Edison (The Henchmen MC 10)

He was looking for ghosts come back to haunt him.

I didn't know the man. He wasn't the kind of man you could know. But I knew many men like him. The closed books. The rooms with locked doors. Men like Roan needed locks and keys sank at the bottom of the ocean. Men like Roan had done things that made it necessary.

I knew this maybe because Roan and I, yeah, we were cut from the same cloth. We had paths that no one needed to know about, not in excruciating, brutal, cinematographic contrast - the deep blacks and grays making the bright, red of the blood stand out all the more.

Men like us, yeah, we were covered in the shit. It just took others like us to be able to see it all.

I saw it on Roan.

He was soaked in it.

No amount of scrubbing would get that off of him. But that was the job. You wanted to play one side against the other with you standing in the middle? Yeah, it was unavoidable.

I had met a spy or two in my day, both, though, being Russian, so I didn't know much about American ones. I figured, though, that a spy was a spy was a spy. Maybe Russians spies had a certain style, but they all did the same sordid shit.

"Been watching the Abruzzo place for almost a year," Roderick tried to reason, a man who liked the calm because it meant he could enjoy the perks that came from men draped in leather riding hogs. Drinking, respect, and women. No one could blame him either. He was the youngest of the group. He hadn't had as many years of hellraising as we did.

"He's on the drug front," Sugar insisted, tipping back a beer. "That was a threat when it was a threat, and that shit with Summer's mother needs to be watched because it sounds like a holyshitbomb if she is still alive and gets free, but the chances of a threat coming from that direction - her aside - is low. It is more likely going to be the syndicates looking for the gun trade. Which, well, is half of them. Pretty much the only ones we don't have to sweat are the Italians. They are happy with what they have going. Guns are hard to hide. They are always being invaded by the Feds. They don't want the heat. But the Russians, Chinese, Irish, and even all the South American groups all would kill for a piece of what Reign and his dad before him have built here. The contacts are too good. The income is fucking insane. If there is going to be a storm, it is going to come from almost any direction except the Abruzzo compound."

"Where you going?" Roderick asked when I moved to stand.

"Got a shift," I told them, grabbing my phone, tucking it in my pocket.

"Tell Jstorm I got a lead on that puppy thing," Sugar called, referencing one of Janie's endless crusades to right a wrong. In this case, though, I would be happy to string the fuck who tried to drown a litter of puppies in the Navesink my damn self. Luckily, someone had heard the yip, dove in, and saved the pups that were all happily living up on the Hailstorm compound, getting trained like all the rest.

But Janie wouldn't rest - both literally and figuratively - until she found the prick who tried to kill them all.

For reasons that weren't clear to me - and were frankly none of my business - she had tapped Sugar for help.

I was glad he was coming through with something.

"Will do."

"Try not to get your ass kicked again," Pagan called as I headed out the door, referencing last week when one of the girls in my class - a woman who had been brutally raped by three men just two months before, there for free because Lo and Janie - and by extension, Cash - let women who had been attacked train for free - had gotten in her head during a hold and had slammed me so hard in the face that my nose bled for hours after.

She hid in the bathroom for an hour once class was done, crying. Even when she came back out, she was shaking so hard that she looked like she was having a seizure. I took her to She's Bean Around for a coffee and talked about her form.

Janie, Lo, and Cash weren't the only ones at the gym who had a soft spot for women who had been abused at the hands of men.

I had been a champion for them almost as far back as I could remember.

That was why I worked at the gym, even though I didn't need to, even though they didn't particularly need me either.