by BT Urruela
Copyright © 2019 BT URRUELA & CD BRADLEY
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Photographer/Cover Designer: Furious Fotog
Editors: All About the Edits and ProofingStyle
Promotion: Lucky 13 Book Reviews and News and CJG Consulting
Formatter: Epistula Publishing
For a few of our inspirations, whose passion, charisma, strength and quirks helped mold many of our characters: Golden Czermak, SD Hildreth, Christopher Harlan, Joe Adams, Charlie Day, and the man who brought this story to life, Shaun Smith.
For the dear readers who support our work … We love you!
Trigger Warning:
This book is fucked up in just about every way imaginable.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Prologue
Dimitri King’s mother was a Soviet figure skater. A woman of unparalleled beauty, who carried a natural grace on the ice as much as she did on the streets in her hometown of Magadan. During her first and only Olympics run—the 1980 Lake Placid games—Natasha Mishkin made a man named Jameson King fall head over heels for her from his seat at center ice.
Jameson wasn’t even supposed to be there. He and his best friend made the trip to New York to watch what would become the Miracle on Ice and they had no plans to catch anything else. Twenty years earlier, Jameson’s father had taken him to Squaw Valley, California as a birthday present where, as a ten-year-old boy, he watched the U.S. hockey team win their first ever Olympic gold. The memory was one he always held on to. He was enamored by the utter enthusiasm his father showed beside him—a childlike glee, by the crazy ebb and flow of the game, and the way thousands were left on the edges of their seats, biting their fingernails one moment and cheering their heads off the next. The joyful celebration after the win, with high fives and tears, and the steak dinner with his father before they made their way back to the hotel, the broad smile never leaving his old man’s face … it was the pinnacle of his young life.
So, when his best friend in the world surprised him with the trip to Lake Placid in memory of Jameson’s late father, he felt compelled to go along with whatever the man wanted. And the man wanted to watch figure skating.
There Jameson was, bored out of his mind, watching the skaters do their routines and throwing a few jokes his friend’s way for being so enamored by them all. But when Natasha hit the ice, he had no more words, no more wisecracks … he could barely catch his breath. He could only watch her make the music come alive like he had never thought possible.
A hard man turned to mush, right before his friend’s very eyes.
Natasha hadn’t seen Jameson at first. How could she from the ice? She had gotten used to blurring out the spectators’ faces. Thousands of sets of eyeballs turned to stars on the blackest night. No faces. No expressions. Just her and her skates against the ice, the scrape of steel against the smooth surface. To the tune “Apparition De Myrthe: Dance of the Wilis,” she did what she had done a million times before, her routine practiced obsessively, over and over and over again, at the behest of her father and coach. If he could even be considered a father. Maybe by seed alone, but he was never the kind of father her friends had. They were kind and open-minded. Nurturing and protective. Her father knew only order and discipline. And he instilled them with an iron fist as much at home as he did at the rink.
She had been happy when her mother died, not because she hated her—she was apathetic, if anything—but because the end was so much better than a future with him. He was no more nurturing to his wife than he was to Natasha, and his fists were worn from her much the same.
He finally joined her mother in the grave just before the 1980 Olympics. Two months before, to be exact. And Natasha remembered most the need to smile at his funeral, overwhelmed by the sense of complete relief, and how hard it was to remain composed. She felt a weight lifted. She wanted to rejoice, not mourn.
How odd it was for her then, when she hit the ice in Lake Placid and still heard her father yelling from the bench, the only face she could ever make out against the darkness and the sets of star-like, spinning eyeballs. She could see him standing straight, his hands against his hips and his face in a snarl.
“You’re not focusing, Natasha!” he bellowed just before her first triple axel.
She saw him throw his arms up in a rage.
“What kind of landing was that?” he hissed.
She felt good, felt like she’d landed it perfectly, as she had so many times before. But then she heard him again, his disapproving voice rooting its way inside her brain.
“Worthless, untalented disappointment.”
Even so, she felt freest on the ice. It was the sense of power that controlling the crowd gave her. He mattered no more in those moments. He was just one of them, watching her do what she did best.
He mattered no more.
It struck her then, in the midst of her camel spin, the eyeballs becoming stars once more, fleeting into oblivion, he did still matter, and he always would. Dead or not, he’d be there, like a parasite ready to devour.
And devour he did.
She had skated out of the camel spin and set up for a jump combination when she saw him there, standing on the ice with his arms crossed, his eyes red, his mouth in a wicked grin. The stars behind her father’s hideous gaze became eyeballs again, and against the blackness, there were thousands of glowing fangs set beneath them, gnashing at her.
She panicked, landing awkwardly on her second jump and spilling on the ice as she never had in competition before.
There came a silence then as she tilted her head slowly, seeing for herself her father wasn’t really there. Just her and the hard ice, numbing her face. She didn’t hear the loud collective gasp from the crowd, didn’t see any of them with their mouths gaped and hands to their cheeks. She didn’t care to move a damn muscle.
She just laughed, loudly, maniacally.
She had failed, terribly, on the sport’s biggest stage, and yet, she felt the anxiety wither away. Then, a relief came over her … because there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing. She was free from the burden of another Olympics. Free from the incessant training. Free to live her life selfishly for once.
Free.
Jameson King didn’t see failure then. He didn’t see Natasha’s ugly past, or the monsters that haunted her. He saw only beauty. He saw a woman who was doing what God made her to do, and she was doing it more exquisitely than he ever thought possible. He was possessed by the way she moved so freely. He saw the pain she carried, her wounds nearly visible, and he wanted to mend
them.
And then she fell, and all he wanted to do was run down there, pick her up from the ice, and care for her. He had no idea where that feeling came from. He never felt things like that before. Never worried about women or their needs. Never pined or obsessed. It wasn’t because he was some misogynist, he simply never engaged with them. He hadn’t the time.
But she was different. She demanded his time and attention.
He did make his way to the bench that night, and he asked the beautiful Russian woman he would marry six months later if she was okay.
Jameson King grew up the only son of the founder of a motorcycle club, made up of the hardest hitters and sickest individuals you’d ever care to meet. Natasha could hardly believe her eyes when she looked upon the well-dressed man with the tattoos, muscles, and dangerous deep-set eyes, could hardly believe he was watching her routine. In a moment, the pain of the fall was gone.
Jameson was dangerous. He made a name for himself in the St. Louis underworld after taking over for his father, Gregor King, who founded the South Side Sinners back in ’59, once the Army was done with him, and he’d had enough of working in factories for shitty pay. He wanted to give his family the life he never had.
St. Louis City was a real shithole back then, filled with shadowed alleys where few had the balls to wander, and even fewer possessed the reputation, respect, and fear it took to bring order like Gregor did. He said little about his time in Korea, but people could see it in his eyes; in the scars that etched his face and chest. And when they forgot, he was quick to remind them just how damaged he was.
Even though Jameson was his son, Gregor never believed in nepotism. He made Jameson earn his stripes through blood, like the rest of them. Jameson wasn’t always comfortable with all the violence and the killing—after all, he was only eighteen when his father brought him into the world—but he grew to appreciate it over time, and how it quieted his busy mind.
And to make his father proud, of course.
That was all he ever wanted, and something he’d never quite get. His father changed after the club started really making moves, and Jameson was left with only the memories from his youth, before the club took his father’s attention completely. When Gregor eventually died of an unexpected heart attack in 1971, with St. Louis City as unruly as it ever was, a young Jameson was pushed into his father’s role. Before long, he found himself becoming just like him. As tough as he ran his club, Jameson was not the same man on the streets as his wife Natasha got back home. They shared a once-in-a-lifetime bond. A mutual respect, love, and admiration for each other that they knew was something rare. Something not many ever found.
He often felt the weight of his love for her become a detriment to his responsibilities as the president of 3SMC. All the violence and bloodshed, all the risk, it stopped mattering so much. She was all that mattered to him then; wasting time with her, his only wish. But he couldn’t. He had a responsibility and knew the importance of carrying on the legacy of his father. He would never forgive himself if he let it all fall apart.
As real quarreling began within the club, the MC’s stronghold on the city deteriorated. It wasn’t so much due to Jameson’s leadership, or his softening heart, but an all-out gang war that erupted just north of the city.
The East Enders, Delmar Disciples, and a few other smaller sects ran the streets, stealing business from each other, and killing over it too. The city quickly became one of the most dangerous places in the country. Jameson fought to clean up his territory through a focus on harmony with the inner city gangs, essentially paying them to stay in their own lane, and to keep the violence out of the South Side. For the most part, it worked. In doing so, he provided a semi-stable life for the woman he loved. He cherished Natasha and knew what she yearned for most was a baby. To be a mother. The kind she always wished she had. They fought for years to conceive, and he watched as a little piece of Natasha died with each negative pregnancy test, and each miscarriage—three in total. He died right along with her, wanting only to make her happy, to give her what she so desperately desired.
Then, the fourth pregnancy came, against the doctor’s wishes, but that time, it took. Dimitri Antoni King entered the world on the morning of December 27, 1988, a healthy eight pounds, three ounces.
Natasha King died a few minutes later, just as the blood was being frantically hooked up to her line, just as Jameson dropped to his knees and screamed out to his god … just as the newborn baby’s cries rang out from the nurse’s arms. His cries.
One
Dimitri never knew his mother.
He barely knew his father.
At the time, he hardly knew himself.
“Yo, you good, D?” Victor “Knuckles” Gomez’s voice carried in the small room, which was concrete on all sides, and suffocating. Knuckles was a burly man, born and raised on the streets of Chicago—White Sox country, not those shitty Cubs—who was usually unnecessarily loud wherever he went. Confined to that ten-by-ten kill room though, in the basement of a secluded house in Jefferson County, it became deafening. His thick black hair was matted from sweat as he had just spent the better part of thirty minutes beating the man beside them half to death, the one duct taped to a chair with a rag in his mouth.
Dimitri stood frozen, the phone still tight to his ear, the words still circling his brain. There was no one on the other end, they had already hung up. Just a dial tone rang out, news already delivered, but he couldn’t seem to lower his arm. Couldn’t seem to comprehend what he’d just heard. Couldn’t do much of anything.
His eyes drifted to Knuckles but he said nothing, his mouth open, the words stuck at the back of his throat.
Knuckles removed a KA-BAR from their latest victim’s throat, a bookie caught skimming off the top. The man groaned through the rag as he wriggled helplessly. Bookie-ing wasn’t huge business for the Sinners by 2011, not anywhere near where it was when they started, but it kept them busy enough still.
Though, usually it wasn’t the bookies they were killing.
“What’s up, man?” Knuckles asked, concern wrinkling his thick brow as he stowed the knife in a scabbard on his thigh.
“Dad’s dead,” Dimitri muttered. His voice cracked, his face paled, and the words shocked him again, as if he had just heard them from the doctor for the first time. “He’s dead,” he repeated, the phone finally falling to his side, his eyes lost on the filthy concrete wall, stained with the blood of many men.
Knuckles stepped closer. “What?” His voice hitched, his emerald eyes shooting wide. “What the fuck happened?”
“Motorcycle wreck off Delmar,” Dimitri said mindlessly. “Some trucker hit him at an intersection.” He pinched his eyelids closed and shook his head, fighting the feelings away, the despair of his loss, and the desire to choke it out with a stiff drink. “Fuck!” he yelled, throwing the phone against the concrete wall, shattering it into pieces.
Knuckles flinched away from the plastic shrapnel before moving in closer. “Are they sure he’s gone? Where’s he at?” he asked, setting a hand to his best friend’s shoulder, though he knew it would do little to calm him. Not much could when Dimitri’s mind overwhelmed him, when shit hit the fan.
“Barnes Emergency. He’s already been pronounced.” Dimitri shook his head again, running his hands through his clean-cut, brown hair, in stark contrast to his bushy beard, and then rubbed his tired eyes. “I can’t fucking deal with this, bro. Not right now.”
“I’m sorry, man.” Knuckles squeezed his best friend’s shoulder, looked at the man duct taped to the chair, then back toward Dimitri. “We should probably get you to the hospital, huh?”
Dimitri nodded, dropping his hands slowly, tears welling in his eyes—more from the rage than from the hurt—and he eventually looked at the bookie, cocking his head. “We’ll finish him off first though. Dad would’ve wanted it that way.”
Two
“What the fuck are we gonna do here?” Dimitri asked the man who had practically ra
ised him, later that evening.
After moving up from Georgia as a young man, Richard “Preach” Pritchard spent his twenties collecting and enforcing alongside Jameson, under Gregor’s guidance. He showed the years and the wear on his face in thick wrinkles and sunken eyes. He was still handsome, but weathered, like Sam Elliot, and was the brother Jameson never had. When Natasha died and Jameson lost his shit, Preach was there to pick up the pieces the best he could, with both the club and the boy without a mother.
Preach shook his head, leaning back in his recliner and taking a contemplative look at the ceiling. For the first time in his life, he was speechless. He had mentally prepared for Jameson’s death for years, but it still rattled him all the same; the choking realization his death may just bring the downfall of the club they both spent their whole lives building and protecting.
Preach shook his head again, frustrated by the helpless feeling. “No idea, kid, but that’s not what you gotta worry about right now. Your father just died.” He felt stupid for even saying it. As if Dimitri wasn’t aware.
“And your best friend. So?” Dimitri raised his palms and shrugged. “You and I both know he’s been dead for years. What he wouldn’t want is for us to drop the ball here and let a guy like Robbie find his way to the top. This patch meant everything to him, Preach.” He jabbed a thumb behind his back, toward the 3SMC patch adorning his leather vest.