Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 118332 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 592(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118332 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 592(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
When he was seventeen, he only joined the Fury for one reason.
When he was thirty-seven, he came back for…
Hell, no valid reason.
None.
So, why the fuck did he come back? Why did he want to rejoin a club that was responsible for his mother’s death?
Because whether he wanted to admit it or not, the Originals, while completely dysfunctional, had become his fucked-up family of sorts. His only family. All but one member, of fucking course.
His initial plan, the one that drove him in the beginning, was to kill them all. Every last one of them. Not just the person who did his mother dirty.
He figured he’d do it slowly by planting himself in their midst.
Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
So, yeah, his plan had been to get in good with them. Convince them to trust him. And when they least expected it, he’d begin to take them all down.
One by fucking one.
Then he listened carefully, paid attention, asked the occasional question. Even though all of them had been involved in selling and running drugs, the decision to teach Fender a lesson for ripping off the Fury was an executive one, but taking out his mother at the same time was not.
Maybe Ham hadn’t expected his mother to be there. His excuse—when Ozzy forced it from him—was that he didn’t want to leave any witnesses behind.
Unfortunately, his mother had witnessed everything. Ham said she fought him and went after him with a kitchen knife.
But, fuck that desperate self-defense excuse he came up with within moments of the end of his own life. It wasn’t self-defense when the motherfucker broke into Ozzy’s house. Ham could have easily waited for that low-life Fender elsewhere. Somewhere other than where a woman, who had nothing to do with the MC life, and her child lived.
Ham could have ambushed Fender on his way out of town. On a back road. In a place that would have zero witnesses. Anywhere except where an innocent woman would be involved. A woman who probably had no clue what fuckery Fender was embroiled in. Which turned out to be running drugs from his club in West Virginia north to the Fury in Manning Grove.
The Deadly Demons had been the Fury’s drug supplier.
But that motherfucker hadn’t even killed Fender.
Fuck no, that had been left up to Ozzy to handle. Because Ham’s instructions were to keep the loser alive. For it to be a message to the Deadly Demons to not fuck with the Fury again.
To not steal the cash and keep the drugs that were to be exchanged.
After the night his mother died, the Fury never worked with the Demons again. After that night, the Demons and the Fury became rivals. The distance between the clubs the only thing keeping it from turning into a full-blown war.
But after that night, more than his mother’s life had been altered.
The two men who directly caused his mother’s death lost their right to breathe.
Actions had consequences.
Life was full of well-deserved karma.
With time and a fuckuva lot of patience, Ozzy delivered that karma.
Serving up that karma had been one of the most satisfying feelings he’d ever experienced.
He shook those dark thoughts from his head, not sure why they were currently invading his brain. Not when he had a hot woman on the back of his sled, clinging to him. A woman who didn’t live the life, but didn’t seem to have a problem with it, either. One who hadn’t shied away from him when she saw his colors, even when she was shy about her own smile and laugh.
She intrigued him.
He reached back and slid his hand from her knee down to her calf and held onto her there. The way his Iron 883 was set up, the “bitch seat” was higher than his. That made her calf the perfect place to hold onto. As soon as he wrapped his fingers around her denim-covered leg and squeezed, she squeezed his waist even tighter and snuggled closer, making him smile under the bandana he wore over his lower face to keep from eating suicidal bugs as dessert.
While they ate at Dino’s, he’d steered the conversation away from her father, the Originals, and his own childhood by asking her about Boston.
He had to remind himself several times to eat, otherwise, he would’ve stared across the table at her like some brain-dead idiot as she talked and told him the pros and cons of a place he’d never been. And he’d been to a lot of fucking places.
He’d stayed away from the northeast because of the limited time for good riding weather and, when he’d been a nomad, he stuck to warmer states where he could ride all year long.
It wasn’t until he got to Manning Grove, and back into snow country, that he bought a vehicle to drive when he couldn’t ride. But like most of his brothers, he rode even in the winter, unless the weather or roads were hazardous.