Outlaw's Ride: An MC Romance by Carter Steele (books recommended by bts .txt) 📕

is decent enough. I thought about reaching out a few times just to touch base, but Dunk doesn't want any part of him. Dunk heard Bravo killed Snake Eye's kid, Ricky, then ran off and became a member of our biggest rival at the time, a gang called Diablo Riders. Then it gets a little muddy. The Diablo Riders murdered Bravo...sort of. Some people say he faked his own death. No one knows for sure what happened, but one way or another Bravo came back and orchestrated a coup. Killed every last one of the parent chapter. Everyone except Snake Eye himself, who -if you can believe it- Bravo just let walk away. I hear the motherfucker hung himself in a motel down in Reno,” I said as my final score flashed letting me know I was out of balls and the game was over. “Beat that.”

“Jesus!” Sarah mouthed the word, looking staggered for a moment by the absurdity of it all.

“Yeah, not the typical way things are done in MCs. Needless to say Bravo's rise to power pissed a bunch of people off.” I put in two quarters for her and stepped out of the way.

“Why not join another club?” she signed. Sarah placed her phone on the glass of the machine.

Normally I'd never tell anyone all this, but it was the most engaged and interested I'd seen Sarah in days. Maybe this helped her take her mind off whatever was bothering her? Maybe this would help her open up a little more to me about what was going on in her life...what new bullshit Patrick was up to with her.

“We thought about it,” I continued, leaning against the pinball machine and watching the way the bright flashing lights played off her face. She was already at half my score with the first of her balls. Sarah had such incredible focus which was why she took to darts and games so quickly despite probably not having much experience with them since working for Patrick.

“When the changing of the guard happened Dunk reached out to the Hell Knights, a splinter group consisting of all the angry bastards who weren’t happy about the new policies coming down from Bravo. In the end we voted against it after meeting up with the Hell Knights president. We figured out pretty quick that they were made up of all the shittiest members of the Devil Kings. They just wanted to watch the world burn. We decided not to play on either side and just do our own thing.”

“Why keep using the Devil Kings name?” Sarah mouthed the words while never breaking concentration from the game. “Why not create a new club?”

“It's hard to explain.” I paused, watching Sarah double my high score and showing no sign of stopping. I struggled to organize my thoughts. The club was the club. The why of it all wasn't something I'd ever had to think about before. Shifting my focus to nothing in particular on the far side of the room I tried to put it all into words for the first time. “We all have the ink on us. It becomes part of you. Kinda like asking why not stop being an American after you found out about the Trail of Tears? You believe in what it should represent not what the assholes currently in charge of it are doing. My uncle, Mac, was one of the founding members of the Devil Kings back in the day. The MC was originally founded on a set of ideals that he still believed in, that we all still believed in.

“I guess we belong to the Devil Kings. It doesn't matter that the Devil Kings don't belong to us anymore. It's the only home we have, even if we can never actually go back there.”

Sarah touched my arm, snapping me out of my introspection. The music and background bar noise made it so that I didn't know when she stopped playing. There was a warm empathy in her eyes that told me she understood the loss and yearning I might be feeling.

“I'm probably not making any damn sense.” I rubbed my hand across my forehead, then dragged my fingers through my beard. “Never been very good with words.”

“Words are overrated,” Sarah signed with a small but earnest smile. “Beer?”

“Now that I am good with!” I put an arm around Sarah and started toward the bar. Remembering her phone on the glass I turned back to give it to her but she beat me to it, having stuffed it in her back pocket at some point. “Now Dreamer, that motherfucker is a poet. I mean that literally.”

Sarah raised an eyebrow at me. Dreamer was by far the most reserved member of the chapter so I doubt they'd spoken much to each other.

“He's got something like three books published in Mexico, all in Spanish of course. Mexicans love his shit apparently. At least enough that his family can survive off that alone.”

“Why not publish here?”

“He can't. He's been here since he was two but he's not a citizen. It's a long, messy story that's not mine to tell. Let's just say he's here and his family isn't. The system fucked them all in the worst possible way.”

I sidled up to the bar next to Buck who was on his phone. I thought about having a beer, but ordered the three of us a shot of whiskey instead. Beer wasn't going to cut it after the past few heavy conversations.

“You man enough for a shot?” I asked Sarah with a smirk after the bartender poured them out.

“What do you think?” Sarah narrowed her eyes at me in sassy defiance to my challenge, then downed both hers and mine one after the other. She slammed the second glass down victoriously and raised her eyebrows at me. Well? Then completely broke bravado and gagged at both the taste and sheer volume of alcohol.

I bent forward over the bar, and died laughing. Buck tucked the phone