“Loose lips sink ships,” Normie states. “She’s gone. Anyone bringing her onto club land is out.”
“Out?” one of the men says in shock.
Usually, doing something like smuggling a woman into the club grounds would result in a revoking of some privileges, not being completely disbarred.
Ghost folds his arms across his chest and jerks his chin at the man who’s just spoken. “The week she was sucking your cock, she was also sucking Officer Perez’s cock, too. That kind of bedroom talk could be deadly for the club, so yeah, she’s out-out.”
The man’s cheeks color a little and he nods once.
Behind me, the door to the room bangs shut, and I turn to see Smokie Saul walking in, his face pale. He comes to me and whispers behind his hand into my ear. My entire body tightens as I listen. Fucking hell, this is the last thing we need right now.
“You can address the room,” I tell him.
He begins to talk.
The room is quiet as the men take in the sheer importof Saul’s words. The recent fucking shipment is missing. The two men who had been escorting it are also gone.
It wasn’t a big shipment, just a small delivery we were due to pass on to some other one percenters up near the Canadian border, but the fact that two men are gone, and maybe killed, has my blood turning to ice.
Fuck my life. I’d called this meeting to talk about Camile and the threat to her, and potentially my daughter, from the cartel war that has erupted to the south of us, but now this clusterfuck of news has taken over the meeting.
“How long?” Ghost demands.
“They’ve been out of contact for over thirty minutes now, according to Becker.” Saul tucks the unlit cigarette he always has about his person behind his ear. “But they were close to us, only a couple of hours away, they said at their last call-in, so they were damn close to home when it happened.”
“Do we think it’s the Iron Revenants MC?” one of the junior members asks, mentioning a rival club’s name.
“It’s clearly them,” Ghost replies. “And why am I only just hearing about this?”
Saul frowns. “I’ve been on it and came to you as soon as I knew.”
“The main thing we need to focus on now is getting our shipment back and finding our men, preferably alive.” I shut down any argument. If they’re not alive, then that’s an all-out war brewing between us and the Iron Revenants.
These fuckers have been the bane of our existence, but this is sending things up a notch. The Iron Revenants MC are not as big or as powerful as us, yet they’ve managed to hit us badly. It shows they’re on their wayup, and that will also mean us being on our way down, which I’m not going to accept.
With what’s going on with Camile, it makes me extra antsy. Could it be related? I’m sure it won’t be, but right now nothing can be ruled out.
I’ll get Ghost to put cameras up on the roads out of here so I can see who comes and goes in the next few days and weeks, in case their men are scouting us out. We won’t tell anyone else, and I’ll get him to keep a log. I also want to know if there’s a way he can monitor members’ calls on their cells. Not necessarily listen in but just log them and see who they are calling. I’ll ask him after the meeting. Not that I don’t trust my men, but I didn’t get to be President by being too trusting. It’s just a precautionary measure.
The thing about a club like ours is that we might fuck around, and we might do all kinds of stupid shit to one another, but we’re tight. You must prospect for an age before you get patched in, and you have to do some seriously dangerous shit. The worst jobs? They go to the prospects. The most dangerous jobs? The prospects. Not only that, but they’re hazed to within an inch of their life.
My gaze is drawn to Rook, and I think back to the hazing he was recently put through. I wasn’t there to witness the actual events, but I know they must have been bad because some of the men wouldn’t look each other in the eye for a few weeks afterward. It also looked to me like Rook wasn’t exactly walking properly for a while. Rumor has it that Ace was the ringleader, and we all know Ace has zero boundaries. You really must want to be in the club to go through that shit, and once you’re in, there’s no out.
If you leave, you’re mostly out bad, which meansyou’re in our bad books forever and you’d better pray you don’t run into us, or you leave in a box.
Very rarely, someone is allowed to leave due to health issues or other reasons, but even then, they still have close ties to us, and we’ll support them as best we can.
Rook shifts in his seat and his head snaps up, as if aware of my scrutiny. He holds my gaze and gives me a nod of respect, and I nod back.
Wanting to get this shit sorted fast, I turn to Ghost. “Once we’re done here, pick a couple of club members and head out, see if you can find any signs of the missing men or the shipment. Increase security, too.”
“Yes, Prez.”
I lean in close. “Wait for me after Church so I can have a quick word. I’ll wrap this up fast.”
He nods once and sits back down.
“Okay, we’re going to shut this shit down.” I look around everyone, seeing they’re all glued to my words. “There’s clearly a threat from a rival club, and on top of that, one of my daughter’s friends is in trouble. To reiterate what I said at the start of this meeting before the shit hit the fan, Camile is here as my guest. She’s under my protection. She’s not a sweetbutt. She doesn’t want to be passed around between you guys. Anyone touching her must answer to me.” My gaze lands on the three Numbnuts, and they all look away with varying degrees of discomfort. “Under-fucking-stood?”
