DECK
As I stalked into the war room, my mood wasn’t good. In fact, it was pretty close to pissed the fuck off.
My day started off the best possible way, deep inside my woman. First, she’d made me come by sucking me off—her blow job skills were coming along very nicely. Then I returned the favour. I hadn’t intended to fuck her, too, just eat her until she came, but her moans and groans of pleasure made my dick so fucking hard. I absolutely had no choice but to demand she got on her knees, and I’d ploughed hard into her until I’d emptied my balls for the second time in minutes.
So why was I getting called off the site in the middle of the day when fifteen ten-foot-by-five-foot triple-glazed glass panels were about to be delivered? And with all the shit thrown at this job so far, I wanted to be there. Someone had better have a good fucking reason for that.
“Deck, what the fuck is this about?” Creed growled from the door, not even in the room yet.
“I’ve got the fucking council up my arse today about permits and shit. I need to be there.”
I gave him a no-shit glare.
“Understood, brother. I’ve got issues of my own at the site. Booth calling saying we all needed to be here including Darth is pissing me off. Those fucking glass panels are thirty-five hundred each. If I can’t be there, I need Darth there.” I said, raking my fingers through my buzzed hair, I barely hung on to the urge to punch something. The wall, table, Creed—anything would do.
Finally, the door opened, and Booth stomped in with Mannix, Steel, and Darth following him. Their looks of annoyance and frustration mirrored Creed’s and mine.
Then I saw Ford jogging in, his ever-present laptop and iPad juggling in his arms. He was such a contradiction. He was heavily tattooed, had a lanky body, and his face was pierced to the fuck. He wore large round gauges, stretched to the max, and yet, he was the best motherfucker with a computer there was. And if he was in here, then there was bad news on the horizon for the Wounded Souls.
“All right, listen up.” Booth’s booming voice got our attention easily. We had all learnt to listen first and ask questions later or not at all. Just do as we are told. With Booth using this voice, I got a feeling we would be doing a lot of listening.
“Ford has been doing some digging and looks like he might have found something.” Booth turned to the man in question. “Ford, you’ve got the room.” Booth sat at the head of the huge table, his expression grim like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. And that gave me a very bad feeling.
Ford opened his laptop. Then, pulling up the surveillance for our businesses, he placed it so we could all see. The seventeen-inch screen was broken up into six squares, and each square showed the front of each business.
“Okay, so I was going through the camera footage the other night just on a hunch. I have tried my old contacts in the commandos and the army, and I pretty much drew a blank. But something had me checking the cameras,” Ford explained. But we all knew why he did. His gut instincts. Our lives in the battle zones depended most of the time on our guts knowing when to walk on and when to stop and take cover.
Absently, I rubbed the tattoo on my waist—the dog tag numbers of our fallen team members. That day, our instincts had been off. First time ever. And we paid dearly. I pushed the memory of that day back into the recesses of my brain. Thinking about that clusterfuck was not my favourite pastime, and it wasn’t Booth’s, either.
“Now, this footage is of the days when the shit started going down with each of the businesses. What do you see, brothers?” Ford asked us all.
Booth stood up and moved over to where he could see the screen better. He studied it intently. It only took a few minutes of silence from all of us to study and put together what we were seeing. The gun shop and range, the bar and grill, strip club, Creed’s custom bike shop, my current job site, and the front entrance to the club.
“You seeing it, boys?” Booth asked. Obviously, he had and so had I, and by the reaction of my brothers, they did, too.
“Dark blue SUV, 2015 Ford Ranger. Dual cab. Custom bull bar. The number plate is covered by an illegal ghost cover.” Mannix called out what we had all seen. In every picture, the same SUV was sitting out front of each place.
Checking the time in each frame, I could see the vehicle had been there on the days when the complaints and problems happened the first time. Ford had called it right.
Now, all we needed to find out was who, why, and if this was something more sinister. I looked closer at the image of the SUV sitting out front of the club compound, and what I saw made my blood run cold—the person in the car had what looked like a camera poking out the window. The image was blurry, but a trained eye could make out the outline of a hand, arm, and a black object held just outside of the window. When I looked even closer at the picture, I saw what the person was pointing the camera at—
“What in the ever-loving fuck,” I heard Darth growl out.
Momentarily stunned, I looked up at the big man and noticed he had seen exactly what I had.
In the front car park of the compound, before you got behind the high-security fence, you saw my daughter and my woman.
I felt rage like I had never felt before. Some motherfucker was sitting out front of my home and taking photos of my family. No fucking way. My head spun with so many emotions it was hard to keep them under control.
“Who in the hell is this, Ford?” I directed my question at our tech guy first. He had the means to find out quicker than anyone else in the room at the moment. It had to be done right then. My baby girl was the reason my heart beat, and now Charlie was part of that beat. Their protection was my number one priority.
“Darth, Shiloh goes nowhere without you. Understand?” Booth ordered. His reaction was better than mine was. I was still seething with unbridled anger. Somewhere out there, someone had photos of my baby, and I felt more helpless than I had ever felt in my entire life.
“No need to ask, Pres. If Deck can’t be with Shiloh and Charlie, I will be.”
Hearing Charlie’s name, I snapped out of my trance. The last thing I wanted was for Charlie to freak out over this. We didn’t know who it was nor why it was happening, but it was possible she might think it had something to do with her family. We had taken care of her debt payments and got them up to date, but Booth also called in his lawyer and had him send a cease and desist letter to put a stop to all the random extra payments her family kept insisting she owed.
So far, they had complied, and the originally agreed upon terms were back in place, but it could be possible they got their snotty noses out of joint and decided to take a different route.
“Pres, is it possible it could be Charlie’s family?” I asked, voicing my theory.
Booth took only a handful of seconds to consider it, but then quickly shook his head.
“Doesn’t feel right, Sarge. Even if they have looked into Charlie’s relationship with you, there is no way they could know about the businesses owned by the club. Not in the short time between our lawyer sending that letter and the start of all this fuckery.” Booth paused, looking pensive. “No, that’s not the direction we look.”
Steel came closer to the laptop and took a good look.
“Ford, will that military facial recognition software help?” he suddenly asked.
What the fuck? That kind of software was only helpful if the person looked at was in the system.
“Only if their photo is on file somewhere,” Ford answered with what I had been thinking.
Steel didn’t seem to be listening. His steely glare was on the grainy photo of the SUV, hence his nickname. The best damn sniper in the commandos. Steel could see a target a mile away and never missed. He kept our arses safe and alive more than once. So, on this, I was going with him.
“What are you seeing, brother?” I asked him. I didn’t take my eyes off the computer screen, hoping what Steel saw was something important.
“Steel? What’s got you?” Booth questioned quietly. We rarely yelled or shouted at each other. Other motorcycle clubs may carry on like that, and sure, we did at times when the moment called for it, but mostly, for us, it was only in fun or to bust someone’s chops. However, in situations like this, we stood back and let the training take over.
Each of us had a specialty, and we took those specialties seriously.
Steel finally broke free from his concentration, but his look was not one of triumph. Instead, he looked utterly devastated. Pointing at the image of the vehicle sitting in front of the gun shop, he then looked up at us—especially looking at Creed.
“Tell me that isn’t what I think it is, Creed?” Steel asked with his finger now on the screen and sitting on the image of the person, specifically at the arm.
Creed leaned in closer and took a real close look. His facial expression changed almost instantly. His look of bewilderment and annoyance morphed into complete and total disbelief. He almost staggered back from the desk.
“Holy fucking shit. No fucking way.” Creed sounded like he really didn’t want to believe what they were seeing. And I mean they because I still saw shit. What I saw was a black blob type of detail on the forearm. My heart was screaming that it wanted to know what the fuck it was they were talking about. My soldier’s mind was telling me to wait.
Ford, however, had never been one for mind games, and he let them know it.
“Will you two stop talking in fucking code, and tell me what the fuck you are seeing?” Ford shouted, exasperated with our former commando snipers, too.
Yeah, what he said.
Steel looked over to Booth, then to me. Then he rolled up his shirtsleeve to reveal the tattoo on his forearm. Creed then held out his arm, and his tattoo was the exact same as the one on Steel’s arm—a sniper rifle with a pair of dog tags wound intricately around the barrel of the rifle.
“We got these after we finished sniper training just before we joined the fifth commando regiment.” Something about Creed’s tone had me very worried. My mouth was dry, my brain was starting to catch up, but Jesus Christ, I hoped I wasn’t on the right path. It couldn’t be.
“Me, Creed, and five others have this same tattoo. I designed it, and we used our actual dog tag numbers for the tattoos.” Steel sounded shattered.
All of us were silent as we stared at the tattoos and then back at the screen, the second square on the screen our only target. Finally, our former commanding officer and current club president said the thing no one else wanted to. I knew I sure as fuck didn’t want to say it.
Booth had a look of fury on his face as he still stared at the laptop. “It’s one of our own.” He growled.