CHAPTER ONE
Sway
“Could you not fuck women on the kitchen island?” Detroit asked as I walked into the kitchen the morning after, yes, fucking a woman in the kitchen.
“Hey, I wiped it down with those cleaning wipes,” I reasoned, shrugging. “Besides, I fucked her over the counter,” I clarified. “No ass or pussy contact with the island.”
“Whoa,” a female voice said, making both of us turn to see a bleary-eyed Morgaine, hair bed-messy, wearing one of Crow’s shirts under her silken robe. “That’s… a lot for the first thing in the morning,” she said as she went to the electric teapot that Detroit had already put on.
He was good at shit like that.
Thinking ahead.
Doing small things for others.
Especially for the girls.
I’d overheard the girls talking once, wondering why he hadn’t settled down yet, since he wasn’t like me, always whoring around. He wanted something serious. He just didn’t seem to be seeking it out, either.
“Purely tit-to-counter contact,” I went on, getting a head shake from Morgaine as she dropped a tea satchel into her mug.
“This place is like a frat house,” she added. “Someone was… occupying the elevator last night too. Oh, my God. Seriously?” she asked at my smirk.
“It was a busy night,” I said, shrugging it off. Most nights when we brought chicks back to the house were busy nights.
Shady Valley wasn’t a big town, but it had its fair share of women who wanted to be club girls. Who were we to deny them the experience?
I never minded having my hands full.
“Here,” Morgaine said, dropping a little packet of electrolyte powder on the counter in front of me. “You probably need to hydrate,” she said before making her way out of the kitchen, just barely remembering to give Cat—our club pet, a grayish-white cat with blue eyes—a wide berth.
It didn’t matter how much the girls tried to love on him, he hated women.
Sometimes, we had to lock him up in someone’s room when we were going to have chicks over. After the whole… clawing a poor, naked girl’s ass thing. Having to clean the claw marks then apply triple antibiotic had killed any chances of things getting fun for the rest of that night.
“You know… you could fuck a woman over the kitchen island on occasion,” I suggested. “I don’t think you’ve broken in this room yet.” And the kitchen was his domain, being the only one of us who enjoyed cooking.
I never said anything, but I actually did know how to throw some things together. But if Detroit enjoyed it, and I just tolerated it, I figured I would just be doing him a disservice by letting him know.
“Ah, might you know who this belongs to?” Nyx’s voice called as she walked into the living space with a red bra dangling from the very tip of her finger.
“Ask him,” Detroit said, waving toward me as he went to the fridge to grab some eggs.
“That is a good question,” I agreed, nodding.
“How many chicks did you hook up with that you don’t remember who had the red bra on?” she asked, rolling her neck, making some of her long black hair fall out of the claw clip she had it wrapped up in.
“That one is on me,” Coach said, snatching it out of her hand. “I’ll stick it in the lost & found.”
Yeah.
We had enough chicks over who often lost or forgot pieces of clothing that we had a plastic container in the bottom of a closet full of bras, earrings, even a shoe. How someone went home without a shoe was beyond any of us.
“Have I mentioned how nice it is to wake up to someone else making breakfast?” Nyx asked as she got herself a mug of coffee.
“Not in the past… day,” Detroit said as he whipped the eggs.
“Well, I am,” she said. “Has anyone seen Slash?” she asked. “He wasn’t in the room when I got up,” she added as Detroit and I shared a look.
It was barely after seven.
It was weird for him to be up and moving around.
“I’ll go take a look,” I said, getting a nod from Detroit as I moved through the clubhouse and toward the front door.
It was the middle of February, but the temperature was in the mid-fifties. The closest thing to winter we got.
Slash, Crow, and I had spent winter at the mother chapter in New Jersey a while back, and the bracing cold had… made me appreciate the milder cold months in California.
Still, my coffee steamed a bit in the chill as I walked around the front yard, looking down at Shady Valley, still sleepy in the early morning, just the occasional dot on the street, likely shopkeepers opening up for the day.
Hearing a voice, I curved around the side of the building, looking up at the prison. Unlike the town, the lockup was already buzzing with activity. Coach and Judge said the day started at six every morning. Everyone was probably already down to breakfast.
A part of me wondered which convict Slash was going to size up to invite to the club that was in that building right now, dreaming of the kind of life we lived. With real food and kitchen sex.
Just as I started to round the back of the clubhouse, though, I saw Slash standing there, phone pressed to his ear, jaw tight, eyes far away.
Something was up.
I mean, a phone call that early in the day always meant something was going on.
Was it Riff and Raff?
They’d taken off to do a run in the south, taking our supply we currently had in the vault, and collecting up some guns to deliver to the sister chapter in Florida, a somewhat new part of their job, thanks to the Golden Glades crew getting a big contract with an international arms dealer.
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll keep you posted,” he agreed, nodding at me, then ending the call.
“Everything alright?” I asked, watching as Slash let out a sigh.
“Yeah,” he said, but he dragged out the end, a telltale sign of nothing being emergent, but something being up.
“Who was it?”
“Raff,” he said.
“He okay?”
“Yeah. They made it down to Golden Glades, no problem. But there’s some shit about their contact wanting us to track someone down in our neck of the woods.”
“Track someone down?” I asked, surprised. That wasn’t exactly part of our job. I mean, sure, if we knew we had an enemy, yeah, we figured out where they were and what they were up to, then we took them out.
But we sure as shit didn’t contract ourselves out for someone else.
“It’s a weapons designer,” he said.
“A weapon… designer,” I repeated, my brows furrowing. “Those exist?”
“Apparently,” he agreed.
“The fuck do they do? Create different types of guns?”
“In the official, legal, way, they mostly modify current guns to make them better or safer. That kind of shit.”
“And in the unofficial, illegal way?” I asked, since that was what we dealt in.
“They build guns and other stuff that do interesting and different shit. The kind of interesting and different shit that some people will pay a fuckton of money to get their hands on.”
“And, what, we’ve been commissioned to get our hands on it?”