Ride Hard (Raven Riders 1)

“To be honest, I’m not sure, but my instincts tell me I’m missing something about what went down in Baltimore, missing some loose end. Maybe I’m being paranoid given the strength of the groups we were up against. Though the Church Gang was pretty well obliterated, someone else will rise in their place. If nothing else, that’s something to keep an eye on,” Dare said, wishing his gut could nail down what was bugging him.

Ike sat at the far end of the table, the ink on his head and neck making him look like the hard-ass he could sometimes be. “Since I’ll be heading back to the city this week, I’ll make sure any intel Nick’s team acquires gets passed on here, too.” Nick Rixey was a good friend of Ike’s and the unofficial leader of the team of former Green Berets the club had fought alongside in Baltimore these past weeks.

“Good,” Dare said. “That’s real good.”

“How worried do you think we gotta be?” came a deep, quiet voice from the back corner of the room. Sam “Slider” Evans, his nickname earned almost a dozen years before when his back tire hit a patch of gravel on an old country road and he went off into a ditch. He’d missed a huge tree by inches, skidded over the root system, and ultimately laid down his bike in a gully. Not a single serious scratch to rider or machine. For years they’d referred to him as one lucky SOB for coming out of that wreck without sustaining any damage, but no one had said that about him since his wife died of breast cancer three years before, leaving him with two young sons to care for on his own. Slider even attending a club meeting was noteworthy, as he’d nearly withdrawn from everything but his job and caring for his boys.

“Not worried, just cautious,” Dare said. He fucking hoped he was right.

Wearing a black doo-rag knotted around unkempt, light brown hair that probably hadn’t seen a haircut since before his wife died, Slider heaved a breath, a troubled frown on his face, but he said no more.

“One other thing we probably ought to hash out while everyone’s here,” Dare said, his shoulders heavy with the weight of this topic. “The guns we picked up during the ops in Baltimore.” The Ravens had taken the hardware in partial payment for providing muscle in the Hard Ink team’s fight—that was back before losing two of their own had brought the Ravens into the fight of their own free will. No payment required.

Doc sighed and scrubbed his hand over the whitish-gray hair of his beard. “Guns stolen from the Church Gang. This is dirtier shit than normal, Dare.”

Dare nodded, knowing Doc hadn’t agreed with the club taking possession of the weapons captured during an ambush of the Church Gang a few weeks before. It had been one of their most heated meetings and most divided votes. And Dare understood why. From the very beginning, going all the way back to when Dare first pushed to rebuild the Ravens’ membership in the years after he’d arrived there, he’d made a commitment to Doc that he wasn’t trying to recreate the Diablos’ way of life in Maryland. That meant he didn’t want to turn the Ravens into One Percenters who prized violence as proof of loyalty and a rite of passage, and who fought and killed to defend territory, usually because they wanted to control drug and gun sales in that territory. Dare’s father’s full embracing of the hardest parts of the hard-core MC culture was what had created the ice-cold rift between Doc and his son when Dare was just a snot-nosed kid.

So those had been easy commitments for Dare to make—because he didn’t want to become his father. Ever.

None of that meant the Ravens were squeaky clean, though, because they weren’t. But Dare was more than comfortable with the places where the legality of their actions became blurred or outright crossed the line, because it made the protective work they did possible. Ends justifying means and all that. Sometimes doing a little wrong allowed you to do an even greater good. His version of morality probably seemed like splitting hairs to some, but Dare had lived both lives—he knew there was a difference, a big one. And it mattered a helluva lot.

So, yeah, Dare wasn’t in love with having these guns or needing to sell them. But the club had voted on it, and now they had to deal with that. “I don’t disagree. But now that we have them, I don’t want us holding on to them longer than we have to.” That weight he’d been feeling on his shoulders pushed down on him ever harder as the tension in the room thickened.

Phoenix sat up straight in his seat and jabbed his finger into the table. “I say we should keep a small cache for ourselves. Just in case. And when we sell them, we do it way outside of our own backyard. We don’t want all that heat on the market here. We don’t want it associated with us. And we sure as fuck don’t want it used against us.”