It almost made me feel bad about what I was doing.
But there was no room for emotions in stories. I had practice at emotionally distancing myself from humanity when I was writing about it.
“When are you finally gonna realize that just because you haven’t slept with me doesn’t mean you’re in love with me?” I countered, pouring a whisky for Sven, a blond-haired, tanned Norse fricking god of a man.
Though I had a feeling he was closer to a demon than a god.
He winked at me as he took it.
Claw glared at him, then me. “Well, then you have to sleep with me to find out.”
I rolled my eyes, turning to grab some glasses from the sanitizer. “I don’t have to do anything, it’s a free country, remember?”
Something darkened in his eyes. “Baby, you’re in Sons’ country, nothin’s free here.”
A chill settled in the base of my spine at his words. That same foreboding that had come and gone as I got deeper in the lie, deeper in the danger if the truth came out.
“Claw!” Hansen yelled. “Get your ass over here, Jagger’s comin’ back from his run soon, we’ve got shit to figure out.”
Claw gave me a wink and sauntered off to the table of men.
I watched and considered going over in the guise of clearing empties from the table in order to hear what they were talking about. But it was too obvious, plus the bar was busy. It was still open to the public, public being men who wanted to patch in, or pretend to be tough, or women looking to have a good time or trying to escape a bad one.
I made drinks on autopilot. The bar work was oddly calming after my ‘work’ having consisted of something a lot more complicated than pouring beers for over a decade.
I idly wondered about this ‘Jagger’ character. The men and women had talked about him on and off since I’d been here. He was one of the only two surviving members of the club massacre this past Christmas. Hansen, the new president, was the other.
Scarlett was the only club girl that survived. Which hadn’t surprised me. She was someone who I thought might have already survived a lot of horrors that would’ve killed a lesser woman, or man.
She wasn’t the only woman connected to the club that survived. There were old ladies turned widows. Fatherless children. All of whom were ‘taken care of’ by the club.
The rest of the club were either transplants from other chapters, Nomads or new patches.
It was obvious this was a club that wasn’t scarred but still bleeding from an unfathomable loss. But clubs like this didn’t stay bleeding for long. Their wounds scabbed over. They drew more blood. And my research had told me that it was someone involved in high profile human trafficking that was responsible for the killing. A retaliation for something this chapter did? A deal gone wrong? Sure, that could’ve been it, but it didn’t seem to me that these were the kind of men to be involved in human trafficking. Though smiles and twinkling eyes could hide a lot. And monsters never seemed like monsters.
So it was possible.
But as I’d done research on not just the club, but those connected to them, I’d seen that Rosie, the biker princess, daughter to a founding member and sister to a president, had disappeared for a year a few years ago. I couldn’t locate any more information about that time away, but from what I’d found out about Rosie, I doubted she was sunning herself in St. Tropez. And she wasn’t the only one who was involved in things that could ruffle international feathers. Lucy, her best friend and a friend of the Amber club, was a prominent investigative journalist—I’d admired her for many years, broke a story that got her stabbed on the side of the street.
And these weren’t even women married to patched members.
It didn’t have to be a beef originated in New Mexico. As I’d seen, one chapter was a small part of a whole, which made them strong. But it also made it harder to pinpoint where it all originated, and easier for the enemy in question to strike unexpectedly.
Someone the club was yet to locate.
And this Jagger character was off on some kind of recon mission by the sounds of it. Along with a few notable members of the Amber chapter, where I personally thought this war had originated.
The only reason I was here, and not another, more conventional war zone—or at least what the public was desensitized into thinking was conventional—was not because I’d lost the stomach for it. Because I had grown unable to handle seeing deaths of strangers and friends alike, or because I knew it was only a matter of time before I wouldn’t be seeing death, I’d be meeting it.