Club business aside, when I wasn’t busy having my president’s back, I had a small side project to keep me busy. It was my grandmother’s idea. The infamous Sybil Calley. The original biker queen. Fierce and wild. A fiery redhead with a penchant for blinged-out caftans and red lipstick. To help with my recovery, she had given me an old fisherman’s cottage to renovate. It was a dilapidated shack that sat across the river from the family cabin. It was unloved, unlivable, and in such a state of disrepair I could work on it for one hundred days and it still wouldn’t be close to finished.
Which was exactly why my grandmother had given it to me. She wasn’t a fool. She knew I needed help settling back into life outside of the military. She knew I’d find a lot of myself again while I worked on that beat-up old house. I hadn’t yet, but I hoped that one of these days I would find some kind of peace.
Until then, I would bury myself with club business and forget the other part of me that wished things had worked out differently.
I thought about this morning’s encounter and another punch of shame twisted my gut.
“I swear to fucking Christ, you have the attention of a two-year-old,” Cade said, annoyed. “Did you just hear anything I said?”
Nope.
“Where the fuck are you, Brother?”
In my bathroom, with my hands around a club girl’s throat, choking the life out of her while I come.
I felt a flush creep up the back of my neck and shifted uncomfortably in my seat.
“Are those headaches back?” Caleb asked, raising his beer to his lips.
“I have good days and bad days,” I said.
Apparently today was a bad day.
“You still seeing the doctors over in Humphrey?” Cade asked.
I was fucking sick of doctors.
And something told me I was seeing the wrong kind of doctors.
That something being my hands squeezing a girl’s throat as I came.
No, that wasn’t me.
I shifted uneasily. If it was, then I didn’t need a doctor. The only thing that was going to save me was a bullet.
The approaching rumble of a familiar Harley told me that Bull, our president, our uncle, would be joining us.
Watching him pull up to the curb, I felt the shoe drop for the second time that day. My brothers had lured me away from the clubhouse. But this wasn’t a friendly ride into town for a couple of beers. This was a fucking intervention.
I glanced at my brothers, who both pretended like nothing was amiss.
“Assholes,” I muttered, sitting back in my chair and lighting a smoke. “If you wanted to know if I was alright, you should’ve just asked. Not arrange a fucking intervention like I’m some kind of strung-out tweaker.”
“And what would you have said if we did?” Cade asked, knowing there was no point denying it. “You would’ve told us everything was alright. But it’s not, Brother. You don’t sleep. You don’t talk.”
“Something is going on with you, man,” Caleb added. “Talk to us.”
Out of my two brothers, I was closest to Caleb. Growing up, Cade was always busy with Indy, which meant Caleb and I spent a lot more time together.
When I was lying in a hospital bed like the living dead, his phone calls and visits saved my sanity. Sometimes he’d just call and talk shit to me. He knew I couldn’t reply, but he understood how important it was for me to know there was life outside of that hospital room. A life worth fighting for. I needed to know there was a place for the lifeless to live again. Because I’m not going to lie. I spent more time wishing I would die than I did wishing I would live.
“Was it you two who paid that girl to fuck me?” I asked.
The look of confusion on their faces told me it wasn’t them. It didn’t surprise me. This reeked more of Joker and Vader than my younger brothers.
“What girl?” Caleb asked.
I took a drag of my smoke and told them about the girl. Everything except the choking.
“It was probably Joker and Vader,” Cade said, echoing my own suspicions.
“They’re worried about you, man,” Caleb added. “It would be their way of trying to help you out.”
“I don’t need that kind of help.”
“Then what do you need?” came Bull’s voice from behind as he approached our table. He sat down and lifted his dark sunglasses. He had the weirdest fucking eyes I’d ever seen on a human. Almost demonic. It was caused by his acute color-blindness, which made him sensitive to light. As a result, you very rarely saw him without his dark sunglasses.
“I saw Tammi-Lynn leaving your room this morning,” he said. “She was shaken up. Not to mention naked. Seemed she couldn’t get out of there quick enough. Want to tell me about it?”