About the only damn thing she could do to make me forget this was to go into my actual bedroom.
The place with photos of my wife.
Photos of when we were a—relatively—normal family.
I was barely ready to handle that myself, given how often I slept at the clubhouse. I sure as shit wasn’t ready for a woman I’d slept with once to see it.Even if Hailey is as close to someone you care about since…sinceherdeath…
I shook the thoughts from my mind and concentrated on getting to the clubhouse. When I needed to, I was damn good at blocking everything else out other than the task at hand.
I still hadn’t decided, after all these years, if that was a blessing or a curse.
* * *
When I showed up at the clubhouse, I was even more pissed than before.
The King’s Men hadn’t so much “shot” the place as they had buried an avalanche of bullets in the side. It was shocking and unsettling how many bullet holes riddled the store; if Spawn told me they’d set up a machine gun nest and laid waste, I would have thought he was underselling it.
I stepped inside to see everyone there and looking pretty sober. The place reeked of alcohol, but that wasn’t different relative to the rest of the week.
“Did no one think attacking was a good idea?”
“We were pinned, boss,” Spawn said. “We would have been dead if we tried to return fire.”
I bit my lip from saying anything else. The clubhouse had never been designed to use as a bunker to return fire. It was built, well, as a goddamn clubhouse. Would you expect the local arcade to double as a military base?
“Anyone get hurt?”
“No.”
I nodded.
“For now, we stay inside,” I said. “Spawn, Sonny, come with me. The rest of you, lay low, get some rest. Keep a gun by you at all times. And have one person guarding the door. No one gets in or out until sunrise.”
It felt so fucking cowardly, but I hated the idea of the King’s Men picking us off in the darkness as we left the clubhouse. Better for us to have the visibility of light to protect us if we needed it.
And who knows, maybe having just been with Hailey was making me a little bit soft. Regardless, I wasn’t going to apologize for keeping my men alive, not when it was readily apparent that the Devil’s Patriots were going to escalate shit.
In church, Spawn and Sonny took their seats.
“I—”
“Where were you?”
Sonny’s question caught me off guard. I hadn’t fucking anticipated getting grilled when I entered here.
“I was with a lady, now—”
“We need to talk about that.”
I sighed. Sonny wasn’t talking to me as a club member. He was talking to me as family.
“In a moment,” I said. “For now, gentlemen, we need to bring the Black Reapers in here.”
“What?”
You would have thought by their reaction that I’d suggested we become suicide bombers.
“I’m not saying for them to join us or for us to join them,” I said, “but they’re clearly still in town, I fucking saw them earlier, and they know what they’re dealing with in the King’s Men. We need to speak to them.”
