Cole Read online

  And there I was, having struck out on my own in the past year and a half, having made my father proud—I hoped—and having started a new club entirely from scratch with a handful of old Black Reapers, and I was single.

  But the honest truth was that this was no time to be looking for love. Yes, there was something about being the guy who always got “last pickings” in comparison to Lane, but death had a way of putting petty grievances in their place. Love was nice, if you had the space to get it; when you didn’t, it didn’t fucking matter.

  Lane came over to me as I stood at the front door, quietly sipping on some champagne. I couldn’t tell from his approach what he had to say, but there was always a certain level of guardedness I had with Lane.

  “How you doing, brother?” he said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just sort of reflecting.”

  “Yeah? On how much more your facial hair makes you look like an adult?”

  Two years ago, I would have retreated from that remark, quickly deferring and agreeing with him.

  Two months ago, I probably would have smacked him with some trash talk.

  Now, I just shrugged.

  “Would you have me shave at a time like this?”

  “Probably not,” Lane admitted. “Probably wouldn’t have anyone in these clubs do anything other than focus on the Fallen Saints.”

  He was right, but I wasn’t sure that he was hitting the point home hard enough.

  “We’re not doing things the right way,” I said.

  Lane looked at me askance. In his mind, he probably thought things were going great. If they were, we wouldn’t have gotten dressed up and placed one of his officers—and one of our closest confidants—six feet under.

  “We keep trying to come together, hash out our differences; we quibble over something, we split, and then we wind up getting attacked by the Fallen Saints. We can’t be having this anymore.”

  “I know,” Lane admitted.

  In a strange way, I almost wondered if he and I were the reason that the Fallen Saints were landing such devastating blows on us. Everyone in the room besides us seemed to mostly get along; you could pick out individual quarrels here and there, but that was true in any club. Was this whole split really because the two of us couldn’t put our egos aside?

  “Old habits die hard,” he quipped.

  “Yeah, well, either the habits die, or we do.”

  Lane, in the middle of sipping on his drink, paused, turned his eyes to me, noticeably gulped, and turned them back to the club. It occurred to me that he and I hadn’t spoken this frankly in a long, long time; all our interactions since our father’s death had been short-lived or under extreme tension. We hadn’t had the chance to have a quiet moment together without a sense of urgency underlining it.

  “There you are.”

  We both turned to see Angela walking in, wearing professional attire and some nice black heels. I stepped to the side to let Lane kiss her, and when the kiss lasted for more than just a quick second, I completely stepped away. I didn’t need yet another reminder that the typical dynamic of Lane and me was really me as the third wheel to whoever Lane was dating.

  Actually, I needed to step away from the clubhouse entirely. Exhaustion had started to settle in, and I could barely muster the energy to talk to my own brother.

  I left, keeping my head low, looking ahead as the sound of conversation, laughter, and condolences slowly faded into the background. By the time I got to my bike, the sounds were so distant that I could not make out individual words. And in a way, I kind of liked it like that; I was one of the few bikers that was both conversational and social and who also enjoyed the serene things in life.

  I pushed my kickstand back, revved my engine, and pulled out of the lot just as I saw Phoenix coming out to check on me. I waved to him, telling him there was nothing to worry about, and pulled out.

  I had gone on my first motorcycle ride when I was about six years old, and unlike most kids who screamed and laughed and said how awesome it was to be on one, I found it strangely calming. It was a place where one’s concentration could only be on one thing. I didn’t have to worry about other things whenever I got on the bike, whether by riding with my father or driving on my own. I only had to worry about the road ahead of me.

  Others got a thrill out of the speed of the road; I got calm out of the simplicity of the road.

  At first, I just sort of meandered my way around Springsville and Ashton, not really having a purpose to my direction, just sort of going with the flow of the day. I welcomed the opportunity to be distracted from having gone to a funeral earlier.

  But thoughts kept coming back to “the end.” The end of Father Marcellus. The end of my feud with Lane. The end of the feud with the Fallen Saints... or, on the other side of the coin, the end of the Reapers as we knew them and, accordingly, the end of my life.

  There was a certain finality that was starting to settle into the collective zeitgeist of the MC community in the area, one that I knew Lane felt and that I had to imagine the Fallen Saints felt, even if they would never admit it. The death of a chaplain was a step too far, a line that, now crossed, could never be undone. And even though I felt more and more at peace with myself, that didn’t mean that I was confident and certain about our war.

  Yes, some kind of an end was near. I just didn’t know whose.

  Maybe my father knew.

  Maybe the very place that I had left earlier today was the place I needed to go back to. Just like how I need to go back to my brother and the Black Reapers in the end.

  Halfway between Ashton and Springsville at the time that the thought entered my mind, I gunned my bike back toward the graveyard. When I got there, there was no one, not even an employee of the funeral home, in sight. I silenced my bike and listened to the sounds around me.

  Birds chirping, some of the songs of a higher pitch and faster melody than others. A gentle breeze emanating from the west. Distant cars driving, perhaps to the nearby gas station or grocery store.

  I thought of all of the club members that we had laid to rest here over the last year and a half. Father Marcellus. Red Raven. My father. Too many members of both the Black and Gray Reapers. This had become less of a graveyard and more of a mass of bodies that had perished far too soon.

  And the only one of them that had died a natural death was my father.

  It was up to Lane and me to hit “Stop” on all of the early deaths by whatever means necessary.

  I got off the bike and started walking toward the tombstone, but halfway there, I paused. I could see my father’s tombstone from where I stood; I recognized it with ease given the number of times that I had been there. But for some reason, I had never taken in the sight that just now hit me.

  How many tombstones beyond the Reapers were from the last year and a half?

  By what number had these graves multiplied because of the bloodshed since my father’s death?

  The personal names, both in and out of the club, were easy. Roger Carter. Shannon Burns. Austin “Red Raven” Smith Senior.

  But there were many people who were connected to me that I may not have known as well as them. Other bikers in the Black Reapers and the Gray Reapers. Civilian casualties caught up in our warfare. Hell, as crazy as it was to say, even the Fallen Saints who were good people but, through extraordinarily difficult life circumstances, had just fallen into the wrong circle.

  Lane would never have agreed with me about that, but that’s what made me different. I saw the good in darkness; he saw only the darkness. Or that’s what you’ve wanted to believe but haven’t given him credit for.

  There was really only one person that I saw as truly irredeemable, one man whom I felt nothing could be done for; even if such a man could find repentance, he had inflicted so much suffering onto the town of Springsville that he deserved nothing less than death.

  Lucius Sartor.

  It was there, as I mentally pictured this graveyard from two years ago to now,
that I realized it wasn’t so much about destroying the Fallen Saints. We’d had it wrong from the start—perhaps even my father had gotten it wrong. It wasn’t about killing the Saints dragged into the abyss, driven by nothing more than fear of consequence from their leader.

  It was about killing the devil of this town, about killing the man that was, quite literally, the root of all evil in this town.

  That’s what needed to come to an end.

  I didn’t need to visit a tombstone to figure that out. I didn’t need to pray to my father. I knew if my father was here right now, he’d say exactly what was now at the forefront of my mind. Figure it out yourself. I didn’t raise you to rely on me any longer than you had to.

  I looked out over the graveyard. How many people here had just waited for the right advice and never seized on an obvious opportunity? How many people here had simply thought that if they kept asking questions, instead of actually making something happen, they would get the result they wanted? How many people, if they had figured out that the real issue was not a rival club but an evil man, would have taken swift action?

  I felt like I’d searched in the wrong place this whole time for the right answers. I kept looking outward for answers, to my father, to my peers, to anyone... except me. I already knew what I had to do.

  I’d pointed the finger at the wrong people this whole time. I kept looking to the Fallen Saints, to Lane, to the members of the Black Reapers who blindly obeyed him... I had blamed Lucius, but I had done him a favor by diverting the blame away from him. I knew exactly what I had to do to him.

  I walked over to my father’s gravestone.

  “I’ll make this brief,” I said. “I’m going to make you proud. I’m going to be a leader. I’m going to take charge. I’m going to end the reign of Lucius Sartor.”

  I nodded in thanks to his grave and turned around. I marched forward. When I got back to my bike, I dialed Lane.

  “Cole?” he said. “Where’d you go?”

  “To look for some answers, but I found them,” I said. “Gather all the Reapers. Let’s not keep planning. Let’s just end this whole damn thing for good.”

  “As in, now?”

  I bit my lip. I hadn’t planned on that being my answer, but I was in the mood to act.

  “Yes. We meet now. We end it tonight.”

  “We end the Saints?”

  More than that.

  “We end the evil of this town. We end Lucius.”

  Lilly

  I could hear my father’s footsteps from literally three rooms over.

  Marble floors had a way of echoing that made the idea of privacy in a mansion-sized home impossible; rich people like my father liked to buy extravagant things, believing that it sequestered them from the rest of society. Rich people also liked to spoil their children with an endless supply of lavish gifts that they had never had as a child, thinking that it somehow made them happy.

  Maybe if my father had actually listened to me once in his life instead of just thinking that what I wanted to hear was whatever he wanted to say, he could have saved himself a ton of money and time. But that wasn’t how my father operated; it wasn’t how he got to where he was. I may have loved him, but…

  Sometimes, it would have been nice if I just had a father that treated me like an adult and not like his precious, glass-like child that couldn’t do anything on her own.

  “Lilly,” he said in his fatherly voice. “Do you have a moment?”

  I always have a moment, Dad. You won’t let me do anything else.

  “I’m kind of busy right now, Dad, can it wait until later?”

  I heard a hitch in my father’s breath, the hitch that told me he was holding himself back from saying something scathing. I knew the cycle. Be polite, cut me, apologize, treat me like an angel. Rinse, repeat. Over and over and over.

  I dreamed of the day when the cycle honestly just involved “Dad not being present.”

  “What could you possibly be doing that’s more important than talking to me right now, dear?”

  I shook my head. Thank God he couldn’t see me.

  “I need to work on my monologue for my next audition,” I said, even though I had none lined up. “I’m not going to make it to the big stage if I don’t ever have something lined up.”

  “You have all day to do that, my dearest Lilly,” he said.

  “To do it, yes, but I need alone time to mentally prepare.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  God, this is exhausting.

  “Dad, I promise you I do,” I said. “Besides, you know it’s in the alone time when I come up with the best ideas for helping your club out, right? So maybe if I get that—”

  “Lilly Sartor.”

  Oh, God, he’s using my full name as if I’m some sort of petulant teenager. Might as well be for how he sees me.

  “I am your father, and so help me as long as I live, I will be that way. Now open up this door.”

  “Coming,” I said, groaning.

  If I acted like a brat, maybe it was because I had no choice but to be for how I was forced to behave.

  I opened the door. My father stood there in his normal red cut with the “Fallen Saints” logo embroidered on the back, but otherwise, he looked much older than he usually did. His eyes looked more sunken, the wrinkles on his face were more pronounced, and his beard had more white than usual. He had often talked in the last year about how this was his chance to paint Springsville in his image, but apparently, that was not going so well.

  “How goes your monologue?” he said.

  “It’s OK,” I said. “It’s from Fiddler on the Roof. It would be going better if I had some privacy, though.”

  My father chuckled, brushed past me, and sat on the edge of the couch.

  “You are a feisty one,” he said. “If your mother were alive, I think she’d be proud of how much you’ve turned out just like her.”

  I folded my arms and didn’t say anything. The only way to make my father proud, apparently, was to do anything that made him look better or his little biker club stronger.

  “Unfortunately, I didn’t come here to compliment you or flatter you.”

  “Shocker,” I muttered, softly enough that he didn’t hear me.

  “I came here because I am worried that this town is getting to the point of collapse,” he said. “Our rivals, the Reapers, are becoming more and more violent by the day, and I fully anticipate that they may strike here.”

  “At the house,” I said, less of a question and more of a call-out. I didn’t follow club politics or battles closely, but I knew attacking people at their houses almost never, ever happened. Someone had told me my father had done it once, but it had failed to work as he had hoped.

  “Yes.”

  My father smiled, more of a cackle than a loving smile.

  “The Reapers are just awful, just terrible,” he said. “They are rapists. They are murderers. They are criminals of the highest order. If they get their hands on you, my sweet Lilly, they will do unspeakably terrible things to you. Things I don’t even want to think about.”

  “I know.”

  But I really didn’t, actually.

  For much of my life, I’d believed my father. I had believed every word he said and had seen him as nothing less than the perfect man. He could do no wrong in my eyes.

  But when I turned eighteen and tried to leave the house and go to college, he refused. His grip on me tightened. And what had started as just good, if a bit too good, parenting had quickly become the grip of a father who could not let go. And as a result, I was no longer sure if my father was telling the truth or just telling his truth so that I wouldn’t leave him.

  “With this new development in the Reapers’ attacks,” he said, “Lilly, I have had to make a difficult choice. I can’t have you staying here.”

  “So… you’re telling me I can move to New York?” I said, not even caring that this might make my father upset.

  “Huh? No, dear ch
ild, I can’t have you out there on your own. I need to make sure you’re fine! No, I have bought a house in the rural parts of Oregon you can go to. No one but me and my Sergeant-at-Arms will know where you are.”

  I felt my head lighten and my chest squeeze. My fingers curled. I could leave... but only to where my father sent me... to someplace even more remote and isolated than Springsville... where I’d likely have no freedom... no social life... nothing…

  “Lilly?”

  “Dad,” I said, my voice trembling. “Please, just listen to me. Can you let me speak?”

  My father folded his arms and snorted. I guessed he was giving me this chance, if not embracing it.

  “Oregon is not going to do anything for me,” I said. “I know that you want what’s best for me, and I know you care about me, and I love you for that.”

  That’s more of a stretch than I care to admit.

  “But I am an adult, and I know what’s best for me now. I—”

  “You may be an adult, but you have no idea what lies in wait for you outside,” my father interrupted. “In the woods of Oregon, they will not know where to find you. In a big city like New York? You’ll be found before you even know they are following you.”

  “Dad!” I said, but I knew I would not win this discussion by yelling. I took a breath and lowered my voice. “I understand, but I’ve learned from you. I can escape. Yes, they are bigger than me, but I can blend—”

  “I did not raise you to be an insolent child,” he said. “You are going to Oregon, and that’s final.”

  I could take a lot of things from my father, especially since, for better or for worse, I was so used to it. I could understand a lot of what he did came not from anger or hatred, but from sincerely wanting the best for me.

  But at my age, I could not handle being talked to like an eight-year-old. Especially when I had already tried to be nice. I couldn’t fucking take it anymore.