Page 5 of Havoc

I looked from Storm to Breaker and back again, ignoring the throng of other brothers standing around. All of them were drenched, especially Breaker. His black t-shirt was plastered to his chest, and his forearms were dripping with water.

Grit wandered back into the room. Only then did I realize the water pouring from the sprinklers had finally stopped. Grit was swiping water off his arms. “I can’t fucking wait to hear how you managed to pull this off.”

I stammered, “I didn’t do this on purpose. Obviously, it was an accident.”

Storm grumbled, “Yeah, we already know that much. You have a whole fucking lot of accidents.”

Having Storm’s full attention locked on me had always made me uncomfortable, but never more than when I fucked up. And this fuckup was huge.

“It’s gonna take days to make this right, to dry everything out again.” Storm’s tone told me that he was just about had it with me and my many fuckups.

“This is bad. I get it, I truly do.” Looking him in the eye, I tried to sound like a man who knew how long it would take to dry this place out.

Hacker wheeled himself into the room just in time to hear the last exchange. He was shirtless, drenched, and had obviously been interrupted while spending intimate time with his old lady. His expression wasn’t just angry, it was enraged. He slammed to a stop right in front of me.

“Do you? I only ask because I don’t think you truly comprehend the damage you’ve done by just fucking around with things that don’t concern you.”

“I was trying to help the club. You know how the club officers always told us to take the initiative and step up. That’s what I thought I was doing.” I sounded defensive as fuck standing there, looking down at Hacker. He was former military, like me. Only, I’d been a grunt, and he had a long, illustrious career in military intelligence until he got injured in Afghanistan.

The angry expression dropped from his face, and he wheeled himself back a few inches. “If you’d bothered to ask one of the club officers, rather than running off half-cocked, you’d know that Rebel has already been out to have a look at our electrical system. He told us it needed a complete overhaul and was trying to free up time to do the job right.”

Grit chimed in with a chuckle. “Yeah, Reb says our whole system looks like it was installed by a bunch of feral raccoons.”

Storm stated angrily, “Rebel’s a fucking master electrician. If he says it’s FUBAR, then we need to tear it all out and start again. I trust his opinion.”

“I thought it was just a loose wire, you know, an easy fix. I was clearly wrong about that. I fucked up, I’m sorry.”

“The bottom line is you didn’t ask, and like always you ran off half-cocked and caused thousands of dollars’ worth of property damage. You aren’t the fucking club electrician so why the fuck did you think you needed to try fixing shit?” Storm’s firm voice felt like I was getting raked over the coals by the person I respected most, and it was a sharp sting to my pride.

I gestured around the large meeting room. “I just wanted to help. I don’t know if I’d say it’s thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. If I get started right away drying everything up and don’t let the water sit, it should be okay…”

Hacker rubbed his hand over his face, groaning. Then his hand snapped down, and he was back to furious again. “It’s like you don’t fucking understand a word coming out of our mouths.”

A familiar voice came from the doorway. “Let me have a whack at the stupid fecker.”

I braced for Storm’s cousin, Celt, to let me have it. I couldn’t imagine what he could say that hadn’t already been said.

He stalked up to me, dripping wet like the others. His hand came up, and his finger poked me square in the chest. “Open yer fecking ears sonny-boy. Shit’s not funny anymore, you ignorant fecker.”

Storm cleared his throat and murmured, “Dial it back a notch, cousin.”

“Sorry, brother. That last part was uncalled for. But seriously, you’re pissin’ me off with all yer blunders. This cleanup ain’t gonna be a walk in the fecking park like you seem to think it is. We’ll spend thousands just replacing all the electronic equipment that got water damaged.”

I opened my mouth to say I’d pay for the replacements, but he cut me off by holding up five fingers. “We’ve got five big screens scattered around the building and a multitude of high-dollar security equipment. Not to mention the equipment in the server room that just got drenched. All of that was paid for by the club and will need to be replaced—all because of whatever the feck you decided was a good expenditure of your time tonight.”

My mouth opened and closed as it hit home exactly how much damage I had caused this time.

Storm seemed to have recovered his calm and stated grudgingly, “Everything’s insured, so money is not the issue. From my point of view, it’s the unpleasantness of having our night interrupted and this huge mess that is going to take all of us working around the clock for the next few days to clean up. This escapade of yours has assigned every brother in this club fifteen or twenty hours of hard manual labor. We’re gonna have to shift out the furniture and set everything that’s not nailed down out in the sun to dry. And I’m sure there are a dozen more things that I’m not even thinking about.”

Finally getting it, I apologized. “I’m really sorry I made a bad decision, and my club brothers have to pick up the slack. I just wanted to help, make myself useful for a change.”

Storm sighed, clearly mentally exhausted from dealing with the mini-disaster I’d unwittingly created. “You’re a good brother, Havoc. You have a good heart, you’re loyal, and you’re someone I trust at my back when danger is near. It would be all too easy to write this off as just a one-off accident, but we both know this is just another in a long string of good deeds gone wrong. And you always seem to be standing right in the middle when things go bad.”

Storm wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. So, I reluctantly admitted, “I used to think it was all because bad luck followed me wherever I went. And, although I tried to do good, it always went bad in the end. Now, I don’t know anymore. Tonight, for instance, I sure didn’t see this coming when I decided to have a look at that light fixture.”

Storm’s voice dropped an octave. “I’m gonna be real honest with you, Havoc.” Gesturing around the wet room, he explained, “I might’ve seen my way to forgive all this, and even the brothers and club bunnies getting unexpectedly drenched. But most of the married brothers had our old ladies in the basement. I don’t like seeing my wife, the mother of my children, get a nasty shock like she did tonight. I don’t like other men seeing her in her pretty lace lingerie that’s meant for my eyes only, running out of the clubhouse in a panic.”

Breaker and Hacker nodded in agreement. But Grit, like always, joked about it. “Yeah, it looked like a throng of Victoria’s Secret models rushing to a photoshoot.”

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