“Are you going to keep me locked up like an animal forever? I mean, if you are, can you just put me down like a sick dog? Hell, prison is better than this place.” Dax had gone down to check on Hawk. It had been two weeks since they brought him back from Canada. Dax had their club “doctor” look at him, and a couple of the club girls, volunteers, had been nursing him back to health. Dax was keeping him in a small room in the basement that he kept locked, from the outside. Just because he agreed with Hawk, that Dan was the instigator of all the chaos that had been happening, didn’t mean he trusted Hawk. Besides, what he was hoping for was to lure Dan out. He knew if Dan didn’t hear anything about Hawk turning up dead soon, he’d be calling.

“You want me to turn you over to the FBI? They’re asking questions about those dead men up in Quebec and they still want to talk to you about Max. Apparently, they have both of our DNA on that kutte he was wearing. They kept me in interrogation for hours, but it still wasn’t enough for them to arrest me. They’re looking for a murder weapon. After the DNA turning up, I wouldn’t doubt that’ll turn up soon as well. We need to find Dan.”

“Fucker. When I find him, he is one dead son of a bitch.”

“Why did you betray my dad?” Dax asked. Hawk looked up at him, shocked by the question and the way it came out of the blue. “He loved you like a brother and he was a good man. You ruined him.”

“No, son…”

“Don’t fucking call me son.”

Hawk sighed. “I didn’t ruin Doc. He did that to himself.”

Dax felt a hot surge of hate course through him once again. Almost daily for the past two weeks he thought about going down to the basement and holding a gun to Hawk’s head and making him say that Doc wasn’t the coward everyone in Hanover said that he was. Then he’d pull the trigger and stand there with the old biker’s flesh and blood splattered across his own face. It was a fantasy he’d had since he was a kid, and it was taking all his self-control every minute of the day to let Hawk live. “You went behind his back and nearly started a war with one of the most powerful MCs on the East Coast. When he found out about it, he spared your life. Other people served your time in prison…”

Hawk cleared his throat and said, “We remember what we want to remember, I suppose.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“You were a kid. You looked up to your dad. He was a good man, Doc was. But he wasn’t the hero you made him out to be, kid.” Hawk stopped talking and Dax sat in silence, waiting for him to go on. When he didn’t Dax said:

“What does that mean? You have something to say, old man, say it.”

“So you can put a bullet in my head for speaking the truth?”

“Every minute that goes by that you’re still breathing is a miracle. You may as well get this shit off your chest before I decide that one more breath is one too many.”

Hawk rubbed a hand over the grizzly beard that had started growing before they left Canada. It was sitting on the front of his chest now and the dark hair was peppered with gray. “That deal, with the club in New York…that was Doc’s doing, not mine.”

“Fuck you!”

“You asked me to tell you, kid. You either want the true story or you don’t.”

“I’m not sure you’d know the truth if it bit you in the face, old man.” They sat in silence again and finally Dax couldn’t stand it any longer. He needed to know the truth, even if he didn’t want to know it. “Talk.”

Sighing again Hawk said, “Your father was smart and he had a cool head on his shoulders, and he kept us out of a lot of shit because of it. But he had one big weakness—your mother.”

“My mother was long gone by the time all that went down.”

“She was gone, but not forgotten. What you didn’t know, Dax, was that your father took every chance he got to go up to Jersey and see her. She didn’t want to be here on this ranch he’d built like a fucking commune, but she still had a soft spot for him too. They messed around for years, even after she was married to that other guy. Your old man even thought that other kid was his, though as far as I know, your Ma never admitted it.”

“So even if all of this is true, what does it have to do with any of the shit you pulled?”

“You ain’t gonna believe it, so there’s really not much reason for me to say any of it.”

“You got this one chance to clear your conscience before you die, old man. I’d take it if I were you. You never know when I’m going to get sick of looking at your ugly old face.”

Hawk laughed. “Well, I guess if you’re gonna kill me either way, I may as well have my say. Like I said, I doubt you’ll believe me, but what I’m about to tell you is the truth. You remember when your mama and that man got… divorced?”

“Vaguely. I’d moved back to the ranch by then. I was fifteen, I guess.”

“Yeah, well to tell you the truth, they weren’t divorced exactly.”

Dax raised an eyebrow. “They weren’t?”

“No. You see, Doc got a call from her late one night. He woke me up. Told me that we had to go to Jersey. I didn’t ask any questions. We rode all night and when we got there, we found her and the kid pretty beaten up. Doc spent hours fixing them both up and then he told me to take the kid to this woman that used to be one of our club girls. She didn’t live far and she was still friends with your ma. I did what he asked me and when I got back, your dad was gone. Your mom told me that he’d gone after your stepdad, and she was freaking out. It turned out that guy she married was the brother of the VP of the Black Widows and she was afraid your dad was gonna do something that would get him killed. The Black Widows were more than bad news.”

Dax sat up straighter. “What the fuck?”

Hawk nodded. “What was his name? Your stepfather?”

“Mike.”

“Yeah, well, Mike’s older brother was a guy they called Patch. Patch was the VP of the Widows. Doc caught up to Mike that night. He was staying with some family in Queens. When Doc got there, it was just Mike and the woman of the house at home. Doc tied her up or knocked her out or something, I’m not sure what. He didn’t kill her, or hurt her. He just got her out of the way. He took his time killing Mike. He beat him, as badly as Mike had beaten his wife and son, before he killed him. I’m not sure why, but Doc was still there with the dead body when the man, Mike’s friend, got home. There was a fight and Doc told me later that he accidentally killed that man too. At first he had a lot of guilt about that, thinking he’d killed an innocent man, but later we found out that ‘innocent man’ was a collector for the Rossis, and a nasty one at that. He called me again that night. He needed help, getting rid of those bodies. The shit was hitting the fan in huge chunks.”

Dax thought back to that time in his life. He was an adolescent and so caught up in his own life that he had vaguely registered the fact that his mother told him his stepfather was “gone” in one of their phone conversations. She seemed all broken up over it, but the truth was that Dax never liked him, so he didn’t care. He didn’t have any clue that any of the rest of this shit was going down…if Hawk was to be believed and it all really happened. Hawk went on to say:

“When Patch got word of what happened to his brother he understandably, wanted answers. He showed up on your mother’s doorstep. He hurt her and he threatened to take her boy. She finally told him about Doc going after him. She snitched on him, even after all he’d done for her. Patch left and went after Doc that night. I think it was four or five a.m. when I got a panicked call from him. He’d killed Patch and he knew he had just declared war on a club we’d never beat, much less survive. I’m the one that came up with the idea of saying that Patch was in town to do a gun deal with us. I sent Doc back to the ranch and took a couple of the boys with me to set up a scene and make it look like the deal had gone bad. The boys I took with me were nothing but trouble, Dax. Yes, they both had families, but they were mean little shits who didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger of their gun at any opportunity. They were going to get us all in trouble someday, and their families ended up better off with them in prison. So, that night, I killed two birds with one stone. I got Doc out of a mess with the Black Widows and I set those two boys up to take the fall. But the only believable way I could do it was by making it look like the three of us had gone renegade.”

“Bullshit! I remember those days! I remember how hurt Dad was when he found out about you.”

“You remember what you want to remember, Dax. You saw what you wanted to see. Doc felt guilty as hell and he even wanted to turn himself over to the Widows. That’s what you saw. You interpreted it differently because he was your dad; you didn’t know the whole story and you wanted it to be someone else’s fault. So, after all of that, there was no way I could just go back to the ranch without bringing shit back with me. I told Doc to tell everyone that I’d left the club and was looking to start my own. I drifted around New York and Boston for a while, doing whatever I could to make enough money to live on. Then one night I met Dan—and I told you the rest of that story. I used that money to start my own club and while everyone was screaming for my head, your pop protected me and died while everyone still believed that it was because he was a coward.”

“You’re so full of shit!”

Hawk laughed. “Like I said, I knew you wouldn’t believe it. But ask yourself this, kid, what do I have to gain by telling you the truth now? Your father wasn’t a coward. He made choices using his head most of the time and not his emotions, but that situation with your mom pushed him too far. He could have lost everything because of it. I owed him everything. So, I did what brothers do. I had his back, and until he died, he had mine.”

“Why didn’t you come to me when he died and tell me all of this?”

“Boy, by then you hated me with a passion. Everyone on this ranch did. I already had my own club going and I figured there were some things better just left alone. Hell, I would have stayed in Massachusetts and out of your hair forever if it hadn’t been for Dan calling me to do jobs here and there that just kept bringing me closer to your territory. I thought about telling him no, just because I didn’t want to go to war with you anymore than you did me. But the SOB paid me so well.”

“Things like what? What was he paying you to do?”

“A lot of times it was security. He’d get a shipment of guns or drugs in down at the docks, and me and the boys would stand by while it was loaded onto a truck and then we’d follow the truck to its destination. Sometimes he’d have us transport the stuff ourselves and he’d give us a cut of the take. The night your warehouse was wiped out…that was us. Dan set that up. He had a truck waiting, and all we had to do was go in and take the stuff and park the truck in the short-term parking at Port Authority.”

“So he’s been fucking with us for years? Why? What is his issue with some tiny little club in Connecticut and an even smaller one in Massachusetts, Hawk?”

“I wish I knew. I tell you what, if I ever come face to face with the piece of shit, I’ll make sure he pays for it. That is, if I live long enough to get out of this prison you’ve got me in.”

Dax looked at the old man long and hard before saying, “You might, but just know that none of this changes how I feel about you. I still despise you.”

Hawk chuckled again. “Good. I can’t stand your pretty-boy ass either. Now, can I get a fucking shot of whiskey and a beer?”