Chapter 35: Wolf.e: Chapter 34

I put my phone back in my pocket. The AirTag I stuck under Brinley’s car tells me she’s still at work. I’ve run thirty-two miles in the last five days, tore my fists up on the bag and blew through almost a thousand rounds of ammo. Yet none of it is working.

I can’t get my fucking head right and I’ve resorted to tracking her every move. I told myself on Monday it was because I had to make sure she wasn’t gonna talk, but it became clear she has no intentions of going to the cops. Most of the time, from what I can tell, she seems skittish, like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The other shoe being me.

I’ve fallen into this primal need that I have to see her again. I watch her in the night, in the hours when her sleep is the deepest. During the day, I use my truck to follow her on the way into the office, to make sure she gets in safe, then return again to follow her home at night. I can’t shake her. I can’t get the way her body molded to mine out of my head. I tell myself it’ll pass but then one day blends into the next and still…

“Boss,” Jake calls as I stare out the window. “Chapel.”

I nod.

“Steele Street Clinic was ransacked in the middle of the night,” Jake says as we all assemble. “Their entire methadone supply was wiped out.”

“How did that happen? We have eyes on them,” I say. We have multiple cameras in every location.

Jake shakes his head. “I dunno, man, it’s like they knew the blind spots.”

I look around the table at all my men. None of this makes sense. The faces I see here I’ve known most of my life. They’re my brothers. To not trust them seems impossible.

“That’s not all, there are more rumors everywhere. DOS members are talking. Word on the street is they’re planning something,” Jake adds.

“Glen Eden rally, maybe?” Kai asks.

“Not sure they’d wait that long,” Flipp says as he lights a smoke. “That’s not till next month and there’ll be a ton of crews there, why involve them in our bullshit?”

I shrug. “It’s what I would do. Easier to blend in with the masses.”

The rally they’re talking about, Glen Eden, is annual and massive. The biggest in the south, it attracts thousands, from every major player in the one percenters, all the way down to the smaller recreational clubs. It’s a place for us to make connections with other crews and to bullshit and let loose a little. It’s only forty-five minutes south of here in the hamlet of Benson, Georgia. The town is completely taken over, even the main roads. The acreage on the outskirts is owned by one of our sister clubs, Titans MC, and there are cabins and places for people to camp. It’s an all-out party. New people, new women. One I normally look forward to, but this year the only woman I want is one who belongs nowhere near my world.

“Send a crew to Atlanta, help the clinic get cleaned up. The cops’ll be all over it. Contact the PD there and find out what they know,” I tell Robby.

He nods.

“Take a prospect and Flipp.”

The Atlanta PD is a friend of the club, they walk a fine line between looking the other way and accepting our help. If there’s anything they think will help us stop this from happening again, they’ll tell us.

“On it.” Robby nods.

“All right, next we need to talk about—”

The sound of glass shattering stops Jake from finishing his sentence as the main window in the chapel shatters. I catalogue every single thing around me all at once. It’s not a gun that causes the window to shatter, something was thrown through it. I scan the room to make sure it isn’t an explosive. I don’t move as I start to count. If another hit is coming, statistically it will happen in the next twenty seconds.

My gaze lands on a brick with something tied to it on the other side of the room. Paper? The window on the east wall quickly follows, exploding inward as we all cover our heads. None of us have our phones in here, so we sit and wait for gunfire or another attack for the last ten seconds before I’m on the move, crawling out of the room with Jake and Ax behind me. I reach the main hall where the people hanging around the clubhouse are all on the floor. Broken glass is everywhere out here too—two windows are shattered and women are cursing, one is cut up and bleeding.

I nod to Flipp to see to her, and make my way to the door, pulling my gun as I approach but the assailants are long gone. Tires spewing rocks and leaving a cloud of dust that makes it impossible to see who it really was. I already know it was DOS but a visual of the vehicle would’ve been nice.

Nodding at the cameras, I look at Kai across the room and yell over the noise, “Check ‘em.” Then I head outside with Ax close behind me.

We secure the perimeter and notice the busted fencing in the distance.

“That has to be fixed by end of day. Call Stevens Metalworx and have them out here this afternoon,” I tell Ax.

He nods.

When we’re satisfied with the exterior, we head back in where things have calmed down a little.

“It was a superficial cut,” Flipp tells me about the woman as I breeze by him to get my phone.

The rest of the guys follow and do the same. Someone is already sweeping up and I hear Kai on the phone with the window replacement company. This isn’t new to us. Attacks happen more often than we care to admit, and we need to be prepared after what we did to Gator. The thing that makes no sense is that people don’t just come onto our property like this and it’s the second time in two weeks. How would anyone know exactly when we’d be in Chapel? Everything in me screams that something is wrong, but I can’t put my finger on what.

I pick up a brick off the floor. Pulling the paper attached to it free, I inspect carefully. It’s printed photos of Ax and Layla unloading his bike in their driveway after the wedding. Of Robby and his ol’ lady Margo through their kitchen window eating. Flipp and his teenage daughter at her soccer game.

“Fuck, boss.” Ax mutters, holding a brick and photos of his own. I take them from him, they’re much the same—my men in various stages of their lives, at their homes. A note is buried inside Ax’s, ransom style, that says, “No one is safe.”

I move to the chapel, leaving Ax in the main hall as his phone starts to ring. Picking up another brick off the floor, I rip the photos free of the elastic holding them. There’s five of them and they’re all of me. But not just me, of Brinley too. One through the second story window of her den, I’m shirtless and holding her dad’s bottle of scotch.

One of her heading out the door of the design studio midday with Dell. Me leaving her house the night I was with her and there’s a note inside that says, “In war, avoid what is strong and instead, always strike at what is weak. Have we found the president’s weakness?”

The last paper in the stack slips out from behind the others and a fury I’ve never felt—a deep, dark wrath—rises from a place inside me that I haven’t allowed to see the light of day in a long fucking time. It’s Brinley walking out of the local coffee shop by herself, only this time someone has scratched her face out with a red sharpie and scrawled the words “dead bitch” across the bottom of it.

“Boss!! We gotta fucking go, now!” Ax yells from the next room. He peers into the chapel, gripping both sides of the door.

I’m already moving toward him. The look he’s wearing confirms everything I already know.

Brinley is in trouble, and I was naive enough to think this wouldn’t touch her, even if I stayed away from her.

Of course it fucking would, carnage follows on the heels of every single thing I do.