Bear The numbness that had been good to me over the last several months had been replaced with the familiar anger that drove me my entire life. The anger that allowed me to take lives. The anger that allowed me to hate enemies I'd never met. However, this new kind of anger bubbling inside me was for one man and one man only.

Chop.

I was still half drunk. It was hard not to be. If I wanted to be completely sober it would take months to clean my system out. Maybe years.

The broken lines of the highway blended into one long streak of white and yellow as I pressed down on the gas pedal, the engine shrieked and groaned in protest. The red line of the speedometer pulsed with hesitation, climbing higher and higher as I pushed the old bread truck to its limit.

I'd given the ring to the little girl as a fucking joke. A way to placate her, make her feel good for not calling the fucking law. I never expected her to show up to the damn MC. What could she have needed my help with anyway? I honestly thought she'd forget all about the ring and the fake story behind it.

I was so fucking wrong.

Just because it was that same girl in the picture King sent me didn't mean it all wasn't an elaborate trap set up by Chop to get me back to Logan's Beach.

My old man was a cocksucker, but he was a smart cocksucker. He wouldn't come after me in public, and with all the surveillance around King's house he'd be sure to stay as far away from The Causeway as possible.

But the girl?

She could be on the Bastard's payroll for all I knew. All she needed to do was guide me to a quiet spot without surveillance so the Bastards could take me back to the clubhouse and hang me in the middle of the courtyard so they could throw beer cans at my body until I started to smell.

But what if she really was just going to the MC because she needed my help? Needed me to fulfill a promise I'd had no intentions of ever following through with.

In the picture she was clutching the damn ring like it was the most precious thing in the world to her. I felt a pull from the bottom of my fucking gut, but like every unwanted emotion tumbling through my brain, I pushed that shit right back out.

My stupid joke ended up on King's doorstep. The plan was to get to Logan's Beach and quietly clean up the mess I made. Then I would send the girl on her way and head right back out.

Each bump in the road caused me to glance up and look into the rearview mirror. The back windows were blacked out and about as useless as a monk with a ten-inch cock. My bike was strapped down to the back of the truck with heavy nylon straps that attached to hooks in the floor.

A tied up mechanical beast wasting away when it was meant to be flying down the road.

Like me.

I'd rented the truck under an alias from a junk yard that operated solely on paper tickets, no computer system of any kind. I wasn't hiding from the club. I wasn't a fucking coward, but I wasn't about to advertise my arrival and put King's family at risk either.

I wasn't hiding, I just needed time.

Time to do what, I wasn't fucking sure.

Over the last few months the only thing I'd accomplished was being a wasteland for booze, coke, and loose pussy and as soon as I handled my business I was going right back to it.

My old man wasn't stupid enough to take our fight to the streets, but he was stupid enough to send me a message by beating on a girl he knew I'd given my promise of protection to.

How long ago was that? Six, seven years?

It seemed like another lifetime.

One where I was so sure of my place within the club. One where I was content being a naive soldier whose main concern was pussy and a party.

Pussy.

I'd been knee deep in it since I was twelve.

De-virginized the same way all the other preteen boys were who grew up in the club. An older member, for me it was my old man, sat me down in the middle of a room full of brothers already drunk or high or both, while a half-naked club whore twice my age gave me a sad excuse for a strip tease to an old Bon Jovi song, every brother I'd known since I was born looked on. She dropped to her knees and sucked me before sitting back up and turning her back to me. She held onto the armrest for support when she sank down onto me, taking my cock inside her pussy.

The crowd cheered and my old man's right-hand man, Tank, shook a bottle of Bud, popping the top off with his knife, spraying beer all over me and the club whore after I blew my load in under twenty seconds.

Best fucking day of my life.

I'd give anything to have those days back. To be blissfully unaware of all the fucked up shit that made me eventually turn on my brothers and take off my cut.

I was happy being just another ant in his mound, doing his bidding without question.

My life outside the club always grated on Chop. The fact that I was close to civilians, namely Preppy and King, never sat well with him. He took every chance he had to warn me of letting them in and reminding me of where loyalties needed to lie and how outsiders caused nothing but problems in our world.

I never saw it that way. King and Preppy were useful to the club. The Bastards leaned on them when something was too high profile for us, and they leaned on us when they needed a cleanup. They embraced my brothers and opened up their houses to us and our wild partying ways.

Chop even went as far as offering them cuts. Patching them in. I think he did that because the fact that he had no power over them was driving him ballistic.

Of course they said no. King was a bull who ran in his own direction and Preppy was the wild donkey, running amongst bulls with no direction at all.

I went out of my way and took every opportunity to show Chop that my loyalties were with him. With the club. I pulled triggers on demand. Buried his problems deep in the woods without hesitation. Lived my life according to our code and no one else's.

But it was never enough.

The more he pushed me on his idea that in order to take the gavel I needed to lose my friends, the less I wanted it. I started spending less and less nights at the compound and more nights in the makeshift apartment in King's garage. We'd throw parties in his backyard for my brothers who embraced King and Prep, not just as my friends, but as friends of the club.

Preppy died at our clubhouse several months back because there was a traitor amongst my brothers.

A rat.

Chop was more concerned about the blood on the concrete than Preppy's death or the traitor in his midst. And that's when it hit me. The reason Chop was worried about my loyalties was because he had a reason to be worried.

When it came down to it. Life or death. A gun held on Chop and one held on my friends. I had to play God and choose whose life I would save, I would choose my friends, the only real family I'd ever had, over Chop.

I think he knew this long before I did.

When he refused to let me help King save his girl he made the choice easy for me. King or the cut.

It wasn't even a decision that was hard to make. King had saved my life at a time when not a single Bastard came to my rescue, when Eli and his gang of pussy ass motherfuckers tied me down and tortured me.

Chop talked a big game about loyalty, but he'd never done a goddamn thing to earn it.

I felt naked without the soft leather of my cut against my skin. And not a good kind of naked. The shameful kind of naked.

I missed it.

I missed my club.

I missed my brothers.

I missed knowing my place in the world and knowing who I was because driving that truck back into the gates of my hell, I had no fucking idea.

All I knew was that I didn't miss Chop.

I may have given that little girl my ring as a joke, but this wasn't a joke anymore.

This was fucking war.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Bear The day I met King was a bloody one.

I chipped two teeth and gained the scar that runs across my left elbow.

We'd gotten into a fight over-over I don't even remember what. Whatever fourteen-year-old kids fight about. Well, fourteen-year-old kids who dealt dope, stole cars, stripped them for parts, and ran from the law.

We'd traded blow for blow until we were so bloodied and bruised neither of us could see past the slits of our swollen black eyes.

Preppy, some scrawny kid who came along with King, sat on top of a nearby hollowed out log and kept running his fingers along the front creases of his pants, sharpening them. He seemed totally unfazed by the mutual beating taking place just feet away.

In fact, he looked...bored.

"You cunts done yet?" Preppy called out with a sigh letting his shoulders fall. "Ya'll fight like bitches. When one of you taps out I bet it's because you gotta go change your fucking tampon." He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

King had weight on me, but I had speed on my side. For every time he trapped me underneath him, I was quick to maneuver out of his hold and land another blow to his rib cage.

This seemed to go on for hours.

We wailed on each other ferociously, mercilessly. Rolling around on the soft wet ground, I tried to spit the mud out as soon as it entered my mouth so I could catch my breath.

King straightened his arm and punched the heel of his hand against my face, sending my head sailing backward. A rippling pain shot down the bridge of my nose and vibrated against my cheekbones. Blood dripped from my nostrils into the seam of my lips, sending copper flavored warmth into my mouth.

It was the third time my nose had been broken.

A loud shriek tore through the air. King and I both whipped our heads around toward the direction of the sound to see Preppy, who was looking down at his crisp white shirt in absolute horror. His already pale face seemed to get even more pale. "What the fuck?" he screamed, jumping down from the log. He pulled one suspender down to his elbow, revealing the small spec of mud splattered directly above his chest pocket.

I barely registered that King and I had stopped fighting. His hands were still firmly around my neck, my knee was tightly pressed into his stomach. Preppy slowly looked up from the spot on his shirt and back to us. His cheeks reddened, his fists clenched at his sides. Before I could register what the fuck was wrong with the kid he'd launched himself into the air with a yell that could rival the fucking Braveheart call to arms, and landed himself right between King and me, knocking the wind out of my lungs, sending King falling backward into the mud. Preppy then proceeded to come at the both of us with all he had, but since the kid was built of elbows and knees...

It wasn't much.

"You motherfuckers!" he screamed, his pubescent voice cracked over the vowels as he tried his damnedest to inflict pain on us for dirtying up his clothes.

King and I burst into laughter and after Preppy had given all the fight he had to give he collapsed onto his back and laughed with us. The three of us spent the rest of the day getting high on top of the water tower. That was the night Preppy drew the giant dick on the water tower.

I learned that day that Preppy had been responsible for all the dicks that had been spray painted on stop signs and light poles throughout the town. "I use special paint, too. Shit's never gonna come off. When I'm long gone my beautiful big black cocks will still be everywhere in this shit town."

"Oh you like big black cocks?" I asked, nudging him in his bony ribs with my elbow.

"Only my own," Preppy said, grabbing his dick through his khakis.

King rolled his eyes. "You're not fucking black, asshole."

"I am from the waist down, motherfucker, have you seen the size of my fucking cock?" Preppy reached for his belt.

"Preppy, if you pull your fucking cock out again I'm throwing you off the water tower," King warned.

"It's your loss." He shrugged, taking his hand off his belt. He sat back down between me and King and leaned over the railing looking down at the scattered lights below. "We're gonna own this fucking town."

Big. Thick. Black.

The Logan's Beach water tower came into view. The outline of the spray painted dick around the letter L was still visible, even though the city had attempted to cover it up several times with cheap thin paint. The smell of the salty air mixed with sunscreen and fish permeated the air through the open window and with the smell of home came the memory...I hoped to fuck the city never invested in decent paint, because I'd climb the motherfucker in the middle of the night and recreate Preppy's dick pics all over again.

When I pulled down the long dirt driveway that led up to King's house, an odd feeling swept over me. It used to feel like home.

Now it was the last place I wanted to be.

A sense of dread lingered inside my chest, growing larger with each roll of the tires propelling me forward.

Get rid of the girl and get the fuck out as soon as possible.

The three-story stilt home to my right was the main house, but that's not where I was going. Passing the fire pit in the backyard made me want to throw up, but I shook that image from my head and instead chose to remember the time Preppy was so high he convinced everyone he could walk over the burning coals.

We were all on board. His feet though?

Second-degree burns.

King stood outside his newly rebuilt garage with his arms crossed over his chest. He was a man of few words and never spoke before he thought it out, which was the opposite of his girl, who was always spouting out the first thing that came to mind. King was always a big motherfucker, but when he was released from prison last year he'd come out even bigger, like he'd skipped being someone's bitch in exchange for doing non-stop sit ups. His hair was short and dark and he had an even darker look in his eyes.

He looked the same as he always had, but there was something about him that seemed ...different, although I couldn't figure out what it was.

King lifted the cover off of a key panel on the side of the garage that wasn't there before I'd left, and punched in a code. The right side of his neck was covered with gauze. The garage door opened automatically, disappearing overhead. King waved me inside and I drove into the darkened space. As my eyes adjusted I was careful not to hit any of the classic bikes and cars in different stages of repair that I knew were hidden under the multitude of dusty tarps.

I killed the engine and hopped out.

"Do you own anything besides black t-shirts and dark jeans?" I asked, trying to lighten the mood and avoid any heavy conversation he might feel like having.

"This coming from the guy who doesn't own a fucking shirt."