“Thirsty.” Her voice was heavy with sleep, but she lifted up her arms, and he heaved her upward into his embrace.
She was five and almost too big for him to hold her that way, but he appreciated these moments that were slowly starting to fade into quiet memory. She was becoming a kid, who would turn into a teen, and then an adult. Pretty soon, the only thing left would be the ghost of the infant with the fat cheeks and tired eyes he’d rescued and promised to love until he no longer had breath in his body.
There were moments in his day he would stare at her and wonder how the fuck it all happened to begin with. Plenty of kids were born into club life. He had survived comfortably in it until his mom bailed—but Gunner had once upon a time sworn to himself he’d never subject a child to shit like this.
He wasn’t a man with courage. His crime for involving authorities and outside civvies, taking what Satan’s Souls thought belonged to them was worse than when he’d let Rook fuck him up the ass. He deserved to be flayed alive, dragged through town, to have the bits and pieces of him still recognizable as human paraded around as a lesson to anyone who would fuck with their authority.
But he’d gone far enough, and fast enough, and he’d tried to disappear three thousand miles away, in River Crest.
Gunner had been keeping his head down, working as a mechanic, trying to earn enough to pay for their shitty apartment and her formula and diapers, and the ten bucks a week his neighbor charged to watch her. But a man like Gunner couldn’t hide who he was, or where he was from, and that was exactly what happened when the owner came back to work.
Gunner had been at the Chains mechanic shop for three months, hearing stories about the owner named Aaron who was some sort of mechanic genius. The guy kept his personal life close to his chest, but the moment Gunner met him he knew he’d come from a club.
Aaron didn’t advertise it, of course. He was several years older, and the guardian to a younger brother who went to some sort of boarding school for the blind, and he didn’t have family apart from that. Aaron was a wild card, took no shit, and functioned almost like the shop enforcer whenever customers got rowdy.
Before they met, Gunner had pictured a man tall, bald, massive, and imposing. Instead, Aaron was at least two or three inches shorter, a head full of impeccably styled hair, which was peppered with grey, and a thick, meticulously groomed beard that covered half his face.
He had smiling eyes though, and ink stretching from wrists to shoulders, and he wore a leather jacket like he’d been born in one. Gunner recognized club life on him from the moment they locked eyes, and it didn’t take long for them to start swapping stories.
“It was easy for me to leave,” Aaron told him as they sat outside having a smoke. “My old man was the President, but he didn’t give a flying fuck about me unless I was increasing his business. He wanted Rory out, and he knew he could control me that way.” Aaron’s voice went quiet, and Gunner recognized the pain and trauma in his tone when he spoke again. “He put me on some job—some kid was supposed to have information about a traitor in our club who had been patched in. Me and two other Enforcers worked on him all night. Turns out the kid didn’t know shit, my old man just wanted to see how far I was willing to go.”
“Jesus,” Gunner breathed, and Aaron let out a rough, jagged laugh.
“One of the other Enforcers bailed after that, and Rory and I didn’t stick around much longer. I thought maybe he’d send someone on our heels, but that fucker never came looking, and we never looked back.” He took a long drag of his cigarette and then let his head fall back against the brick wall. “But I think you know just as well as I do, you can’t escape the shit that makes up half your blood.”
That day, Gunner should have heard the words for what they were—the birth of the Broken Chains. But it took until Smokey showed up one night with a new name for himself, a plan to get started, and an offer to make him VP for Gunner to get it.
And he sure as shit didn’t understand why Smokey would name a washed-up, single-parent mechanic with a bum hand and half a smile as his second in command, but Gunner took it because he knew it was the only way he’d ever truly feel like he belonged anywhere. The patch now sat on the breast of his cut, and it was filthy and worn and perfect.
Still, Gunner took the office with the feeling like someone was sitting on his chest, and he told himself it was pride and relief rather than gut-wrenching fear that it was all going to come crashing down on him like before. He trusted Smokey, though, and he loved him like he was supposed to, unlike the so-called brothers in Satan’s Souls.
But Gunner never trusted himself, and couldn’t see what Smokey insisted was inside him. A leader, someone with the ability to know what was good for their brothers, and someone who wouldn’t fuck up.
“You’re a fucking idiot for choosing me,” Gunner whispered a week after they patched in their newest officer, and it was met with a hearty laugh as they straddled their bikes and looked over the small dunes at the wide stretch of the Atlantic. It looked pitch black and smelled sharply of salt and hope, and Gunner felt like maybe he had—for the first time in his life—made a good decision. “And I’m a fucking idiot for saying yes.”
Smokey just shrugged, taking a long pull from his cigarette. “You know, my older brother tried to name me Smokey back when I first told him I wanted to prospect,” he said after too long a silence. Gunner could see the guy’s eyes trained out along the water like he was afraid to look over, and Gunner understood that in the most profound, painful way. “I was twelve, but I was already taller than him. He thought I was going to be huge.” He took another drag and tilted his head back. The smoke was barely visible in the dim light of the moon, but Gunner watched it fade off into the distance. “He died when I was sixteen. Some bullshit job gone wrong. My useless old man didn’t even have a memorial for him. Didn’t even go back for his body. I picked a different name after that. But it feels right now, taking what he wanted to give me. I like to think he’d have come with me, when I packed Rory up and took off.”
Gunner dragged his tongue over his bottom lip. “It fits.”
“Yeah,” Smokey said, breathing the word out with a sigh. He dropped his cigarette and crushed the glowing cherry into nothing with the heel of his boot.
Gunner leaned over the man’s shoulder. “We really gonna do this, brother?”
Smokey laughed and shrugged. “I guess we fuckin’ are.”
Five years later, and Gunner didn’t regret a damn thing, even when the nightmares had him standing in the kitchen holding his sister who had never known another parent aside from him.
“Mimi?”
“Hm?”
“Can we get ice cream after dance if I promise to be real, reaaaaal good?”
He laughed, only because that was the plan anyway. He ran a hand over her hair, then eased her back to the ground. “Get to bed, Cricket.”
She gave him a flat look. “But could you say yes first?”
Rolling his eyes, he chuckled and fixed the collar of her nightgown. “Yes. But you have to pinky promise you’re going to behave.”
She wrinkled her nose, visible even in the dim light through the window, but she offered her pinky without hesitation. His large one curled over hers, and he let her drag his hand in a sharp tug before she turned on her heel and ran back down the hall. He allowed the quiet of the room to settle back into his bones again, turning to stare out the window at the thick brush, with the moon hanging fat and yellow just above the tops of the trees. He was tired, and he was lonely. He was feeling every second of his twenty-nine years on the planet, which wasn’t a lot for some, but for him it often felt like a hundred lifetimes.