Page 1 of Legacy

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Legacy

Home means something differentfor everyone. For some, it’s a white picket fence, coffee brewing in the morning, and watching a sunset on the back porch after a long day at work.

For me, home is this clubhouse.

Home is music blasting so loud I can barely hear my own thoughts and being constantly surrounded by people. Home is whiskey-soaked floors and cigarette smoke in the air.

It’s living life like the next day isn’t promised and accepting it.

Home is this barstool.

Fourth from the end.

The first time I sat here, I was thirteen. My father handed me a beer and said if I was old enough to take someone’s life, then I was old enough to drink. He didn’t ease me into being a biker; he threw me headfirst at theTwisted Kings. He preached the cut above all—including family. And as I drained that first beer beside Dad and his brothers, I believed him.

Growing up at the Twisted Kings compound, the son of a ranked member, home wasn’t chicken noodle soup when you were sick.

It was bourbon to cure a cough and tough love with little comfort.

Mom was the only buffer from that reality. She lived in the neighborhood, a grouping of houses at the edge of the Twisted Kings compound. A place where the Twisted Kings are able to keep their families protected within the gates of the property line.

The neighborhood is far enough from the clubhouse that it almost feels like a different place entirely, and Mom used that to keep her distance from the club. It’s probably the only way she was able to put up with a man like my father for as long as she did.

Dad lived up to his road name, King. That’s what he was to his club and the women who chased after him.

He spent more time at the clubhouse than with his old lady and kid, so it wasn’t until I was older that I really got to know him.

Around the time Ghost moved in with us, Dad started dragging the two of us to the clubhouse more frequently because, according to him,the clubhouse is where men are made.

I was young and impressionable enough to eat that shit up.

The clubhouse represented freedom, and I loved every second of being inside these walls.

But as I lift my beer to my lips and take a sip, I can’t shake the weight settling inside me.

This used to be enough. It used to be all I needed. Until five years ago when Beatrice King struck my life like a bolt of lightning.

Unexpectedly perfect and the greatest gift. Too damn good for me and this life.

The second I held my daughter, I knew something in my core shifted. That this life started to look a little different. For five years, I’ve kept that buried behind the mask I wear for my club, and I pretend nothing has changed.

It was easy to separate until I took a bullet four months ago, and mortality took a swing at me.

One gunshot, and I was reminded how the grim reaper hangs on my shoulders. How one night can take away everything my daughter knows. Even on nights like tonight, when I know she’s safe at the house, I’m blindingly aware that one moment could change everything.

I spin on my barstool to face the room, leaning my elbows back on the bar and gripping my beer. Fans spin at full speed overhead, stirring the thick, smoke-filled air. They don’t do enough to temper the Las Vegas summer heat when this year was blistering, and it’s still unbearable in early September.

Condensation drips down the neck of my beer bottle as I take a sip.

Chaos and Soul sit on the stools to my right, taking bets on a dark-haired beauty across the room with the bachelorette party that just walked in. Soul knows that the brunette is more Chaos’s type, but Soul can’t resist a competition, so he’s making one of it.

I watch it play out like I’m caught between two sides of my life.

The biker and the father.

If I count whatever haunted version of myself hangs in the center lately, maybe there are actually three sides splitting me in pieces.

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