Orange was never really my color.

I sat bitterly in the cell, my back to the wall. There were so many of us in here that, after one brief night with my own private lockup, they’d tossed all the rest of us together to make room for the next arrests.

My imposing size kept almost all the inmates from bothering me, but a few rat bastards already had their eye on me. Two in particular seemed to hang together. They looked like they were all bark, which is why they hadn’t yet sprung for bite. But they were classic material for prison henchmen – latching onto a larger fish, looking at me like a meal ticket to prove their worth once they’d gotten inside. Probably sizing up how best to try and jump me, after we were sent further into the system.

It would only be a few days. Once we’d been moved into detention, I knew they would quickly become a problem for me…

Worse, I hadn’t been making any friends. Not that I’d been pissing anyone off, but none of these fuckers in here looked particularly friendly, or even useful.

My first mistake had been trying to keep to myself. Being the strong, silent type had done the exact opposite of what I’d wanted. It had drawn fucking attention.

I hadn’t had to think about any of this shit for so long that I’d need to adapt, and I’d need to adapt quickly…

I could only hope that Sarah had gotten the single phone call they’d let me have. Her phone had, of course, gone straight to fucking voicemail, so I’d left her a brief message of where I was and trusted for the best…

Oh man, I thought to myself.

If word of this hits the Outlaws, then I’m gonna be in some pretty deep shit…

My organization was my great, big mark upon the world. My entire framework was built upon bad guys playing nice, and holding back any real threats to the populace. In the last year alone, I’d personally witnessed a few near misses that would have spelled catastrophe, right under the noses of the police.

There was too much red tape with them.

Everything important got rubbernecked, tied up in bullshit bureaucracy, and running in circles until it was too late.

But my people were there for when the police fucked up. I was proud of the Outlaws, my great, big middle finger to the law enforcement that had been a thorn in my side since the start… it was the kind of middle finger that said, If you won’t do your fucking jobs right, then let someone else.

Fight fire with fire, right?

Nobody better to keep the serious dangers out there away than to use people who aren’t afraid to go behind the law to do it…

But me being arrested was a problem.

It hadn’t happened in a while. Sure, there was an unspoken awareness that mistakes happened, and sometimes the wind changed on your luck.

But I was their leader.

I was supposed to be untouchable.

In order to get these fuckers to cooperate, I’d had to play a lean hand pretty far. My bluff was one that had lasted easily six years, playing the same damn hand over and over.

If the others saw this as weakness…

The fragile peace could be threatened.

Mutiny could be on the horizon. Hell, if they decided I might turn, it was a possibility that they would send someone to make sure the only place I flipped was in my grave.

It depended on how quickly I was out.

If I got tugged out of the system quick then, if it ever got out, it’d be pretty clear that a simple, laughable mistake happened and that was that.

But what if I’m in here a week or two?

What if I’m in here LONGER?

I took another hard look at those two rat bastards. They were loitering near the bars, and the one that I hated the most made eye contact with me, before grinning widely.

I fixed an icy, stony glare on him.

He crumbled and glanced away.

It wouldn’t be beyond the Outlaws to have one of their own arrested – probably a prospect, eager to pay some time for membership – just to put a would-be assassin within a ten-foot radius.

Would they turn on their own ruler?

I decided I didn’t want to know the answer.

This is what was all going through my head when the corrections officer approached. I was so wrapped up considering and weighing all of these implications that I only heard her on the third try:

“Hunter Hargreaves! You don’t want me to have to ask again!”

I rose from the bench, approaching the bars. The rat bastard brothers slid away, their beady little eyes hungrily locked onto me. They were extremely interested in what was going on with me, and I didn’t like it.

“You made bail,” the officer told me with cold, hardened eyes. “Step back, the rest of you. Gotta let our little birdie fly.”

The rest of the cell grumbled, although most of them had been in here longer and hadn’t even seen a judge yet. The rat bastards looked like their dinner had just been ripped away out from under them; I gave them a withering, triumphant glare, just to watch them retreat and scheme elsewhere.

The corrections officer assigned to babysit me put me back in cuffs. She silently, bitterly led me through the brief, oppressive hallways of the county prison, pausing only to unlock doors with her keyring.

“Bail, huh?” I asked.

She glared at me.

I smiled. “Just making conversation.”

Her glare deepened.

“Don’t.”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself, lady.”

After she finished unlocking that door, my new best friend led me to a counter to take my thumbprint and have my mug shot taken. I made sure to smile big and wide, just for her.

One room over, my cuffs were taken off. I was given a moment to collect my things out of a plastic box and advised to change back into my street clothes, returning the orange jumpsuit. Thank God I wasn’t wearing my club leathers, I thought to myself, although I suspected that the fuzz already knew who I really was.

After all, they were stupid, but they weren’t that stupid.

Once I’d signed a clearance form, my friend the officer escorted me through the final door and left without a trace.

Sarah instantly threw her arms around me.

But the moment lost some of its luster as I stared down her father, standing solemnly on his cane. He had hung back, watching me carefully while I had my reunion with his daughter.

“Jack,” I grunted. “You’re lucky we’re still in a county prison, or I’d have already laid you out on the goddamn concrete.”

He looked away.

Sarah held my cheeks in her palms, pulling my face towards hers.

“No, Hunter… things are different now.”

“Different, huh?”

I tried to glare over at that asshole again, but my fiancée stopped me.

“Dad paid your bail.”

My anger took a strong hit at that one.

“Fine. Let’s just get the fuck out of here,” I grumbled, eager to get away from this goddamn place. I felt like a caged animal in here. “When we’re far, far away from here, then we can discuss whatever’s going on…”

* * *

There wasn’t a lot room in Jack’s truck, so I chose to ride in the truck bed. Sarah wasn’t eager to be separated again from me so soon, so she curled up in my arms as we pulled away from the building.

Out of respect, I’d glanced at Jack first.

He’d merely nodded and climbed upfront.

We didn’t wind up going back to Jack’s place. Instead, Sarah had called ahead to the Parkers, who had been more than happy to cook for the two of us – and an extra.

It took Jack only about forty-five minutes in the late day traffic to navigate us towards their quiet little neighborhood. I tapped on the back window and gave him quick directions through the sliding visor so he could make sure he pulled us into the right driveway.

The Parkers recognized their old sheriff on sight – apparently, they’d been a pair of campaign contributors back in the day.

“Oh dearie, you should have told me he was your father!” Elaine fretted to Sarah as Jack shook Russell’s hand and hobbled aside to shoot the shit with him. “I’d have cooked a far better meal!”

“Don’t worry,” Sarah reassured her. “I’m sure that whatever you’ve made is fantastic.”

I followed the ladies inside, eager to get away from her father for the moment. While there was the fact that he’d been the one to bust me out, the simple matter was that I was only there in the first place because of him.

Until I’d heard more of the puzzle, I wouldn’t forgive him for what he had done. But we were in the company of kind strangers now, and I could break bread with him without breaking his neck.

Fortunately, dinner was fantastic.

Elaine underestimated her skills. On short notice, she‘d whipped up a delicious beef lasagna with all the trimmings, plus broiled vegetables and a chocolate cake for dessert.

“The cake’s store-bought,” she chuckled in my ear. “But don’t tell the others. I burn every dessert I try to make!”

Well, okay.

Plus a store-bought cake, then.

Russell said grace, and we dove into the food. After a tray of that parish prison slop, I had even more appreciation for her cooking. It put Jack’s best efforts to shame, and I smiled to myself as I overheard him ask her for her recipe.

After we had eaten our fill, Sarah leaned her head on my shoulder and Elaine carved up a few slices of the chocolate cake. Russell brought Jack and me a beer, although Jack quietly declined, citing one recent hell of a hangover.

No shit, I thought quietly.

I helped Elaine in the kitchen, cleaning up the cookware and dishes. Thank God she wasn’t using that cast iron bullshit, because I didn’t know if I could go through that again.

The elderly couple retired to the living room with Sarah for company as Jack and I walked out for a chat. I met her searching glance with a calm, reassuring smile as I held the door open for her quiet, hobbling father.

We sat out on the back patio with a pair of drinks – beer for me, orange juice for him.

“Sarah says you posted bail for me.”

Jack nodded. His glance was distant, lost over the Parkers’ backyard fence and watching the last traces of sunlight vanish. We could still make out the silhouette of rolling hills and distant mountains from here.

“Wanna tell me why?”

Jack sighed.

“Sarah told me everything.”

“Define everything.”

He looked at me sadly. Gone were any traces of his former gruffness, and he looked like a man caught in mourning.

“The missing girls,” Jack explained. “Sarah told me about the case, and the things that you two did to save all those innocent lives.”

“I’ve saved more innocent lives than theirs.”

“She told me about that, too,” he nodded. “Not any real details, but she convinced me that I have been wrong about you all along. And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you.”

“Everything you’ve done to me made me who I am today,” I told him sternly. “Everything you’ve done pushed me from the start, putting me on my path. They’ve made me the kind of man I am right now.”

“And what kind of man is that?”

I looked Jack Buchanan right in the eye.

“A man who doesn’t take any bullshit,” I told him firmly. “A man who has vowed to keep men like you from ever standing in his way again. A man who has to be as resourceful and cunning as possible to keep those under his care protected…”

I stoically held his gaze.

“…And a man who forgives.”

Jack’s eyes lowered to the patio floor.

“I’m sorry, Hunter. I regret all the troubles I caused you, for being so blind in my arrogance…every time I looked in your eyes, I saw so much of Gabriel Hargreaves…but now, I see a man who can make a real difference out here.”

I dwelt on the moment. “Apology accepted. But only on one condition.”

Jack looked defiant for a moment.

“What kind of condition?”

“You see, I’m going to have to do things a little backwards here. We’re on the verge of having our son. I’ve already asked for your daughter’s hand in marriage. But…”

“You want my blessing.”

I nodded sternly.

“Hunter,” he spoke, watching me carefully, “I think at this point you and I both know we’ve made mistakes – some bigger than others. In my case, my treatment of you is one of my biggest, and yet I see the kind of person you turned out to be in the end…and how much you really mean to my daughter.”

He leaned forwards.

“Cut the shit. Marry my kid.”

When he held out his hand, I shook it.

And that’s how Jack and I made amends.

* * *

I brought one last beer outside for myself, plus one to hand to my future father-in-law. At first he stared reluctantly at it but, when I insisted with a polite nod, he took it.

As I sat down beside him, we took one look at each other, popped the tops in our palms, and clinked the bottles together.

Jack was the first to speak.

“There’s just one thing I want to know.”

“Shoot,” I replied calmly.

“When we were trying to free you from jail, the supervising Lieutenant mentioned that there was a long list of expired charges they wanted to pin on you. Now, that in itself isn’t that strange to me, but they wanted to keep you over a bench warrant concerning a speeding ticket…”

“Speeding ticket?” I raised my eyebrow. “All of that fuss for a goddamn speeding ticket?”

Jack hesitated, his eyes on his beer.

I enjoyed the serenity of the falling night as he tried to pull his words together.

“It appears that some in our law enforcement system have come to suspect that you run your very own little crime syndicate. In particular, this Lieutenant had the wild idea that you had somehow figured out how to round up a bunch of unsavory types and get them to behave together.”

I remained quiet, listening to him as I drank.

“He thinks that you’re the leader of a silent organization of criminals that keep some sort of unspoken peace in the desert. The way he worded it, there wasn’t much evidence. They want to get you back on that stand, and then they’ll bend the rules to hit you with any expired charges that will stick. Once they’ve got you, they’ll start building an investigation into this criminal conspiracy.”

I took another sip.

“What are you asking, Jack?”

He looked me in the eyes: “Is it true?”

“Yes,” I replied without hesitation.

Jack shook his head.

“What am I supposed to do with that? How do I reconcile that with everything that Sarah told me about you, and the feats you’ve accomplished?”

I sat my beer down.

“How do you think I pulled them off?”

He looked at me with uncertainty.

“Jack, you rose through the ranks to rise as high as being the sheriff around here, after a long and decorated career in law enforcement. Think of what I’ve done as being the same, only on the other side of the tracks…” I smiled in confidence. “Only, what I’ve done didn’t come with any kind of hierarchy. There were no ranks to ascend, no superiors to order me around. I had to make it all up as I went along.”

“You think it was worth it,” he noted calmly. “That you’re justified in doing this.”

“The kinds of things that I’ve seen out here, and the ways that the cracks in the system let them happen, would make your head spin and your blood boil. I’ve seen heinous things. Ungodly things. And I’m not the only one. My loyal Devil’s Dragons have followed me on more than one thankless charge into danger to do some off-the-books housecleaning, but we aren’t big enough to do it on our own. You’re aware that, with how remote and secretive you can be in the desert, keeping out the kinds of monsters who will rot this part of the country to its core requires constant vigilance.

“There will always be criminals and thugs, biker clubs and hackers. You, and your kind, will never win the fight in stomping out evil for good. Sometimes, there’s just too much red tape; others, your people are a few steps too late…”

“And your way is better?”

“Of course not,” I shrugged. “I am not trying to introduce anarchy into the world. That holds the door open to disaster. All I want is a way to keep the peace. That will only happen with the overlap of both of these worlds: yours and mine. That’s the system I’ve tried to put into place.”

Jack thought on these words.

“It’s ambitious,” he noted. “Pulling together a grand truce between criminals and getting them to patrol beneath the law. What on earth pushed you to do this?”

I smiled knowingly.

It was rare that I shared this story.

“Do you happen to remember the old leader of the Devil’s Dragons?” I asked the retired sheriff, taking another swig from my beer.

“Eduardo Rodriguez,” Jack replied. “He was a real nasty piece of work. Those were the wicked days of the club.”

“That’s right…”

I walked down memory lane briefly, thinking of my old club president and the dark, twisted ways in which his brain operated.

“For all his faults – and trust you me, there were many – Eduardo was a man of vision. He had this plan to unite as much of the desert underworld as he could into a single organization. In pursuit of this dream, as he took the club eastward from its original base in Los Angeles, he built a lot of connections and shook a lot of hands.

“But Eduardo wanted power. He wanted to sit on the throne above a criminal syndicate, one so powerful that nothing short of martial law and bringing in military reinforcements could stop.”

Jack looked at me.

“And when he died in that raid…”

“I knew his dream. I knew that he had a book, a physical copy that he wrote these plans down in. So, after the dust settled, I snuck back into that strip club and cleaned out his hidden cache. After all, there was no risk of him punishing me from the afterlife…

“So I read the book, and I learned. I never let the others know I had it. It was only years later that I would even tell my most trusted ally, a former Marine who had come to serve me…”

I thought back to when I first met my dear friend, the wandering, haunted man who met our scattered club and saw something in me worth his undying loyalty…loyalty that I had rewarded, again and again.

I can’t thank you enough, Grizz.

“You were mentioning a book,” Jack said.

My thoughts pulled back to my story.

“I studied his dream, learning it in and out. I inherited it. But there was a keen difference here. Where Eduardo saw power, I saw potential. He wanted to pull together every thug he could get his hands on, convince them of the value to strength in numbers, and build his own army…

“But I saw a better way.”

“You saw how to protect people,” Jack looked at me with something that faintly resembled awe. “You saw how you could adjust those plans, take all those misguided dreams, and make something good from them.”

“It wasn’t easy,” I replied. “But yes. I tweaked them. I spearheaded them, taking them in a much different direction.”

Jack nodded quietly to himself.

“This is my contribution,” I told him. “This is the way that I give back. This crime syndicate, as you put it, is the necessary fallback that I have spent years cultivating and carefully putting into place. I’ve put a lot of hard work into it.

My tone changed as I lowered my beer.

“You see then, Jack, that I can’t risk anything happening to that. If it’s true that people are asking questions, then I can never let myself fall back into the system. If they suspect that I’ll rat on any of them – and some would think so – then it will bring a new wave of anarchy. Mutiny. Utter chaos. And the last thing any of us out here wants is for dozens of veteran bikers, felons, thugs, and worse to erupt into a power vacuum or, God forbid, a bloodbath of a civil war…

“The system is built to withstand certain things, including my absence. But me suddenly disappearing into custody is not one of them. It’ll bring a panic. There can be nothing to throw the balance into complete jeopardy, or else the lawless world you know from ten years ago comes screaming back with a vengeance…”

“This sounds delicate. What happens if you drop dead? Or if you just up and leave?”

“It can be fragile at times,” I told him. “But it grows stronger every day. So long as Johnny Law isn’t suspected as having a hand anywhere, then the entire thing is designed to be a self-fixing machine.” I smiled warmly. “Part of the brilliance in Eduardo’s schemes. He thought all of this shit out for years. I swear the man had a psychology degree under his belt somewhere…”

My tone lowered again.

“But back to the risk factor, because I want to be crystal clear here. I know you ponied up bail, and I’m grateful. But I am telling you right now that, by the time that court date comes, Sarah and I are going to be long gone…”

“Oh, I’m aware of that,” Jack smiled.

“Good,” I nodded.

He laughed. “What, do you think I’m a fool? I knew the second that I told them I’d pay your bail that it was money pissed into the wind. But I felt that it still went to a good cause.”

“I figured so. You’re a smart man.”

“The longer I listen to you, the longer I think that we’re both smart men, Hunter Hargreaves. If only I had listened sooner…”

“The past is the past now,” I told him. “As far as I see it, it all worked out in the end – and that’s what really matters.”

Jack looked touched.

“You know,” he studied his beer for a second, “Sarah said that exact same thing to me earlier today. My God… after all this time, the two of you really are made for each other, aren’t you?”

“We always were, Jack.”

“I’m damn glad we got you back out, then.”

“That reminds me… how much did you have to give up?” I asked coyly. My face suddenly fell when he didn’t answer immediately. “Oh God. Jack, don’t tell me you put the house up. Sarah will never fucking forgive me!”

“Heavens no!” He laughed again. “They were asking for fifty-thousand dollars.”

I whistled.

“Bah,” he scoffed, waving it off. “So I give up a year’s pension. I’ve got savings. If that’s the cost it takes to show the two of you that I’ve truly come around, and that I just want my daughter, hell, the two of you to be happy…”

He winked at me.

“It’s a price gladly paid.”