Page 25 of Knight
While Brass wasn’t my direct Prez anymore, he still meant a lot to me. Not only that, but he was part of the club and he held a lot of power. Then add the whole thing about how I looked up to the man and the fact that he was pretty much my dad’s best friend and it was just a whole shit cupcake that I wouldn’t ever take a bite of.
I respected her dad in so many ways. While it’d been practically a lifetime since I’d seen or even talked to Gwen, I’d kept in contact with her dad throughout the years. He meant as much as my own dad meant to me.
While my dad was a good man and raised me the best I thought that he could, he was terrible with advice. Especially when it came to shit that really mattered. He tried his best, bless his damn soul, but it got to the point that I’d stop going to him for any little piece of advice whatsoever. That was usually the time I would call up Brass, lay it out there while he listened intently, and then I would wait for him to process before giving me his words of wisdom.
Now, when I needed his advice the most, I knew I couldn’t go to him. The one topic that had never been talked about between us for so many years. Gwen. His little girl. The club princess that never took her title to heart. And the thing was, this was the one thing I really needed advice on.
Sometimes life could be downright cruel. It wasn’t bad enough that I ripped my heart out right along with hers that night. Then I’d spent the next couple of years being so close to her but having to force myself to pretend as though she didn’t exist. Once I was away from the club and at college the only thing I’d learned about the situation was that no matter how many miles I put between us, it wasn’t enough to keep her out of my mind. I proved that time and time again when I’d look at someone and see some part of Gwen in them. Or the nights that I stayed awake, the pillow becoming too hard under my head, the sheets becoming too scratchy making me feel like little shards of glass cutting into my skin as I toyed with my phone for hours.
Now life was really taking a hammer to my nutsack with her being under the same roof.
I had to let thoughts of Gwen go. I had to be out the door and trying to figure out what was going on at the docks. I wondered who would dare to fuck with us. And why? That corner of the lot held old shipping containers that were pretty much too rusted out to use anymore. While we hadn’t gone through and checked each one out, I couldn’t imagine that there would even be anything in them. But then again, you never knew, there could have been a million dollars stashed in one of those things. I mean, I highly doubted we’d be that lucky. It looked like I had a shit-ton to do today then.
I thought about who I could get to help me go through all of those damn things. I wanted to kick myself that we hadn’t done it before, but then again, we’d been juggling a lot of balls the past year trying to get everything up and running. Maybe opening three businesses and trying to turn the abandoned motel into something we could function out of was just too much all at once. We had been ambitious. I think we were not only trying to prove to the other chapters that we could make it work, but we were trying to prove to other factions of the city that we were marking our corner. We had to show that the club was there to stay and make a place for ourselves at the outlaw table.
I decided to talk to Iron once I got to the clubhouse about who I should get to help me. I knew he’d leave it up to me but I always wanted his input. So far, Iron had proved to be a good leader. Different from Brass and even Cal from what I’d been around to witness. And that was neither a good thing nor a bad one.
I thought Iron’s way of doing things worked for this chapter and the brothers that were here. I had a feeling we would go far with him at the head of the table for years to come.
It didn’t surprise me that the clubhouse was quiet. Most of the guys were either already at work or sleeping away their hangovers. This was the time of day I loved to walk through this place. Not because I hated the chaos that came with so many men sharing one area, but because I loved the fact that there was a calm among that chaos. That was what the club was for me, noise and peace. The kind of noise that would normally help quiet the things that threatened to tear me apart on the inside. And the stillness of times like this was the balance that kept it all from becoming overwhelming.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Up there was Iron’s living space that was more like a tiny apartment, his office, and the room we held church in. I knew I’d find him waiting in his office, no doubt a huge mug of coffee in his hand and I knew it wouldn’t have been his first one of the day. As I approached the cracked open door, I found out that I was indeed right, his head tipped back as he downed whatever was left in the mug.
“I never said this shit was going to be easy,” he said motioning for me to step inside. “But damn, why does it have to happen so early?”
He let out a strained chuckle. I knew he was tense about the whole thing but he also needed to not let the heaviness that sat on his shoulders weigh him down. I had a feeling that he thought if that happened it would spill onto the rest of the club. He saw it as his job to hold that weight for all of us and not let it show how heavy it was at the same time.
I had an idea of what it was like to be in his position. While I’d never carried that patch myself, I’d been around in the moments that Brass would step from behind his shield. He never said the words, but I could feel his burden, I could see the strength that man had to have in his eyes.
Iron showed me the security footage. It was hard to tell if it was a woman or a man. They had on dark clothes and the hood of their jacket pulled up over their head, just like Iron had said. It didn’t help that the footage looked grainy and it was dark. The figure looked at a few of the containers then down as if they were looking at something in their hand. But from the angle, we couldn’t tell shit. Suddenly, the person whipped around and without having any sound, I had no idea why. But then it seemed like they got spooked and took off out of sight.
“Alright,” I said as I blew out a harsh breath. “I’ll start there and see if I can find how they got in and out. I thought it might be a good idea to start going through those containers to see if any of them actually have anything in them. I just assumed they were all empty, but I suppose you never know.”
“Good idea. Take a few guys with you, cut down on time.”
I nodded and sat down across the desk from him. Though his call had shocked me awake, I still could feel the blurriness in my eyes. I needed coffee and possibly some eggs, something to jump start me and rid me of this hangover.
“Hit it hard last night, huh?” Iron asked his eyes holding back none of his amusement.
“Yeah,” I cleared my throat. Damn, I would have killed for some water. “Boys came over and we drank too much.” That was the simple explanation.
“How’s the roommate thing going?”
“Fine,” I croaked and by the half-smirk he shot me, I wasn’t fooling anyone.
“She does good at the bar. Know her pops wanted her to have the shit shifts, but she goes the extra mile when it’s not busy. I sure as fuck appreciate that.”
I nodded, only half paying attention. I mean, I knew that whatever Gwen did she did it will everything she had. She wasn’t one to half-ass shit and try to skirt out of doing the dirty work. So it didn’t surprise me at all that she would find things to keep herself busy with when the place was dead.
“We really should think about hiring an actual staff for the place,” he said and I had a feeling it was hard for him to imagine that.
The bar did well enough on its own, the brothers took turns running shifts there. But if we were going to keep the place going, we needed to get people in there who would not only draw in a crowd but keep them happy as well. Some of us didn’t necessarily have that easy vibe to us. We could be intimidating and scary. Fuck, some of them could be downright moody.
And not to mention, that we needed to get someone in there to manage the place. We’d done well enough so far, but we needed someone steady to do the ordering and keeping the books and all that shit that most of us didn’t know about, or the ones that did, didn’t have the time.
“Probably not a bad idea,” I agreed glad we were moving on from the Gwen subject. “Ky had mentioned that the garage is picking up too. Maybe we should think about someone from the outside for there as well.”
This shouldn’t have been a problem because all of our businesses had been set up to be legit. It was a big thing that the club wanted going forward with this chapter. I knew some of the other chapters had businesses to hide money, and I also knew that at one point they were working towards stopping that.
