and Curtains both snicker.
“You’re in a position of power, people’ll always want what you got,” I said as I leaned back in the chair and steepled my fingers to get comfy for the long ass meeting.
“King’s right. Told ya weeks ago the Berserkers wanted to meet up to discuss patchin’ over––”
“Pieces’a shit, the lot of ’em,” Axe-Man grumbled as he shoved on a pair of glasses that were completely at odds with his tatted, biker aesthetic and readied himself to take notes of the meeting. There was a ripple of agreement.
As far as MCs went, there was definitely a spectrum. The Fallen’d always been outlaws; we peddled in marijuana and sometimes, arms trafficking, but we didn’t do any of the fucked shit like narcotics or human trafficking. We got our own systems of belief and codes of fuckin’ honour whereas clubs like the ’serkers only had straight-up greed and nothin’ but shady morals and a fuck ton of mean to back it up.
As a club, we hated them. As a man, I wished every single piece of shit with the wolf head patch on his cut would burn in hell. The tension between the two clubs had nearly exploded when we found out Harleigh Rose’s long-term Old Man had beat her for the past few years and none of the brothers did fuck all about it.
And now they wanted to parler.
It was straight-up stupid, and we would’ve been just as dumb to assume the overture was genuine.
“They want somethin’,” I muttered.
It was easy enough to draw that conclusion, but I knew more than most of the brothers sitting at the table with me because I had an in with one of their members.
The only one I didn’t actively want to kill and the only one with any shred of morality. Probably ’cause of the girl I was secretly harbouring for him while he made sure he could keep her safe.
“The way I figure it, they’re makin’ nice to lull us into some false ass state of security while they try to pull the rug out from under us,” Zeus agreed. “Reaper had nothin’ real to say about crossin’ over, and the whole time he sat there with a motherfuckin’ grin like he knew somethin’ I didn’t.” He paused and tugged on his bottom lip the way I did. “Turns out, he’s fuckin’ Farrah.”
My eyebrows shot into my hair as everyone went on alert. “You’re fuckin’ kidding?”
“Wish I was, but the bitch has shacked up with the jackal. Seems the only real reason Reaper had for meetin’ me was to introduce me to his new Old Lady and let her ask me for a little fuckin’ favour.”
“No shit.” Bat shook his head and cracked his bat tattooed knuckles. “Motherfucker has a set of balls on him.”
“It’s Farrah with the balls,” Buck grunted. “She always was a piece of fuckin’ work.”
“Thank God, you traded up, Prez,” Nova said with an eyebrow waggle. “Lou’s a fuckuva lot easier on the eyes, and she’s a sweetheart.”
“Farah didn’t used to be such a bitch,” Zeus protested, but even he didn’t seem convinced of it.
There must’ve been a time when my mother wasn’t a ragin’ bitch, but I certainly couldn’t remember it. From the time I was a kid, my only priority was takin’ care of Harleigh Rose and keeping her as far from Farrah’s influence as possible. Our mother had an unhealthy obsession with being a bitch to H.R. while groomin’ her at the same time. Me, she just ignored.
As hard as it was to believe my dad, my fuckin’ hero, could’ve made as massive of a mistake as he did marryin’ a woman like that, I had to be thankful he did or I wouldn’t fuckin’ be here.
“What’d she want?” I asked over the chatter.
“Leads into our next problem,” he growled, eyes flashin’ bright as lightning. “Apparently, the Ventura outfit has seen fit to start up a fuckin’ underage pornography gig outside’a Entrance. That drug ring we busted in the high school a while back? A part’a that was hooking the teenage girls on drugs and gettin’ them in too deep with the cartel so they’d have to work it off with Irina in her studio.”
“That’s just…” Curtains swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbin’ in his thin throat. “I’ve seen the kinda places shit like that is posted, and it’s… it’s not good, and it’s definitely not fuckin’ safe for those girls.”
“No shit. Seems Javier had been tryin’ to set up a human traffickin’ circuit along the coast from here down to Mexico, but it was too much of a hassle, so Irina started to recruit locally. Now, you’re probably wonderin’, those’a you who had the displeasure of meetin’ my cunt ex-wife, why she would offer up that info all sweet and easy. She didn’t. Apparently, Honey’s involved.”
My heart spasmed at the name of my half-sister. Hadn’t seen the girl since she was a baby, the first year she was born to Farrah and the man who had moved in about thirty seconds after Zeus was incarcerated, and we’d all lived together like one fucked-up family. Farrah had taken her when she�
��d fucked off over a decade ago, and I hadn’t seen her since.
But I’d always thought, in those quiet moments before bed when your conscience is most acute, about what happened to that pretty little girl with the unfortunate name.
Knowing Farrah, she couldn’t have grown up good.
And evidently, she hadn’t.
“What’re we gonna do about it?” It wasn’t a question of doing somethin’ or not. There was no way The Fallen would let somethin’ like this lie. We were the only outlaws allowed in Entrance, and we’d gone to greater lengths to see that enforced than savin’ some poor girl from prostitution.
Zeus scrubbed a hand over his face. “Got a lot on our plate right now. The fuckin’ PD wouldn’t lay off for a second. We need to make sure our shit is tight and not go head first into somethin’ that might lead to gang warfare, you get me?”
“Well yeah, but the girls…” Curtains protested, paler than I’d ever seen him. “Boss, you don’t got the right idea of what’s happenin’ to those girls.”
“And you do?” he asked with a raise brow.
The redhead licked his lips, quick and reptilian. “I––fuck, I used to work for a man who did some darknet dabbling. He liked…those kinds of things. Took me a while to figure it out, but when I did, I was outta there.”
“No one’s judgin’ you, man,” I said, tippin’ my chin up. “Brothers here have done a whole lot worse than that.”
“Never get those photos outta my head,” he muttered, lookin’ down at his computer and peeling at the edge of the Hephaestus Auto sticker there. “Don’t like the thought’a girls bein’ forced to do that shit.”
“None’a us do,” Zeus assured him. “So we got three issues to tackle. One; how the fuck do we shore up our shit so the pigs don’t find a way to end us while we’re expandin’? Two; how the hell do we get the Ventura fuckers to close up shop? And three… how do we get Honey outta that shit stat?”
“I’ve been lookin’ into some things,” I said, even though I knew before I even opened my mouth that I’d be met with protests. “Couple’a things we could do as I see it. Openin’ up a few legit weed stores now that shit’s legal just makes straight-up sense.” The murmurs of dissent started, people muttering about the government cutting into our profits, etc. I held up a hand to quiet them. “I’m sayin’ we open a few. It’s not gonna cut into our profits or your cut of those. We gotta put up some money to start this shit up, but trust me, your average housewife is blazing Mary Jane these days in Canada. We’ll get a shit ton of business, and any association with The Fallen and marijuana can prettily be tied into the new gig.”
“’S a clean idea,” Priest muttered beside me.
“It’s fuckin’ horseshit,” Skell objected loudly, as I knew he would. “I didn’t join a fuckin’ Fortune 500 company where I gotta pay into a fuckin’ 401K. I’m a bona fide member of an outlaw biker club so I can fuck the man, not blow him.”
“Fine distinction, that,” Nova said under his breath with a smirk.
“It makes sense, brother,” Axe-Man, surprisingly, pitched in. He was what I considered the Old Guard, the generation of bikers that grew up in the era of my father. The man wasn’t that old, but he’d been patched in since I was a boy, and he wasn’t the kinda guy to rock the boat.
He tipped his chin at me as if he knew what I was thinkin’, and I returned the gesture in thanks.
“No sense to me,” Skell retorted, his ugly mug screwed up with disgust. “We never done shit like that, and I don’t see no reason to start.”
“Entrance PD has never been so up in our shit before,” Nova countered, his affable smile melting clean off his face. “King’s tryin’ to protect us, you dumbass.”
“Dumbass?” Skell shoved back from the table and loomed over it with a sneer. “You wanna take this outside, and we’ll see just what this ‘dumbass’ can do to rearrange that pretty face’a yours, Casanova?”
“Fuckin’ sit down, Skell,” Zeus barked in a way that defied disobedience.
Skell didn’t even hesitate.
“That’s it, sit like a good little doggie,” Priest praised in his cold as a blade voice.
Skell made to stand again, but Zeus’s voice cut through the tension. “Enough!”
“He’s not even fully patched in,” Skell objected, pointin’ a bony finger at me. “He’s not even old enough to wipe his own ass without help from his teacher.”
It was my turn to shove back from the table. I planted my hands on the surface and leaned across it close enough to breathe the same air as the hotheaded biker. “You speak one more word against my woman, and I shit you not, Skell, brother or not, I’ll beat your face in.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
“Not eighteen anymore,” I reminded him, flexin’ the thick muscles coiled like ropes beneath the skin of my arms and chest. “Haven’t been a kid since Z went to prison, haven’t been a boy since I met the woman who made me understand what it means to be a man. Sorry you don’t have a woman to help you understand that the only type of man to be is one who listens instead’a judgin’.” I glared down at him, noting the sheen of sweat poppin’ out over his brow and the way his body hunched away from mine in instinctive fear. “You wanna fuck with me, brother? I’m down. But you fuck with my woman, I kid you not, it’ll be the last thing you fuckin’ do.”
Thick quiet followed my words, vibratin’ the air like a struck gong. No one stepped in to pull me away from Skell because no one liked the way the fucker talked about Old Ladies. His was, regrettably, a grade A bitch, but that didn’t mean the rest of us stomached it when he spewed that crap about our women.
Especially me.
And Zeus.
“And when my boy’s done beatin’ your face in, Skell,” he said, an echo of my thoughts as he stared down at his scarred hand and clenched it into a ham-sized fist. “I’ll be there to beat the leftovers.”
Skell’s beady gaze shot back and forth between Z and me for a tense moment before he scowled and leaned back in his chair to cross his arms like a petulant child.
“But King?” Zeus said idly. “Skell’s got a point. You’re not a full member of this club, so when we take the vote ’bout the legit businesses, Ransom and you won’t be included. You wanna head out to the bar, and we’ll meet ya there?”
A muscle in my jaw jumped as I ground my teeth against the frustration of my situation. I was born Fallen, but even if I wasn’t, I’d worked my ass off my whole fuckin’ life to better myself so I could better the club. I’d graduated with honours from one’a the top universities in the country so I could bring that knowledge to this exact table and make a difference, only now, the Old Guard wouldn’t have it.
Lockin’ eyes with Zeus, I read his resolve and also his disappointment in some of our brothers for not acceptin’ all I had to give. He wanted them to, but he wouldn’t force it, and I hated that that made him a good leader.
“Fine,” I said, standin’. “But know this, brothers. I’m here to stay, and I’m here to take the club to even greater heights than we’ve seen before. All you have to do is trust my intent and give me a fuckin’ chance.”
I meet each other their gazes before I turned on my boot and walked out the door with Ransom on my heels. And not for the first time that week, or even that day, I wished like hell my best friend, Mute, could have been beside me.
Even so, when I sat at the bar and Ransom rounded it to grab us both a beer, I knew I had support in the club, and half an hour later when Nova, Curtains, Boner, Axe-Man, Kodiak, Lab-Rat, and even Priest took up seats around me after Church, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d get a real spot at the table and a real say in the game.
Cressida
* * *
Spring was breaking through the perpetual grey ceiling we lived under in the winter months, the light turning from creamed to liquid honey as it streamed through the porous clouds over my upturned face. I sat on the top of one of the picnic tables to the f
ront side of the clubhouse, my hands braced behind me so I could soak up the rays. There was the distant hum of machinery and male chatter from the garage bays at Hephaestus Auto to the left of the lot and the soft brushing swish of sea breeze in the evergreens standing before the high chain-link fence like sentries. Ares sat on the bench beside me, but his entire side was pressed against my leg, an arm looped around my calf as he read in his hoarse, Latin-accented English from John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
“How can I live without thee, how forego
Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no, no, I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.”
Ares stopped reading, his thumb sweeping over the text as if he could feel the words like the texture of a flower petal on his skin or in his soul. I smiled as I watched him because I recognized a poetic heart when I saw it, and I loved that he was being raised by a biker club who would protect him so that heart could flourish.
“What do you think?” I asked.
I wanted to card my hand through his hair, but Ares had rules about how he liked to interact with people. No touching, not unless he instigated it. He was incredibly affectionate when the mood struck him, especially with Loulou and me, but if he was touched without consent, he turned, frankly, terrifying.
He angled his head up and back to look at me, and the sun caught his depthless brown eyes, turning them liquid and warm as maple syrup. “I think Milton gets this story better than those idiots who wrote the Bible.”
I clucked my tongue at him even though I agreed. “We might not believe in that kind of religion, but that doesn’t mean we talk crap about it, Ares. What would you do if someone said something like that about the club?”
The arm around my leg constricted, and his jaw clenched.
After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4 Page 3