Page 3 of Cruel Savior

Chapter Two

Axel

Standing in the shadows,I watched the man approach our clubhouse. Since he'd made it past security and driven in like he owned the place in his fancy fucking Jaguar, someone must have been expecting him. It wasn't often our club let outsiders into this area.

Usually, if the club or its president had some business to conduct with nonmembers, we took care of it at the casino on the backside of the property.

This change in procedure didn't bode well and with fucking Turner being the civilian in question, I didn't think the news would be good. The last time he'd come here, he'd hired us to find his missing daughter and that had turned into an epic shit show. Especially when it turned out she wasn't missing at all. She'd gone off and gotten herself mixed up with the fucking mafia.

I shook my head and pushed her out of my thoughts. She did not deserve my time. Whatever Turner wanted, JD could take care of it and leave me the hell out of it.

The club had enough on our plate at the moment. Since the death of Frank Mazzeo, we’d barely had a day of peace. Not that anyone expected killing the head of the Seattle mafia would halve their operations.

No, crime like theirs went on and someone rose up out of the ranks and took over. Although the new man in charge rarely hid behind the cloak of some corporation now only known as the collective. What the hell did that even mean?

Lame is what I called it. I dropped my cigarette to the dirt and stomped on it with the toe of my riding boots. The soft pelt of the winter rain sounded above me on the metal roof, masking any sounds I made and keeping me hidden from anyone who didn't know where to look.

Turner climbed out of his car and every muscle in my body went rigid. I really had hoped to never see the man again. As unrealistic as that was since he also lived in Sultan, a man could fucking wish, couldn't he?

I was about to reveal myself and stop him from invading our private space when my phone chimed in my pocket. I cursed—silently so as not to give away my position—and pulled the damned thing out of my pocket.

I actually didn't need to see it to know who it was from. I had a specific ring tone for the president.

You need to stop stalking the man and come inside. He has a job for us and we need to hear him out.

Fuuuck me.

That tightening of my gut earlier screwed down harder. If this had anything to do with Mandy,Amanda, Kelly, or whatever she might be calling herself these days, I was out. And I would have no problem letting JD know my position on this. Once had been enough. If she was back in town, I expected her to keep as far away from me as possible.

She'd fucking walked out of my life without so much as a goodbye. I hated her for that shit. But when her fucking father told me she’d gotten rid of the baby, I hated her with the kind of passion that usually got men killed.

Ten years was not enough time to get over it, and it sure as fuck wasn't long enough to forget.

With my anger building to a fevered pitch, I pushed off the wall and made my way into the clubhouse. I didn't see Turner in the main room. Only a few of my club brothers and some of the women who hung around all the time. I shook my head and made my way to the conference room—our inner sanctum. He had to be kidding me, right?

I popped the door open with more force than necessary and the door hit the wall with a decent thud. I wouldn't disrespect my president with a raging temper tantrum in front of someone who didn't belong here, but I would make it clear to everyone in the room that this shit was not worth my time.

"Thanks for joining us." JD smirked, the cock of one eyebrow a clear warning that I needed to settle down. Something not likely to happen if this went the way I expected it to go.

"I didn't know we had a meeting."

"Turner has an urgent request for us. I thought you should be here for the whole story, so it didn't have to be repeated secondhand."

I turned to our guest, and at the sight of his scowl in my direction, I had to swallow down the desire to tell him to fuck off and walk out. He didn't like me any more than I cared for him, so why he kept coming to the club for help made no damned sense.

Except that if you had a situation that needed to be handled outside the law there weren't too many other people to go to.

Finally, he looked away and leaned forward, placing his hands on our sacred table that had our club emblem burned into it. Something about that only riled me further. He needed to get the hell on with it and then get the fuck out.

"We had an incident out at the ranch today, and to put it frankly, it’s far more complicated than my personal security team or the Sultan police department can handle."

"And?” I asked, when he paused for too long without elaborating.

“A package was delivered to the house, and my wife had the unpleasant experience of opening it. She nearly lost her mind. It was her screams that my entire security team responded to, and then they called me. However, the damage was done. Finding my wife with blood on her hands and arms freaked out our entire staff, and now half of them are too scared to come inside the house."

This time, JD beat me to the next question.

"What was in it?"

---