“Well, I’ll be damned, look who decided to grace us with his presence at church today.” The room was full. Everyone had turned out for church, as they usually did when Stone called the meeting. Over a hundred men followed Stone’s eyes to the back where Zack was sitting. Zack smiled. Not because he felt like it, or because he was happy. It was his way of saying “fuck you” without getting shot for it, most of the time. He raised the cup of coffee in his hand in Stone’s direction. He’d gotten up before dawn, drove to Memphis, and followed Nicole to the bakery. Once she was inside, he’d been reluctant to leave, but he knew if he didn’t show up to this meeting, there would be consequences. He was fucking beat. He needed a good fuck and about ten hours of sleep.

Stone rolled his eyes at him. Zack knew he was lucky that the older man liked him. Partially that was because Zack kicked ass when it came to doing his job and partially it was because Zack was about the same age as Stone’s son had been when he was killed. Zack reminded him of his son, Jeff, and sometimes Zack felt like Stone thought God have given him a second chance to do something he’d never been able to do with his own son…protect him. “We’ve got a lot on the agenda today,” Stone said, “so we better get started. I’m going to turn it over to Skid. He’s got some important information on what’s happening with the Defenders.”

“Quiet down!” Skid said. Although Stone commanded a lot of respect, he wasn’t as disciplined as Skid was. The room fell completely silent and their vice president went on to say, “This new alliance with the Defenders is still on shaky ground.” Zack felt like Skid looked right at him when he said that. Zack had pissed them off by knocking out a guy named Spider in the parking lot of a Memphis bar. Stone had ordered him to apologize but instead he had gone to the aid of Spider’s girlfriend and baby son after Spider got wasted and threatened to kill her and take the baby if she didn’t agree to take him back. She had a bruise on her face and a cut on her lip and blood on her shirt that undoubtedly came from her nose. Zack wanted to kill him, but he knew not only he but his club would pay dearly for that. He smiled at what he and the few brothers he trusted to keep their mouths shut had done to him instead. By the time the piece of shit woke up on the riverbank, nude and probably freezing his tiny dick off, Nicole and Liam and Nicole’s friend and babysitter had been packed up and moved into two of the apartments owned by the club. If it were up to Zack she would have gone far away from Memphis, but Nicole was holding firm that she wasn’t ready to give up her job and leave town. She had spent the night at the clubhouse with him, in his bed, while he slept on the floor. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Between his aching cock and the fussing baby, he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep, but the second he took her to her new place and dropped her off the next day, he’d missed her presence.

Nicole had let him help her that night but for the past two weeks she’d been refusing any help he offered her and had even taken to leaving a twenty, or once even a fifty, on his table when he came in to the bakery…to “pay him back.” No matter how much he objected, she wouldn’t concede that she didn’t owe him anything, so he finally just started taking the money to make her feel better, but saving it for her for when she was ready to finally leave. Zack reluctantly put away his thoughts of Nicole and tuned his ears back into what Skid was saying:

“Friday night, we’ll need six men to follow the van and six more to stand by while they unload it…” Zack stood up. Skid looked at him like the only thing keeping him from taking out his piece and shooting him were witnesses. “What?” he said.

“With all due respect,” he said, looking from Skid to Stone and over to Stone’s favorite sergeant at arms and one of Zack’s best friends, Justin. “Why the fuck are we aligning ourselves with these assholes? We don’t need them. We sure as hell don’t need to get back into a business that we worked hard to get out of.” The Invaders, Zack’s club, had spent years as the biggest arms and drug dealers in the south before Stone’s son was killed in a shoot-out with the cops. After that, the despondent president had eased his soul by trying to bring the club from being one of the few one percenters in the south, to…if not legitimacy…something close enough to keep most of them alive and out of prison. Zack honestly didn’t understand why, just when they seemed to be turning a corner, the executive board seemed to want to take them back in the wrong direction.

“I believe we’ve discussed this with you already, Zack. The executives voted on this alliance and since you are not an executive in this club, you don’t get a say in that…you just do what you’re told.”

“Oh, so now this club is being run like, say…the Head Hunters? You fucking do what I tell you and you do it blindly? Since when do we not get a say in what goes on around here? Did that change when I was gone for nine months, trying to scare up some alliances that would really do this club some good and not get us all fucking dead?”

Zack knew he was pushing the limits, but he was confused and pissed off. He left his home, his family, and everything he knew three years ago to get away from his asshole father and the shit that went on in that club. Zack felt a twinge of…something, at the thought of his father. A fresh memory of watching Swinger’s chest explode just before he hit the ground, and the wailing of his mother when he’d told her he was dead, flashed across his mind. The world was a better place without Swinger walking it, Zack knew that rationally, but sometimes the little boy that still lived in his heart wanted to argue the point. He put those thoughts away and focused again on what was happening in the room. Rumbles of conversation had begun to roll through the seats of the men who, like Zack, hadn’t been given any choice in this alliance. His directness seemed to spark confidence in some of them and soon there were a dozen or more on their feet wanting the same answers that Zack did…what were they going to get out of this and how was it going to benefit the club in the long run?

Skid was banging the gavel and as the room began to quiet down, Stone’s hard stare was focused on Zack’s face. Zack hated that his president, a man that he greatly respected and admired, felt betrayed by him…but he had lived blind to what was going on in his father’s club for far too long to ever let it happen again. “One at a time,” Skid said, loudly. “Patch, what is your question?”

“The same as Zack’s,” the biker who wore a patch over his left eye said. Patch’s left eye had been a casualty of his time in prison. He was arrested at eighteen for killing a rival gang member and sentenced to twenty years. He got paroled at thirty-five and he’d gone right back to the club he’d remained loyal to for all those years. He was usually quiet and reserved…but deadly when he had to be. Speaking out at church was new, and Zack was grateful to the man for having his back.

Skid had to bang the gavel again to get the rest of the men vocally agreeing with Patch to quiet down. Zack saw him look at Stone. Stone gave him a nod and Skid turned to their treasurer, a man that went by the name of Comrade. Comrade looked out at the room through a pair of oddly light green eyes that from a distance almost seemed devoid of color. He ran a hand through his shaggy brown hair that grew up instead of down his back, and said:

“The Defenders will be paying us a lot of money monthly to escort them from Memphis to a warehouse outside of Clarksville, where they have recently begun to store their merchandise.” In real English, everyone in the room knew that the warehouse was a virtual armory and the Defenders didn’t want any of the street gangs they did business with following them out there. The last time they’d been followed to their warehouse in Memphis had resulted in a bloody mess where they lost five men and all their “merchandise.” They were still at war with that gang, a deadly spinoff of the Mexican Mafia known as Los Bandidos. Basically, they wanted the Invaders to be their bodyguards, and that didn’t sit well with Zack, or a lot of the men in the room. “We need that money,” Comrade said, flatly.

“Why?” Zack asked. “Are we in some kind of financial straits?”

“I’ll take that one,” Stone said. Zack could see the sad look in his president’s eyes all the way from the back of the room. “I’ve tried hard to turn this club around. We’ve made some solid investments on the apartment buildings and bars we’ve bought around town. But look around you. We’re supporting hundreds of people. By cutting our ties with the cartels and refusing to push their poison out to our community, we’ve cut our income drastically. Without the relationship with the cartels, we haven’t been able to get the quality of guns we were getting before, so the Defenders have moved in to do what we couldn’t. To be fair, that club is strong enough that instead of choosing to ally with us, they could have chosen to go to war and simply rid themselves of us for good. This alliance will benefit us financially and keep us out of a war.” Zack couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Stone sounded defeated. It was unlike him and far from what their club had always stood for. As the room began to rumble again, and Skid banged the gavel, Stone got up from his chair behind the table at the center of it and walked out. Zack got up and was about to follow him when his phone vibrated in his pocket. He stepped out the door into the almost blinding sunlight and made the mistake of answering it without checking the caller ID. It was his mother.

“Zachary, tomorrow evening is your father’s memorial.” He could tell by the sound of her voice that she’d been crying…again. He’d talked to her more in the past two weeks than he had in three years and each time he did, she turned on the waterworks. He’d missed his father’s burial, but despite his mother’s attempts at guilting him, he slept just fine at night.

“Yeah, and?” he said, forcing himself not to give into her dramatics.

She sucked in a loud sob and said, “You need to be here. You let them put your father in the ground without paying your respects; you need to do it at the memorial. The club expects you to be here. I need you here…Please, Zack! It’s all falling apart. Randall is back and he’s taken over. I’m going to end up homeless and destitute!” Her wailing started then. To Zack it was akin to the sound of nails on a chalkboard. If he thought it was geared toward anything other than manipulating him, he might feel sorry for her. As it was, he was just pissed at himself for answering the phone.

“I’m in Tennessee, Mona. I won’t make it to Texas overnight, so it’s too late even if I wanted to be there, which I don’t. Why would I pay respects to a dead man that I didn’t respect in life?”

He had to listen to her sob for another full minute before she said, “He was your father, Zachary, and all he ever wanted, whether you believe it or not, was what was best for you.” Her voice went from high and screechy to soft and infused with as much fake motherly love as she could muster, “Please, baby, do this for me. I’m all alone. I’m broken and scared. You could fly out and be here by morning. Please.”

Fuck. Zack hated the human part of him that wanted to buy into the idea that since she gave birth to him, he somehow owed her something.