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They were a family because that was what the lifestyle demanded of them. Closeness. Trust. Loyalty. All they had was each other.
Which must have been lovely, honestly, if you weren’t counting the danger involved with it.
How did the women deal with that uncertainty?
And what did they tell the children?
The truth?
Some version of it, only to let that evolve as they got older and could understand fully?
What was the morality involved in being with an outlaw biker, and raising children with one?
You know, as a whole. Not for my own personal interests or anything.
“Your dad was an outlaw biker too?” I asked, suddenly needing to get all my facts straight.
“Yes.”
“What about your mom?”
“An… accountant. Sort of,” he said with a smirk that seemed to imply her work wasn’t entirely above board.
“Your sister?”
“No, Kit is a vlogger. She never had any interest in this life. And a lot of the kids don’t. None of the girls are in the club. Some do normal shit. Librarians and businesswomen. Some do… other shit. High-stakes poker like Layna. Skip chasing like my cousin Violet.”
“But the guys…”
“A good chunk of them are in the club,” he agreed. “The legacy shit is important to people around here. Which might be hard to understand if you haven’t been around this a lot. But some guys aren’t. We’ve got a cousin who is off touring with a rock band, for example. No one is forced into this life. But most of the guys around here who leave it, they always come back.”
“Because of the money? Or the thrills?” I asked.
“I guess it’s different for everyone. Some of the guys got plenty of thrills off doing their own thing, but still came back. And the money is good. No one wants to worry about money their whole lives. It gives peace of mind not having to do that.
“But it’s just the community here. Everyone comes back because, eventually, you are starting to think about the future. The next generation. And you want them to have what we had growing up. You were never struggling to find a playmate or someone to teach you a skill. There was always someone to lean on or go to for advice.
“That’s the kind of shit I’d want my kids to have. This is how I’d give it to them.”
“But isn’t that risky?”
“Life is risky,” he said, shrugging. “You can get shot going to a concert or run over by a drunk driver. Walking out the door every day is a risk. Hell, sometimes being in your own home is a risk.”
“I guess,” I agreed, knowing a thing or two about the latter, at least.
“Look, Lana, it’s not my place to try to convince you that this lifestyle is okay. That’s on you and your own sense of right and wrong and general morality. But I can tell you that the best people I have met in my life, all of them are in, or have been, in this club.”
“Your dad seemed pretty great,” I said. Because it was true. Hell, I’d been imagining Isaac having a grandfatherly figure like him in his young life.
“He is,” Seth agreed, nodding.
“Have any of you been arrested?”
“Sure,” Seth agreed, nodding. “Petty shit, though. And most of it before the club. One of the brothers, Cary, he served actual time. But that was before he joined up with us.”
“So no one has done any jail time in this club’s history?”
“Not since Reign, our current president’s father, took over from his old man, no.”
“What about… been killed?”
To that, he exhaled hard.
“Yes. There was an incident soon after Reign became president that left a lot of the men dead. But since then, there have been a fuckuva lot of changes around here. And nothing like that has happened again.”
“What about hurt?”
“Yes. Yeah, people get hurt sometimes. Not a lot in recent history. Rowe fell off a building. Really fucked up his back. Other than that, no permanent types of injuries.”
“And what about the club members? Have they hurt? Have they killed?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t elaborate on that, just let that word hang heavy in the air, allowed me to really consider it.
“Cold-blooded?” I asked.
“No. No one here would kill for sport. That shit happens when it’s involved with the job. Or someone is threatening our women and kids. We take that shit… very seriously.”
I had very specific reasons why that last part appealed to me.
“What about the kids?” I asked.
“What about them?”
“Have they ever been hurt?”
“That’s a complicated one,” he said. “Okay. Reign…”
“The former president.”
“Yes. His teenage daughter was once kidnapped. Long story short, though, it honestly… it wasn’t club-related, honestly. It was kind of… a family issue actually. But she had been kidnapped. And the whole crew came together to save her.”
“What about the women?”
“That is even more complicated,” he said. “Some of the women came into the orbit of the club with their own shit,” he said. “Their own bad guys in the wings, kind of thing. And those situations sometimes ended up with the women getting hurt. Not fatally. Not even permanently. But hurt.
