Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6)

by Susan Fanetti

  And they had killed more men than Ronin could count.

  He knew his own count; he’d felt every kill. But the club’s whole tally was more than he could keep track of. They’d all done their turn digging graves and building pyres for men they’d fought and vanquished.

  This wasn’t the life Ronin wanted. It had never been. He’d never been drawn to the money, and now he had more than he knew what to do with. He hadn’t needed violence to get his adrenaline fix; Iraq had cured him of that. What adrenaline he needed, he had stunt bikes for his fix.

  He’d voted against the move to the dark. He’d watched greed and violence take down his first club, kill a host of his first brothers, ruin the rest, and he’d wanted no more of the dark life. The Horde before they’d known La Zorra—that was the family he’d belonged in.

  But he was loyal. When he loved, he loved for life, and his brothers had voted to go into the dark. So he’d stood side by side with them and gone there.

  Now, their family was falling apart. He didn’t know what to do. He was tired. But he was loyal, and he loved these men. He’d made them a promise.

  But damn, he was tired.

  They all were; he could see it in their drawn faces, their downcast eyes. Their bond to each other was breaking; maybe it had already broken. Maybe losing Hoosier was more than they could withstand.

  Connor was the first to finally speak. He looked across the table at their Vice President and said, in a voice flattened by sorrow and weariness, “You should take the gavel, Bart. Start this meeting.”

  Ronin didn’t think anyone at the table would object to Bart stepping into the President’s role—not the seat yet, that black drape would stay where it was until after Hoosier was buried, but the position. He’d been their VP since the charter’s inception, and he’d led them well when Hoosier had been unable. Ronin thought a vote would be little more than a formality; Bart would need only to name his officers.

  But Bart shook his head. “I’ll run this meeting. We need to work out details for Hooj’s rest. But I won’t take the gavel. I don’t want it, and I won’t take it. I don’t even want VP anymore. Somebody else needs to come up for the seat and name new officers. Connor, it should be you.”

  “We need to figure out who the fuck we are first,” Muse interjected. “Last couple of months, everything’s blown the fuck up. I don’t know what this club is anymore.”

  Ronin turned and considered Muse, sitting at his side. Hearing Muse’s words voice his own thoughts had an unexpected calming effect on the torrent whirling in Ronin’s head.

  “We’re a family,” Connor’s voice was so low and rough it was a growl. “That was more important than anything else to my dad. We are his family.”

  “Are we?” J.R. asked. His tone held no malice or even much challenge. He seemed honestly curious. But then he kept going, and his tone sharpened. “We haven’t all been working in the same direction for almost a year. We’ve been at each other at least that long. Trick bailed on the work, now Bart’s bailing on keeping his seat. Seems like nobody wants in this family anymore.”

  “Fuck you, you son of a bitch,” Connor snarled. “You want out, there’s the door. You’re worst of any of us, sniping over little shit, picking fights over nothing, sitting right here and counting every fucking penny, measuring it against your brothers. You’re in it for yourself and always have been.”

  “That’s bullshit. I take care of everybody here. Of your families, too. I’ve sewn up every body in this room and more outside it. You need me, you call me, you get me. Do I want to get paid? Damn straight, I do. We put our families at risk for that take. We bleed for that take. I get up to my elbows in your blood for that take. I want my fucking share. If you don’t like me saying so, you can suck my big black dick.”

  Connor stood, his chair rocketing back and slamming into the wall behind him. J.R., much smaller, stood, too.

  Trick slammed his fist on the table. “SIT THE FUCK DOWN! ENOUGH!”

  Trick was a quiet, thoughtful man. He’d shocked the whole club by hitting the table. His shouting drove Connor and J.R. back to their seats.

  When the room was quiet again, Trick, speaking calmly, in his normal tone of voice, said, “Muse asked a good question, and I think we need an answer. Who are we now? Without Dora, we don’t have a partner for most of the business we did. Without Zapata, we don’t have an enemy.” He looked at Sherlock. “Do we?”

  Ronin shifted his eyes across the table and focused on the Intelligence Officer. Sherlock sat forward, his normally furrowed brow drawn even more tightly. “I think we have an out right now, if we want it. La Zorra and Zapata both dead, and most of their closest associates, too—it’s left a massive vacuum. All the power she’d amassed? It’s like a star went supernova in the middle of Mexico. The work she did is undone, and it’s the Wild West down there again, but nobody’s looking our way. We took out Zapata. Nobody wants to fuck with us. They’re fighting each other, jockeying to redraw boundaries La Zorra had erased. Plus, they need to rebuild what she’d laid to waste. If we use this time to clean our own house, then I think we can go legit again. If that’s what we want.”

  “And when they get their boundaries drawn and start looking to move product north again, you think they won’t look our way?” Fargo asked.

  “They might. That’s years down the line, though. At least a couple. They’ll probably be glad we’re out of the game. And if they want us in, we can say no.”

  Demon shook his head. “We tried to say no to La Zorra.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Sherlock corrected. “We knew there’d be a risk saying no, so we voted to say yes. We didn’t take the risk. We took a different risk. And now we know how much. And”—Sherlock scanned the table, his eyes narrow, as if he were calculating something, or trying to recollect something—“there are only three men sitting at this table today who voted aye: Connor, Muse, and me. Five men here voted no: Roe, Trick, Demon, Bart, and J.R. And three men here weren’t members when we made that vote. This is a different club.”

  “Four men who voted aye are dead: P.B., Lakota, Diaz, and Hooj,” Bart said, speaking for the first time since he’d refused the gavel. “Connor—where’s your mind on this?”

  Ronin knew what Bart was doing, and he was acutely interested. Listening to the fractious discussion around him, he’d realized two things: first, that the club wasn’t broken, not yet. Even while they fought and gnashed teeth, they were all thinking in the same direction—toward a club future; and second, that Connor would be, should be President, and that his answer to the question Bart had posed could help Ronin understand what his own next move might be.

  For several heavy moments, Connor stared at the table before him. Then he heaved a ponderous sigh and looked up at his brothers. “We took the wrong risk. It cost us too much. Almost everything. Sherlock’s right. We were a different club then. Most of us have women and children now. There’s so many babies around, the Hall smells like fucking diaper cream half the time.”

  A light rumble of laughter greeted that statement, but his voice cracked on the last word, and he stopped, and the laughter stopped with him. They waited until he could speak again.

  “I want that, too. Kids of my own. But I’m not gonna get it while we do this work. I wanted my dad to be the grandpa to my own kids that he was to all of yours, and that’s not gonna happen. Because he died saving me. His plan saved us and killed him. He went out saving us.” His voice broke again, and he cleared his throat. He took a second, then continued. “Sherlock’s right. We are different now. I think all the shit we’ve been going through and the fighting we’ve been doing with each other—all of that was us not realizing that we’re different. I think we need out—and we need to stay out. Our family is more than just us. We have people we need to be home for. We need to have their backs, too.” He looked across the table and met Bart’s eyes. “And we’ve been letting them down. For what it’s worth, I think we need to take this chance and get clean
. Because we are still a family, and we need to look around and see that. We need to take care of our family. As it is.”

  Bart nodded. “I move that Connor takes his father’s seat.”

  “Second,” Ronin said. Several brothers turned, surprised, as usual, to hear his voice. Ronin was surprised himself. When he’d sat down in the Keep for this meeting, he’d been more than half decided that it was time to give up his kutte. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

  “Discussion?” Bart asked.

  “Who’re your officers, Con?” J.R. asked.

  Connor didn’t hesitate at all when he said, “Trick, VP.”

  Trick, however, spun his head, making his long hair fly around his shoulders. “Con, hold up.”

  “No, T. It’s got to be you. I didn’t think it was my time, but if it is, then I need you at my side. Always have. Salt to my pepper.”

  Trick smiled. “More like ice to your fire.”

  “That, too. C’mon. Have my back.” His eyes took on an extra depth of sad need. “Please.”

  Trick stared at Connor for a few seconds, then scanned the table. When he met Ronin’s gaze, Ronin nodded. It was the right call—those two were a solid team. They understood each other intuitively and provided strength to fill in each other’s weaknesses. And Trick was right—he was calm and thoughtful, while Connor was fierce and physical. Connor would need someone he trusted completely to bank his fire.

  When Trick turned again to his best friend, he said, “We have to stay straight, Con. You’re right—we have people to be home for. Our family is different from what it was. We have to give up the coin and the rush and stay straight. I need your promise.”

  “You’ve got it,” Connor answered. “I promise. To the extent I can control it, I won’t take us dark. But this is a democracy, so I can’t guarantee the club won’t vote to go dark again.”

  “We won’t,” Muse said. “The money turned my head, too. I thought I needed it to take care of my family. But I’ve got myself a fucking ulcer now because since we’ve started, I haven’t had a single fucking second when I’m not eating myself up worried about my family getting hurt. No amount of money is worth putting our own innocents at risk like we do. I think we all know that now.”

  “Do we?” Demon asked. He turned to the youngest patches, all single, all sitting in a row: Fargo, Keanu, Big Nate. “Brothers, you don’t have ladies or little ones to worry about yet. Are you good with your envelopes getting thin?”

  Ronin gave Demon a bit of a smile. He was impressed. Demon didn’t speak often in the Keep—more than Ronin, but he tended to sit back and listen like him. In the past, with his penchant for outbursts of violence, he’d struck Ronin as immature and unpredictable. But he’d grown into a steady, reliable, thoughtful patch.

  Fargo answered first. “I know I’m a pussy to say it, but I’m scared all the time, the way things have been. I got Diaz killed because I’m so fucking scared when I’m on a run. Too scared to think. I’ll do what you need me to do, and I’ll try to do it good, but I’d be okay just doing the bike rental shit with Muse. I like that.”

  “You’re not a pussy, bro,” J.R. said, patting the young patch’s back. “When the bullets are flying, we’re all scared. Life or death, man. It wears you down.”

  “I could live without gettin’ shot again,” Keanu offered. “That was, whoa, too fuckin’ real, you know?”

  The table rumbled a laugh again.

  “I just want to work on bikes,” Big Nate mumbled.

  Muse turned back to Connor. “Like I said, Con. We won’t vote to go dark again.”

  “Then I’m in,” Trick said.

  Connor clapped his hand over Trick’s shoulder. “Thank you, my brother.” He cast his eyes down the table. “Muse—you’re my SAA.”

  Muse held Connor’s gaze for several beats, then nodded.

  “And Sherlock, you stay where you are. IO and PR.”

  Sherlock nodded. “You bet.”

  “Connor, Trick, Muse, Sherlock. That’s your leadership if you vote aye for Con to take the gavel. Further discussion?”

  Ronin’s ears perked up at Bart’s use of the words ‘your’ and ‘you,’ but he set that aside for consideration at another time. He’d picked up a few clues that suggested Bart was contemplating the weight of his own kutte. And rightly so; he’d suffered an incomprehensible loss, and the fault sat squarely on this table they were all sitting around.

  “Call it,” Sherlock said.

  With a curt nod, Bart said, “On Connor becoming the second President of the Night Horde Motorcycle Club, Southern California charter, what say you?”

  The vote was unanimous.

  ~oOo~

  Mere weeks after they’d buried Bart’s wife, not even six months after they’d buried Diaz, the Night Horde SoCal buried Hoosier, their first President.

  Hoosier had a long club history, with friends and brothers all over the world. Hundreds of bikers and their ladies attended; the turnout was, to Ronin’s eye, even bigger than Riley’s—and almost exclusively composed of people in the life. That many bikers couldn’t come together, even for a somber event such as this, without it turning into a party.

  And Hoosier would’ve wanted that. He’d have had no patience for a bunch of crusty old bikers crying into their whiskey. He’d gone out fighting. Saving his son, saving his club, saving his family. He’d have wanted his life celebrated, not his death mourned.

  Bibi was…Bibi. She refused to give over hosting duties to the other old ladies, so people had trouble slowing her down to pay their respects. Ronin suspected that that was part of her plan. She kept moving, kept busy, kept being Bibi, taking care of everyone and ducking away from people trying to take care of her. Ronin heard some chatter among the women about how to get her to slow down, but he didn’t think they’d be successful, and he didn’t think they should. When Bibi slowed down, she’d have to confront her future without Hoosier, and they’d been together a very long time. She shouldn’t be surrounded by hundreds of people when she slammed into that brick wall.

  Connor was stoic, too, and he seemed to have decided that the best way to take care of his mother was to be the focus of their mourners’ attention. He worked the room, Pilar at his side all the time, accepting condolences, listening to stories about his father, telling his own, staying strong.

  But a couple of times, Ronin caught sight of him down at the end of the dorm corridor, leaning alone against the wall, his head down. The picture of loss and grief.

  Despite the full-to-bursting clubhouse, a couple key faces were missing. Isaac Lunden, who’d ridden west with his old lady for Riley’s funeral, hadn’t been strong enough to make another four-thousand-mile round trip ride so soon thereafter. He’d been badly hurt years ago and had lived with pain since. Most of the rest of the Night Horde mother charter had arrived, however. They’d been putting a lot of miles on their bikes the past few years, riding west again and again to help SoCal bury their own.

  The President of the Night Horde Montana charter, K.T., had been injured in an earlier Zapata attack and wasn’t riding yet. Otherwise, though, Ronin saw just about every living person he knew, and many more he didn’t. It served as a reminder that there really was deep good in this life, even when it was dark. The brotherhood was real, the love was true, and the bond couldn’t be broken lightly.

  Yet Ronin still wasn’t sure there was a place for him in it. The club was different; both Sherlock and Connor were right about that. But as their wounds of body and spirit healed, as they voted in a new leadership and closed the gaps between them, Ronin noticed something new. Or not new, simply newly noticed. Connor’s Horde was young. Very young.

  Maybe it had been Hoosier’s presence at the head that had masked the full import before—a club run by a man in his seventies couldn’t truly be a young club—but now, Ronin really saw and felt that he was too old for his brothers.

  Muse, a decade younger than Ronin, was next oldest. Bart was a few years younger than Mu
se. The youngest patch was Big Nate, who’d just turned twenty-one. All the other patches were between twenty-five and forty. With the exception of Connor, and Ronin himself, they all had young children—or were so young themselves they hadn’t started families yet.

  This new, clean club wouldn’t need his blades. He didn’t work on bikes at Virtuoso. He coordinated with Muse or J.R. on certain stunt jobs, but most of his stunt work came independent of the club.

  Where was his place in this club?

  He’d never been completely in step with his Horde brothers. He’d always kept to the sidelines; his hard-partying days had been behind him long before he’d moved to Madrone. He hadn’t felt that as a lack before, though. Simply a difference.