Two Months Ago

“Old business?” My club president asks to the crowded Church room. My brothers look around at each other, watching for anyone to add additional information into our daily club meeting.

Hero, our VP, clears his throat, and I suddenly get the sense that I’m not going to like what I’m about to hear.

“I’d like to bring up Slider’s patch vote.”

I stifle a groan. The kid has stepped up when he’s been asked, but his cocky attitude has started to wear on me. In his mind, he’s already earned his patch. The reality is that he still has so much to learn about what it means to take the oath and join our brotherhood. He fared well in our more violent moments. That I can’t deny. He just needs to learn that not everything is going to end in a bloodbath. The delicate balance between peace and violence was fast becoming the new normal for us. He just had to accept that, instead of looking for another fight.

“Do you really think now is a good time?” Tyson retorts with a questioning look plastered on his face.

“I think we need to make our decision soon,” Hero fires back. “It’s not like he hasn’t gotten his required time in. We need the numbers. The latest run in with Rex should be proof enough of that.”

“I agree, but I’m with Tyson on this. He’s put his time in, but I have some reservations about the kid. He needs more time to mature, before we give him full status. We shouldn’t jump to add in new members just because our numbers are down. If we need help, we can call in the other chapters,” Raze offers as a suggestion to the table discussion.

Raze shifts in his chair, pulling his hands up to the gray, stumbled beard that whips around his chin. The last few years has visibly aged him, despite the resurgence of his more youthful pursuits with Darcy as his old lady. He is almost chipper on occasion with her around. I should send her flowers for that one of these days or would that be weird? A card with “Thanks for fucking my Prez” might just send the wrong impression. I scratch the gift idea and pay more attention to the conversation going on around me.

Hero scowls, but doesn’t say anything more. He doesn’t always agree with Raze, and I get it. We’re stubborn fucking bastards who think with our dicks most of the time, but Raze is right on this one. There’s no threat lingering on the horizon to warrant such a rapid-fire response. The suggestion that Hero made is something else entirely. I just need to find out what.

Raze adjourns the meeting, and as I’m leaving, I spot Hero heading into his office. Now’s my chance to find out what’s really going on in his head without the audience of our brothers. We might share just about everything, including the club pussy, but something is off about him. I haven’t seen him like this since Dani’s kidnapping by her stepbrother from hell.

I don’t even bother knocking, when I shuffle into his office and close the door behind me. His elbows are firmly planted on his desk, and his head hangs low in his hands. Hero doesn’t even hear me enter or shut the door behind me. Oh yeah, something is definitely up. He’d be halfway across his office with a knife at my throat, if he thought I was an intruder.

“What’s up your ass today?” I question him.

His head shoots up like someone screamed “FIRE!” in the clubhouse.

“Jesus, V. I didn’t even hear you come in,” he quips with a startled look on his face. “You need a damn bell around your neck.”

“You just wish you had my stealthy ninja skills,” I tease him back, and that elicits an eye roll from him.

Plopping down in the chair across from him, I prop my feet up on his desk and take a sip of my coffee that I brought to the meeting with me. Extra dark with a shot of extra espresso. Just the jolt of holy fucking shit I need in the morning to get these batteries going. It’s like drinking motor oil, but hey, it does the trick.

“Get your fucking feet off my desk, dude,” he orders.

“What? It’s fucking oak, not mahogany, Effie,” I fire back, as I comply with his wishes. He cocks an eyebrow at me, and I just shake my head.

“You really need to get out more. How did you not catch The Hunger Games reference?”

Hero just stares right at me without showing any emotion on his face, while shaking his head in return.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been a little fucking busy with club shit on top of having twins and a pregnant wife at home.”

I smirk back at him. He really has changed so much from the resident VP asshole extraordinaire into a semi-domestic family man. He used to be such a hard ass. Now, he’s just a pissy little pussycat with a ring on his finger. Dani tamed the beast incarnate and gave him twin girls to terrorize him the rest of his life. He tries to act all big and bad, but with a future filled with pink tutus and Barbie dolls, he is getting softer by the day. It’s fucking priceless.

“Is Dani the problem?” I ask gingerly.

“Don’t let her hear you say that. Pregnancy hormones mixed with my woman is about as easy as trying to fucking find a needle in the damn haystack. If it’s not In N’ Out cravings at three in the morning, it’s Farral’s Ice Cream when they’re closed. I have a fucking stockpile of that shit hidden in a freezer just in case. That’s how bad it is.”

“She’s pregnant?” I tease him, as I jump out of my chair and do a fake celebratory dance. He scowls back at me. You’d have to be an idiot to not notice that Dani is pregnant again. It’s just not polite to say that in public or to her face. I do have manners after all. Some days.

“Shut up, asshole.”

“I see someone’s hormones are raging. What? Does Dani want you to get your shit fixed after this one?”

Please be another girl. He deserves it at the rate he’s going.

Hero growls at me, and then gets a very serious look on his face. I move at a glacial pace just to fuck with him. After years of knowing the guy, I know how to push his buttons to just above the explosion point. It’s a skill, and it comes in handy, when I want to annoy the piss out of him.

“No, but I have more at stake than ever before. What happens if Dani is in labor and shit comes knocking on our door? I want my family safe, and I think the best way to deal with that is bringing in more guys. We may be out of the shit business, but it doesn’t mean it’s done with us.”

I consider his side and nearly agree with him, before I stop myself. He knew the risks when he came into this club, and maybe Jagger’s death has rattled his brain more than I first assumed. Sure, it was a direct hit with all of us, but we’ve made the best of what happened and fixed it from happening again. Rex’s resurgence was a bit out of left field, but again, that problem is dead and buried. Our threats were dwindling like an old maid’s chance of ever getting a man. So why is he worried about this now?

“I get it, Hero. Having a family is scary shit. You and Raze have the most to lose out of all of us, but your brothers have your back. If you are worried, I can beef up some of the security at your house. Maybe even put up more cameras if you want. You know, I could even get you a copy of anything I record in that bedroom of yours,” I wink trying to ease the tension.

“Stay out of my fucking bedroom, V,” he growls. “But I’ll take you up on the security offer.”

“Fine,” I huff. “But sex tapes are so last year. You could live stream that shit now.”

“No,” he growls louder. I pop up from the chair, and extend out my hand to him. He stares at it, before reaching out his own and shaking.

“Happy to do business with you. I’ll be over later to install those sex cams for you.”

“Not in my bedroom, fucker,” he yells out the door as I leave, heading across the hall to my own domain.

“Good morning, girls,” I call out to my computers along the north wall of my office, as I flick on the light switch. “Did you behave last night?”

Of course, silence is all I get in the return, other than the soft hum of fans running internally and the echoes of my footsteps on the linoleum floor. I’d be crazy to think that they would respond back. Well, until I get the chance to figure out a way for that to happen, and I have a few ideas. But that is neither here nor there. I have bigger fish to fry.

“Alexa, play my get shit done mix,” I request to my Amazon Echo that sits on my desk, as I set my metric fuck ton size coffee and phone down. The cup begins to tip, but I save it from ruining the paperwork littering my desk from a previous case from the security group our club runs. Just another case of a cheating spouse and the wife that cat-fished him into confessing. It was an open and shut case that required very little of my technical wizardry, as Ratchet calls it.

“Playing get shit done playlist,” her electronic voice repeats. Within a few seconds, the sounds of Five Finger Death Punch blare out of the speakers that are perfectly Blue-toothed to my Echo.

My ass moves to the beat, as I walk over to the computer consoles and touch the screens like Vanna White to wake each of them up. The screen on the left blinks off the Anime Marvel porn screensaver of Wonder Woman and Agent Romanov getting down and dirty. I don’t know what horny Asian kid drew and designed it, but I fucking love the Internet for giving it to me.

Lines of computer codes scroll and flash across the screen, as the search program I had running last night is still going. Which is surprising because you wouldn’t think that finding a hole in the State of California Government family services department would be that hard. They had to be working with outdated technology because finding a back door should be child’s play. Maybe my hacker extraordinaire skills were becoming obsolete.

Nah. That’s not possible, unless we’re talking about some punk North Korean hacker. They’d be the ones who would give me a run for my money.

I watch the screen flick through the codes of the government’s database for a few more minutes, before I shrug my shoulders and turn my focus to my other task for the day. Sliding over to the other computer monitor, I swipe my finger across the screen. Good Morning, Boss Man comes flashing up, and I swipe my finger on the scanner to unlock my more secured of the two consoles. The dossier of my target pops up, and I refresh my memory on the case, finding out more information about Ricca’s therapist, Dr. Matthews.

She may hold the key to getting my brother’s ass back to his club where he belongs. With her counseling Ricca, Ratchet is concerned that she might have gotten Ricca to spill about her time here. She was a wild card, and I only like to deal in absolutes. In her case, I needed to know more about her and find a way into her life to monitor her activities a few thousand miles away. Mixing business and pleasure wasn’t something that I liked to do as a refined professional. However, this one would be filed among the special cases.

The fact I had come up short was driving me crazy. I was lying awake at night trying to figure out another angle or re-creating a crazy backstory about why she was eluding me. Everyone had an Internet footprint, and other than an account on a dating site that I had found, she was a ghost. Ghosts are suspicious, and something wasn’t jiving with me about her.

Casper or not, she had to have information out there, and I was forced to think outside the box. This case called for the highest level of discretion. It required looking at every angle with kid gloves, in order to not disturb the case currently going against my own brother and the old lady he hopes to have on his arm, when he returns. Yet, it didn’t stop me from contacting her through the dating site. It was the last resort and likely the only way to connect with her on a personal level. In order to get into the mind of someone with so much pull over Ratchet’s situation, I’m pulling out all the stops.

I just didn’t expect to find her so interesting.

Call it a curiosity, but I couldn’t help myself, when her profile popped up so perfectly on my first web search. The profile read like a doctoral dissertation. It was just the facts. No funny quips. No sexual innuendos. If this woman was looking for love, she was doing it all wrong. Even her photo was generic. Her face was obscured by her long, dark hair, and a single brown eye was exposed. It was so boring that it was somehow turning me the fuck on with the mystery of what was hidden beneath her hair. Was she just too shy? Was she ugly? Was it an embarrassing mole like in Austin Powers? The suspense was killing me so to speak.

I’m weird. Sue me.

I did complete my due diligence, by searching her mystery photo against stock photo databases and Google Images. Nothing came up. So either the photo was real or she was a magician with Photoshop. Either way, she’s piqued my interest on a level that may or may not be completely professional in nature.

The biggest surprise came, when she messaged me back within a few days. Well, not me-me, but the computer start-up CEO me who lived in San Diego. Creating an alternative reality of myself was almost fun. The man she thought was on the other side of the screen was a suave bugger. The one with all kinds of features that made the ladies yell woo-woo. Not that I wasn’t good looking because well, I think I am, but I still had to be careful. If I fucked up, while looking into her personal life, my photo might lead her back to the club. The guilt of lying to her via a fake profile picture, as I got to know her more, was nagging at me. The photo was a necessity for the club and the country, you could say. She could be the crazy stalker type of girl. Not that I wouldn’t mind a few more stalkers in my life, but that’s beside the point.

Our first few conversations were the basic getting to know you questions. Kids (hell no), jobs, and relationship statuses were all checked off the list. The beginning was a delicate dance of re-con. And when I was satisfied that I had both found the right person and that she seemed to be interested in furthering our conversations, I put the ball back into her court with giving her my phone number. Well, a burner phone number because again safety first. Crazy stalkers might be fun, but now isn’t the time to bring that shit into the club, so soon after the issues we had with a former colleague of the club. But he was dead and the other club that came riding into our territory was sent on their merry way back down the yellow brick freeway. Everyone’s adrenaline was still running on high alert, and disturbing the balance between sanity and rage was still wavering on a day-to-day basis with Ratchet so far away. He was needed here, but without some closure with Ricca, he wouldn’t be fit for duty.

The sound of a light saber rings from my phone, and I slide in my wheelie chair rolling back over to my desk. Pressing my fingerprint to the home button of my iPhone, I unlock the screen and find that the good head doctor had finally replied to my message.

DrMatthews: How’s the tech world today?

Ah, small talk. My favorite kind. I smile as I type out my reply.

It’s all code to me. How’s the brain business? Did you send any patients to the loony bin?

The terrorizing three dots of agony flash on my screen as she replies.

DrMatthews: Not today. You know I couldn’t really tell you, even if I did.

She’s playing the small talk card, but she’s also playing hard to get, and I’m starting to like it.

Ah. The hippo law.

The dots show up immediately, and I already know she’s going to correct me.

DrMatthews: It’s HIPAA. Any plans for the weekend?

I pause for a moment, before I respond.

Oh, maybe a jaunt on my yacht in the Pacific or a trip into the heart of Vegas. You could come with me. I bet you’d look beautiful on my deck.

Smooth, dumbass. I wonder if she’ll even pick up on my play on words.

The dots flash off and on for several minutes, before her reply finally pings back. I flustered her. Score one for me. As a therapist she should be seeing this song and dance from a mile away, but I get the distinct feeling that she’s not exactly knee deep in social interaction with the way she’s responded to me.

DrMatthews: Your deck? That doesn’t sound dirty at all. Besides, you don’t even know what I look like. How do you know if I’m beautiful?

Hook, line, and sinker. It’s time to go in for the kill.

Well, your profile picture was a little mysterious, but that brown eye of yours is pretty beautiful. You should send me a real picture of yourself, so I can prove to you that I’m right.

Play your cards. Come on. Give me what I need.

I stare at my phone for an eternity. No dots. No pings. Fucking nothing. Did I overdo it? Did I push too soon? Jesus, a month of talking to this woman, and I may have fucked it up with a photo request. This actually seems like a reverse dick pic kind of reaction.

Tossing my phone on my desk, I slide back to my computer screens. The scan of the code is still working, and I space out watching it as a distraction. But even the clock ticking on the wall is taunting me.

Tick. Tock. You. Fucked. Up.

I shove away from my computer monitors with an audible huff, while I internally berate myself, but a ping brings me my salvation.

I bolt for my discarded phone, dropping it in the process.

“Motherfucker,” I exclaim, chasing after it. I drop to my hands and knees under my desk. Finally, my fingers grasp it from the dark, depths of the underside of my desk along with a long lost Cheeto. I look at it for a second, considering whether or not to take a bite, before tossing it over my shoulder and unlocking my phone. It would probably be the start of the newest plague if I had eaten it anyway.

My finger shakes, when I click on her name, and my breath is sucked right out of me, when her photo pops up on my screen. Her heart-shaped face is framed by long, dark hair from her profile picture. Her lips are pursed, but it’s her eyes that draw me in and won’t let go. Two of them are definitely better than one.

I stare at her photo far longer than I should, and send a copy of it to my personal e-mail account. I will search it like I planned, but I didn’t want to take the chance that it would self-destruct and disappear. There’s something about this woman, and this photo only makes me want to know more.

You are the most beautiful woman that I have ever seen.

The dots return again, and I get lost in texting her for nearly two hours, until my code search program comes through with my way into the government website. I had hacking to do, but it wouldn’t be the only thing on my mind.

This might be a game of cat and mouse, but the lines of which part I was playing, were beginning to blur.