by Trent Jordan
Phoenix
An MC Romance
Trent Jordan
Contents
Prologue
1. Phoenix
2. Jess
3. Phoenix
4. Jess
5. Phoenix
6. Jess
7. Phoenix
8. Jess
9. Phoenix
10. Jess
11. Phoenix
12. Jess
13. Phoenix
14. Jess
15. Phoenix
16. Jess
17. Phoenix
18. Jess
Epilogue
Preview of “Cole”
Cole and Lilly
Free Prequel
Also by Trent Jordan
Prologue
Austin “Phoenix” Smith Jr.
The only person I loved in this world was dead.
Imagine having to wake up every morning knowing that your father, the man who had given you everything, even after your mother had died of a drug overdose, wasn’t there to greet you. Imagine that the man who had given you not just all of the lessons of this world, but an opportunity at a career and a lifestyle, wasn’t there to hug you and tell you he loved you.
And now imagine that the reason he wasn’t there to be by your side was because your so-called brothers had murdered him in cold blood.
How the hell do you think you’d feel?
I can tell you how I felt. I had a lot of bitter resentment toward the world. I already thought that the Black Reapers were, at best, ineffective in their leadership, incompetent at worst. Now, though, they had gone from a group that I liked but had reservations about to the group I considered my sworn enemy. There was no one, and I mean no one, that I hated in this world more than the Black Reapers.
And that was a hell of a fucking thing, considering that for the longest time, the Fallen Saints were my sworn enemy.
Someone knocked. It startled me so much, I jumped. I muttered “fuck” under my breath as I put on my tie, something I hadn’t done in ages. Something I shouldn’t have a reason to do.
“Yeah?” I shouted. “What?”
“Mind if I enter?”
I shook my head, catching my breath. Just because he’d scared the shit out of me didn’t mean he deserved the same venom I had for his brother.
“No.”
Cole Carter opened the door very slowly. The president of the Gray Reapers, a man who treated his men like, well, men, Cole had a presence to him that suggested a certain ease and cheerfulness that Lane had never had.
But he had also become a harder man since the shootout that took the life of Lane’s fiancée—the night the patriarch of the Carter family had perished. Speaking of people who are probably rolling over in their grave at what the Black Reapers MC has turned into. Jesus fucking Christ.
“How are you doing?” Cole said as he shut the door behind him.
Cole’s shift to someone tougher and harder hadn’t just come in the form of his actions. He’d shaved his head and grown a bit of stubble—not a full-on beard, but enough to make him look rugged and older. He also didn’t smile as much as he used to, but he was still easily the warmest and most gregarious biker that I knew.
“I’m fine,” I said.
It didn’t take a psychiatrist to see I was full of shit. But it also didn’t take one to see that pushing back on me would be a huge fucking mistake.
“It’s OK not to be,” Cole said. “No one in the club expects you to be perfect today. They know what the Black Reapers did. They know it’s your father. They know—”
“I get it, Cole,” I snapped.
But in truth, I appreciated the words. That didn’t mean I was going to cry or even show emotion. That could not fucking happen, and my father would’ve been ashamed of me if I had.
“My father would have wanted me to be strong,” I said. “I am going to give a good eulogy for the man. I am going to lay him to rest. And then I am going to kill every last one of those motherfuckers to avenge his death.”
Cole didn’t flinch. I knew he still, somehow, for some stupid reason, held out hope that he could make amends with Lane. I didn’t know why—it’s not like Lane ever treated him well, not even in the supposed couple of months of peace when the Gray Reapers had come to help us...
Us?
No, them.
“I understand,” Cole said, patting my shoulder. “We’ll let you lead the procession to the funeral. For today, you’re the President of the Gray Reapers.”
And that, right there, was exactly why Cole Carter was ten times the President that Lane ever could be. Actually, no, that implied that one could measure how much better Cole was; Cole was infinitely better than Lane. It was like asking who could be a better leader: a Navy SEAL or a newborn kitten. They weren’t even on the same fucking scale.
“We’ll leave on your cue.”
Cole left.
And as soon as the door shut, all those heavy feelings, all the weight from what had happened that fateful night, all the anger came out in full force.
“God fucking damnit!” I roared as I punched through the mirror in front of me.
I screamed in frustration and in pain. My knuckles were bloodied, but that was nothing. That would heal, maybe even create a good story at some point.
But the scars of my father’s loss?
I can see it now.
I’m right outside Lane’s house.
Dad’s going up to tell him the news about the Saints.
Suddenly, Butch and Axle intercept him, and Patriot comes over to tell me that they just want to make sure everything is fine. He’s using his fucking fake-ass charm.
And then...
Butch kills him.
One bullet. No remorse. No regret.
Some people preferred to black out a memory like that, for fear that it would cripple them forever.
Me? I replayed that exact moment when Butch raised his gun, pointed it, fired, and blood spurted off my father’s forehead. I remembered the sickening way my father just fell to the ground in a thud, dead before his head collided with the concrete. I remembered how it wasn’t a dramatic fall like a tree; it was more like a pitiful crumpling to the ground.
Even if my father was the fucking rat... even if he had somehow, someway betrayed the club... did he really fucking deserve a death like that?
He was not Red Raven, Secretary of the Black Reapers to me. He was not Red Raven, wise sage and trusted adviser of Roger Carter.
He was just Dad.
In more formal settings, he was Austin Smith Sr. He had passed down his name to me, wanting me to pick up in areas that he felt he had failed. He was a man that gave everything of himself to me under circumstances that would have broken anyone else.
And how did the Black Reapers handle such a serious accusation?
With an impromptu bullet to the fucking skull.
I collapsed to the floor and began to sob. Punching the mirror wasn’t going to bring my father back. Murdering Butch and the rest of the Black Reaper officers, save for Father Marcellus, the one man I had a genuinely good relationship with, wouldn’t bring my father back.
But I wanted desperately to believe that it would give me some measure of peace. Some said eye for an eye didn’t work, but that was only for those who believed forgiveness and compassion were possible. For the average man, sure.
I was no average man.
I was raised in a household without a mother. I was kicked out of multiple schools. I went to jail at fifteen. I had learned to trust no one, save for my father, a lesson I had forgotten terribly in the last weeks of my father’s life. Or perhaps he forgot it. Perhaps he trusted them too much.
And look what it cost him.
Forgiveness? Compassion? I coul
d recognize them when I got them, and I would always appreciate them.
But I could never give them to my enemies. The most I could give was a cold shoulder instead of a fired bullet. That was the extent of my “forgiveness.”
Be strong. Get your ass off the floor, get to it, and be the man your father needs you to be.
I let out my last sniffle and rose. I looked at myself in the broken mirror, the shards in the glass cutting through the image of my limbs and my heart. I told myself that it was time to stop crying. I’d had a private moment. I could not have a public moment.
I turned and grabbed the door handle.
“Let’s go honor a hero.”
Provided the Black Reapers were wrong.
And if they weren’t?
It was a question I refused to entertain. Anything of that nature had no upside. If the Reapers were wrong, it would confirm what I already knew. My father was a hero.
And if they were right?
Losing my father was devastating. Losing my father’s legacy...
Some things were just too unfathomable to even ponder.
Jess Walters
Maybe this will be the bar where I won’t get shot at.
It was a relatively benign beginning to my new job in a town far, far away from the last bar I’d tended to, which had burned down. If I never went back to Springsville, it would have been too soon. The place had its share of interesting stories, but I was tired of feeling like I was about to be in the middle of a shootout.
In a lot of ways, the bar I now worked at, Tom’s Billiards, was very similar to Brewskis. This one had a couple of pool tables, a couple of dartboards, and a full bar, but not a lot of seating or scenic views; it was the kind of place that very few people attended. No one would ever think to take a date there for a formal Saturday night, or even a casual one. It was the definition of dive bar, where gangsters and bikers came to play. There were a couple of tube TVs in there and only one credit card processing machine; it looked like a place that had been built in 1975 and had never been renovated.
As far as the town of Ashton, my new home, though I had seen some motorcyclists, the sight didn’t worry me. Bikers were a dime a dozen in California; seeing a bike and freaking out was akin to seeing a taxi in New York City and panicking. It made no sense. What did make sense, given the relative quiet of the town and its isolation from much of anything else, was the low crime rate, the older population, and the lack of modern technology.
The door swung open, and I assumed my standard pose—leaning forward, a slight smile on my face, my arms spread on the bar top. It was the kind of look that was a little flirtatious, but not so much so that it gave customers the wrong idea.
And then I laughed when the owner of the bar, an elder gentleman by the name of, not surprisingly, Tom, walked in.
“You changed your hair!” he said in surprise.
“I told you, I like to mix it up a lot!” I said.
That was true. At Brewskis, I liked to change it as much as I could as a way of relieving stress; it was an activity to take my mind off the danger of the bar.
But here, the straightening of my hair and the return to the natural dirty-blonde color was my attempt to return my life to normalcy—or, at least, my idea of normalcy, since I couldn’t exactly say that I had ever had a “normal” life.
“Well, it’s a good look,” Tom said. “You’re the type of girl I hope to see when I walk into my bar.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying not to show that I was a little unsettled by his words.
Tom had struck me as nothing more than a friendly man from a different era in the interview, and I wanted to believe that was the case. I still had my guard up just in case, though. The last owner had made some comments about how I’d be eye candy for the bikers and then never showed up again. He hadn’t even contacted me when Brewskis had burned down; I got my last paycheck, and that was that.
“I just wanted to come in here and give you a heads-up,” he said. “Got a call from a friend of mine. They’re coming here after a funeral, probably about a dozen of ‘em. So you may get slammed at an hour you’re not used to.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” I said. “Not like you have a unique setup to your bar here. I know where all the liquors and liqueurs are.”
Tom smiled and patted the bar.
“You know, small town like this, it’s pretty rare that we get someone as experienced as you,” he said. “How did you wind up in Ashton?”
I chuckled, trying to think of the best way to answer. Did I dare to tell the truth? That I had run away from home at fourteen, trying to make it on my own, and only recently had opened communication with my father—a decision I sometimes regretted to an enormous degree?
Or did I just tell a small lie?
“The last place I worked at burned down,” I said.
That wasn’t a small lie. But it was a deflection, a statement so outrageous and so bold that anyone hearing it would immediately lose interest in knowing anything else and want to know about that.
“Wait, what?” Tom said. “You didn’t say that in the interview!”
“You never asked,” I said with a sly smile, the kind of smile that I knew would make Tom laugh.
“Well, I sure am now! What happened?”
“You didn’t hear what happened at Brewskis? Up in Springsville?”
It took a second for that to click with Tom, but I could tell the instant he remembered it.
“Oh right!” he said. “Yeah, I saw that on your resume, but I just figured you’d left before that fire. I hope you weren’t there when it happened.”
“Yeah, well, actually, I was,” I said. “But I managed to get out.”
It wasn’t a very difficult or dramatic escape, actually. I’d been behind the bar, with no patrons inside, when someone—I presumed a member of the Fallen Saints, since they were always the more difficult group by far—threw a Molotov cocktail inside. It was easy to escape out the back, and my car wasn’t damaged. The Fallen Saints either didn’t care that I had escaped or didn’t notice, but nothing had happened to me since.
“Bunch of bikers, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, then, maybe you shouldn’t be bartending tonight.”
Don’t tell me...
“The group that’s coming is called the Gray Reapers.”
“You mean Black Reapers?” I said.
“What? No, the Gray Reapers. I know, similar colors, but I’m almost certain it’s gray. Unless I’m so old, I can’t even tell my colors apart.”
Tom sounded too sure and wasn’t that old, anyway, for me to doubt him. The Gray Reapers... was this a rival to the Black Reapers? A spin-off? A charter? Something else?
“I can handle bikers,” I said, although I really wasn’t looking forward to that being part of the job again. “It’s all I did the last few years. I’m more concerned about one specific biker group, and as long as it’s not the one I’m thinking of, then it should be fine.”
“Hmm, OK then, if you say so,” Tom said. “They’re a bunch of fine young men, anyway. I know the leader of them, uh, Carter, I think his name is.”
Like... Lane Carter?
Or is it the other one? Haven’t seen the other one in a while. Cole, maybe? Colin?
“Anyway, call me if anything comes up. Just wanted to drop by and inform you of the business that’s coming.”
“Thanks, Tom.”
Tom left without another word. I sat down on a stool, taking a second to process the news.
Maybe I hadn’t left the insane world of the MCs. Maybe it was impossible to escape.
Maybe it would be different this time.
Either way, I was curious to see what this new group looked like. To date, all of the MCs had taken the approach of maintaining a respectful distance from me—I served drinks and spoke when spoken to, but otherwise, I was more than happy to avoid the drama and chaos that usually followed.
But in a town like this, where
there didn’t seem to be a rival of any sort, maybe things would be just a little bit different.
Phoenix
When I walked into the church to say goodbye to my father, it took all of my strength to not collapse.
On the one hand, the funeral home had embalmed him beautifully. He no longer looked like the man who had died from a gunshot wound to the forehead. I owed so much to whoever had cleaned him up because, aside from a small ring on his forehead that was seemingly impossible to remove, he just looked like an older man who had perished from a heart attack or some form of cancer.
But on the other hand...
This was the final time I’d get to see him with my own eyes. In about an hour, give or take a few minutes, his body would be lowered into the ground, never to be seen again. He would become one with the Earth, and that would be it.
There would be no chances for surprise revivals, even if I knew that was hoping for something beyond a miracle, beyond the physically possible. There would be no more respects, no more times for grieving over his actual body, no more gatherings to remember him. It would, simply put, be the end.
Cole put his hand on my shoulder as we moved to the front. I ignored it, even though the gesture was much appreciated. We took our seats.
And then I saw a member of the Black Reapers approaching me.
But it was not an enemy or someone I hated—it was Father Marcellus.
“My son,” he said.
I embraced him as soon as he came into reach. There was no bad blood between us; I was not sure anyone, outside of the Fallen Saints, had any bad blood with the chaplain of the Black Reapers. Father Marcellus was just one of those people that managed to transcend petty drama and nonsense. He had my respect and he had my appreciation.