Xander swung his leg over the side of the bike and slipped his helmet off, hanging it off the edge of the handlebar. The other men who rode into the desert with him that morning to pick up the goods were already inside the Immortal Souls’ lounge, probably drinking in celebration. As usual, Xander planned to drink away the feeling of restlessness that plagued him. He wanted to get on his bike, ride away for hours and days until the sand whipped his face raw and he didn’t even look like himself. So why don’t you do it? Why don’t you just go ahead and do it if you’re so fucking sick of this place? His inner voice pestered him like it did at least once a day. Maybe that’s why he drank so much—just to get it to shut up.
On his way into the lounge, he bumped shoulders with someone almost painfully hard. “Ay, watch it!” he shouted.
“Oh, yes, of course, Your Highness,” the other man retorted sarcastically. Oh, great, it was Roger. That fucking bastard.
Roger had been in the organization for five years now. He was an adoptee, someone accepted in rather than born into it through family lines. Even so, he acted like he’d been in his whole life, bossing around the boys like he’d been voted president. Most of the other boys feared Xander and shied away from any kind of confrontation, but not Roger. For now, Xander just scowled at him and kept walking. Maybe later I’ll teach him a thing or two about the Immortal Souls.
Xander went through the lounge, nodding in acknowledgement to the young bucks Ezra and Collin on his way out to the back stairway. He took the steps two at a time up to his apartment in the loft.
He walked in, tossing his backpack on the floor and marching over to his kitchen to grab a cold beer before he heard a throat being cleared.
There, on his fucking sofa, sat Uncle Jerry and a tall, leggy woman he’d never seen before.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he barked at his uncle. Sure, Jerry probably had a key to every room in the building, but he’d never barged in without asking before.
“Sit down, Xander. We need to talk.”
“And who the fuck is this?” Xander yelled, gesturing at the beautiful woman on his couch.
The woman got to her feet, straightening her short dark dress so less of her toned thighs showed. “I apologize, of course. It was rude to come in without introducing myself first. Olivia Brennan.”
She offered her hand for Xander to take, but he just stared at it, then looked back at his uncle. “Who. The fuck. Is this?” he repeated.
Uncle Jerry cleared his throat again. “Last week, we discussed how to help you, remember?”
Realization dawned on Xander like a cold shower hitting him right in the face. “Jesus, fuck. I told you no, Jerry! I said no!”
“It’s perfectly normal to be resistant to the idea at first,” Olivia spoke up. “But I assure you that we can reach some common ground and help you get to where you need to be.”
“Oh, what’s that? Patented parole psychobabble? Save it,” Xander said, going into his kitchen to get his drink. He definitely needed one now.
“Come on, Xander, we both know you’re unhappy. Why not try this, just once, to see if it works? She’s done a lot of—”
“Yeah, I’m sure she’s babysat a ton of felons, but I ain’t one of them,” Xander said, pouring himself a shot and downing it so fast he almost gagged. “You really think I want to be followed around and told what to do? I’m 29 fucking years old, Unc.”
“Then start acting like it,” Uncle Jerry shot back, his voice icy cold. “It’s time to stop the fighting and the fucking and whatever bullshit you get into around here. It’s time to be a fucking man. If you can’t do it on your own, I’ll help you get there, even if I have to drag you kicking and screaming the whole way. Now, sit down and talk to this dame before she has to go home.”
Xander poured himself another shot but just held it in his hands for the moment, too frustrated to drink. “You can’t force me to do anything, Uncle Jerry. Isn’t that what you want from me? To be a leader, to be strong? How can I do that if I just do whatever the fuck you want?”
“Xander—” Olivia attempted to cut in.
“Can it, lady!” Xander yelled before finally downing his drink. “You don’t know me. You don’t know what I need. You don’t know what I want. You can’t help me.”
Olivia leaned her head to one side, brows furrowed. “You’re right. I don’t know what you need. But if we work together, we can figure it out.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Xander said. “Sorry, Jerry. I know you must have paid a shit ton of money to get her here, but there’s no fucking way anyone’s going to be following me around, let alone a fucking cop.”
“Xander!” Jerry protested, but Xander marched past him, back toward the stairs, running down into the main level of the clubhouse.
That fucking asshole. Who the fuck did he think he was, going behind his back after Xander already told him no? He wasn’t going to be anyone’s pet project, let alone some woman who worked for the police. Nobody can force me to do any—
A pair of wide, strong hands pushed against his back and slammed him into the wall next to the stairs, just out of sight of the partying club members in the neighboring room. Xander bit hard onto his tongue through the impact, tasting blood. He swallowed the thick and coppery fluid and turned around to face his assailant: an incensed Uncle Jerry, breathing like he’d just run a marathon.
“I will fucking tear you limb from limb, boy,” Uncle Jerry growled, shoving Xander back into the brick wall, hard. As tough as Xander was, as many fights as he’d won over the past few years, there was still a part of him that feared his uncle.
The other part of him wanted to bite back his fear and growl at him, tell him to fucking try it, knock his skull back into the wall until Xander bled.
But he looked down into his uncle’s eyes and felt himself start to tremble at what he saw there. No, it wasn’t just the fact that he was serious about beating him to a pulp, though Xander could plainly see that in his uncle’s gaze. It was the terror there, the desperation. His uncle clearly wanted this more than Xander had ever known him to want anything.
“What’s it gonna be, Xander?” Uncle Jerry grunted, tightening a hand around Xander’s throat.
Xander just shrugged. “I don’t know, Jer.”
“Well, I do,” Jerry insisted, toughening his grip on Xander’s neck. “You better talk to her, at least once, or I will never speak to you again. You got that? Ever.”
Xander sighed. If he wanted to, he could flex out of his uncle’s grasp and just gun it out of the clubhouse. Maybe it would be a good thing, leaving this all behind. Maybe Xander could finally be happy.
But his uncle’s face was so raw and open. Angry yet so vulnerable, so breakable. If Xander walked out now, would it kill the old man? Would there be another person he loved, dead because of him?
Xander shrugged, feigning indifference. “Fine. One time, if it’ll get you off my back. But you gotta promise to stop nagging my ass day and night. Okay, Jer?”
Uncle Jerry relaxed his grip, keeping one hand on Xander’s shoulder. “Okay, Xander. Okay. Now get on up there and talk to her.”
“Tomorrow, okay?” Xander suggested, stepping out of Jerry’s half-embrace. “I need to do stuff today, all right? Tomorrow, I’ll talk to her. Just not tonight.”
“Xander,” Jerry said in a warning tone of voice.
“I promise, okay? You have my word. On Ma’s grave, I swear it. I’ll talk to her. Once.”
Uncle Jerry chewed on his bottom lip for a moment. “How about on Marta’s? Can you promise me that? On Marta’s grave?”
Xander cleared his throat and nodded.
“I need you to say it, Xander,” his uncle prompted.
“Okay, okay. I swear, on Marta’s grave, that I’ll give it a try. Happy?”
Uncle Jerry sighed deeply, nodded, and gave Xander space to walk past. “Thank you, Xander. You’re a good boy. You’ve always been a good boy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Xander huffed, walking through the lounge at breakneck speed, ignoring the catcalls from the group of club ladies huddled around the bar.
On his way out the door, who else should he run into again but fucking Roger. Roger, with his stupidly over-decorated jacket and his dumb wide grin. “Gee, sorry, boss!” Roger said in that same sarcastic tone, rubbing his own shoulder as if Xander had hit him too hard.
“Shut up,” Xander grunted, trying to step around Roger and get to his bike.
But Roger stepped in front of him, getting too close to his face. “You know, the old man is getting rickety. Almost fell off the bike today on an arms run. Did he tell you?”
Xander just stared at him. What the fuck was the point of this?
“Seems like it’s time for somebody else to step in, you know? Lead the boys. Uncle Jerry can’t do it forever.”
“He’s not your uncle,” Xander spat out, hoping Roger would get the underlying implication. The club’s not yours, punk. It never will be. Roger was thirsting for that leadership spot like he was starving to death in the desert. It was obvious to everyone with half a brain inside the group. It made Xander sick to see how fucking desperate he was.
“You’re right, he’s not,” Roger agreed, that silly-looking grin spreading across his scarred face. “But blood ain’t everything. Guess you’re proof of that.”
“You wanna fucking go, punk?” Xander spat, feeling his muscles tense up, ready for action.
“Oh, I’ll go wherever, whenever. Fucking count on it,” Roger promised, his smile slipping off his face as he straightened up.
Xander smirked, mean and dangerous, before raising his fist to slam into Roger’s face.
***
Olivia sat alone in Xander’s apartment, awkwardly tapping her feet on the floor and fidgeting with the fabric of her dress. Well, that didn’t go very well.
Honestly, she’d had worse first meetings, especially with felons showing up to their first check-in with her after release. Even on some of her life coaching jobs, a lot of young kids were rebellious at first, running out of the meeting like they were being punished.
I guess he is being punished, Olivia thought. She briefly fretted about the ethics of what she was doing. She worked with criminals all the time, but her felons had already been put through the system and paid time for their crimes. And it wasn’t like Xander was being punished for his drug running. The whole point of this was to make him even better at it.
But she had taken the money without even blinking. Without pausing to think for a single second about it. What did that say about her?
Before she could berate herself any further about the situation, Jerry walked back up the steps, much slower than he had bolted down them. “So. Tomorrow. He says he’ll speak to you then.” He sat down next to her and cradled one of his knees in his hands, wincing slightly.
Olivia stared at his legs, trying to imagine the types of aches and pains that elderly MC members felt as they developed arthritis. “Tomorrow works. I’m surprised he came around so quickly.”
“Yeah. That’s a good sign, right?” Jerry asked, turning to her with hope in his eyes.
She opened her mouth to respond, but she was interrupted by loud noises rumbling from the far right corner of the room, coming in from the open window. Jerry clearly heard them, too, as he got up from his seat and walked over to the window. Olivia stood up and followed him, flinching a little as Jerry cursed under his breath.
“God fucking dammit,” Jerry muttered. “That little fucking prick.”
She leaned over Jerry’s shoulder and peered out of the window, looking down onto the front of the Immortal Souls’ clubhouse.
Two men were fighting, one of them completely dominating the other one, bending him over a bike and slamming his head into the metal. “Wanna talk about blood now, you fucking asshole? Huh? How’s your blood taste now?”
It was Xander’s voice, Olivia realized, and she blinked her eyes several times to focus them more clearly on his body, how he moved in combat, like an animal fighting for his life with every punch and kick. “Well,” she said, more to herself than to Jerry, who was still cursing at his nephew and flexing his fists on the window screen. “This should be interesting.”