Roan (The Henchmen MC 17)

ONE

Roan

I'm not stupid; they all think I'm crazy.

The kids below me from my perch in the glass room above the rest of Navesink Bank.

Maybe if you subtracted fifteen years, and added on a whole lot of youthful bravado, I would think the same damn thing if I saw someone like me watching the horizon for a storm that no one has even predicted.

But, I figure, those white-headed men out in the midwest who walked out onto their front porch one morning, smelled something in the air, declared a tornado was coming, and took off to their underground shelters were always the ones to make it through when one did touch down in town, taking everyone who had called him an old fool by surprise.

Better prepared than dead.

That seemed like a good motto for life, one I learned early, one I had needed to live by for a long, long time.

Did it mean I missed out on a whole fuckuva lot since joining up with The Henchmen? Yeah. Did it make me a running joke at times? Again, yes. Did I sometimes need to question my own sanity? Yep.

But I learned half a lifetime ago that my gut was almost never wrong. And it had been in a familiar knot for a long time, one that nothing could untangle.

So I sat.

I waited.

I endured the boredom, the uncertainty, the noise of my own mind that had a tendency to wander when hours became months that became years.

Below me, the club was an ever-changing one, a world in flux, while mine stayed mostly still.

It was nothing new, though, I guessed.

The movies and shows always make the life of a spy seem action-packed and exhilarating. But the reality is a whole lot of waiting around for something, often getting nothing, for days, weeks, months. But then something happened, something that finally spurred you into action, finally let you close the case, secure an asset, get a major win in the name of your country.

And while that life was ripped away from me quite a while ago, the reality was that working for any criminal organization (which, aside from private security - was pretty much all an ex-spook was qualified to do) involved a lot of the same aspects of life. Keeping an eye out for an enemy - from within or out - was a job that required diligence.

From what I knew - thanks to some endless conversations with the big man who was clearly concerned by my insistence that something was wrong - Reign, and the organization in general, didn't have any current enemies.

I was quick to remind him.

That he knew of.

It was easy when you knew there was a rattler in the high grass. You kept an eye, an ear down, grabbed a shield, grabbed a shovel, and chopped the fucker's head off.

It was different when one of the bastards snuck up, sank their fangs into your calf, and killed you before you could get an anti-venom.

The arms trade was a volatile thing. I'd watched it operate across several continents, through endless countries.

It was competitive in the best of conditions. Rarely did an organization live long enough to pass on to a second generation.

Which was what set Reign and his MC apart.

He'd inherited a lot of his contacts from his father, then busted ass for a few years to secure new suppliers when the demand started to surpass what he had to offer.

An organization with those kinds of steady contacts, that was a prime target. Because people who were trying to break into the business, or ones who were greedy for more, they knew how established organizations got.

Complacent.

Cocky.

Lax.

I wouldn't say it to his face if he asked me, but that was why his club got gutted years back, why he had needed to start over, rebuild, get a helping hand from Hailstorm.

I couldn't claim to know what it was like to be in his shoes, to be a boss, to have so many people relying on me, to have to handle the business end of things, but also the petty day-to-date shit like bills and keeping the men from going at one another's throats, keeping the prospects miserable and hungry to prove themselves.

I didn't know about any of that.

I'd always, for the most part, been a one-man-operation.

So it wasn't fair to judge.

And I wasn't.

Some things were just clearer to me than they were to some of the kids a few floors below me, many of whom who happened into the trade out of their desire to join a club, a brotherhood, and therefore completely green about the details of the arms trade.

Maybe except for Cam.

But since he didn't speak to any of us, what we did know about his past in it came from Roderick's woman - Livianna.

She understood a bit more than the others, too. Maybe because when she had gotten into it, she didn't have the security of long-established contacts, the security of being surrounded by a bunch of burly, armed men.