Nester

 

I drove around angrily for most of the night. Hurt and fury built inside until I was a monster of my own rage, blinded by it until it was probably unsafe for me to be driving, but I didn’t care. I needed my freedom and I needed time to work through what Zelda had told me tonight.

 

How could it be Santos? How could she, of all people, knowing what a goddamned monstrous snake he was, go to him? And she told me she couldn’t date a criminal. So what the hell was she doing sleeping with a fucking wretch like that?

 

My stomach twisted and knotted uncomfortably at the thought of them together, lying and twisting and writhing in pleasure. I could imagine the look on Santos’s face, warped with pleasure as Zelda’s eyes stared up at him, switching between vengeful ecstasy and remorseful pleading.

 

I felt bile rise in my throat and had to force it back. I swallowed it down, determined to keep my cool and my sanity alike.

 

After the sun finally crested the horizon, I went back to Jackson’s. He was pacing nervously, like some damn mother hen, when I got back and it was clear that he was both waiting for me and dreading the moment when I would arrive. He stopped his pacing as I walked through the door and waited for what he must have sensed was coming.

 

My eyes narrowed at him dangerous. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”

 

He chewed on his inner cheek and his lower lip until it looked like he was mangling them both in his mouth like dinner, preparing to regurgitate them for his newborn. After a moment, he released his lip and sighed, shaking his head. He ran a hand through his thinning brown hair, working through every nervous tick he had before finally addressing my question.

 

“Things were hard when you were in the slammer. They changed, you know?” he began by way of both explanation and appealing to my sense of justice and righteousness. I wasn’t sure I had those things anymore, but I tried to stay calm and reminded myself that revenge wasn’t really about shooting the messenger.

 

“Right, changed,” I spat, letting myself plop down onto his old, worn couch. I glanced at the stairs which led to the second floor. Jackson had a kid, but only part time and I didn’t know if the kid was here or not.

 

Jackson must have noticed my gaze, because he shook his head in answer. “No, Angel’s with her momma tonight. Meeting that new slab of meat that keeps trying to get her to call him daddy. I’ll break his fucking neck if he…” He broke off and shook his head, forcing his breath out in a heavy whoosh.

 

It looked like I wasn’t the only asshole having adjustment issues. “Focus,” I told him, bringing him back to the thing at hand. “Why the hell didn’t you guys tell me? If things were changing so badly, why leave them up in the air?”

 

Jackson shrugged again. He took a seat in the overstuffed chair, just as old as the couch and maybe matching or maybe just so faded you couldn’t tell one way or the other anymore, and leaned back in it. My tone had softened ever so slightly and it must have been enough to settle him, because he wasn’t as tense as he had been moments before. Not as tense and not prone to the same typical nervous ticks that he usually did when he knew something bad was coming.

 

“Because what could you do?” he answered finally after a long pause. “I mean, really? So we tell you, right? Then what? You come busting out of prison to kill Santos and Zelda both? That doesn’t really come off as a sound plan. Even if you could bust out, you’d go straight back, and for longer because of it. No, in the end, you couldn’t do a damn thing while you were in, so we decided it wasn’t a smart thing to tell you.” He shrugged again, apparently his move for the night. “We didn’t see the point in upsetting you any more than you already were.”

 

I rubbed at my eyes, suddenly feeling tired, burned out. I’d been out and back for only a day now and already it felt like the world was shifting beneath my feet. Was this really how things were?

 

Yes, I thought. And you’d better fucking learn to accept that, you chump, before things get worse. Before you look weak.

 

Running my hands through my hair, I thought about my options. There were things that I obviously needed to do. The top on my list was get revenge on Santos. Despite what Zelda thought—or claimed she thought; I’d seen the hesitation, the uncertainty in her eyes—I was convinced that Santos was behind my getting put away. She could redirect the blame all she wanted—yes, I’d gone with the plan, yes, I’d done a thousand drug deals over the years—but in the end there was only one man I could truly blame for what had happened to me.

 

Santos DeArma.

 

But the thing about revenge was it was easier said than done. I’d been intending to rally my guys and take down Santos the old fashioned way, but my encounter with Zelda had changed my opinion on a few things. Maybe hitting Santos where it hurt wasn’t just about the club, though I decided quickly I would have to start there.

 

It just wouldn’t end there as I’d originally planned.

 

Looking up at Jackson again, I asked, “How many are still loyal?”

 

He looked up at me in surprise at my question, almost like he’d forgotten I was there. Maybe he had, lost in his own thoughts about the dad who was muscling in on his girl or the woman he never could hold on to. “Berserker?” he questioned, though he surely already knew the answer.

 

I nodded. “Yeah, how many stuck around?”

 

He hesitated, running a hand once more through his hair. It was getting thinner than I remembered, though he was only a couple of years older than me. He’d always gotten the short stick as far as hair went and eventually he’d just shave it all off. He just didn’t want to, so he was trying to hold on to what little he still had, almost desperately.

 

He chewed on his lip again, telling me that he really didn’t want to answer me.

 

I let out a sigh. “Just tell me, Jackson. I already know that we lost a few. I need numbers to know where I stand.”

 

He finally managed to meet my gaze and I saw what might have been pity there. “We lost more than a few.”

 

I tensed at that. “How many more?”

 

Sighing, he shook his head, slumping forward until his elbows were on his knees and he could use his hands to scrape along his scruffy face. “Over half.”

 

My eyebrows must have hit the roof, I was so shocked. Sure, I’d factored in losing a few. The Berserkers had been pretty loyal, all things considered, but taking a hit like your leader going to prison was a hefty thing and I didn’t really fault guys for shying away after the fact. A record like being busted for drug deals could do wonders for your reputation, but it also meant that every cop in the area knew who to look for first when something was going down.

 

But over half? I had expected at least some loyalty from my boys, and the idea that so many had just shrugged their shoulders and headed for the hills, well, it hurt in unexpected ways. I had at least been prepared in some small way for the betrayal of Zelda. No, I hadn’t been expecting her to be shacking up with that crook Santos DeArma, but at least I had known we were over when I got out.

 

But this? How could I have known that I would lose so many of my brothers after being gone for a measly five years? It just didn’t seem right.

 

“Over half,” I repeated as though I’d simply misheard him—or he was out of his goddamn mind.

 

“Yeah, boss, over half,” Jackson confirmed in an unfortunate tone that told me just how much he hated being the one to tell me. “A lot of ’em, well, they freaked out. ’Specially the ones who haven’t done time yet. The ones who were young and stupid anyway—we can do without ’em.”

 

He was working hard to cheer me up, I could tell, but I thought some part of him honestly felt that way, too. Jackson had done time himself. He’d spent four years in prison and done an additional two years of probation, so he knew the system and he despised it. It meant he was both terrified and not afraid at all. He never wanted to go back, would probably rather go out in a blaze of glory than get thrown in the slammer all over again, but he also knew he could do it. He could survive it and he would for that little girl of his.

 

I let out a heavy sigh, trying to collect myself. I needed a plan, and knowing how few people I had left made that plan a little more difficult, even as other parts of it were starting to come together.

 

“Alright, well, who do we have left?” I asked as calmly as I could. I could feel the now familiar bubble of anger overtaking my chest cavity, like an ulcer, the worst kind of heartburn, tearing through my system, unwilling to let me be.

 

Jackson thought a moment. “Well, most of the guys don’t really come around anymore, you know? We haven’t had an official meeting in ages. Didn’t seem right without our leader,” he clarified hopefully, trying to gauge my reaction. When I only nodded, he pressed on. “But I keep in touch with the guys, keep tabs on who’s still around. The Bobby Boys are still with us, and so is Schumacher. Grease, Bones, and Wildcard, too. Few others. Some of the stubborn kids are still here, some of the old farts are out of the picture. You know, like Carlson, who decided he was just done with the whole fucking thing. Some headed off to other clubs, some moved out of the state, and some just retired.” He shrugged.

 

“So how many total?” I finally asked, forcing myself to be calm and collected about the whole thing.

 

Jackson took a minute to think about that. He counted on his fingers and in his head, adding up imaginary numbers. Finally, he fixed me with a pained look. “Fifty you can count on. Maybe seventy-five on the high side, but I wouldn’t push my luck with a lot of them. They’ll probably get on board when they know you’re out, but I wouldn’t put my money where my mouth was until you talked with them.”

 

I couldn’t say anything for a moment.

 

Fifty. After my club had grown to over two hundred, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the idea of only fifty. We’d gone through recruitment a few years back and nearly doubled our numbers. We were discussing expanding our territory. We were talking about taking over a few other dwindling clubs and maybe branching out into another city. We were thinking about becoming big, real big, and now? Now fifty was all I could count on.

 

The rage surfaced again and I wanted to kill someone. I wanted to kill a lot of someones in fact. I wanted to go after every asshole who’d thought he belonged, who’d taken advantage of our brotherhood and then pissed it to the wind because he decided that it got a little hard.

 

Revenge was starting to sound like a tall order as the list of people I needed to exact it upon grew.

 

But then the rage simmered down. I reminded myself that some of those guys were old, ready to retire when I’d been put up and lingered only for my sake. I reminded myself that some of them were just kids, too stupid to know what they wanted. I reminded myself that this had been a culling of sorts and the fifty men who were left were my hell riders. They were the men who I could count on no matter how rough or crazy things went.

 

It was a blessing in disguise, I told myself, though I wasn’t sure how true the words really were. I guessed it was time to find out.

 

Taking a deep, soothing breath, I let it out and finally fixed Jackson with a stare hard enough to make him flinch. “Alright. Then call the fifty. I want to see them all tonight at ten.”

 

Jackson’s eyes got huge for a second, then returned to normal as a slow, almost eager smile crossed his lips. He nodded. “Yeah, you got it, boss. Where we meeting?”

 

“Old stomping grounds,” I answered, thinking of where that little fucking club had started in the first place. “The old rock quarry out on Foch. I want a place where we can make some damn noise.”

 

Now Jackson was actually grinning and nodded. “I’m on it. Tonight, ten, the rock quarry.” He got up and pulled out his phone at the same time, already starting to dial up the fifty numbers he would have to call that day. He didn’t care that it was only a little after five in the morning. The fuckers would pick up and show up or they wouldn’t be my boys anymore, whether they’d stuck around or not.

 

I relaxed a little after Jackson left the room. I could hear his low voice drifting in from the other room, but didn’t pay much attention to it. Instead, I tried to push away the buzzing in my brain. There hadn’t been a whole hell of a lot of sleep for me in the past twenty-four hours and it was finally starting to catch up with me. I’d need sleep to stay focused, especially tonight.

 

Because tonight I’d remind them why I was leader of the Berserkers.

 

***

 

We drove separately because it was important for the sake of the meeting—appearances being far more important than I wanted to give them credit for—that we ride our separate motorcycles. Besides, it was still too much of a novelty for me to be on my own damn bike out in the world, free again, and for Jackson, well, I was starting to get the impression that he didn’t ride as much as he used to.

 

When I got there, Jackson tailing behind me, there were already several guys waiting. I was surprised, since we were half an hour early, and from the way Jackson had said it, there weren’t a whole hell of a lot of Berserkers left in the end. But here they were, beginning what looked like a line of motorcycles right now but what would quickly turn into a circle surrounding the whole place.

 

The quarry was huge. Much of it was underground at this point, but they’d dug and delved into the side of a mountain, leaving a huge cliff face on one side where the road wound up and was generally speaking off limits to the public. Down the other side was a manmade lake where they’d used water to wash out the debris that came out and kept it from seeping up and clouding over the entire damn city.

 

There were remnants of broken pieces of equipment, including a crane which had been set up years ago and ended up killing at least two men, and a tractor of some kind that was used to dig and haul large quantities of rock and loose earth. There were some scaffolding skeletons and loose two-by-fours lying around from when they were still trying to brace beneath the ground where they’d been digging, but in the end, all of it was half rotted.

 

It’d been here forever.

 

I jumped the fence easily because I wouldn’t let anyone call me chicken. Besides, ghost stories or not, I wasn’t afraid of a damn place like this. How many run down hell holes had I seen in my life? Dozens. I’d lived in them, called them home, watched as people too drunk and too high let them fall below livable levels until they crashed into what I fondly called “Desecrated Ground.” If I could survive all of that crap, then I wasn’t going to worry about a little thing like ghosts.

 

Behind me a half a dozen kids from my school were holding back, leaning against the fence, watching me as I headed towards the belly of the beast as they liked to call it.

 

About ten years ago, a man had died on that scaffolding up ahead. There was some tragic story about how he had been in love and the love of his life betrayed him or something. Cheated with another man, a friend or a coworker or his brother. Something sort of epic and destructive.

 

I didn’t care. If the story was true—the death probably was; the girl not so much—then he wasn’t much of a man to begin with. What sort of asshole got all broken up over some chick who clearly didn’t love him enough to not stay faithful?

 

Loyalty was a big deal to a guy like me and any girl I dated would show it in spades.

 

There was supposed to be a ladder that led down below to the lake and some of the older pieces of machinery, and as I crept closer towards the edge I noticed it. A shadow in the distance. It was the movement that made me freeze, but it was the taunting voices behind me—“Chicken already?” and “Some tough guy you turned out to be”—that spurned me on.

 

More determined than ever, I made a beeline for that shadow. I was seventeen and I wasn’t about to be scared of some shadow haunting an abandoned rock quarry.

 

When I finally got within arm’s length of the shadow, I reached for it, and as my hand wrapped around something solid and clearly not ghostly, I swung the form around. Then I caught my breath.

 

Even in the dim lighting she was beautiful. She had a sweet face and full, kissable lips. Her hair was thick and wild, falling about her shoulders in heavy waves that seemed to defy gravity, as dark as the night. And her body? Well, that was any kid’s wet dream. Her tits were the size of melons and the urge to reach for them was almost overpowering.

 

Instead, I licked my lips.

 

“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded, glad that my voice wasn’t breaking all the time like it had the previous year.

 

Jerking her arm out of my grasp and startling me, she folded her arms beneath her chest, causing those damn tits to smoosh together and push up until they looked ready to spill from her shirt at any moment.

 

Which wouldn’t have bothered me a bit.

 

“What are you doing here?” she returned back to me. “I was here first.”

 

At that, I smiled in the darkness, deciding instantly that I liked her. “My name’s Nester Perry,” I introduced, taking a step closer to her instead of offering her my hand.

 

She didn’t back down. Instead, she lifted her chin and said, “Zelda. Zelda Rivers.”

 

It had been the first time I’d ever met Zelda, just at the time when my life was finally shifted. We wouldn’t date for another two years—she had always been picky like that; I wasn’t sure what changed—but she was always in the peripheral of my life. Hanging out cautiously on the edges of it, maybe watching, maybe waiting to see what I would do, maybe waiting for me to finally work up the nerve to ask her out.

 

In the meantime, I started the Berserkers. It was small and started with only a few guys—Jackson being one of them and Santos finally refusing to be a party to my madness, as he said—but it would grow with time.

 

And we met here, because that night had been something special to me.

 

Thinking back on it now, I almost regretted deciding to meet here. There were a lot of memories here and not all of them had to do with the club. They had to do with Zelda on her back, calling out to me as I drove into her, not caring that we were outside or that someone might find us or that she was fucking loud and the place echoed. They had been good memories once, but now it was hard to think of them.

 

Harder still because my body still responded to them physically.

 

I needed to get laid, I decided, and was starting to think it didn’t matter with who. I had almost decided that I would just call the damn waitress when everyone really started to arrive.

 

I spent the next twenty minutes getting reacquainted with those who had remained loyal and true to the club. I was pleased to see who I had left, even if some of the absences disappointed me. When it looked like everyone was here that was going to be here, I started.

 

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” I began in a harsh tone that had people cringing as they heard me, even Jackson, “but it’s got to change. Fifty? Really? Fifty of you assholes managed to get their shit together and be a true rider. The rest run scared.”

 

There were murmurs around the club, but no one outright said anything. Which was fine; mostly, this was for show. This was about explaining to them that I was pissed—and that I was grateful.

 

“Well, fucking good. Good, because I’m not interested in dealing with any half assed wannabes. This is about the people who are. The fighters, the powerful. This is about the guys who are gonna follow me when I lead them into danger, because, damn it, that’s what we do! And if you’re not interested in that, then you’d best leave now. And I’m not just talking about the club or the quarry. Get the fuck out of town and get the fuck out of my way, because I don’t have time for the likes of you.”

 

There were murmurs that once again rippled through the semi-circle of riders surrounding me. There seemed to be hesitation, even fear, but no one made a move. No one spoke out. They were holding fast as I hoped they would.

 

“Good. Because I’ve got a plan and I need some goddamn warriors to carry it out. Are you warriors?”

 

There wasn’t a pause this time. No hesitation as a roar went up and echoed through the walls and across the surface of the water. I knew then that the quarry had been a good choice, regardless of the connotations for me personally.

 

After my little speech, we broke it down. Not everyone needed the specifics yet, but I needed a few guys on my side who knew the intimate details of just what we were getting into.

 

“Santos?”

 

It was Bob, Jr. who spoke, who wasn’t really a junior at all. He was roughly my age with noticeable facial hair and some scars from a bad car crash he got years ago smearing his otherwise good-looking face. He was pretty quick on the wit and reckless as hell, especially when coupled with Bob, Sr., who was in no way related.

 

They just happened to have the same name and were generally regarded as the Bobby Boys because where one was, the other wasn’t far behind.

 

Bob, Jr. straightened, folding his arms across his chest and shaking his head. “Why the fuck you wanna go messing with Santos? I mean, the Wicked Titans are a bunch of flashy assholes, but ain’t no way we can win a war with them. They’re like four hundred strong now!”

 

I raised an eyebrow at him. I’d known that the Wicked Titans had grown in size, but I was surprised by how much. That didn’t mean I wanted them to know I was surprised. Part of being a leader was keeping your cool even when things didn’t go your way. This was definitely not going my way.

 

Bob, Sr. snorted. “So what the fuck ever? We’ll cut ’em down no problem.” When Bob, Jr. sent him a dirty look, Bob, Sr. just shrugged. “What? They’re a bunch of pansies.”

 

Bob, Sr. was old enough to have gone half gray and have leather for skin. His face crinkled up in a strangely pleasant way when he smiled, but otherwise he was a sight to look at. Like some kind of pirate cast in the wrong movie, he almost looked like he needed an eyepatch across his face.

 

Before the Bobby Boys could start arguing—as inevitably they would—Schumacher spoke up. “Senior’s got a point. Santos’s got the numbers, but they’re jittery, nervous. They aren’t ready to go to war for him.”

 

I thought about that. Not ready to go to war for him. That, at least, was an advantage. I didn’t have near enough men to go head on with these guys, but if I could scare enough of them off, there was a good chance for us.

 

“Alright,” I told my small group. “We fight this smart. I want dirt on Santos, as much as you can dig up. And I want to know what he’s doing at all times.”

 

I was going to make Santos pay, and in that moment, standing with a group of ruffians in the place where I’d first met Zelda Rivers, I realized the perfect way to do it. I was going to seduce Zelda all over again.