Still, it was evident that egos were going to be an issue. It wasn’t anything new, but Satan was right to test just how together this was. If the alliance under one name wasn’t very strong, then what the hell was the point of us aligning with them?
“I see,” Satan said. “So then, what the hell are you doing here?”
Cole leaned forward.
“I—”
“I want to hear from you two,” Satan said, pointing to Lane and Brock. “You two drove all the way out here. I requested your presence. Let me hear you talk.”
He’s good.
Cole gradually shifted back. Lane nodded to Brock, who came forward.
“The Bandits,” he said, pausing. He didn’t look my way, but he knew. He very much fucking knew. “They were funded by King. They went from a local turf war into something involving military-grade weapons and reinforcements. They vandalized this man’s bar with the name of a club that they’d defeated before. He’s not someone that could be a threat. He is—”
“I know damn well what kind of a threat King is; the bullet holes in my clubhouse can tell me that far better than you ever could.”
“And yet, you ask for our presence.”
Well, this meeting is just going swell.Satan drew in a deep breath.
“I want to know why the fuck we should agree to work with you two, you three,” Satan said. “Right now, looking across from here, I see three boys who won one fight and think that they know how to handle themselves because of that. Well, kids, playtime is one thing. War is a fucking ‘nother.”
“You say that like we didn’t lose men,” Lane said, speaking from a place of much more certainty than before. “I lost one of my closest fucking allies, a preachereveryoneloved, because of this war. I lost a woman I thought I would marry. Cole and I were lucky not to lose our father to King’s minions and instead just to old age. If your war is something worse than that, tell us now, and we can handle it.”
Satan strummed his fingers on the table. There was a tense silence that felt like it could crumble into finger-pointing, fuck offs, and a dissolution at any given moment.
“Tell me, each of you, about how you defeated the enemy in your town,” Satan said. “Tell me how you overcame those losses.”
Lane looked at Cole. Cole nodded back to him.
“The two of us split apart at first, me in Springsville, him in a small town a little bit away. He recruited his own club and I continued my father’s. We faced an enemy, the Fallen Saints, that we realized we could not beat alone. So we reunited our clubs under the Black Reapers banner.”
“And before you were…?”
“The Gray Reapers.”
Satan nodded and turned his attention to Brock.
“We just used the assistance from the California Black Reapers.”
It seemed like an organic enough theme, but it was also clearly something the two of them had hammered home.Alone, we fall before King’s Men. Together, we triumph.
“Seems like by sheer numbers alone, you managed to push back the enemy,” Satan said, still poking and prodding. “Tell me, why can’t I just recruit more and more men?”
“How many men you got right now?” Lane said.
“Twenty-something.”
“Not enough,” Lane said. “Definitely not enough.”
“Oh?” Satan said with a hint of sarcasm.
“Probably need at least fifty,” Cole said. “Remember, we dealt with local threats. We’re talking about an enemy that has hands across state lines. You’re fighting a real monster here.”
Satan leaned back, folded his arms, and shook his head. He looked like he was searching for any reason not to join the Black Reapers, to keep our independence. It wasn’t my place to make these decisions, only to execute orders, so I kept my mouth shut.
But if there was one thing I knew about Satan, it was that he didn’t let anyone goad him into a decision. He made it on his own. And even when he did, if Sonny felt he fucked up, he was the only one with the balls and the standing to push back. And right now, Sonny looked even more visibly annoyed than Satan.
