“Give me my chain back.”
“I will, some day far in the future, when you don’t even remember I have it.”
I was going to cry, and I didn’t want him to see. I didn’t even know why. This guy was a primo asshole. He was toying with my emotions, pushing my buttons. He should have known better. He should have known I was trapped. You don’t walk up to a slave and ask them to go for a walk. It’s not fair.
I stormed out of the bar. As soon as the door slammed, I burst into tears. Fuck him. How dare he play with me like that. It wasn’t right. You don’t take the one thing a person wants most in the world and dangle it in front of them for fun. Talk is cheap. Where I come from, you either give a girl what she needs, or you shut the fuck up.
You don’t get to talk the talk and not do anything about it.
He could keep the shitty chain. Twenty bucks would get me a new one.
In the coming weeks, I forced myself to push him from my mind. And yet, nothing was the same after that.
Days turned to weeks and then months, and Wolf treated me worse and worse.
I didn’t even know the name of the jackass from the bar, but I couldn’t forget him. I couldn’t forget that there was someone out there with the balls to say, ‘Fuck Wolf Staten.’
And if he could say it, why the hell couldn’t I?
Chapter 2
Jackson
THE DAY OF MY FATHER’S FUNERAL.
I always knew it would be a violent death. What I hadn’t counted on was it having such an impact on me. It shook me up, brought me face to face with my own mortality. I was an only son, the last of the line, everything would end with me. That didn’t sit right.
I was out on the highway, headed to the Los Lobos hangout. I hated meeting those guys. They were nasty, and they had no clue how to live—no clue how to be men. I’d seen the way they locked up their women, terrified them, turned them into slaves. There was no honor in that.
Los Lobos was a syndicate of twelve grade-A assholes. They were killers, drug-runners, human-traffickers. All twelve deserved to be put in the ground. The fact that I was doing business with them made me sick to my stomach.
I was buying information from them for the Brotherhood. That’s my group. Four grade-A assholes, but not like Los Lobos. We’re different. We steal money, but we don’t hurt people. That’s a subtle distinction to most people, but to us it’s real. People think all criminals are the same. They’re not. Maybe I’m biased, I love the other three members of the Brotherhood as if they were my real brothers. They’re real men. Men you can trust—rely on—men who’ll do what needs to be done when the chips are down.
At sundown it started to rain. I was on a lonely stretch between Reno and Carson City and the glow of a vacancy light called out to me like a beacon.
I walked into the motel bar with one thing on my mind—getting fucked up. It’s not every day they bury your daddy.
There are certain nights in your life different from the others. The force of destiny weighs down on you. Everything that happened before seems to have led to that fateful moment. Everything after is a consequence.
This was one of those nights. I could feel it in my bones. I can’t say I was particularly close to my father, but his dying, it took the ground out from under me. It made me realize I hadn’t yet achieved the most important thing in life. I was risking everything on a daily basis, but I hadn’t planted the seed of the next generation.
I was soaked from the rain but didn’t care. I took a place at the bar and slapped my gloves and helmet on the seat next to me.
“What can I get you, cowboy?” the bartender said.
I looked around the room. It was a dingy place. Not too many customers.
“You got sugar back there?” I said.
He nodded.
“I’ll have a bourbon with sugar. The way the old man used to drink it.”
“I can make you an old fashioned,” he said.
“No. Just the bourbon and sugar.”
He put a shot glass in front of me. I downed it in a single motion and asked for another. As I downed the next, the door slammed behind me. I turned.
In walked trouble.
Chapter 3
Jackson
IT WAS A GIRL, little more than a kid, soaked to the skin, makeup running down her face in long, black streaks. She cut a tragic figure—a drowned kitten—desperation written all over her.
There was something familiar about her, and then I remembered. A few months earlier, the Los Lobos bar, she was Wolf Staten’s girl. Instantly, I could see what was going on. She was on the run.
She’d actually done it. She’d taken her life into her own hands. She was fleeing the most savage group of men you’re ever likely to hear of.
And how did I react? I’ll tell you.