Prologue
Solomon “Sonny” Briggs
There’s a war coming, and we are not prepared.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in Phoenix, the unblocked sun making it even hotter than it normally was. Although many of the Devil’s Patriots liked to roam the streets at night, either alone to clear their minds or in packs to establish their presence, I always preferred the afternoons. It was a chance to separate myself from the crowd, to give myself the space to play devil’s advocate to the man who named himself after the devil.
My father, Sam Briggs, also known as Satan. The best man I ever knew and would ever know. A man that I respected the hell out of, loved, and would die for.
A man who was also brutally egotistical, too stubborn, and too unaware of the shit that was about to go down.
From the start, I’d always had a worry that whatever King could bring to us would pale in comparison to our counter. It started small, but that was actually worse. An enemy that showed force at the start would be compensating. An enemy that sent messengers was one that was trying to warn us of what was to come.
And now that they were actually in town, they were fighting in ways we were not prepared for.
My father had grown up looking an enemy in the eyes, combating him, and defeating him. He didn’t play politics because he never had to—who needed to know how to talk or how to softly accrue power when blunt force would work? But he’d never had to answer the rebuttal to that—what would you do when someone with greater force came?
Right now, the answer seemed to be slamming our heads against the wall even harder. Sure, the wall might eventually crumble, but at what fucking cost?
And that was why I had to have these afternoon drives. Because I needed to figure out how to change the mind of a man notorious for never changing his mind, most especially when his son suggested it.
That, and the King’s Men were not relying solely on underhanded, political means to undermine us. They were really bringing the battle out into the open. At least in broad daylight, in the middle of Phoenix, I knew they wouldn’t strike.
As I made my way into the heart of Phoenix, a thought came to mind. My father and Spawn, our sergeant-at-arms, a man I knew doubted my father but who had become too preoccupied by love recently—also like my father—had gone to the rooftop of a nearby bar to investigate sightings of King. Such sightings hadn’t so much been spying as they had been open taunts, because King walked through the city with the paranoia of a man who thought he would never die.
Not couldn’t die. Wouldn’t die.
But no one had gone back since. We were overdue for some investigations, and the recent interrogation of a King’s Men member had revealed to me that King had no intentions of leaving until we were all six feet under, so I made my way back to that balcony. I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening.
I made it to the roof, nodding to the staff. I knew my appearance didn’t fit in with the normal crowd, but these weren’t normal times. I didn’t bother to hide the fact that I was looking for King as I stood near the railing and raised my hand over my eyes to reduce the glare of the sun.
King wasn’t in his room. I stood there for a good two or three minutes, waiting to see if King had just taken a piss. But no, he really wasn’t there.
I almost left when I decided, on a whim, to look at the rest of the hotel room. And wouldn’t you know it, the fucker had moved about five floors down—just a hair below straight ahead, but still visible enough for me to get a view.
He had his back to me. But what was more concerning was that there were two new faces there. And—perhaps out of my paranoia about what the King’s Men could do—I’d done my digging around. And I knew immediately who the fuck they were.
Crush and Prince.
The sergeant-at-arms of the King’s Men.
And the vice president of the King’s Men and the son of King himself.
King didn’t have a title in the club, at least not in the sense that we did. King was…King. He ran a multitude of things. He wasn’t limited to just a single entity. It may have been title inflation to say that his son was in charge of the club, but it wasn’t wrong to say that if Crush and Prince were showing up, we were in serious fucking trouble.
King kept his hands clean, at least to those outside of the known. But Crush and Prince were two of the most notorious fuckers in that club. Crush made Spawn, and even Butch and Mason from the Black Reapers, seem like kittens; he didn’t so much kill his victims as he took them to the brink of death in the most painful way possible and tried to keep them at that edge as long as he could. Prince was a little bit more “clean,” but he had his father’s silent ruthlessness combined with youthful vigor.
I’d long wondered if Prince being his son was something we could exploit, but that was based on the assumption that anyone in our club would want to play the insider game. The odds weren’t great.
But one thing was for damn fucking sure. If they were here, the attacks were going to increase significantly. And if they managed to kidnap any of our guys, it was a guarantee they’d either die, betray us, or “disappear” somewhere, never to be seen by anyone on the West Coast ever again.
I hurried back down to my bike, a new sense of urgency kicking in. This wasn’t trouble. This was disastrous. This mandated Satan taking what I said seriously and putting his ego aside. Of course, that was easier said than done, but every-fucking-thing about this situation was easier said than done.
I arrived back at the clubhouse to see Spawn alone, looking content but a little bored. It was my hope that by the time I finished speaking with him, he’d be anything but.
“Spawn,” I said, “I just got some intel on the King’s Men I thought you might be interested in.”
“Would I be?” Spawn said, almost sounding like he didn’t want to hear the news. “Seems like every time we get intel, we learn this fucker is even stronger than we thought.”
