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  Only one person had my number and when I first left Logan’s Beach he called me every day.

  I never answered.

  The calls slowed to once a week.

  I never answered.

  When the calls stopped completely I felt a mixture of both hurt and relief.

  The phone buzzed for the fourth time and I couldn’t take it anymore. I reached over and pressed the green button, holding it to my ear without saying a word. “Bear? Bear is that you?” a female voice asked.

  Doe.

  “I’m so glad you answered. You don’t have to say anything, but you need to come home. Something’s happened,” she said, the worry in her voice cutting through my fog.

  I sat up on the bed quickly. Too quickly, and saw stars.

  “I don’t know where to start. It’s just that…” she paused and it sounded as if she’d covered the receiver with her hand. “You’re so pushy,” she said, but not to me. There was a commotion on the line like the phone was being passed and I knew exactly who it was being passed to, even before I heard him murmur, “I’m going to make you regret that smart mouth of yours after the kids go to bed.”

  I didn’t need to hear that shit. It was hard work sustaining the constant headache that pounded between my ears and I needed to get back to it.

  “You there?” King asked. I responded with a grunt and the sound of my lighter as I lit a cigarette. The smoke opened up my lungs and sending just enough nicotine to my brain to make the rusted wheels in my head start turning again. “I’m here,” I said in case he didn’t hear my grunt, my voice dry and scratchy. I reached over for my bottle of Jack Daniels but it was empty.

  I tilted it back and opened my mouth, the remnants dripped into my mouth.

  One, two, three, done.

  “You sound like fucking shit,” King said.

  “Well hello to you fucking too,” I sang.

  “We have a situation here more important than the sound of your fucking voice and as much as I’d like to take care of it for you, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “What?”

  “Gus was here…”

  Holy shit.

  I leapt off the bed, and again it was too fast because I fell to the floor with a thud. The phone slid across the carpet. Turning over onto my back I grabbed the phone and again held it up to my ear.

  At least I didn’t lose my smoke I thought, crossing my eyes to look at the cigarette still dangling from my lips.

  “What the fuck is going on over there?” King asked.

  I looked over at the clock on the nightstand. “Don’t worry about it. What you should worry about is why a brother is at your fucking door at three o’clock in the morning.” The MC was after me. As much as they’d love to take out King, killing civilians brought too much heat, but I still couldn’t think of a single reason why Gus would be there, other than taking out my closest friend to get to me.

  “He’s not here anymore. He had a girl with him.”

  “Gus has a girl? He’s an awkward motherfucker, but good for him, I guess,” I said.

  “No, shut the fuck up and listen…”

  “I’ve got a headache the size of the fucking Grand Canyon so cut the vague shit and tell me what the fuck is so important in the middle of the night that a text wouldn’t have been sufficient,” I said. The popcorn ceiling above me had blackish mold growing in the corners and if I closed one eye I could practically see the patch of fuzzy spores slowly growing into long-term lung issues.

  “It’s one in the afternoon,” King corrected. “And I just sent you a picture. Check it,” King said.

  Clicking over to the messages a little red number one appeared over the green bubble. I clicked on the icon and when the picture popped up I sucked in a breath. It was a girl. Naked, bruised and bloodied. Her hair was a weird shade between red and blonde.

  Pink maybe? Or maybe that was the blood in her hair.

  “You get it?” King asked.

  “Looking at it now, but why the fuck are you sending me a picture of a dead girl?” I clicked the speaker button so I could talk to King and look at the picture at the same time. She looked familiar. Her eyes were closed and her crazy colored hair was covering most of her face. “I’m not Preppy, this kind of shit doesn’t get my dick hard.”

  “It’s not a dead girl, asshole. She’s alive, but she’s here and she’s pretty banged up.”

  “So take her to the fucking hospital…” I began, ready to end the conversation and bribe one of the maids to make a liquor store run for me.

  “Bear!” King snapped. “She’s here, in the garage apartment. Gus saved her before the MC could work her over worse than they already did, but he’d heard your old man say he was gonna dump her here, for you.”

  Why the fuck would the MC do this?

  I didn’t have to think about it too hard. Knowing my old man and how he operated, I knew there was only one reason why he’d beat up a defenseless girl. Well, actually there was a few. But there was only one reason why he’d beat up on one and dump her somewhere he knew I would be told about it.

  To send a message.

  The realization set in as King kept talking, although I couldn’t hear what he was saying. It was the pink hair. I hadn’t seen it in a long time. Not since…

  “Look at her fucking hand, asshole,” King barked, bringing me back to the present. I could practically see through the phone the vein in his neck that always pulsed when he was angry.

  I used my fingers to zoom in on her hand and my breath caught in my throat when I saw what she was clutching between her fingers.

  A ring. A Bastard skull ring.

  My Bastard Skull Ring.

  “I’m on my way.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Bear

  The numbness that had been good to me over the last several months had been replaced with the familiar anger that drove me my entire life. The anger that allowed me to take lives. The anger that allowed me to hate enemies I’d never met. However, this new kind of anger bubbling inside me was for one man and one man only.

  Chop.

  I was still half drunk. It was hard not to be. If I wanted to be completely sober it would take months to clean my system out. Maybe years.

  The broken lines of the highway blended into one long streak of white and yellow as I pressed down on the gas pedal, the engine shrieked and groaned in protest. The red line of the speedometer pulsed with hesitation, climbing higher and higher as I pushed the old bread truck to its limit.

  I’d given the ring to the little girl as a fucking joke. A way to placate her, make her feel good for not calling the fucking law. I never expected her to show up to the damn MC. What could she have needed my help with anyway? I honestly thought she’d forget all about the ring and the fake story behind it.

  I was so fucking wrong.

  Just because it was that same girl in the picture King sent me didn’t mean it all wasn’t an elaborate trap set up by Chop to get me back to Logan’s Beach.

  My old man was a cocksucker, but he was a smart cocksucker. He wouldn’t come after me in public, and with all the surveillance around King’s house he’d be sure to stay as far away from The Causeway as possible.

  But the girl?

  She could be on the Bastard’s payroll for all I knew. All she needed to do was guide me to a quiet spot without surveillance so the Bastards could take me back to the clubhouse and hang me in the middle of the courtyard so they could throw beer cans at my body until I started to smell.

  But what if she really was just going to the MC because she needed my help? Needed me to fulfill a promise I’d had no intentions of ever following through with.

  In the picture she was clutching the damn ring like it was the most precious thing in the world to her. I felt a pull from the bottom of my fucking gut, but like every unwanted emotion tumbling through my brain, I pushed that shit right back out.

  My stupid joke ended up on King’s doorstep. The plan was to get to Logan
’s Beach and quietly clean up the mess I made. Then I would send the girl on her way and head right back out.

  Each bump in the road caused me to glance up and look into the rearview mirror. The back windows were blacked out and about as useless as a monk with a ten-inch cock. My bike was strapped down to the back of the truck with heavy nylon straps that attached to hooks in the floor.

  A tied up mechanical beast wasting away when it was meant to be flying down the road.

  Like me.

  I’d rented the truck under an alias from a junk yard that operated solely on paper tickets, no computer system of any kind. I wasn’t hiding from the club. I wasn’t a fucking coward, but I wasn’t about to advertise my arrival and put King’s family at risk either.

  I wasn’t hiding, I just needed time.

  Time to do what, I wasn’t fucking sure.

  Over the last few months the only thing I’d accomplished was being a wasteland for booze, coke, and loose pussy and as soon as I handled my business I was going right back to it.

  My old man wasn’t stupid enough to take our fight to the streets, but he was stupid enough to send me a message by beating on a girl he knew I’d given my promise of protection to.

  How long ago was that? Six, seven years?

  It seemed like another lifetime.

  One where I was so sure of my place within the club. One where I was content being a naive soldier whose main concern was pussy and a party.

  Pussy.

  I’d been knee deep in it since I was twelve.

  De-virginized the same way all the other preteen boys were who grew up in the club. An older member, for me it was my old man, sat me down in the middle of a room full of brothers already drunk or high or both, while a half-naked club whore twice my age gave me a sad excuse for a strip tease to an old Bon Jovi song, every brother I’d known since I was born looked on. She dropped to her knees and sucked me before sitting back up and turning her back to me. She held onto the armrest for support when she sank down onto me, taking my cock inside her pussy.

  The crowd cheered and my old man’s right-hand man, Tank, shook a bottle of Bud, popping the top off with his knife, spraying beer all over me and the club whore after I blew my load in under twenty seconds.

  Best fucking day of my life.

  I’d give anything to have those days back. To be blissfully unaware of all the fucked up shit that made me eventually turn on my brothers and take off my cut.

  I was happy being just another ant in his mound, doing his bidding without question.

  My life outside the club always grated on Chop. The fact that I was close to civilians, namely Preppy and King, never sat well with him. He took every chance he had to warn me of letting them in and reminding me of where loyalties needed to lie and how outsiders caused nothing but problems in our world.

  I never saw it that way. King and Preppy were useful to the club. The Bastards leaned on them when something was too high profile for us, and they leaned on us when they needed a cleanup. They embraced my brothers and opened up their houses to us and our wild partying ways.

  Chop even went as far as offering them cuts. Patching them in. I think he did that because the fact that he had no power over them was driving him ballistic.

  Of course they said no. King was a bull who ran in his own direction and Preppy was the wild donkey, running amongst bulls with no direction at all.

  I went out of my way and took every opportunity to show Chop that my loyalties were with him. With the club. I pulled triggers on demand. Buried his problems deep in the woods without hesitation. Lived my life according to our code and no one else’s.

  But it was never enough.

  The more he pushed me on his idea that in order to take the gavel I needed to lose my friends, the less I wanted it. I started spending less and less nights at the compound and more nights in the makeshift apartment in King’s garage. We’d throw parties in his backyard for my brothers who embraced King and Prep, not just as my friends, but as friends of the club.

  Preppy died at our clubhouse several months back because there was a traitor amongst my brothers.

  A rat.

  Chop was more concerned about the blood on the concrete than Preppy’s death or the traitor in his midst. And that’s when it hit me. The reason Chop was worried about my loyalties was because he had a reason to be worried.

  When it came down to it. Life or death. A gun held on Chop and one held on my friends. I had to play God and choose whose life I would save, I would choose my friends, the only real family I’d ever had, over Chop.

  I think he knew this long before I did.

  When he refused to let me help King save his girl he made the choice easy for me. King or the cut.

  It wasn’t even a decision that was hard to make. King had saved my life at a time when not a single Bastard came to my rescue, when Eli and his gang of pussy ass motherfuckers tied me down and tortured me.

  Chop talked a big game about loyalty, but he’d never done a goddamn thing to earn it.

  I felt naked without the soft leather of my cut against my skin. And not a good kind of naked. The shameful kind of naked.

  I missed it.

  I missed my club.

  I missed my brothers.

  I missed knowing my place in the world and knowing who I was because driving that truck back into the gates of my hell, I had no fucking idea.

  All I knew was that I didn’t miss Chop.

  I may have given that little girl my ring as a joke, but this wasn’t a joke anymore.

  This was fucking war.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bear

  The day I met King was a bloody one.

  I chipped two teeth and gained the scar that runs across my left elbow.

  We’d gotten into a fight over—over I don’t even remember what. Whatever fourteen-year-old kids fight about. Well, fourteen-year-old kids who dealt dope, stole cars, stripped them for parts, and ran from the law.

  We’d traded blow for blow until we were so bloodied and bruised neither of us could see past the slits of our swollen black eyes.

  Preppy, some scrawny kid who came along with King, sat on top of a nearby hollowed out log and kept running his fingers along the front creases of his pants, sharpening them. He seemed totally unfazed by the mutual beating taking place just feet away.

  In fact, he looked…bored.

  “You cunts done yet?” Preppy called out with a sigh¸ letting his shoulders fall. “Ya’ll fight like bitches. When one of you taps out I bet it’s because you gotta go change your fucking tampon.” He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

  King had weight on me, but I had speed on my side. For every time he trapped me underneath him, I was quick to maneuver out of his hold and land another blow to his rib cage.