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  Cheyenne says something that makes my mother laugh, and the two throw their heads back with short laughter before they calm themselves and let out hefty sighs. It’s then that I see the tears pooling in the corner of Cheyenne’s eyes. My feet carry me across the room, and I find myself lurking over their table before I think about it too much. It doesn’t matter what it is, I hate it when women cry. I’d rather be stabbed than to listen to the sounds of a chick wailing.

  “Daddy,” she says and stands instantly. She’s barely over five feet tall and a hundred pounds. Her arms normally feel light as they wrap around my waist when she pulls me into one of her hugs, but right now, every single touch feels so heavy. I lift an arm and wrap it around her shoulders as she rests her head on my torso. One quick sniffle and the tears are gone, but the sadness isn’t. Chief was her godfather—the man who would have fulfilled my role in her life had he outlived me—a role he took seriously. Chief’s tribe is how Cheyenne got her name, a symbol of what I hope she will grow into—strong, fierce, resilient, and proud. I’ve always been proud of my girl, but standing here, holding her as she keeps her chin up high and puts on a stoic face, shows me how incredibly strong she really is.

  “This sucks,” she whispers into my cut.

  I tighten my grip around her shoulders and whisper back, “Yeah.”

  Because it does.

  “Where is the memory patch?” my mom asks. Her curiosity is natural, but the question still makes me flinch. I turn slowly and point to it quickly before turning back around.

  “Who sewed that on?” she asks, a bit perplexed.

  “I did,” I say. She’s seen me work a needle and thread before, though not often. She always offers to help, but that’s not how things are done.

  “I could have done it for you,” she says, predictably.

  “No,” I say. “He was my brother, and my patches are my responsibility.” I skip telling her that it’s in the club bylaws, and that there’s honor in sewing on a fallen brother’s patch. I don’t tell her it’s symbolic for the members to sew their own patches. She won’t get it anyway, so I save my breath.

  Jim rounds up the entire room and gives direction for where we’re supposed to be. “Brothers, on your bikes, Old Ladies on the back of your Old Man’s bike, and extended family in the SUVs.”

  Just as everybody starts to move, the front door creaks open and slams shut. All heads turn toward the door. Standing at nearly six feet tall, with broad shoulders and caramel-colored skin, is Elle Phillips, Chief’s eldest daughter. Even in her grief, Elle is fine as fuck and one hell of a woman. Though her normally hard-set features are somewhat soft now, and her dark brown eyes are rimmed with bags, she still carries herself with confidence and determination. I fight the urge to go to her and show her a side of myself that few people will ever see. But I don’t. As it is, my brothers wonder about us, and today is not the day to disrespect her father any further.

  Cheyenne relaxes in my arms as she reverently whispers, “She came.”

  “And me?” Elle asks in her raspy voice. Jim places his hands on his hips and gives her an honest smile. None of us expected that she’d come today. Not after I made the ride to Sacramento to tell her the news. Upon hearing of her father’s death, she stood emotionless in her front doorway and, without a single word, slammed it in my face. I banged on that door for nearly an hour before the neighbors bitched too much, so I gave up and rode east for as long as I could, until finally I’d run out of gas in some nowhere town and had to push my bike a good two miles to the nearest gas station. I’d have kept riding, but Chief had this theory that when shit went wrong it was for good reason and it gave you an opportunity to evaluate what you’re doing. So I came home, and now here we are.

  “SUV with Barbara,” he says. She takes one step farther into the room and shakes her head. Watching this woman refuse to back down from a man most fear to even make eye contact with practically crushes my soul. She’s one tough bitch, that’s for sure. But sometimes I think that, underneath all that strength and bravado, that she’s still a woman who needs to be handled with care every now and then. And right now, Jim needs to show her some care. If he doesn’t, I will.

  “No,” she says in a plea. “He was my father, and I have as much right to ride as any of his brothers do.” I shouldn’t be surprised that Elle, who’s been riding since she was seventeen, would demand to ride alongside her father’s brothers. She may be somewhat estranged from the club and her father, but there’s no doubting that she loved him as fiercely as I hope Cheyenne feels for me.

  Jim closes the distance between them and wraps her into a tight hug. We’ve never allowed someone from outside of the club—family or not—to ride alongside us at a time of tribute to one of our brothers, but I can’t see anybody saying shit about it.

  “I’m glad you came, Little Bird,” he says, using the tribal name she was gifted at birth. Chief couldn’t have known that the child he declared Little Bird would turn into something of an Amazonian-type woman who knows four ways to kill a man without the use of weapons. When they pull away, Jim holds her at arm’s length and looks her over.

  “This club has never allowed a non-member to ride with us to bury a brother,” Jim says, telling everybody what we already know. Having known the man for the last twenty years, I know where he’s going with this—he’s giving Elle her wish. He just has to make sure everybody knows that he knows this move goes against tradition. “But there’s a first for everything.”

  She doesn’t smile, nor does she say a word. Her face hardens, and she nods her head. It’s a long moment before she pulls away and crosses the room to where her stepmother and younger half-brother and sister, Stephen and Izzy, sit. Izzy jumps up and wraps her small body around Elle’s immediately. Stephen is slower to follow. After the kids have had their moment with her, Barbara uneasily reaches out and gives her step-daughter a hug. It’s an awkward moment between the two, but at least they’re both trying to mend fences.

  My brothers move to congregate around Jim as he starts giving orders. I pat Cheyenne’s back, and she lets go, and then I join my club. Jim scratches at his chin and looks at Ryan and says, “You know the order best. Put Elle in the back with the prospect. Don’t care which side.”

  “Prospect hasn’t even been riding a month now,” Ryan says with obvious annoyance in his voice. “I don’t think he should ride.” The kid’s dad is an incarcerated brother, so he was fast-tracked into prospecting—we gave him a cut and told him he was going to have to earn his top rocker. The kid had no fucking clue how to ride when we did it, but he’s family and apparently we’re all about making exceptions for family these days. Jim gives Ryan the order again, and, like the idiot he is, he’s about to argue when Wyatt closes in on him and he backs down. He’s not a total moron after all.

  We break, and the room empties as we all head outside. Between the line of bikes and the line of SUVs is a glass hearse with a Harley trike attached to the front of it. It’s a bit extravagant for our usual tastes, but we let Ruby do some of the planning, and this is what we ended up renting. No fucking clue where she got a hearse attached to a Harley, but fuck if it doesn’t make a statement.

  Fish, Bear, and the prospect help get the women and kids into the SUVs. Jeremy tries to put his sister, Nic, into an SUV, but she refuses. Nic’s as much Duke’s Old Lady as Ruby is Jim’s. She’s just not voted in yet—that’s going to take a while. But I suspect Jeremy’s insistence on sticking her in the SUV comes from the fact that she’s carrying his nephew. I watch as Duke catches sight of the disagreement and lumbers over. We ride with our women on the back of our bikes—pregnant or not—all the time, but Duke’s been a special kind of protective over Nic since the moment she let him in. It surprises me when he pulls her into his side and tells Jeremy that it’s cool.

  “They’re cute together,” a soft voice says from beside me. The words are filled with love and happiness. If it were anybody else who sounded so happy right now, I’d have
their face in the pavement beneath my feet. But as I look over at Ruby, knowing all the hardships she’s endured in her life, I can’t help but let her have this. “You used to look at Layla like that,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “How she doing?” she asks. I quickly glance around and breathe a sigh of relief when I catch Cheyenne standing by an SUV with Barbara, the kids, and my mother at the other end of the parking lot. “Relax, you know I wouldn’t ask if she could hear me,” Ruby says, always so in-tune with everybody’s feelings.

  “Fuckin’ jacked. Got an Old Man up in Redding who’s got her sucking dick for crank.” Lying to Ruby and telling her I don’t keep tabs on Layla is useless. She knows me too well.

  “Stupid bitch,” she says and places a hand on my upper arm. “Gave up a lot for a couple of rocks and a high, didn’t she?”

  When I look over I see that her eyes are firmly on Cheyenne. Layla leaving her kid because she couldn’t handle reality and all that it entailed never has sat well with Ruby—nor should it, considering everything she’s sacrificed for her own children—and she’s never hidden that fact from anyone, especially not Layla.

  “That she did,” I say and decide to skip my monthly trip to go check on her. It’s only a few hours’ drive, and it’s worth the peace of mind to know whether or not my kid’s mom has overdosed, but she’s hospitalized right now so that’s not much of a concern. She was supposed to be here today, but Chey snubbed her for dinner last night, and like always, Layla couldn’t handle it. By the time I got to her motel room, she was already having chest pains and difficulty breathing. Wyatt had barely gotten there with his truck when her mood spun out of control and the paranoia set in.

  “Do yourself a favor and let her go,” Ruby says. “If life has taught us anything, it’s that it’s too fucking short to spend it alone.” She casts me a small smile and walks over to Jim, where she climbs on the back of his bike and places a soft kiss to his top rocker right between his shoulder blades. Ruby thinks she’s like the biker love connection or some shit. She’s convinced that nobody should spend their life alone or that they should be without what she has with Jim. But she’s smoked too much of that shit we grow—not everybody wants that kind of baggage. Layla being gone is a fucking blessing in a way. It means I don’t have to worry about my Old Lady doing me dirty, or losing her. That shit’s already happened, and now that I’m out of it, I have no desire to make it back to that place where I have one more fucking thing to worry about. Love isn’t a blessing; it’s a fucking burden.

  “Saddle up, shithead,” Wyatt yells from his bike, seated next to Jim at the front of the caravan. I snap out of my thoughts and take my place on my bike behind Jim. My nerves turn to lead as I eye Ryan to my right. Thin, pale arms wrap around his waist, and a heart-shaped face rests against his back. Alex. For a brief moment, her eyes meet mine, but then she thinks better of it and looks at the ground. Fucking bitch shouldn’t be here. We risked too much to keep her ass safe, and now this fucker is taking her out in the open like we’ve got nothing to lose.

  Ryan, being the road captain, has the responsibility of organizing rides and, at times like these, organizing placement of the club. Highest ranking officers always ride at the front, but the mid-level officers and non-office holding patched brothers are up to Ryan’s discretion. And the bastard just can’t help but fucking taunting me. His head turns my direction, and he lifts his chin. I grip the handlebars of my bike as tight as I can so I don’t jump off and pummel his ass. Chief would be here if it weren’t for Alex’s presence in our lives, and to have her here is a fucking disgrace to his memory.

  “Chief would want this,” Ryan says firmly. His words cut to my soul. Would Chief want her here? He probably would, but he was a fucking pussy when it came to women. He was also a better man than I ever will be. I know he wouldn’t blame her. She didn’t ask for us to take her on, nor did she do anything other than exist to get him killed. But even though I can see through the anger long enough to know that, I don’t feel it in my heart.

  We fire up the bikes and ride slowly through town, purposefully creating as much noise as possible. As we travel down Main Street, some of the natives stop what they’re doing and watch us as we ride by. Passing by the hardware store, Old Man Hill even removes his worn ball cap from his head as a show of respect. I rev my engine and keep in line with my brothers, making sure that as we pass through, we occasionally glance at those who are paying Chief respect by watching us pass. I steel myself as I see two men, each with an arm slung over a slick black Mercedes, both wearing dark sunglasses—despite the overcast sky—and impeccably tailored black suits. Mancuso. Signaling that we’ve got company to Ryan, who gives notice to Jim and the rest of the men, I don’t take my eyes off the Italians until I’m forced to keep my eyes on the road. Hopefully they’re just making a statement and not making their next move in what’s turned into a war.

  The show of disrespect is almost more than I can handle, but I refuse to let my anger get the best of me today.

  I LET MY fingers drift over the cold granite surface that rests flat in the grass. I'm careful not to touch the engraved letters that tell the story of the best man I ever met. Rather, I trace around them. It's not the letters that make up his name—Charles Phillips—nor is it the inscription that reads "beloved brother, loving father, proud Cheyenne," that pains me. Unlike some clubs, who bury their men in a uniform fashion, Forsaken's founding members didn't want their men to ever forget that they are more than just soldiers. The club is a brotherhood, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that we’re also fathers and sons. The same Norse warrior that adorns our cuts stares back at me from the granite, but it’s just a picture stenciled into rock. No, it’s the year of his birth, followed by the year of his death, at the very bottom of the flat stone that is most upsetting. There shouldn’t be a year of death on there, because he shouldn’t be dead. But he is. A few blades of freshly cut grass rest atop the stone. I blow them away, suddenly discontent that we didn’t wait until we could get an upright headstone in here.

  Not that my younger brothers have bothered to read them, but it's in the club bylaws that were put in place when the club was founded in the middle of fucking nowhere Nevada way back in 1946. It's important, I think, to know our history and to not forget it. That's something Chief taught me back when I was barely old enough to understand what it meant. He taught me a lot about what it means to be a man, and a father, but most of all what it means to be a brother.

  And he's gone.

  "Well, you're an asshole," I say.

  A cool wind picks up and slices right through my cut. I'm worn the fuck out and fighting a nasty hangover. Everything about being here, both at my best friend's grave and in this fucked-up world, hurts like a bitch. Even the wind, though not particularly icy, is painful.

  "You always pushed me to be a better man, but look where that got me—I'm talking to a fucking piece of rock like you can hear me. You could've left me alone you know, back then. You didn't have to help my retarded ass out of those charges. But fuck, you hadn't shown up, I'd either be doing 25-to-life, or selling insurance in Albuquerque. Either way, I'd rather be dead. I wouldn't have Chey had we not rode up to the bar in Arizona.

  “That night, with Layla, you told me she wasn't right. I didn't listen. I remember all that shit, like it's a broken record, but I can't shut off. Everything you told me about women is ingrained into my fucking skull. Not that you've ever been some kind of relationship expert—I hope you found it entertaining that your whore wanted to ride in the SUV with your goddamn wife and kids. You always thought you were so wise, giving out advice like you were some kind of sage, when in reality you were just one high motherfucker whose dick was too social for his own good. Doesn't matter. I still take that shit with me everywhere I go, and in everything I do. So here I am, acting like a fucking brokenhearted bitch. I hope you're happy."

  We laid Chief to rest not too long ago. Mancuso's guys kept their dist
ance and didn't interfere. Still, seeing them on the side of the road on our way to the cemetery was enough to fuck everybody up for the rest of the day. It had been so long since we'd lost a brother, especially the way we lost Chief, that none of us were really in the right frame of mind to organize his burial. Thank fucking Christ for Ruby. She did right by the guy, even down to figuring out the exact details for his coffin, which she had custom made. I give Jim shit for letting her lead them around by his dick a lot, but she's a damn good woman, no doubt. She even arranged to have a medicine man from a local Native American tribe officiate the service. It was perfect—the blending of his heritage, which he had been so proud of, and the life he chose.

  Barbara, Chief's widow, asked if I wanted to say a few words. I was selfish though, and didn't want to look like a pussy in front of my brothers. As a strict policy, we keep our burial services private. No press, no law enforcement, no hang-arounds, and no outsiders. All of the old ladies, even Nic, ended up in tears. As expected, it was particularly tough for Chief's kids. His youngest daughter, Izzy, clung to her mother, and his son, Stephen, held his older, half-sister's hand. I had to look away when I saw the tears roll down Elle's cheek and Stephen lean in and comfort her. Elle Phillips is one tough bitch, and seeing her fall apart almost did me in. But it was the sight of Ryan introducing Cheyenne to Alex that shredded me. It was then that I realized I have to get right with the shit and move on with my life. It's what Chief would want, at least that's what everybody tells me.

  The stark ring of my cell pulls me for my thoughts. Without looking at the caller ID, I slide my thumb across the screen and bring the phone to my ear. "You got Grady."

  "Mr. Grady, this is Principal Beck. I need you to come down to the school. There has been an incident between Cheyenne and her counselor, Ms. Mercer."