I was the last person to hobble into our meeting at headquarters, and I was already kind of exhausted when I finally make it there. I never really realized how many flights of stairs the place had or how big it was. Then again, I never knew that just walking somewhere would really take it out of me like this.
“You're looking like shit, boss,” Bryce said as I collapsed into my usual chair next to him. He was grinning teasingly, but I wondered how I must look to all of them. Weak, probably. Pathetic.
My eyes found Max's, and I could see something, some confirmation, there in that little smirk of his. And shit, I just wanted to kill the fucker. To whip out a gun and put a bullet right there between those smug-looking eyes. He wouldn't even see it coming. I wondered if he knew that I knew he was behind Frank's death. I wondered if he realized that his own death would be coming shortly, at my hands.
But if he knew anything, it didn't show on his face, and as stupid as the man was, I bet I would know it the second he realized something was up.
I suddenly realized everyone was staring at me, and it took me a moment to figure out why. “Oh,” I said, clearing my throat a little. “I guess I, uh, call this meeting to order.”
I was embarrassed at that start to my leadership, but I could see a few smiles around the table, mostly from the older guys. They were probably imagining what I must be going through right now, or thinking about what they would have been like as leaders of one of the top motorcycle clubs in the area at my young age. It was only the younger ones who saw it as a sign of my weakness and uncertainty, who saw it as a chink in the armor.
“Look, if this is another meeting about your fiancée and your kid—” Max started, that familiar sneer on his face.
“Actually, this meeting's about you, Max,” I told him, giving him a fierce scowl. And for a moment — just for a moment — I could see a little flicker of hesitation on his face.
But then he was back to his usual, flippant self. “Oh really?” he said. He looked around the table, grinning. “What, you've finally decided to go along with my birthright rather than going along with what Frank said in his delusion? You're going to make me leader of the Devil's Route?”
It was my turn to sneer at him. “Far from it,” I told him. “Instead, I plan to expose you for the lying snake that you are.”
“Oh really?” Max said, but again, I could sense that hesitation, that uncertainty.
I looked around the table, making sure that I made eye contact with everyone who mattered. “I'm sure it goes without saying that we'd all like to find Frank's killer and murder the man,” I said, and I was happy to see a number of nods around the table. “Well, Max may not be the one who pulled the trigger in the end, but you can believe that he played a key part in the man's death. Emilio says Max was the one who ordered the hit.”
A murmur rose up from the table, and I let everyone talk things out for a moment. I didn't want anyone to feel as though I was pressuring them into believing that Max was the culprit here, but with just a little time, I knew they'd be thinking back over all of Max's actions surrounding the raid and those events that had directly preceded it. They would draw the same conclusions that I had always had: that Max would truly stop at nothing to get the position that he really wanted, as leader of the Devil's Route MC.
“Emilio Alvarez tells me that he and Max have a sort of agreement,” I continued. “Where Max finally gets to be leader of the Devil's Route and they work in conjunction with the Holy Flames. The only problem with that plan, as it currently stands, is that I'm still alive. They didn't manage to kill me when they killed Frank, and here I am, a thorn in their sides.” I finally turned to face Max, whose face was white with either fear or anger but I couldn't tell which. Maybe it was a combination of the two.
“You have no proof of any of this,” Max hissed, practically spitting with rage. He looked around the group. “None of you believe this bullshit, do you? This is my father that we're talking about here! What kind of person would I be if I could callously have the man murdered?”
“A power-hungry, failure of a—” Bryce began, but I laid a hand on his arm.
“Look, Max,” I said, shaking my head. “Unlike you, I'm a fair man, and I don't believe in taking a man's life when he hasn't got the chance to look out and defend himself. You must realize that you're a sitting duck here in our headquarters. So, I'm going to ask you to leave. But rest assured, your death is already on its way, and it won't be pretty.”
There was silence in the room. Then, Mike began to clap his hands—and other men joined in, until half the room was applauding what I'd said.
“That's the way to deal with your enemies,” Tom said approvingly. “Give them fair warning and let them do whatever they can to defend themselves.” He gave Max a look. “We don't just have them gunned down by rival clubs.”
“Your own father,” someone else said, and there was a hum of agreement with that.
I was glad we were all on the same page.
I narrowed my eyes at Max as he started to protest. “Get out,” I told him. “Or else I will reconsider my position.”
Max stared at me for a long moment, challenging me with his eyes. But finally, faced with the fact that the majority of the room was on my side, regardless of what little evidence I had, he had no choice but to get up and walk out. I hated the way he kept his chin held high, as though he had any right to call himself a man after what he'd done. But I'd get back at him eventually.
I looked back to the table. “Right now, we have bigger problems to focus on than Max,” I told them all grimly. “As I'm sure you can infer, the Holy Flames are trying their damnedest to take over our motorcycle club.” I wasn't about to tell them the specifics of what Emilio had said to me in the hospital, but I needed to gauge their feelings about all of this, as well as hear if any of them had any sort of solutions that I might not have thought of.
“They've always been trying their damnedest to take over our motorcycle club,” Joe said, snorting a little. “They've just never been much good at it before.”
“Well, they're doing much better lately,” I said grimly. “Of course, Max had a hand in Frank's murder, but that doesn't mean it was solely up to him. As I said, he wasn't the one to pull the trigger.”
“They've been making serious forays into our territory too,” Bryce spoke up. He glanced around. “No one really wanted to tell you this while you were in the hospital because of course we all just wanted for you to heal up. You were pretty shaky there for a while. But they've totally choked off our connection with our arms supplier. We have no positive revenue at the moment.”
I groaned and shook my head. “That's worse than I'd thought,” I said. “Does anyone have any brilliant ideas for how we're going to counter them? Because that's the other part of this. A large reason why they're being so successful in encroaching on our territory at the moment is because we're being stupid. That raid? What the hell was that?”
“Hang on, now, I don't think it was a total loss,” one of the younger guys, Danny, one of Max's close friends, protested.
“Oh really?” I snapped, narrowing my eyes at him as I wondered just how close to Max he was, just what lengths he would go to to defend the other man. Didn't he realize that it was time to change alliances, when Max was clearly on the outs? But no. Max hadn't picked any of those men for their brains. They blundered along behind him because they honestly didn't know what else to do.
But I wasn't about to let that comment slide. “You really don't think it was a total loss?” I asked. “The thing was a tactical nightmare. We had all of the top members of our organization all in the same place, at the same time, and on enemy territory, no less. We let them draw us into their complex, and they picked us off one by one. We're lucky not to have suffered greater casualties.”
“Amen,” Bryce muttered under his breath, but it seemed that a lot of people were echoing his sentiment, based on the number of nods I saw around the table.
And funny, to think that I had been the only vocal person voting against the raid before the whole thing had happened. Maybe that was our problem right there: we were too busy listening to the people and less busy listening to the ideas behind them. If we couldn't impassively make decisions on important things like dangerous raids, maybe it would be better to disband the club. We weren't acting like much of a brotherhood if we couldn't manage to keep our brothers safe.
My phone buzzed suddenly and I glanced down at it. My heart skipped a beat when I saw I had a new message from Halley and then dropped as I saw the single word there on the screen: kidnapped.