Chapter 4
Cade
The morning of the rally came around, and it was time to start my ritual. A steaming hot shower that left my skin red, two cups of black coffee, four hard-boiled eggs, and a fresh pair of jeans. The monotony and the regularity of the routine gave me time to think. A death threat against a pregnant woman usually meant one of two things. One, the person making the threat was the father of the child, or two, the person making the threat had a vendetta against the mayor and wanted to get to him through his daughter. I had to prepare myself for either scenario, just in case someone showed up and decided to do some damage.
I pulled my leather cut over my shoulders and started for the clubhouse. All of us gathered and stacked ourselves with weapons; then we headed out. Knives in our pockets, guns on our hips, tasers on our belt loops. Not to mention running down people on our bikes. Whenever someone called on our protection, we meant business. No one came into our part of New Mexico and fucked around like this. These people were ours. These towns were our turf. And while our club was guns for hire, the one thing we never fucking did was mess with the good people that lived in our space.
That was fucked up, and this world had enough bullshit in it to slay the heavens.
By the time I got to the clubhouse, most of us had shown up. Usually, it was the core group that took on a job like this. But with it being Ryan Thomas, we figured the whole of the club should get involved. A statement needed to be made, especially when it came to his pregnant daughter. If you fucked with them, you fucked with all of us.
All in all, there were one hundred of us. We rode out at eleven in the morning to get to the rally site so we could scope things out. We would have people backstage watching out, we would have people surrounding the rally crowd, we would have people on the sidewalk, and then we would disperse people through the crowd to watch out.
I was always on crowd control because of how tall I was. Standing at six-foot-four, I could see above the heads of every fucking person in a crowd. It gave me a vantage point no one else had, and it allowed me to easily scan for threats.
As for the core group, they all had their stereotypical positions. Doc, Ink, and Vex were the backstage workers and Blade was always higher up so he could overlook the crowd. We got set up with the intercoms in our ears, making sure we could all hear one another. Blade was our call guy and our sniper. I kept things in close range in my peripheral, but he scanned the whole of the crowds from above. He was our bird’s eye view with the ability to take down anyone with a fucking head shot within eight hundred feet.
Blade was our secret weapon for shit like this.
The crowd started funneling in, and we all went on high alert. Doc, Ink, and Vex were chattering away, making mindless jokes as the Thomas family pulled up. The group surrounded the quickly-growing crowd as I stuck myself in the middle of it all, keeping my head on a swivel just in case something happened. Being in the middle of the crowd enabled me to get to any corner of the crowd quicker. Blade watched my back, I watched everything else, and with all of us combined, we could catch the son of a bitch if he appeared.
“This family’s pulled up in a limo,” Ink said.
“You’d think he was running for president,” Doc said.
“I don’t know; they’re daughter’s already pregnant. Isn’t that a box future president’s have to tick?” Blade asked.
I grinned at their jokes as they kept chirping in my ear.
They always had fun with this type of shit. When it was all of us, and we busted out the earpieces, they felt like the secret service. We had on our black jeans and our leather cuts with sunglasses and earpieces. We all stood out in a crowd, and that was how we liked it.
Why? Because we wanted people to know how many of us there were to fuck them up if they tried to pull some shit.
“All right, gang. Listen up. They’re gonna be introduced in about five minutes, so get your eyes ready. You see anything?” Doc asked.
I started my first scan of the crowd and watched as the rest of the gang did theirs.
“Normal in the crowd,” I said.
“Normal back here,” Ink said.
“Family’s safe right now,” Vex said.
“All clear up here,” Blade said. “Nice ass, Cade.”
“Thanks. I work hard on it,” I said, grinning.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for coming,” the announcer said.
“It’s starting. Shut up,” Doc said.
“I would like to introduce you to a personal friend of mine. I grew up with this man. We played together in the creeks down by the red clay mountains. He’s lived in this town all of his life, married his high school sweetheart, and they both had a beautiful baby girl. Now, he’s about to become a grandfather for the first time. He has vowed to be the strong, firm male role model his little grandson will need in the presence of an absent father. He’s a good man, with strong morals and a backbone with the strength of Atlas himself. Here he is, Ryan Thomas!”
“How much you guys wanna bet this dude’s a dick in real life?” I asked.
“Probably. All self-proclaimed family men are,” Doc said.
Everything was going smoothly so far. There were no shifty characters in the crowd, and nothing seemed out of place. The crowd was going wild as Ryan Thomas stepped onto the stage, then his wife and his daughter quickly followed to the other end of the stage.
And time ceased to exist in that very moment.
I’d recognize her anywhere. Those deep blue eyes and that beautiful strawberry blonde hair. She had piled the makeup on so I couldn’t see the dusting of freckles on her nose that crinkled whenever she smiled. Her strong shoulders slipped into a beautiful rack I could remember burying my face into. Tits I remembered marking as my own bled into a delicate waist despite the pregnant stomach she was carrying. Her hips were a bit wider, no doubt shifting in order to accommodate the load her body was carrying.
Memories of our night together pounded behind my eyes as I scanned her once again.
Harper. The woman at the bike rally that I couldn’t get out of my head. Harper. The woman who rode my cock with such elegance and grace that it spun my head. Harper. The woman with the sun in her smile and the sensuality of a vixen.
Harper was Ryan Thomas’ pregnant daughter.
And someone wanted her dead.