Jack (The Kings of Mayhem MC Tennessee 1)

JACK

Five Years Ago

Everything changed the day before Thanksgiving.

It started the moment my brother surprised me by coming home from college for the holiday.

I was in the clubhouse with my Kings of Mayhem brothers playing pool and talking shit when he walked in, his duffle bag over his shoulder, his clean-cut face and short back and sides out of place in amongst the beards and long hair.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” I said, walking over and pulling him into a warm embrace.

Cooper was more of a son than a brother. We shared the same mother, a mountain girl by the name of Petal, who got swept away by the desolate tides of poverty and addiction and drowned in the bottom of a whiskey bottle by the time she was thirty-three.

I was just eighteen years old and a father to two-year-old twin boys when she dropped Cooper on my doorstep and told me she didn’t want him anymore. He was just three years old and severely undernourished, a sweet kid in dirty clothes and no shoes.

Thirteen years earlier, she had abandoned me to my father the same way when I was only five years old. But this time, she didn’t know who the father was, and if I didn’t take him, the foster system would have to. And I wasn’t going to let any of my kin end up there.

He was lucky.

He was too young to remember her.

Unfortunately, I could.

Despite the strain on our already threadbare wallet, my wife, Rosanna, and I made it work. Our little house busted at the seams with children and bills, especially after the arrival of our daughter, Hope. Suppertime was raucous, and mornings were a nightmare with four kids to send off to school, but it was a happy household full of love and laughter, and the kind of warmth that made you feel secure and loved.

Seeing him home for the holidays was like a breath of fucking fresh air.

“You came here before stopping home to Rosanna? Boy, you got some kind of death wish? You know she’s going to sing like a banshee about that ‘til your ears bleed.”

“The clubhouse was on the way.” He shrugged, and I pulled him in for another embrace.

“It’s good to see you, buddy.”

We sat at one of the booths near the jukebox. Across the room, a dancer from our strip club, Candy Town, was working on her dance routine to Metallica’s “Sad But True,” twirling her lithe, muscular body around the pole using moves created solely to drive a man to sin. From the bar, two of my Kings of Mayhem brothers, Ghoul and Dakota Joe, watched on, impressed.

Cooper looked around the club as he sat.

He was a good-looking kid. At nineteen, he was a respectable six foot with a strong muscular body born from years of football training. We shared the same navy-blue eyes and slight cleft in a strong chin. But that was where the similarities ended. My hair was a nut-brown mess hanging past my shoulders while his was bright blond and shiny clean.

The girl twirling on the pole had her eyes fixed on him, but he didn’t pay her any mind. He didn’t pay any girl any attention.

“So how long you in town?”

“Just for the weekend. Thought I could hang out for a bit. Go fishing with the twins.”

“Everything okay?” Despite his smile, he seemed to be wrestling with something.

“Does something have to be wrong for me to come home for the holidays?”

“No. But I know you, kid. Guess it has something to do with that whole raising you from three years old thing.” I cocked an eyebrow at him. “If you need someone to talk to, I’ve got a set of ears.”

His smile faded.

Yep.

He had something on his mind.

But he changed the subject.

“Clubhouse is looking good,” he said, looking around the bar.

Our clubhouse was an abandoned hotel on the outskirts of town. Back in the 1920s, it was where the rich and social elite came to stay on the river. But when the economy collapsed and Flintlock lost its shine, the guests stopped visiting, and the resort fell into decline.

The old building was still rundown in places, but we’d managed to repair and repaint it over the years without destroying its days-gone-by charm.

It was the perfect mix of old and new. And with more than twenty luxury rooms, as they once advertised in the newspapers, we had plenty of space to accommodate our growing club.

Not that we all lived onsite.

The clubhouse was for my single brothers.

It definitely wasn’t the place to raise a family and keep an old lady.

The two club girls making out on Ghoul’s lap were a testament to the kind of debauchery that could take place here.

Rosanna and I still had our little home a few miles away, but if club business kept me late, or I had too much moonshine to get home safe, I had my own room.