Page 11 of Bane's Beginning

“What the fuck!” The guy yelled as he put his hand on his gun.

“Don’t even fucking think about it,” I said with my gun already pointed toward him. “Turn around, get in your goddamn gatehouse, tower thing, and let me the fuck out!”

I heard shouting and curse words behind me and I turned to look to see some club members and my brother running outside to see what was going on. The prospect had his hand on his gun still and as soon as my brother saw it, he yelled, “If you even think about shooting my fucking sister, I will blow your goddamn head off, kid.”

The prospect quickly removed his hand from his gun and looked at everyone nervously. “I’m sorry, Ares. Prez said not to let anyone out and this crazy bitch just fired her gun at me.”

I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t fire it at you, I fired it above you to prove a point,” I said, annoyed.

“And what fucking point was that?” My brother said to me, getting in my face. “Would you shoot a kid dead in his tracks for following orders, Thea?”

“I would do whatever I had to do to survive,” I said and gave him a firm glare. He looked at me, puzzled. I didn’t wait for him to respond. I just pushed past him to reach my car. Behind him, I saw Bullet, Ace, and, of course, their president all looking at me. He wasn’t looking at me with judgment, though, or even in disdain. He was looking at me like I was a puzzle that he was trying to figure out. Unfortunately, for him, this trip made me build up walls even higher than the ones before. Even with my walls up, I couldn’t ignore that every time I felt him staring at me, it was like someone dumped a bucket of ice water on me. Being under his gaze woke something up in me, and I wasn’t sure what the fuck that meant.

“You’re staying here for a few days,” my brother grumbled to me right as I was putting my hand on the car door. I stopped and looked up at him curiously. “We’ve got a lot of shit to figure out between us, and I need to know what your next move is.”

I nodded before getting in my car. I let out a heavy sigh as soon as I shut the door, staring at the clubhouse and the men who were walking inside it.

Well, I had gotten what I wanted, which was to find my brother and make him listen. But what I also found carried a lot more weight than I had anticipated. I couldn’t involve anyone else in my casualties. I wasn’t just little Orphan Annie anymore. I was an aunt and sister-in-law now, too.

I couldn’t stay here for long. I had secrets that I needed to keep buried because my brother may have forgotten what family meant, but I didn’t. And I would do whatever I could to protect mine, even if that meant staying the hell away.

Chapter Six: Maverick

I sighed, taking in all the noise around me as my brothers were gossiping like a bunch of bitches about what went down. Ares stared off into the distance. Sure enough, he was probably wondering how hard I was going to lay into him about keeping his sister a secret. All the brothers in the room made up my council. I called a special meeting earlier with just my higher-up members to get to the bottom of what in the fuck was going on.

We were all seated at the long wooden table in the room we held church in. It wasn’t much, just a room with no windows and barely any light, a large screen and a small fridge to keep drinks in when meetings go long. At my right was an open seat for my VP Cage. He was finishing up a six-month stint in county. That was nothing to him, though. Cage and I grew up together as kids with his father being my dad’s VP. When I mentioned shit got ugly with the Sons, I meant it. Grim had made a lot of promises to a lot of people who hated the Martyrs and wanted to see us gone. Local gangs, the mafia, hell, those rats even went to the feds. That’s what got Cage his first sentence. Though the war was over, the feds weren’t happy that so much killing and destruction went on and they didn’t have anyone’s balls to dangle in their bosses’ faces. Money was tight in the club, we needed to get back into action with pushing guns. But we couldn’t do that with the feds breathing down our necks. With the Sons in hiding, we had to sacrifice one of our own if we wanted them off our backs. Cage, that crazy motherfucker, volunteered as soon as he heard about it. I asked him why, andhe said he was doing it to save the club we’d be running one day, and now, we are.

We were barely legal back then, and he did five years in and five years out on parole. When he got out, he got patched in, and we realized pretty soon he wasn’t the same man that went in. It took him a few years to clean up his act and get over my sister jumping town. Eventually, he did, so when our dads decided to step down and I got voted in as president, it was only natural that I’d wanted him to run this shit show with me.

To my left sat Ares. Though we didn’t grow up together like me, Cage, and a few of the other brothers, he became one of my best friends after one of my battle buddies named Flynn introduced us.

Next at the table was Circuit, our IT guy; Crash, Sergeant in Arms; Hawk, my road captain; and Pops, our treasurer. We call him Pops because he’s now the last founding member seated on the council. Not that my dad, Old School, Sheriff, or some of the other guys wouldn’t sit in on a meeting or offer up advice. Because once a brother, always a brother. They just weren’t as active anymore.

“Are you pussies done whining or would you like another minute?”

After a few grumbles, the room got quiet. “I called a meeting today because we had a lot of shit popping off and I want to know what the hell is going on.”

I turned my head to face Ares as I waited for him to speak.

“Well, I have a sister.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Crash yapped.

“Look, I didn’t mean to keep her from you guys. It was just that I didn’t think it mattered because she wasn’t family.”

“Wasn’t family? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? In case you haven’t noticed, we protect our own around here,” I said as I slammed my fist down on the table. I knew I was coming off angrier than I should have been, but I couldn’t help but feel protective over Thea. Brother or not, Ares practically abandoned the poor girl at the age she needed him most. Everyone at the clubhouse knew that Ares’ parents died some years ago in a car accident.

How long had she been alone?

“I know that,” Ares grumbled. “But Thea isn’t a part of this life. I never wanted her to be.”

“Brother, what you’re not getting is she is a part of this life whether you like it or not,” I scoffed at him. “You weren’t here to see the shit that had gone down with Sons, but most of the brothers around this table and I were,” I said as I started thinking about those days back then. Even as just a prospect, you could see how the war was affecting everyone around the club. “We saw how they picked ol’ ladies and children from grocery stores and birthday parties just to torture them to get back at us!”

“You’re a member of the council for the mother chapter, which means you'll always have a big target on your head and so will the people you care about. Hell, as an enforcer, you probably got just as many, if not more, enemies than I do. You can say she isn’t part of this life all you want, but if something were to happen to her, we’d ride for her just the same.”

I looked around to see my brothers nodding their heads and Ares was stuck staring at his hands. I knew he was finally getting the gravity of the situation. Not often do we patch in outsiders in the New Mexico chapter of the Martyrs. Most of the men who ride beside me have been doing so since we were in diapers, but five years ago, when Flynn introduced me to Ares and said he was a veteran who needed work, my pops and I saw something in him.

Not too long after that, he was patched in. That scary motherfucker worked his way up from being a newbie to our enforcer pretty quickly and you don’t do that without making a couple of enemies. Thea could have been seriously hurt or taken if someone with a vendetta figured out about her before we did, especially with her living nearly 20 hours away.