SAVING GRACE
GODS OF CHAOS MC
BOOK SIX
BY HONEY PALOMINO
COPYRIGHT © 2017 HONEY PALOMINO
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WORLDWIDE
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the author. This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, events, locations and incidences are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This book is for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content and is intended for adults only.
PROLOGUE
With fierce, steely eyes, the man stood stoically as the judge read his sentence.
“The defendant is sentenced to life in prison.”
The bystanders in the courtroom erupted behind him, but he didn’t turn around.
He knew what he’d see and he didn’t want to see it.
Joy. From the ones he’d hurt.
Pain. From the ones he loved.
Anger. From the ones he’d betrayed.
A family ripped apart, a brotherhood destroyed…
He didn’t want to see any of that. Never again did he want to witness the deep misery in the eyes of his two son’s, but if he allowed even one quick glance over his shoulder, he knew that’s what he would find.
He did it anyway.
Self-sabotage. One of his most well-practiced skills.
Like all the times he’d consumed two bottles of whiskey, instead of just one. Like each time he’d agreed to take on a dirty job, when he knew he’d never get out clean…
Or when he pulled the trigger, sending a bullet directly into his own brother, knowing the damage could never be undone once he committed his bullets to flesh.
He couldn’t even think about what he’d done to his beautiful love in the process. It was too much.
Knowing he shouldn’t do something and doing it anyway was a habit by now. The ability to abandon all sense of morality and ‘doing it anyway’ is what brought them all here today.
Here, to the courtroom of the Honorable Judge Horace S. McCormick and the defendant’s newly acquired life sentence.
Here, to the pain and misery swimming in his boy’s eyes.
He looked because he owed it to them.
He’d left them with nothing, their entire identities ripped away, their lives shattered.
The least he could do was respect them enough to allow them the satisfaction of slinging their raging anger his way.
And just as he expected, there it was, four identical blue eyes turned his way, full of rage and pain and misery.
It was his duty to absorb it. To take it. Just like he had to take the sentence the judge and jury doled out.
He had to pay for what he’d done.
He was happy to do it.
That his sons had to pay their own price for his sins? Well, that fact was the hardest part to swallow…
They’d make it, though. If there was one thing he’d instilled in them, besides insipid hatred and a penchant for unnecessary violence — it was an unrelenting toughness. They’d fallen off their bikes so many times, broken so many bones, bruised every inch of skin, and yet they still kept going like nothing ever happened to them.
They were survivors. He was proud of them both.
Even though he’d failed to ever give them a reason to be proud of him…
“Please transport the prisoner back to his cell,” the judge said, slamming the gavel down on his desk like it was a nail in the man’s coffin.
Might as well be.
He nodded to his boys, taking the angry glares they flashed him with a raised chin, knowing he’d never see them again. He’d never allow them to visit him in prison, see him like that, locked up like a goddamned animal. He had too much pride for that.
He turned away from their eyes for the last time. The guards grasped his arms, guiding him away silently, leading him to his new life behind bars — his life in a cage, his life without his club, without his cut, without his beloved hog.
A life without everything he’d ever known.
Half an hour later, when he was led back into his cell and the door closed behind him, the wrenching sound of metal scraping against metal ripped through him like a bullet.
He sat down on the bare cot, only half-seeing his surroundings.
Before he let them all go, before he erased everything he could erase in his twisted head, he laid down on his back and closed his eyes — letting the memories flow over him one last time like a river of pain.
Each one floated by like a dead leaf, its life lived, its peak reached long, long ago, the only remaining remnants flickering in his mind for a half-second of acknowledgement before floating away to decompose on the bottom of life’s river bed.
He drank them in, one by one…
The birth of his twin boys, dramatic and violent as it was…
Getting patched in at the age of twenty, his eyes wide with naive wonder…
The feel of the knife, sliding into his own twin brother’s side…
Everything since then had been a blur. Nothing worth thinking twice about.
With a deep sigh, he let the memories slide away.
Everything in the beginning, everything in the end, and all the bullshit in between.
He let it all go.
It was the only way to survive…
Hanging on to memories like that would kill a man behind bars. And now that he was going to be that man, locked up for the rest of his life, he had to forget everything that came before.
He had to forget who he was.
He had to forget where he’d been.
This was a new chapter now.
The beginning of the end.
The end of everything.
The best he could hope for was survival, for as long as he could hold onto it.
He fell to his knees beside the cot, his palms pressed together, his eyes raised toward the dirty ceiling of his cell. He’d never been much for praying. He’d figured that even if there was a God, that God had given up on him long ago.
There ain’t much sense in talking to someone who’d deserted you…
But now? Well, everything’s changed, hasn’t it?
When a man is isolated from everything and everyone he’s ever known, he tends to turn to whatever he has access to.
When the only thing he has access to is his imagination, God doesn’t seem so far away after all…
CHAPTER 1
MALICE
We pulled our bikes up to the curb of the clubhouse with a roar that only three loud Harleys can produce. After we cut the engines and pulled off our helmets, we slowly sauntered up to the locked gates with slumped shoulders.
“I can’t believe this shit,” my brother, Mayhem, muttered. He lit a cigarette, shaking his head.
“Did you know they were locking us out today?” Fury asked. He’d been our friend since sixth grade when Mayhem punched a kid who was picking on him behind Chapman Hill elementary school.
“Nope,” I replied, shaking my head. I picked up the heavy lock that was keeping us from our home, inspecting it. “But I figured it was any day now.”
“I left a bag of weed in there,” Fury said.
“You can get more,” I said, shrugging, staring past the chain-link fence that separated me from the concrete jungle that Mayhem and I had grown up in.
Three buildings.
One for living in. One for the bikes. One for club business.
Now, the property and everything in it would most likely be sold to some slick
businessman from California and turned into some kind of twisted biker-themed hipster pub or some shit. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but we’d done a lot of work over the years.
Dad carved the bar with his own two hands from ancient old growth Doug fir. It took him almost a year to finish it. We’d laid the concrete floor in the garage ourselves, me and Mayhem working for days to get it as smooth as ice.
Mayhem stood beside me now, no doubt plagued with all the same sorts of memories as I was. He pulled a couple of beers from his pack and handed one to me and the other to Fury.
“To the Gentlemen!” he said, holding his bottle up. “We had a good run!”
“To the Gentlemen,” I replied.
“The Gentlemen!” Fury repeated.
We touched bottles and drank. The beer was bitter and cold, a taste I hadn’t experienced in years. I poured the rest onto the pavement.
“For Dad,” I said.
“And Uncle Rebel,” Mayhem said.
We stood there, silently showing our respects to our dead past, as we finished our beers.
“I need something stronger,” Mayhem finally said, breaking the silence.
“There’s an entire bar in there,” Fury said, pointing to our now forbidden sanctuary.
“That’s not ours anymore, brother,” I said.
“What are we going to do now?” Mayhem asked, the uncertainty that had been growing in his eyes for days now flashing like lightening. “Where the fuck are we supposed to go?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t fucking know, brother.”
“I ran into an old friend the other day,” Fury said. “I was waiting to tell you, but I had an idea I wanted to run by you two.”
“What?” Mayhem asked.
“Ever heard of the Gods of Chaos?”
“Of course,” I said. “Club outta Portland, right? They used to do a lot of business up and down the Five. Think I met a few of them once. Been laying low the last few years, haven’t heard much about them.”
“I knew Slade when we lived on the streets of Portland together that year I ran away from my folks,” Fury said. “He’s a God now. He’s also settled down with an old lady and a kid, but we ran into each other last week when I went up to Portland to visit my sister. I asked him about the Gods, and he told me they don’t really run the illegal stuff anymore. They’re in the business of taking down shady shit now. Helping girls out, shit like that. Some kind of undercover job, so don’t tell anyone I told you.”
“Well, what a bunch of saints,” Mayhem said, his voice laced with sarcasm. “How the hell does that help us?”
“Well,” Fury said, shrugging, “I thought maybe we could ask them if they need any help.”
“Help?” Mayhem said. “Saving chicks?”
“You said you were tired of all the bullshit, man. It’s just a thought. Look what happened to your family, you know? Look what the life did to your father and his brother. It tore them apart. Sure, Rebel fucked up, in a monstrous fucking way. But what turned him into a monster? He wasn’t always like that. The club changed him. The club fucking killed him. Rebel would still be alive, and your old man would still be free, if we weren’t constantly involved with such dangerous fucking derelicts.”
“I don’t know a life without fucking danger,” Mayhem said.
“Well, maybe you could have a little danger mixed in with doing good. Aren’t you tired of looking over your shoulder all the time, man? Don’t you want to just go to sleep and not worry about who’s coming to kill you or arrest you, and knowing you did something good that day?” Fury asked, his voice rising. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m tired of this fucking life, man. It’s all we’ve known, for a really long time, and I’m ready for something different. We’ve got an opportunity for a new start. We should take it.”
“What makes you think they want a bunch of assholes like us?” Mayhem asked.
“We aren’t so bad, man,” I said.
“Our old man was just sentenced to life in jail for killing his brother. We’ve got the same DNA,” Mayhem said. “You think the Gods are just gonna overlook that tiny detail?”
“Slade’s not like that, man,” Fury said. “And I bet the others aren’t either. Just let me call him, alright?”
“Portland, though?”
“Change of scenery might be nice,” Fury shrugged.
I glanced over at my brother and he nodded slowly.
“Fuck it. What have we got to lose?” I said, shaking my head.
I knew he was right. Staying here was useless.
We were lost.
Like a blank slate, we had no future, no path forward, no plans, no fucking clue which way to turn.
I threw the bottle over the fence, the satisfying sound of breaking glass stirring something inside of me.
“Fuck it. Let me know what Slade says.” I threw my helmet back on my head. “I need to be alone for a while, clear my head. I’m gonna go for a ride.”
“See ya, man,” Mayhem said.
“See ya,” I replied.
“I’ll call you soon, brother,” Fury said, his voice drowned out by the roar of my bike’s engine, the only true and loyal thing I’d ever really known in my life, besides my brothers in the club.
But that was all gone now.
All I had was myself. This bike. And the open fucking road, just waiting for me. Something else was waiting for me, but I hadn’t found it yet. Or, maybe it hadn’t found me.
Either way, I knew this wasn’t the end.
I was too young for this to be the end. Hell, I’m barely thirty. I have a whole life ahead of me.
If this is the end, if there isn’t anything better out there waiting for me, I might as well die right now.
The throttle vibrated in my hand, an almost certain death only a flick of the wrist away as I flew down the road, soaring past traffic as I wove in and out of lanes. I had a bad habit of thinking about that when I rode. About how easy it would be to just jerk the handlebars and lay the bike down, sending my unprotected body under the wheels of a semi and ending all this fucking misery.
It would be so easy. It would be over so fucking fast.
But honestly, killing myself was the last thing I wanted.
I’d lost everything I’d ever known, everything I’d ever been taught to be. Without our club, I really had no idea who I was anymore, but I was ready to find out and I was definitely going to stick around for the final chapter.
The thought of joining up with the Gods rattled around in my brain as I drove aimlessly through the city. They say with every closing door, another opens. And Fury was right. Being a prick just to make a buck wears on a man after a while. I’m no pussy, and I can handle the weight of it all just fine, don’t get me wrong. But it might be nice to do some good in the world, balance out the karma a little, just in case.
Who says a man like me can’t have a happy fucking ending, too?
CHAPTER 2
SLADE
The dude that walked in behind me and sat at the end of the bar looked slightly familiar. By the cut he was wearing, I could tell he was one of the Vipers, a club out of Southeast Portland. Most people in the Portland area knew to stay the hell outta their way.
They’re a large club that’s been around a while. The Gods have never had any beef with them, and these days, since we were basically out of the life completely, tensions with rival gangs were a thing of the past for us.
Rarely did I get an afternoon to myself, but my love Diana, the beautiful face of the six o’clock news on KATU, was working on a big story tonight, and our quickly growing son, Jeremiah, was being spoiled at the coast by his grandmother and wouldn’t come home until tomorrow. I’d taken the opportunity to stop off at the Roadhouse for a drink or two before heading back to the clubhouse to hang with the Gods.
Spotting another club’s patch at my favorite bar wasn’t completely unheard of, but it didn’t happen often around here. But, like I
said, we had a clean slate these days, so I wasn’t worried about some stupid turf war or anything. Other clubs were just as welcome as I was here.
Granted, anything could happen, but his attention seemed to be focused on the shot of tequila he was currently cradling in his huge, meaty palms and not me. That quickly changed when his eyes finally shot up and landed on my cut.
He nodded and lifted his glass in a mock salute and I did the same in return. A moment later, he sauntered over to me and sat down beside me.
“Ain’t seen a Gods of Chaos patch in years,” he muttered, before holding out his hand. “I’m Tiny. Viper’s.”
“Slade,” I nodded, shaking his hand. “I think we may have met once or twice.”
“Might be right,” he grunted. “Wouldn’t remember. I drink a lot. Memories shot. Knees are shot. My fucking back is shot, too, but whatever. A lifetime of riding and drinkin’ ain’t so great on the body.”
“I hear you,” I nodded.
Tiny was not tiny at all. He wasn’t small. He wasn’t short. He was nowhere near petite. In fact, he was one of the biggest bastards I’d ever laid eyes on, with huge mounds of flesh jutting from his frame in every direction.
“What brings you out this way?” I asked.
“Just running some money up to a client on the coast,” he replied. “Thought I’d stop in to quench my thirst before hitting that fucking Portland traffic.”
I nodded.
“Yeah, it’s a real bitch lately, ain’t it?”
“Fucking Californians, man,” he grunted. I couldn’t help but chuckle. He was right. They’d invaded Oregon like a bunch of invasive starlings and the infrastructure and roads were taking the full brunt of their arrival.
“How’s your President doing? Snake, right?”
“Yep,” he nodded. “Snake’s doing fine, I suppose. He keeps busy, hell, we all do these days.”
“Business is booming?”
“You could say that. What about the Gods? What are y’all up to? Ain’t heard nothing about you guys in years. Word on the street is that you’re out of the business.”
SAVING GRACE: GODS OF CHAOS MC (BOOK SIX) Page 1