Sugar (The Henchmen MC 12)

"Then I suggest you walk the fuck away and let us catch up with our old friend here," Virgin said with a look that would make a lesser man piss himself. Ninety-percent of the time, Virgin was as chill as you could get. But that ten-percent when he was riled, yeah, you didn't want to fuck with him.

"Fucking knew I saw Tish the other day," D said, shaking his head as he reached to raise his glass, tipping back the whiskey with a sigh. "What do you want?" he asked, looking at Virgin who sat beside him, then at me where I was leaning back against the bar, watching him.

"We want to talk about dead men coming back to life," I said, watching as his face went tense, a dead fucking giveaway. Dunno how I knew, but I knew it hadn't been a goddamn prank.

"Any particular dead man we talking about?"

"Cut the shit," Virgin snapped, snatching the glass out of his hand as he went to raise it again, slamming it down so hard on the bar that you could see the small fractures inside the walls of glass. "What the fuck went down in Jersey City?" he asked.

See, we hadn't been there. When most of the guys were on a job. When they all got shot, stabbed, or pinched. Virgin, me, and a few of the other guys had been left behind to deal with some bullshit small job, all of us resentful for being left out of the fun. Until word got back to us what happened.

Bunch of our men arrested.

The rest dead.

Including our president.

Our current dead-man-talking.

Or, texting, as it were.

Heavy D had been with the rest of the men when shit went south, had taken seven stab wounds to the gut, chest, and left arm. By the time word got to us, and we hauled ass down to Jersey City to check on our hurt men, and see if we could bail out the ones who got locked up, and to bring our dead back to bury, Heavy D was long gone. Signed himself out against doctor's orders. We hadn't heard from him again until we put feelers out and Tish, one of Virgin's old fuck buddies, had seen him.

"You know what went down. The mob got out of control," he said, meaning at a biker rally they had been hired to do security at. But two rival gangs had started shit. In the end, five of our men had died, ten had been locked up, more had been hurt. And that didn't even count the others who had been hurt and killed, including one of the other presidents' old ladies.

It was a bad day for bikers as a whole.

And the end of our club.

Or so we had thought.

"The mob went out of control. People got stabbed and shot. One of those people was our old president," Virgin specified. "Who was dead on the scene, or so we were told. So imagine our surprise when Sugar here got a text from him last night. Unless they're reanimating corpses, I suspect your fucking ass has a lot to tell us."

"Why do you think I know dick?" he asked, looking straight ahead, cagey as all fuck.

"Why else would you up and disappear out of your hospital bed?" I asked, silently noting that he hadn't even flinched at the idea of our old prez being alive. What the fuck was going on?

"I don't like being stuck in a bed full of tubes," D said, looking over at me. And, for once, there was sincerity there. I even believed him. Because, as far back as I could remember, not a fucking one of us followed a doctor's orders to stay in bed, to keep our stitches dry, to leave a cast on for six weeks, to go to physical therapy, or not get hit in the head again because we had already gotten one too many concussions. That was the life. So I could buy him signing himself out because he hated being stuck in a bed. "Maybe if there was some hot nurse to give me a sponge bath, I'd have stayed," he added, lips quirking up slightly. "But I wasn't hanging around to have a four-hundred-pound, pockmarked Nurse Ratched cluck her tongue at me and tell the doctor she thinks I'm on too much morphine 'cause I'm being surly. Fucking surly. I'm a biker. What the fuck was I supposed to be?"

"And now that we got your whole fucking life story," Virgin went on, "tell us what the fuck we are here to talk about."

"Look, I don't know what to tell you. Shit was chaotic as fuck that day. Bikers everywhere. Everyone wearing the same shit, just different patches. It was impossible to tell anyone apart in all of that. Especially once I was down. I didn't know who made it and who didn't until I saw the news the next day."