CHAPTER ELEVEN
Knight
The sound of my phone ringing only intensified the pounding in my head. I drank way too much the night before and I was paying for it now.
“Fuck,” I murmured as my hand blindly patted my nightstand in hopes of silencing the offending noise. The only thing I succeeded in was knocking my damn phone to the floor.
With a haggard grumble, I rolled over and searched for my phone with blurry eyes. The ringing stopped, only to start right back up again. I had a feeling that whoever was calling really needed to get a hold of me and I had an even bigger feeling that whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be good news.
“Yeah,” I croaked out once I located my phone. I didn’t even look to see who it was, I simply closed my eyes as I answered while putting the damn thing to my ear.
“You sound like shit,” Iron commented in my ear dryly.
“Rough night,” was all I supplied.
“Cable saw someone sniffing around the shipping containers on the far lot of the docks.”
That got my attention and despite my whole body’s protest against it, I shot up like an arrow.
“Identify them?”
“No, the cameras on that side are shit and the person was wearing all dark clothing. They had a hood pulled up over their head,” Iron said sounding irritated.
“But there’s really nothing out there to get into. What do you think they were looking for?” I asked as I willed my brain to wake up and process everything.
“Don’t know. But I want to add a guy there for the next few days at least. Who do you trust the most?”
Though he was the Prez, I really appreciated him letting me handle this. The docks were mine and it showed that he trusted and had enough confidence in me to handle it. That didn’t mean he wanted to be left out of the loop, which was fine by me.
“Mouse on day watch. Give the mid-afternoon to Tripp. And Lake can pull midnight to eight, for now,” I said knowing that Lake rarely slept and preferred the distractions come nighttime. I had no idea why, it was just something I’d picked up about the guy after spending a year around him.
“Yeah, sounds good. I’ll call them. You get yourself fixed up then get to the clubhouse.” I didn’t miss the amused humor in his tone. Thank fuck he wasn’t mad.
I was usually more responsible. I didn’t overindulge in alcohol. I took my club duties seriously and I always wanted to be prepared for anything. But last night had done me in. Spending so much time around Gwen, hearing her talk and laugh with such ease and not being able to touch her was like someone cutting me with a thousand knives all over.
To be a part of it but still feel like I was on the outside was like I was bobbing in the ocean with the life preserver just out of reach. It was intoxicating and maddening. Beautiful and painful. All of it at the same time. I knew I had no right to feel the way I did, but it didn’t stop the old memories from flowing in all night long.
Gwen.
The one I always wanted but couldn’t have.
The brightest star in the universe but not one that I could reach.
She had been my best friend at one point. The person that knew everything about me. And then she wasn’t. Then she slipped further and further away from me.
I knew it was my doing and I only had myself to blame. The truth was, I’d spent so many years running, being in denial, of how I felt about her. I had done my best to push her away and move on. But no matter what I did, that blonde hair, blue eyes, and gorgeous smile were always in the back of my mind.
Sometimes I would think that I was going crazy. I would be alone and I’d hear her whisper into my ear. Or I’d be watching something and I’d hear her laugh right beside me. But it was only her ghost in my mind.
Focus. I needed to shake off the shitty feeling I had about the whole situation and focus on club shit. Only, I couldn’t ever completely put her out of my mind. As I left my room, I realized that I couldn’t even put her out of my life now that she was living with me. Though I wanted to take my bad mood out on her, as I walked into the silent living room and realized that she wasn’t even up yet, my frustration deflated. Truth be told, I knew I would have never pushed my grumpy mood off onto her. I could never. I knew if I so much as got one look at her, I would do a one-eighty. There was no way I’d be able to turn my back on her and treat her like shit. Again.
Yeah, I knew what I’d done all those years ago, and every time I saw the sadness take over her eyes, it killed me inside. It was the worst thing I’d ever done. And the thing was, it was something I felt I had to do. Four years difference was a lot back then.
But not so much now.
Fuck! That wasn’t helping at all. Twenty-one and Twenty-five wasn’t that far of a stretch, and with her maturity level, there was hardly a difference. No one in the outside world would have blinked an eye at the tiny age gap now.
The more I thought about it, the more I hated the situation. It wasn’t just age that made me hesitant back then. Sure, that was a huge part, but the whole thing with her dad and the club was the other half of that. Now that was the last thread hanging on. It was a strong one too, I knew it would never break—I could never let it.
While Brass wasn’t my direct Prez anymore, he still meant a lot to me. Not only that, but he was part of the club and he held a lot of power. Then add the whole thing about how I looked up to the man and the fact that he was pretty much my dad’s best friend and it was just a whole shit cupcake that I wouldn’t ever take a bite of.
I respected her dad in so many ways. While it’d been practically a lifetime since I’d seen or even talked to Gwen, I’d kept in contact with her dad throughout the years. He meant as much as my own dad meant to me.
While my dad was a good man and raised me the best I thought that he could, he was terrible with advice. Especially when it came to shit that really mattered. He tried his best, bless his damn soul, but it got to the point that I’d stop going to him for any little piece of advice whatsoever. That was usually the time I would call up Brass, lay it out there while he listened intently, and then I would wait for him to process before giving me his words of wisdom.
Now, when I needed his advice the most, I knew I couldn’t go to him. The one topic that had never been talked about between us for so many years. Gwen. His little girl. The club princess that never took her title to heart. And the thing was, this was the one thing I really needed advice on.
Sometimes life could be downright cruel. It wasn’t bad enough that I ripped my heart out right along with hers that night. Then I’d spent the next couple of years being so close to her but having to force myself to pretend as though she didn’t exist. Once I was away from the club and at college the only thing I’d learned about the situation was that no matter how many miles I put between us, it wasn’t enough to keep her out of my mind. I proved that time and time again when I’d look at someone and see some part of Gwen in them. Or the nights that I stayed awake, the pillow becoming too hard under my head, the sheets becoming too scratchy making me feel like little shards of glass cutting into my skin as I toyed with my phone for hours.
Now life was really taking a hammer to my nutsack with her being under the same roof.
I had to let thoughts of Gwen go. I had to be out the door and trying to figure out what was going on at the docks. I wondered who would dare to fuck with us. And why? That corner of the lot held old shipping containers that were pretty much too rusted out to use anymore. While we hadn’t gone through and checked each one out, I couldn’t imagine that there would even be anything in them. But then again, you never knew, there could have been a million dollars stashed in one of those things. I mean, I highly doubted we’d be that lucky. It looked like I had a shit-ton to do today then.
I thought about who I could get to help me go through all of those damn things. I wanted to kick myself that we hadn’t done it before, but then again, we’d been juggling a lot of balls the past year trying to get everything up and running. Maybe opening three businesses and trying to turn the abandoned motel into something we could function out of was just too much all at once. We had been ambitious. I think we were not only trying to prove to the other chapters that we could make it work, but we were trying to prove to other factions of the city that we were marking our corner. We had to show that the club was there to stay and make a place for ourselves at the outlaw table.
I decided to talk to Iron once I got to the clubhouse about who I should get to help me. I knew he’d leave it up to me but I always wanted his input. So far, Iron had proved to be a good leader. Different from Brass and even Cal from what I’d been around to witness. And that was neither a good thing nor a bad one.
I thought Iron’s way of doing things worked for this chapter and the brothers that were here. I had a feeling we would go far with him at the head of the table for years to come.
It didn’t surprise me that the clubhouse was quiet. Most of the guys were either already at work or sleeping away their hangovers. This was the time of day I loved to walk through this place. Not because I hated the chaos that came with so many men sharing one area, but because I loved the fact that there was a calm among that chaos. That was what the club was for me, noise and peace. The kind of noise that would normally help quiet the things that threatened to tear me apart on the inside. And the stillness of times like this was the balance that kept it all from becoming overwhelming.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Up there was Iron’s living space that was more like a tiny apartment, his office, and the room we held church in. I knew I’d find him waiting in his office, no doubt a huge mug of coffee in his hand and I knew it wouldn’t have been his first one of the day. As I approached the cracked open door, I found out that I was indeed right, his head tipped back as he downed whatever was left in the mug.
“I never said this shit was going to be easy,” he said motioning for me to step inside. “But damn, why does it have to happen so early?”
He let out a strained chuckle. I knew he was tense about the whole thing but he also needed to not let the heaviness that sat on his shoulders weigh him down. I had a feeling that he thought if that happened it would spill onto the rest of the club. He saw it as his job to hold that weight for all of us and not let it show how heavy it was at the same time.
I had an idea of what it was like to be in his position. While I’d never carried that patch myself, I’d been around in the moments that Brass would step from behind his shield. He never said the words, but I could feel his burden, I could see the strength that man had to have in his eyes.
Iron showed me the security footage. It was hard to tell if it was a woman or a man. They had on dark clothes and the hood of their jacket pulled up over their head, just like Iron had said. It didn’t help that the footage looked grainy and it was dark. The figure looked at a few of the containers then down as if they were looking at something in their hand. But from the angle, we couldn’t tell shit. Suddenly, the person whipped around and without having any sound, I had no idea why. But then it seemed like they got spooked and took off out of sight.
“Alright,” I said as I blew out a harsh breath. “I’ll start there and see if I can find how they got in and out. I thought it might be a good idea to start going through those containers to see if any of them actually have anything in them. I just assumed they were all empty, but I suppose you never know.”
“Good idea. Take a few guys with you, cut down on time.”
I nodded and sat down across the desk from him. Though his call had shocked me awake, I still could feel the blurriness in my eyes. I needed coffee and possibly some eggs, something to jump start me and rid me of this hangover.
“Hit it hard last night, huh?” Iron asked his eyes holding back none of his amusement.
“Yeah,” I cleared my throat. Damn, I would have killed for some water. “Boys came over and we drank too much.” That was the simple explanation.
“How’s the roommate thing going?”
“Fine,” I croaked and by the half-smirk he shot me, I wasn’t fooling anyone.
“She does good at the bar. Know her pops wanted her to have the shit shifts, but she goes the extra mile when it’s not busy. I sure as fuck appreciate that.”
I nodded, only half paying attention. I mean, I knew that whatever Gwen did she did it will everything she had. She wasn’t one to half-ass shit and try to skirt out of doing the dirty work. So it didn’t surprise me at all that she would find things to keep herself busy with when the place was dead.
“We really should think about hiring an actual staff for the place,” he said and I had a feeling it was hard for him to imagine that.
The bar did well enough on its own, the brothers took turns running shifts there. But if we were going to keep the place going, we needed to get people in there who would not only draw in a crowd but keep them happy as well. Some of us didn’t necessarily have that easy vibe to us. We could be intimidating and scary. Fuck, some of them could be downright moody.
And not to mention, that we needed to get someone in there to manage the place. We’d done well enough so far, but we needed someone steady to do the ordering and keeping the books and all that shit that most of us didn’t know about, or the ones that did, didn’t have the time.
“Probably not a bad idea,” I agreed glad we were moving on from the Gwen subject. “Ky had mentioned that the garage is picking up too. Maybe we should think about someone from the outside for there as well.”
This shouldn’t have been a problem because all of our businesses had been set up to be legit. It was a big thing that the club wanted going forward with this chapter. I knew some of the other chapters had businesses to hide money, and I also knew that at one point they were working towards stopping that.
Only thing was, now the club was running the show. We had the imports and we controlled the exports. We controlled the runs and who they went to after they left our hands. Well, most of them anyway. There were the guns that the Russians and the Irish ran. For the most part, the Italians had stayed out of the gun business. They had their so-called ‘protection services’ that kept their pockets green.
“That’s good. I had no doubt with Ky’s custom and restoration skills that the place would take off. He does a damn fine job. Makes me want a pimped out classic ride now.” He chuckled.
“Yeah, sure it does,” I joked back. Ky’s skills with rebuilds and paint jobs were no fucking joke. When he was done with a restoration, no matter how bad it was to begin with, the damn thing looked like we’d just traveled back in time. Fucking beautiful. It didn’t surprise me in the least that word had gotten around about the shop and his work.
“Go get some food and get down there,” he said, knowing that I needed to get shit done. “Let me know what you find.”
“Lake ‘round?” I asked as I got to my feet.
“Yeah. I imagine he’s probably still in his room. Seems like you and him had the same idea last night.”
So far, I’d seen Lake let loose a total of three times. He wasn’t one to overindulge, but when he did, man it was bad. I had no idea what it was that set him off every time and I wasn’t about to go prying into his business. He knew that we were there for him if he ever needed. Plus, it wasn’t like he and I were all that close.
The newness of the chapter was still apparent.
While we all had a bond, it was clear that some of us were closer than others. You might even say there were groups of us that stuck mostly with each other. It was something we were going to have to get over, eventually. We needed to grow as a chapter together. Take that motivational, ‘yay team’ bullshit, right? It didn’t help that we were a mash-up of other chapters. Some of us had grown up in the club, and some of us had been part of other chapters. That was the thing, you were comfortable around your people, I guessed. It was something that wasn’t going to change overnight, but I could tell it was something we all were trying to work on.
“Okay,” I said as I made my way to the door. “I’ll call you in a bit.”