Page 23 of Caution to the Wind

I gritted my teeth. “I do what I can for you.”

I’d risked my medical license more than once to go to the aid of the club when one of their brothers was hurt in a skirmish.

“Yeah, well, that’s not enough anymore,” he said simply. “Kinda support you want, that’s club shit. Far’s I see it, you’re a hangaround. Not a member cut into the leather. Not a real brother.”

“I fought with some of your men,” I countered, tryin’ to keep the fury from my voice.

“Not me, you didn’t. You want favours, you try that shit out on Zeus Garro.” His laugh was a hideous, slitherin’ thing. “That man’s tough as nails, but he’s got a soft spot for that Sergeant at Arms’a his you were on tour with. Maybe he’ll throw a stray dog a bone.”

Anyone with an ear to the underground had heard of the mother chapter of The Fallen MC’s president, Zeus Garro. He’d killed his own fuckin’ uncle to get that status and purged a shit ton of members in the club doin’ it.

Rooster hated the man.

Said he ran the club like a pussy, but only in earshot of people he knew wouldn’t snitch to Zeus. He didn’t have near enough balls to say that shit to the man’s face. The president in Entrance, BC, was known to kill men with his bare goddamn hands.

But Rooster was right, even though he was tauntin’ me with somethin’ he thought would never happen. Zeus had a soft spot for Bat Stephens, my former brother at arms, one of the few friends I’d expended the effort to keep from my combat days. The same man who’d been visitin’ town the day Kate was killed.

I’d even met Zeus years ago on a trip out to visit Bat in Entrance and met a few of the men in their club. Each of them had seemed like stand-up men despite the connotation of the 1%er on their leather vests. Hell, I’d even watched Zeus take a teenage misfit under his wing just to keep him from windin’ up in jail. For a man who looked like he could rip a grown-ass adult apart with his bare hands, he treated the men in his club like family instead of underlings.

Bat and I’d talked about the possibility of me joinin’ the club, but we both had zero faith in Rooster as a prez, and there was no way I was gonna uproot Cleo and move her to another province just to get access to The Fallen’s resources to find Kate’s killer.

So really, my only choice was the devil I knew.

I nearly gagged on my sigh of frustration. “You want me to patch in.”

“It’s due time,” Rooster confirmed.

Fuck. It wasn’t that I was against the idea of joinin’ the club, exactly. It was more that as soon as anyone saw you in the patch of The Fallen, they knew you were a criminal. My picture would be added to some bulletin board in the local precinct. I’d be expected to participate in illegal shit without my say so just ’cause the club asked it of me.

Bat’s dad had been a member, and his childhood best friend, Zeus, had patched up when we’d been overseas, so it made sense for him to follow suit when he returned from war. Besides, ten years as a soldier, a sniper no less, had crafted Bat into the kinda man that needed a certain amount of danger to function.

Rick “Hazard” Elsher was the only man I’d served with who got out before I did after one tour of Afghanistan. He’d lost a foot in a car bombin’ and been honourably discharged. But he’d lost somethin’ more than his foot. Somethin’ a lot like his fuckin’ humanity. I barely recognized him now in his role as VP for the Calgary Fallen MC. He was angry, belligerent, and brash, and he seemed to relish his new life as a hardened criminal. Last I knew, he was servin’ eighteen months for distribution of cocaine, and it wasn’t his first stint behind bars.

Johnny Hopper, known as “Cedar” to The Fallen in Calgary, had been in our unit too. He told me the club gave him brotherhood outside of the military, organization and somethin’ to believe in after bein’ disillusioned and tossed out by the army. It gave him family where he otherwise wouldn’t have shit. He’d also been there the night Kate died, takin’ care of Cleo and her friends while I descended into hell to get Kate and Mei.

My real family.

Kate might’ve been gone, but I still had Cleo and my stepmum, Lin.

Even Mei.

From what I understood, The Fallen were a fuckin’ mess under Rooster’s leadership. More brothers were in lock-up than out on the streets. They got into stupid brawls in bars that resulted in civilians bein’ hurt, some of the men were rumoured to be rapists, and the reputation of the club as a whole was so infamous most people flinched and ran away the moment they were confronted with the flamin’ skull and wings motorcycle patch.

But…

They had the connections I needed, eyes in the underworld of normal civilian life. They’d know how to get to this Kasper Kuan, and they’d have my back if I was one of them and I wanted toendhim.

And I had to believe if Cedar and Bat were involved in the organization, it couldn’t be all bad.

Twin points burned into my cheek. I looked up from my desk to see Old Dragon glarin’ at me, his wispy brows tangled into a knot.

No, he mouthed with a slow shake of his head. “Not like this. The only way this ends is in death.”

I ignored him.

It was ridiculously easy to ignore him, one of the smartest men I knew, when temptation was danglin’ so close to me, a ripe and dangerous fruit.

As a soldier, you were taught that evil could be eliminated piece by piece. First in one region with one target and then another and another.