“I can second that,” Hawke agreed.
“Hell, that girl could suck the chrome off my exhaust pipes,” Matlock added, ripping the cap off his beer and flicking it onto the table.
Ignoring them, I sat down. Already seated around the massive wooden slab of Carolina ash were nineteen Kings.
Nineteen mean-looking sonsofbitches who were everything to me. My brothers. My family. My responsibility.
We met in chapel once a week. More if things were happening.
And right now, things were happening.
Thanks to one piece of shit drug dealer.
Gimmel Martel.
The Kings of Mayhem number one arch nemesis.
He had arrived in our town under the guise of being a wine importer. But in reality, he had been a drug importer with a thriving cocaine business. I gave him a chance to leave quietly because this was my town, my people, my county, and I wasn’t going to let him spill his poison into the well and destroy the people my club and I protected. But my offer fell on deaf ears. And instead, he decided to send me a message. He sent someone to intimidate my niece, and when that someone put his hands all over her, well, Martel had to learn who he was dealing with.
No one touched my family and got away with it.
To drive this point home, I burned his cocaine and his vineyards to the fucking ground.
In retaliation, Gimmel Martel ordered his men to shoot up my nephew’s wedding, putting my sergeant-at-arms in the hospital with life-threatening wounds. He executed orders to inflict damage on my club. My family. But he was already gone before I could retaliate. He vanished into the bowels of a seedy underworld, his whereabouts cloaked by a dark network of criminals and organized crime.
I wanted revenge.
Hell, I wanted to tear him apart with my bare hands.
But the coward slid into the shadows like a scared little mouse because he knew I was coming for him.
I was a patient man. At some point, he would have to surface for air, and when he did, I would be waiting.
In the meantime, because I couldn’t hurt the man, I destroyed the empire.
Piece by piece.
Alliance by alliance.
One deal at a fucking time.
I used different pieces of information I found in the ashes of his burned-out vineyard to pick at the threads of his business interests, to slowly unravel his entire fucking kingdom.
And he felt it too. Right where it hurt.
His pile of cash.
He needed to learn.
No one fucked with me and my club.
And no one, fucking no one, fucked with my family.
My anger and lust for revenge had grown into something unstoppable.
He could hide, but he couldn’t hide forever.
I would wait.
I had time.
But time made me more dangerous.
And the longer he kept me waiting, the more dangerous I would become.
I would keep pulling at the loose string of his empire—his drug distribution—until it slowly unraveled everything that meant something to him.
I was going to smoke him out.
And then I was going to kill him.
After chapel, Ruger hung back.
“How’s my niece?” I asked.
“She’s as big as a whale,” he said with a grin. When I gave him a filthy look, he held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, they’re her words, not mine.”
“But you tell her she’s wrong, right?”
“Hell, brother, I’m no fool. I value my balls.” His eyes glittered with happiness. I’d never seen Ruger look as happy as he was when he was with or talking about Chastity. “She’s getting antsy for our boy to arrive.”
“It’s a boy?”
“Found out yesterday. Actually, that’s what I want to talk to you about. She’s on her way over here.”
“What for?”
Before he could answer, Chastity walked into the club. Eight months pregnant and glowing, she looked beautiful. Pride swelled in my chest. But it was quickly followed by a surge of venom when I remembered what happened to her last summer. How one of Martel’s thugs had pulled her over on the highway pretending to be a cop. How he had put his hands on her, threatened her. It was hard to forget because Chastity meant everything to me, and I felt a wildfire of hate in my brain every time I thought about it.
She was the daughter I’d never had, and I wouldn’t think twice about putting someone in the ground for hurting her.
Her whole life, I’d been a little overprotective of her.
If having three older, biker brothers wasn’t bad enough, then having a fiercely protective uncle was a nightmare. And she wasn’t shy in telling me.
When I discovered my best friend was involved with her, I’d lost my shit. In my mind, no one was ever going to be good enough for her. Not even the man who’d stopped me from blowing my head off during the dark days following Wendy’s death.
But Ruger had proved himself to be more than fucking worthy. He worshiped Chastity. Treated her like his queen. Took three bullets for her when he’d thrown himself in front of a gunman at Cassidy and Chance’s wedding.