Hearts: Motorcycle Club Romance (Savage Saints MC Book 7) Read online

  “I’ve lived with Pork for three years now in Panorama Towers,” he continued. “I have never known Pork to throw out a dumb accusation. He says some stupid shit from time to time, and I wished he’d shut his fucking mouth with some of his jokes, but when he’s serious, he’s the most serious person in this room. He’s not going to say something just to get someone out on a political ploy. So if he saw something go down, Krispy, Richard, we all need to know what’s going on.”

  Richard sighed, rubbing his temples with his fingers. What was going on? Richard told me more than he told the club, and it was pretty apparent there was something he hadn’t bothered to say.

  “This is something that I’m playing very close to the vest,” he admitted. “I can’t go into detail. I can just say that the California Saints, since they are unknown to the Degenerate Sinners, they can do things that we can’t.”

  “This is bullshit,” I snapped.

  I couldn’t fucking take it any longer.

  “We’re a club that prides itself on being open once you get through our doors. We don’t let many people in, but once they’re in, they’re family. If you’re keeping secrets from us, hun, you’re not doing your job.”

  Yeah, I went after Richard with some pretty harsh words. I swore I could see Richard’s hair graying on the spot. And who could blame him? We had a suicidal enemy that had more members than us, and we had a business, not just a club, that we had to protect.

  Richard didn’t mince his frustration, swearing under his breath.

  “This is something I have no choice but to keep close,” he said. “This meeting is over. Let’s get some poker going, shall we?”

  “What?”

  I stood up. Richard never acted like this. Never.

  I didn’t think he was somehow working with the Sinners. That was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. But he was acting very out of character, most likely because of the stress.

  “There is no goddamn poker game right now.”

  I hated to throw my political weight around like this, but this was unacceptable.

  “You are going to tell us what’s going on, Richard. We all want the same thing. We all want the club to be better, and we all want to kill the Sinners. There’s no one that wants the Sinners dead more than me. But we’re not going to accomplish that with secrecy and backdoor pacts.”

  Richard sighed and nodded.

  “Alright. Krispy, you knew this might come. What I say here? It stays behind these doors. If Pork wants to hear it, he has to come and apologize.”

  For speaking his mind about something that will likely turn out to be reasonably accurate? Fuck that.

  “In any case, Krispy is not a goddamn double agent. Well, he’s not one against us, put it that way. Look, back up for a second. The stress of this situation with the Sinners is killing me. Natasha calls me out on it. I’m a lot gruffer and to the point than I was before. I don’t like my fucking men getting killed. I think we can all agree on that. I want to kill Scar and all of his asshole friends before they kill us.”

  Nothing Richard had said was anything any of us were going to disagree with. But it also wasn’t particularly useful or insightful into what he had done with Krispy.

  “So, in an attempt to win this battle with a little subterfuge, I have had Krispy here posing as a prospect with the Sinners to try to learn more. The idea being that we get someone in that door, we can have someone learn more, and with that knowledge, use it to take down the Sinners. Problem is, the more people that know about it, the more likely it is to leak. I know we’re all good here, but we all have connections to the Sinners we may not even be aware of.”

  That was unfortunately true. I knew many of the dancers had friends who had boyfriends who were Sinners or the like. Las Vegas was odd in that, in many ways, it was like the world’s largest small town. Everyone in the world knew about it but given the limited locals, everyone came to know everyone very quickly.

  “We’re trying to get it so that Krispy can get a meeting with Scar,” Richard said.

  I felt a pain in my chest when I heard that name. That name had caused all of us so much goddamn trouble in the past and in the present.

  “But so far, it hasn’t happened. The reason for this is we need to try to win this war on two fronts—the underhanded route and the front-assault route. I’m tired of my men getting killed. If I have to put us on the front line to do it, I will. But if I don’t have to? Then why the hell wouldn’t I? Krispy offers us the chance to do that.”

  Krispy nodded, his head held high. I felt good about him being on our side, but there was something just so… so aggressive and untamed about him that made me dislike him. I could see why Joseph had attacked him. Though, in fairness, I probably would have defended a great deal of Joseph’s behavior right now.

  “I’m sorry that I have kept this a secret from you all. I had hoped that this wouldn’t cause any issues, but I let the stress affect me.”

  Just as the stress affected Joseph. He wouldn’t have made that accusation out of the blue with the vehemence he did if he wasn’t stressed.

  “Are we good now?” Richard asked. “Does anyone have any questions about this?”

  No one raised their hand. I glanced at Dom, who seemed disappointed this had all happened but pleased enough with the resulting conversation. I didn’t really have any questions.

  I mostly was just disappointed at how this had all turned out. I’d really hoped that things would go a little better if Joseph had made the accusation he had, and now he had to come back and apologize?

  “Tensions are running high, so let’s take a thirty-minute break, and we’ll decide after if we want to play poker tonight,” Richard said. “Mama, can I speak to you alone for a second?”

  I nodded and had to bite my tongue from saying anything scathing. Richard and I convened in his suite at the club.

  “The fuck is all of this?” I said.

  “I know you’re pissed. I want to talk to you about Pork.”

  Oh, heavens. Just be nice to him. He doesn’t know.

  “Can you get him back?”

  OK. That was definitely not the direction I expected this to go.

  “What the fuck?” I said. “I thought you said he—”

  “Had to come back and apologize, yes,” Richard acknowledged. “I’m not doing very well with the club right now, I know. Pork made an accusation that felt justified in his eyes. For the sake of proceedings, I wasn’t about to stop him from leaving, but it’s pretty obvious everyone in that room knows now that whatever he saw wasn’t as bad as we all thought.”

  “Oh, good, so we keep up appearances but now can bring him back. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled with that.”

  Richard sighed.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “I know, I’m being harsh,” I admitted. “We’re all stressed. We all want that asshole in the Sinners gone. We all… we’re all thinking it.”

  “You, especially, no?”

  I nodded but quickly changed the subject.

  “I can get Pork. It’ll be no problem. Should be easy.”

  “Well, that’s a massive relief,” Richard said with a chuckle. “Do I want to know why?”

  If there was anyone that I could be open with this early, it was Richard, practically my brother. But…

  Actually, you know what? If I was going to call Richard out for not being open about the club’s activities, but then I went mute, I deserved my own level of grief from him. I deserved to get called out.

  “We’re trying to see if something can work,” I admitted. “I’m nervous about it, and I’m doing my best to keep it separate from here. But I’m both hopeful it can be something and fearful the worst could happen.”

  To my surprise, Richard just smiled.

  “I’ve been waiting for the day when you’d open yourself back up like this,” he said. “I think it’ll go better than the last time.”

  “By default, duh.”

  “I
ndeed. Just be careful, and you’ll be fine. But for now. Can you please go get Pork back?”

  What a fucking day it had been. I wasn’t going to say no, but damn, what a fucking day.

  That didn’t mean, though, it wouldn’t get worse without him. We had to have him. We all needed Pork, if for no other reason than for his marksmanship skills with guns.

  And I needed him because he reminded me Tanya Reed still lived. I wasn’t just Mama.

  “I’ll do it now, actually.”

  Chapter 15: Pork

  I hadn’t yet felt the impact of what I had done.

  I was doing everything I could to do just that.

  I was spending my Thursday evening laughing at Joe Rogan comedy specials on Netflix, drinking beer and whiskey, and in general pretending that what had happened at the Savage Saints meeting hadn’t actually happened. I couldn’t feel depressed if I didn’t think about the thing that depressed me, and besides, I was laughing! Rogan was funny! Life was funny!

  Yeah, OK, maybe I’d come down from it a little bit eventually. But right now, the feelings of the whiskey and the laughter had me feeling good. Really good.

  So much so, in fact, that I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my contacts. Most of my calls and texts were to members of the club, a fact which I did my best to gloss over. Hey, Dom would still be in my life as my roommate. Various club members would still be friends with me. I knew all this. Right?

  If not… well, joke was on them!

  Then I got to something that actually made me pause.

  My parents.

  I’d literally scrolled to the bottom of my text message history, to the time from several years ago when I had made the transition from a flip phone to a smartphone. My last texts to them had come an embarrassingly long time ago. I’d told Mama—not Tanya Reed, for I didn’t see how the woman, not the biker, could come to me after today—that I’d just become estranged from them, but what I didn’t tell her—what I could not face up to—was that it was my decision.

  My drinking, my rage, my depression had caused me to shove them away. Sure, they’d gotten pissed off at me for my behavior in a few different spots and called me out on it, but they and my little brother had never said they were going to push me away. I’d just gotten that way out of anger over the SEALs situation.

  Sure was fucking funny, huh?

  I wondered what would happen if I just hit “Call” on my father’s contact. Did he even have my phone number still? I hadn’t changed it, but could you blame him if he chose to delete me forever? If he hadn’t, would he want to answer me? What then? I could just picture it now.

  “Hey, Dad, this is Joseph, yeah, your son, the one who told you to fuck off into your shitty New Mexico life while three bottles deep into some whiskey. Yeah, how are you? Oh, I know, right, we can just go back to the way things were, right? No harm, no foul! Oh, you got hurt? But oh, it was so long ago!”

  Yeah, right.

  If your father has any sense, he’ll never fucking talk to you again.

  But who else was going to talk to me? Not the SEALs. That ship had sailed so long ago, I feared that many of my teammates had either perished in combat or were in therapy to try to forget the horrible things I had done.

  Not the Saints. I knew what I had seen, but apparently, I did not know what I had actually seen. In other words, I knew what happened before me, but I had failed to consider why it had happened—or, for that matter, that the woman who slept with me would choose not to defend me. With good reason, but still.

  At this point, it seemed like the only group I had left was my family, and even then, for what I had done to them, there was no guarantee.

  I was the lone wolf. I was a vagabond without a tribe. I was alone.

  And with that one thought, all of the laughter, all of the Rogan jokes, all of the alcohol’s effects, all of it disappeared in a moment of sobriety that I had never hoped to have again.

  “Well, fuck.”

  And then a loud knock came at my door that stirred me out of my stupor. Who the fuck was that? Dom wouldn’t have come back early, and he would’ve had his keys. Maintenance? Front desk?

  I got up, surprised that I was drunker than I thought and staggered to the front door.

  “Can I help… you.”

  I raised my right eyebrow as Mama stood there, her arms crossed, reeking of motorcycle oil.

  “You’re drunk, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Not like I got anything to be sober for,” I said.

  “OK, I should have known this would happen,” she said. “Let me in?”

  I would not have if she had demanded to be let in. But I was feeling nice and like a softie, and so I let her in since she asked it, not demanded it.

  “Step one,” she said. “You’re not drinking anymore tonight. Tomorrow, sure, but not tonight.”

  “Tanya!”

  I didn’t even realize I’d said her name. It just came out instinctively.

  That was kind of nice. My mind may have wanted her to be Mama—

  “I’m Mama right now,” she said.

  Well, guess my mind had it right now.

  “You’ll get Tanya back, but right now, I need you to listen. Come back.”

  “What.”

  I actually laughed. Good! I’d rediscovered the humor of life. And to think, I had once thought that I’d lost it with a realization. Nope! Joking Joseph wins the night again!

  “I’m serious, Pork.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I said. “I’m not Pork. That was a nickname when I was with the Savage Saints. I’m out. I made an accusation that was false, and the punishment for doing so was expulsion. I left before it got carried—”

  “We never carried it out,” Mama said, leaning against my kitchen island.

  “Say what?”

  “You heard me,” she said, although that was kind of generous given that I was swaying a bit. “When you left, Krispy announced that he was not a rat, taking his phone out and showing all of us. Dom got super pissed. He called Richard out for saying that we’d been operating in a shroud of secrecy. But instead of opening up and telling us what was going on, the fucker just doubled down. So I called him out; yes, me.”

  I could easily picture Mama giving Richard a tongue-lashing. It happened pretty frequently, given how close the two were.

  “He didn’t say anything at first and tried to start the poker game and I flipped and said there would be poker. That’s when he explained that Krispy is operating as an undercover spy for us. He’s trying to join the Sinners so he can get intel and then take out the enemy.”

  “OK,” I said. “But then why the fuck didn’t anyone say anything?”

  Mama had nothing.

  “Cuz Richard made a mistake, that’s why.”

  Well, at least she’s honest about it. At least she’s laying it out exactly as I’d hoped.

  “He asked me to come and get you, Joseph.”

  He did? The guy that kicked me out?

  “Now, come on. You can ride on the back of my bike. We need—”

  “I want an apology from Krispy and Richard,” I said, folding my arms, trying not to show just how drunk I was. “I want them to fucking say ‘I’m sorry’ and then I can head back.”

  “I think that’s fair,” Mama said. “But Joseph, please come back with me right now. You have no idea. We’re all getting desperate regarding this situation. Richard’s desperate. Hell, I’m desperate. I’m desperate to have these assholes removed.”

  “OK…” I said, not sure what this had to do with anything. Then again, my drunk mind—which was only getting drunker—had probably missed more than a few key points in all of this. “And what’s so different?”

  “What’s different is that Richard is doing things he would normally never do, and he recognizes he’s made some mistakes, but he wants the club to keep its cohesion. If we crumble from within, then the Sinners don’t have to do a goddamn thing. Do you get that?”

&nbs
p; I opened my mouth, but as if on a mission before a microphone, Mama’s speech picked up, becoming more passionate and forceful by the second.

  “They’re getting more aggressive, and we know that they’re planning something,” Mama said. “You know this. They went from merely picking at small game to invading a private home to now launching terrorist-like strikes on The Red Door. How long before they come such a force that the feds or the National Guard come in? And then what? You know what. Everyone overreacts, calls us a gang, and then we all get shut down in an overreaction. We have to corral our own to keep the big dogs out of it. I want Scar gone. I want him fucking gone. This has been a nightmare situation. Can you please just come back with me?”

  I hesitated. Everything Mama said was true… but my ego was still reeling from what Richard had done. And frankly, why did they need me? Sure, I could use guns. OK, sure. But I was one man, and one master marksman had nothing against a few dozen determined shitheads.

  “Joseph,” Mama—no, this was now Tanya—said, coming up to me and holding my hand. “Please come back. We need you. I’m not saying that to soothe your ego. I’m saying that because I mean it. Without you, we don’t pose nearly the danger to them that we would otherwise.”

  When Tanya stroked the top of my hand, it sent a pleasant tingle through my arms and all the way to my heart. I looked into her eyes and no longer saw the tough hardass that was going to boss everyone around. I saw the wounded woman that had so bravely exposed herself two nights ago—and I didn’t mean by taking her clothes off. I saw the one person who, even with everything that had just happened, I still wanted to save.

  My feelings about the Savage Saints hadn’t really changed, even with all of Tanya’s attempts at persuasion. But seeing her before me made me want her even more. It made me want to save her.

  To take her far, far away.

  “What if,” I said, a slight smile forming on my face as I thought of how brilliant this plan was—or maybe that’s just the booze talking, “you and I just leave Las Vegas and start over somewhere.”