Chapter One
Jaxson Coltrane lit a cigarette and leaned out of the open sash window of his bedroom. Icy-fingers of cold wind blew in and whipped at his face. His eyes narrowed against a beam of the early morning sun, and he put one hand up to shade them. Taking a deep draw, he looked out onto the empty streets below, taking in the view of the clubhouse in the distance; an inconspicuous outpost of the town he called home.
He smiled. Nothing had changed about the place in the last ten years; still unappealing and functional looking from the outside. At this time of day, it always seemed like the forlorn, abandoned storage warehouse it had been before. Inside, it had been refurbished: scrubbed up, gutted out and turned into a fully operational clubhouse. Inside was where the real magic happened. The place came to life; a die-hard biker’s paradise. Every single operation since day one was planned in the back office. But it was more than just the club’s fortress. The place had been the home that sustained him for the past decade. It was ten years to this day when it all began; ten hard and dangerous years with the Black Devils MC.
Life in an MC had taken him to hell and back. Those who survived the years always carried the scars to prove it. Jaxson knew he was lucky to have come through largely unscathed. Being Vice President of the club for the past three years, he’d hustled and fought to earn his stripes. Though, how he’d managed to do so, was a mystery to him. For others, those whose pictures adorned the Wall of Death, it had proved to be lethal. It’d always been an unnerving thought that he may not have been so lucky. There weren’t many weeks that went by when he didn’t get the stomach-churning feeling that this would be the week when De Luca would tap him on the shoulder and say: ‘sorry kid, I was wrong about you.’
Jaxson still remembered the look of shock on his mother’s face when he told her he was joining the club at the age of 17. She’d wanted him to join the military and ‘make a man of himself,’ instead; she got a punk outlaw biker for a son. She’d warned Jaxson to steer clear of the formidable Bruno de Luca. Bruno, the notorious head of the De Luca crime family, and the clubs’ president, had told him he saw a lot of himself in Jaxson and took him on as a prospect. If she’d wanted a son that lived on the right side of the law, she was doomed to be disappointed.
She told Jaxson she had a horrific sense that her son would be six feet under within months. “He’s a user. He’ll make a puppet of you and cast you aside when you’re broken. You’ll see.’ Warning him that he would be no more than a means to an end for De Luca. She knew the danger in Jaxson making himself a vessel for De Lucas whims.
Undaunted, Jaxson hustled tirelessly as a young prospect to prove his worthiness as a brother in the club. Sure that if it hadn’t been for Bruno, he would be locked up inside the joint, Jaxson became determined never to disrespect the opportunity Bruno had given him. The club was all he had. The club had given something he felt he was missing in life: a sense of family. And it had given him a lot. In return, he became what they wanted him to be, bound for a new life in a new world.
It’d been a frustrating time for Jaxson with no fancy education, no job, no father in the picture, and a mother busting her ass every day just to get by off of waitressing tips. Formal education had dubbed him ‘unemployable.’ Like most of the guys, he had nowhere else to go. It all had left a chip-on-his-shoulder and a drive to succeed no matter what.
Jaxson’s eyes fell closed. Nothing would ever beat the feeling of his first solo ride on that black Harley Soft tail. The sun glinted off of the polished silver as he climbed on and cranked the engine. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as the beast roared to life. The rush as he raced out of the parking lot, wind whipping past his face and through his hair, as he weaved through traffic it was simultaneously thrilling and yet remarkably and amazingly tranquil. It calmed a piece of his soul that life had left hollow.
Life had gotten a lot better very fast for Jaxson. As a unit, the club felt unstoppable. He had a job, an intense passion for bikes, and a brotherhood there to defend him anytime he was threatened. The club protected the town too, not that they seemed to notice, and he was rather proud of this. Although on the surface, Coronado was a charming and agreeable coastal community, there were dark and severe threats to the town from crime groups in neighbouring territories.
To Jaxson’s profound surprise, now three days away from the election of a new club president. Jaxson, it turned out, was infinitely more clever, hardier and dependable than anyone had ever supposed. With the big day rolling closer, he was the favorite to be voted in as the new leader. Too fucking close for comfort, he thought. The prospect of taking on the responsibility of ‘boss’ for the whole MC was unsettling and it had set him on edge for weeks.
Plus, he had to wonder whether accepting the role was a smart thing to do. There was a serious problem in this, as not everyone would embrace this change warmly. Even in a close-knit MC brotherhood, there was always a male rivalry that left tensions brewing beneath the surface.
De Luca’s son, Antonio, four years Jaxson’s junior, had always been disturbed and deeply offended at his father’s affinity for Jaxson. Jaxson knew his underlying jealousy and frustration would become stronger if he were promoted to president. To Antonio, it was all crushingly unfair. To compound his misery, he would have to work under Jaxson every day with no hope of being promoted to take his father place as president, and for that, he would always quietly hate Jaxson to the grave. And Jaxson didn’t relish having to look over his shoulder every moment of every day for the rest of his life, waiting for the knife he knew Antonio would have ready for him.
But this was a world where you had to take the bad with the good. For Jaxson, it had meant having to harden himself to the sight of death. Over time, he got used to it. But he still had flashbacks of his first killing to this day. All he could do was look down at that body, brokenly. The amount of blood he saw took his breath away. Sure, he never pulled a trigger, but the man had died at his hands.
A vision of himself at home in the shower, scrubbing his body over and over, that night, flashed into his mind.
Since then, it had been nearly ten years of looking over his shoulder worrying that someone would find out it was him and take him out. Almost expecting it, in fact. As fate would have it, no one ever came out for his blood. Not yet, anyway.
He rested his head on the wall beside him. He hadn’t thought about this for a while. That same night, Jaxson had come home with blood on his shirt, and his mother snapped—she grabbed a bag, filled it with some things, and in the place of a goodbye, yelled, “That club is nothing but a god dammed suicide. And I’m not going to be sitting at home like a fool waiting for a knock at the door telling me you’re dead.” With one brief pause, she stared into Jaxson’s eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks, in the hope of a concession, but it was too late—he was one of them now. Fifteen minutes later, a taxi came and picked her up. She was out of his life, forever. If Jaxson’s fate were to be as tragic as his mother had thought, it seemed reasonable to infer that she didn’t want to stick around to watch it happen.
He took a few more deep drags of his cigarette, trying to let his mind travel to a place where it could calm down….riding his bike on the open road.
Stubbing out his cigarette, he pulled the window shut and grabbed his leather jacket off of his bed. He stopped to look at himself in the standing mirror before leaving the room. He’d changed since he’d first joined the MC. Ripped might be the word for his body. Arms like steel bands. Dark hair and startling blue eyes. He stood at 6 foot two and was built like a brick wall. Gone was the skinny, lean kid who’d rode into the club in a stolen car while running from the cops.
On his way out of the apartment, he took one last swig of his now cold morning coffee, grabbed his keys and sunglasses, then made his way out of the front door of his apartment.
The vote of his brothers was out of his hands. On the day of the election meeting, his fate would be decided. Jaxson could only hope things wouldn’t come to blows between himself and Antonio.