Renny (The Henchmen MC 6)

Losing over a dozen, I couldn't imagine what they were all going through.

They all coped in their own ways. Reign, most noticeably, took the only action he could given the situation. He secured the compound. He made it impenetrable so he could protect what was left of his men and their families.

Cash lost a little of his easy, carefree, flirtatious charm and clung a little tighter to Lo, was a bit more over-protective than ever before.

Repo was a mostly silent ticking time bomb. His life was the club. True, he had Maze and his son and the baby on the way now and that had given him something outside of his brotherhood to cling to, but that didn't change the fact that for many, many years, all he had was brotherhood and loyalty. He dedicated everything to the club. He was weighted and he was ready to shed blood.

Duke was Duke. He was silent and in-control. But he was fuming too. He was ready to take action, to even the score. Especially because his woman was the recipient of a nasty beating then disposed of like garbage.

Renny was, well, that depended.

See, the thing with Renny was, you could tell there were scars there. Not the physical kind, though he did have those and I found them oddly sexy, but he had emotional ones. The ones from childhood. The kind that never really healed. The thing was, I didn't know what they were. Because while I had files on every single other member of The Henchmen MC, I didn't have one for Renny.

Whether Lo had one at all was beyond my pay grade.

All I knew was- I didn't have one for him.

So I had no idea what those scars were, but judging from what I had seen over the past few weeks, they were deep.

Because Renny could be a completely different person at the drop of a dime.

It wasn't that he was schizophrenic or anything like that.

But if I had to put my money on anything, I'd say there was some definite borderline personality issues going on there.

He was too up and down, too hot and cold, too severe in his swings to just say he was a moody guy.

Because, as a whole, he was light, upbeat, funny, charming, and rational. But when he hit a low, he was low. He was dark. He was obsessive and cold and even occasionally, cruel. He didn't think clearly. He reacted on impulse and he did things that he knew were not normal.

The vast majority of the time, he was his light self. He joked around, tried to keep the spirits up around the compound after all the darkness. He played ball with the boys and he let the girls do his hair or even, once when Ferryn was particularly insistent, his makeup. He seemed to be handling things well.

But there were times when he and Duke when at it or he and Repo had words that almost went to blows, there were even a few times when he and Cash got into it and Cash was almost impossible to rile, but those times were when you could see that he was still coping. Fact of the matter was, he was the one to charge into the clubhouse and find the men dead and dying. And he was the one to make Duke get Penny out of there and safe while he stayed behind, surrounded by death, sitting next to a man he loved as a brother as he took his last breath.

Then when the bodies were removed, he had been there with the bucket and the bleach, cleaning up the blood of his fallen brothers.

True, they were one-percenters and were perhaps a bit more used to blood and death than the average citizen, but he was still human. He still had to have been dealing with the aftermath of that experience.

And the fact that he was spending most of his time trying to keep everyone else from falling apart tended to point to the fact that he himself was going to blow apart one day.

I didn't want to imagine the wreckage from that.

I reached for my phone as the argument slowly started to fizzle out, as Reign got control and demanded the others do as well so they could talk about it rationally.

I went through my files and brought up two pictures, moving away from Renny without saying anything, but I could feel his eyes on me the whole way across the room where I sat down next to Penny and put my phone in her hands.

"Who are they?" she asked, looking up at me, brows drawn together.

That had Duke's attention, stopping mid-sentence, making everyone else look toward us as well.

"Baby, those are the Grassis," he told her, his voice guarded. "That was who was on the street today."