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While there had been incidents at the clubhouse before—chief among them the day they’d lost Dane—and they’d had plenty of fights and other blowouts during parties, but never before had they had a body to deal with while the house was packed full of witnesses.
That day Dane had been killed, the club had been on lockdown, in the middle of the Hounds mess, with all the women and children and other people close to the club holed up within. But that was different. Everybody pulled in on a lockdown was either club family or close enough to be under club protection.
A party like tonight was much more open. The only strangers had come with known friends, but they were still strangers, and the Bulls couldn’t be sure of their loyalty or the tightness of their lips.
So that was a problem Eight had had to deal with. He’d ordered the gates and doors locked and sent Simon and Fitz, the two most levelheaded and generally friendly patches, in to talk with the guests, get control of the narrative and impress upon them the wisdom of keeping their traps shut.
One of the ways they did that was to get a record of every fucking driver’s license in the room. The implied threat of the Brazen Bulls knowing their full name and address would do lot to seal their lips, especially in light of what they’d either seen or heard going down tonight.
Apollo and Jazz talked to Kelsey, got all the info she could give them about this Greg cocksucker, then they buckled down to figuring out who would miss him and how to make sure they told a story about his disappearance that wouldn’t lead directly to the Bulls. The club arrangement with Tulsa PD meant they had some leeway, but they had to sweep the breadcrumbs away as well as they could. If the truth were obvious, the story wouldn’t work. If the story didn’t work, the cops would have to come for the club.
Eight would have been absolute shit at that kind of work, but Apollo and Jazz were great at it.
Then there was the body to deal with. They had property well outside the Tulsa area, very private and tucked away, where they’d buried a whole grove of bodies over the years. The property had been Becker’s; he’d grown up on it but had never lived a day there since he was grown. He’d willed it to Eight, but it was really the club’s place.
Eight couldn’t remember when or how it had happened, but at some point, they ‘d all taken to calling it ‘the field.’ The crop they planted in it was death.
After Christian wrapped up the body, Dex loaded it up in the club van and headed to the field. He took Duncan, Zach and JJ with him, since those three were the youngest patches, still on the hook for grunt work. They were also the most invested in Kelsey; she was sister, or close as one, to all three.
Maverick took Jenny and Kelsey home. Jacinda took Athena home.
With Mo and Sage directing, the rest of the women and some of the guys got to work on the cleanup, of the party and its violent end.
Eventually, the partygoers were allowed to leave, the mess got cleaned up, and everything returned to something like normal. Exhausted, Eight grabbed a half-full bottle of Jack and collapsed onto a barstool to drink straight out of it.
About half the remaining Jack down, he felt Marcella’s hand on his back, rubbing. “Hey you.”
“Hey.” He reached around for her hand and pulled her close. “How mad are you right now? Gimme a percentage.”
“Zero percent.”
Surprised, he squinted at her. She was smiling. “Yeah?”
Her smile grew, and she brushed her hand over his scalp. “Yeah. You were amazing.”
“I was?”
“Eight. Baby, you got everybody out of that without a scratch, except for the bad guy, and that was clean.”
Eight thought of the bits of brain in Kelsey’s hair, on her face, her chest, and wondered how cleanshethought it had been. But he’d heard something else in Marcella’s statement, something much more interesting. He wasn’t the bad guy in this scenario. Somebody else was.
Marcella had seen the Bulls for who they were, right into the heart of the club, and she wasn’t angry or freaked. In fact, she lookedimpressed.
“I guess I did.”
“You did. You scared the entire fuck outta me, walking up on him without your gun, but you did it right. That fool was swinging a fucking assault rifle around, but Kelsey’s okay. Everybody’s okay. You did that.”
Eight’s chest swelled. The way Marcella was looking at him, the words she was saying, the touch of her hands on his skin—he didn’t know what he was feeling, but it was good. It feltgreat. Like he was ten feet tall and carved from gold.
No one had ever looked at him like that, made him feel like that, ever before in his long, sorry life.
He picked up her hand and kissed it.
Marcella snuggled close. At his ear, she whispered, “I really want to fuck your brains out right now. Is there a bed somewhere in this clubhouse?”
“The crash pads upstairs. With all this going down, they’re probably empty. They’re not fancy, though.”
“Are they clean?”
