“Levi, what can I get you, babe?” Levi had been sitting at the end of the bar for fifteen minutes. When he came in Kat, the bartender, had been engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight with her father. It wasn’t the first fight between them that Levi had witnessed since coming to Massachusetts and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. The day the two of them stopped arguing would probably mean that one of them was dead. Levi’s money was on that person being her father. He owned the bar they were in, but Kat ran it. Her father was seldom around because someone was always looking for him and he didn’t want to be found. Now as Kat addressed Levi, the disheveled man looked up as if he’d only realized they had an audience for their argument. He adjusted the collar on his shirt and pasted a huge smile on his face.

“Well, Levi, I didn’t see you come in. How are you, my boy?” Levi saw Kat roll her eyes. She pointed at the beer tap and Levi nodded.

“I’m doing alright. How are you?” Dillon was rubbing his left fist into his right hand and had a little wince on his face as he did. Levi tried not to smile. He had walked in the bar, literally, as Kat was slamming the cash register drawer on Dillon’s hand. She was five-foot nothing with long black hair and giant, almond-shaped eyes that made her look like a cat, so her name was fitting in that respect. The tattoos that covered both of her arms from shoulder to wrist didn’t even succeed in making her look tough. The harsh black lines she painted underneath her eyes and the heavy mascara on her long lashes only served to make her look like a tired super-model in Levi’s opinion. But in the past few months since he’d met her he realized that Kat was probably more dangerous than any man he’d ever met.

“Any day above ground is great, am I right?”

“You’re right,” Levi told him Dillon as Kat sat the beer down in front of him.

“Don’t tell him he’s right about anything,” she snapped. “Did you see him when you came in? The fucker came by this morning acting like he was here to help me open up and I catch him trying to steal from the till.”

Her father rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t stealing. You can’t steal from your own establishment.”

“Oh, yeah? This is your establishment? Since when? Because the way I see it, I’m the one here running this place, putting up with shit from customers and distributors and bill collectors. I’m warding off bounty hunters coming up in here looking for your ass while I wash glasses until my fingers bleed. I’m kicking out the worthless scum that wander in here looking for you and that shit you’re selling them, just so you can make enough money to buy your own…”

Levi lost the battle with his smile when her father folded her arms and said, “And who do you have to thank for making you a strong enough woman to do all of that?” The young biker picked up his beer mug and carried it over to a booth before the glass started flying. Dax had sent him to be in on a meeting that was taking place there between a few of the Skulls and a member of a local street gang. The Skulls and the gang member weren’t scheduled to be there for another hour, but Dax had sent Levi early, to be there when the bar opened and make sure there was no set-up going on. Levi was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and boots. He’d left his bike around behind the bar and his kutte was in the saddlebags.

The show between Kat and her father as he waited had just been a bonus. They were still sniping at each other when the doors opened and a few other regulars drifted in. None of the regulars were surprised by the fight, nor at the way Kat stopped to greet each one of them, and ask what they wanted to drink. Kat called out terms of endearment like “babe” and “sweetie” to those she liked. The ones she didn’t like were “motherfuckers” and “bitches” and those that she didn’t know, she was wary of right off the bat. She’d had a hard life and it had made her suspicious of almost everyone’s intentions. Levi liked her, but he had to admit if only to himself that she scared the piss out of him sometimes. He knew that she kept a handgun and a sawed-off shotgun both down behind the counter and he only hoped he wasn’t in the bar the day she decided to use them. He could just picture her peppering the place with bullets one day after the old man set her off.

His attention was drawn away from Kat and her old man when a young black man walked through the doors. He had on a ski-cap, which wasn’t unusual because it was the middle of December and Massachusetts was cold as fuck. It wasn’t the white t-shirt or baggy jeans that caught Levi’s attention either. It was the red bandana that he had tied around his neck and the other one that dangled from one of his pockets. His high-top tennis shoes were red as well and even the thin rubber bands that held his long braids in place were red. This had to be one of the guys the Skulls were there to meet. Dax had found out they were jacking cars in Skulls territory and this meeting was just a friendly “warning” to make sure they knew how dangerous it might be for them if they continued. Levi was surprised that the guy was alone, but he’d be willing to bet that a dozen of his closest friends were waiting close by outside.

“Hey there,” Kat said to him as he walked up to the bar. She looked him over suspiciously like she did every new customer and asked, “What can I get you?”

While Kat looked him over from the front, Levi checked the guy out from behind. It didn’t look like he had anything in the back pockets of the jeans that were dangling off his hips, but his t-shirt was big and long and it would be easy to conceal a weapon either in the front pockets or in his waistband. Levi took a sip of his beer and waited. “I’ll take a Bud and a shot of tequila,” the guy told Kat, dropping a twenty on the counter. Kat’s dad reached for it and she batted his hand away. Levi smiled again at the two of them; they were something else.

Kat sat a bottle of beer and a shot glass in front of the gang member and poured tequila into the glass. She put his change down and walked to the other end of the bar to tend to another new customer. Levi watched the guy throw back his shot and then down most of what was in the bottle before picking up his change and heading toward the bathroom in back. Levi slid around the U-shaped booth so that he could see both the front door and the bathroom door from where he sat. He sipped his beer and waited, and waited. Ten minutes passed, and then fifteen…and when fifteen turned into sixteen, Levi stood up and headed toward the back of the bar. Luckily it was early and the only day drinkers were a handful of regulars sitting at the bar. No one was in back around the pool tables or the dartboards or the entrance to the bathroom that the banger had gone into. Levi went over to the back-exit door and flipped the padlock on that, before posting himself next to one of the pool tables where the bathroom door would be in his direct line of sight.

It wasn’t long before the rest of his brothers arrived. He made eye contact with Cody, who was in the lead, jerking his head toward the bathroom door. Cody nodded almost imperceptibly as he took a seat with the five other guys that came in with him. Levi stayed alert to any movement in the bathroom while watching Kat go over and take the men’s orders. He didn’t miss that she noticed him standing there, mostly because she didn’t want him to miss it. She gave him a hard look, a warning look. Nothing pissed her off more than a fight in her bar…unless it was her and her father, and then it was just another day. Levi smiled at her and gave her a little wink that he thought was reassuring. She shot flames at him out of her eyes and then bent down and whispered something in Cody’s ear. He saw Cody’s shoulders shake in laughter as she walked away. He could only imagine what she was threatening to do to them. He was mulling that over when the front door swung open, violently, and Cody and the others got to their feet, weapons in hand.

Levi turned his attention back to the bathroom as gunshots rang out in front. The guy hiding in there stepped out, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, and Levi took him out with one shot before he knew what hit him. He heard the explosion of the semi-automatic weapon splitting the back door open. He began shooting in that direction, but the spray of their bullets forced him to take refuge behind one of the pool tables. He looked toward the front and saw Gunner moving in his direction, shooting as he came toward the back in a crouch. While the men coming in the back door were distracted by Gunner, Levi got back up to his feet and picked off one of the men in front. There were three of them and almost as soon as that one fell, Gunner picked off the next one. The shots that took out the last one came from behind Levi. When he turned around, Kat was standing there, clutching her own sawed-off shotgun and still giving him a hard look like the whole thing was his fault.

Levi and Gunner both moved toward the front of the bar but by that time, Cody, Jimmy, and the others had that situation under control. All the Street Chaos members were down, most of them dead. The one that wasn’t dead was on his knees next to the jukebox with his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot me,” he screamed. “I told ’em this was a stupid idea.”

Levi and the others stood back as Cody walked over to him and put his gun to the guy’s head. The man on his knees was crying—real tears—as he begged for his life. “You go back and tell them that this wasn’t just a stupid idea, it was an act of war. And then if you’re smart, you’ll pack up your shit and get as far away from here as possible because nobody in history has declared war on the Skulls and come out the other side in one piece. Nobody. Understand?”

The crying man nodded and Cody pushed him over with the barrel of his gun and said, “Get the hell out of here.” He crawled to the door before scrambling to his feet and running out. Cody turned then and looked around the bar. The patrons that had been sitting on the barstools were all still hiding underneath. Kat’s father was just standing up; he’d been crouched behind the bar. The expensive glass bottles of liquor that had been displayed on mirrored shelves behind the bar were mostly shattered. There were holes in the vinyl seats of the booths and in the tables where bullets had ripped through them. A few of the wooden beams overhead were splintered…and the back door was obliterated. Most obvious, however, were the bodies that littered the floor in pools of blood and other bodily fluids.

“Motherfucker!” Kat screamed suddenly at the top of her lungs. “You motherfuckers! Look what you did to my motherfucking bar!”

“Sorry, Kat,” Cody said. “You know Dax will take care of it.”

“And what if I just tell you Skulls you’re not allowed back in my place? You think I need this shit? You think I can afford the business I’ll lose because of this shit?”

Cody went over and tried to put his arm around her. She was half his size, but she still pushed him away. “I’m really sorry, Kat. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We were just here to meet them, to talk.”

“Get them the fuck out of here, now. I want these smelly bodies out of my bar and I want this mess cleaned up, now.”

“You got it,” Cody told her. He issued a few orders to the guys, who all started dragging bodies out the back door. It was going to be a long day of cleaning up and Dax would probably put the ranch on lockdown. Levi knew that he shouldn’t be happy about any of it, but the truth was he did everything he could these days to stay busy. Busywork, even when it included dragging a dead gang-banger out the back door of a bar, kept him from losing his mind thinking about how badly, even after all this time, he still wanted Zoe back in his life.