Ghost
Fuck this shit.
I’d been around this club my whole life to know when shit wasn’t right. And it wasn’t right.
Since I returned to the club shortly after Remi showed up, I watched from the sidelines as the club went downhill fast. Too many brothers had died. The shit with the Original Seven had taken its toll. Now with this Ascari fucker, the Guardian and the fucking Society, lines had been drawn. There were too many players. Too many people who knew our business. No one knew who was on the level. No one knew who to trust. The discord had a trickledown effect and now the club was divided. Even here, lines had been drawn. Those who believed and trusted Reaper and those who didn’t.
The Golden Skulls was supposed to be a club about brotherhood. Men that had each other’s backs. Now, it seemed all we did was jab the knife in deeper. After the shit that went down with the Collector, Reaper vowed no more secrets. I knew that fucker was lying the second he said the words, but he was my best friend and I figured eventually he would bring me into the fold.
Only he didn’t.
Now, he spent his days on his fucking phone, sending texts and leaving me to run the club. I was the Vice President. It was not my job to decide what the club did. I was only there to enforce what Reaper wanted. The messed-up part was that I was actually starting to believe he had no fucking clue what to do next.
I knew he was hiding something; whatever it was, it was eating him alive. I also knew he would lose everything if he didn’t come clean soon. The brothers could all see the change in him. He wasn’t subtle about it either. Most days he stayed holed up in church talking on his phone. When he was out and about the club, he was short-tempered and easy to anger. I had to step in several times to stop him from ripping into a brother, but when he turned that anger on me, well that’s when I had enough.
There was no secret worth losing brothers over.
I was tired of burying my brothers.
All of us were.
It had gotten to the point where we all didn’t know why everyone was dying anymore. Now with everyone quarantined to the clubhouse, brothers were chomping at the bit for freedom. Fights were breaking out and the hostility was rising.
It was a nasty mix and soon, it would spill over.
I wasn’t like most of the club brothers. After Reaper’s Pop died in my arms, I left the club taking my team with me. Pop’s last words to me were crystal clear, find the truth and stop it. So that’s what I did. It took me five years, but I found what Pop was talking about. Well, at least I thought I had. When I returned to the Golden Skulls, it was to find the club in turmoil. Shit was so fucking messed up we were still cleaning up the mess.
Then the shit with Kitty happened and now that’s all Reaper could focus on. The man just had a kid and was about to get married and all he cared about was finding out what Kitty knew.
Who cares?
She’s dead. Whatever she knew she took it to the grave.
I would have thought when the Guardian told Reaper that two more members of the Original Seven were all dead, he would have thrown the biggest fucking party the club had ever seen.
But he didn’t. Instead, he dove deeper into the darkness. The only one who seemed to reach him now was Remi and even that was hit or miss. Whatever was bothering him was seriously causing the club problems.
And when one problem popped up, several followed.
Getting up from the bar I headed for the Golden Garage, where I knew I would find Massacre. I had had enough of this shit. If Reaper wasn’t going to come clean, I had to go behind Reaper’s back and find the secret myself. It wasn’t something I liked doing, but I would do it to save this club and the remaining brothers.
Even if it meant I had to go over Reaper’s head to do it.
Seeing Massacre elbows deep in a car, I walked over and spoke. “Gather the team. Have them meet me at our spot.”
Massacre stood, wiping his hands with a grease rag. “What’s going on?”
“Not here.”
Massacre nodded as I walked back to the clubhouse to find my wife, Ari. She was the one good thing I had in my life, along with my daughter Becca. I didn’t know what I would do if this club’s mess spilled over into their lives. It was my job to protect them, to shield them. Yet even know I wasn’t so sure that was possible. I worried that with shit going downhill fast within the club I wouldn’t be able to do my basic job.
Protect my wife and kid.
I didn’t have to look far, knowing my woman loved cooking. From the moment she was rescued from the Disciples of the Word, a cult working with the Society to help traffic women, my woman spent hours every day in the kitchen cooking for the club, for me, for anyone because she loved cooking. If she wasn’t cooking, she was reading. Denied the opportunity to get a decent education, my wife was never without a book of some sort in her hands. She absorbed them like water. Learning everything she could.
I found her in the kitchen, busy gathering what she needed for tonight’s dinner.
“Hey you,” she smiled at me as I walked in, her hands deep in some batter she had created. The smell was making my mouth water. My woman may not be book smart but she was a culinary genius in the kitchen.