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CHAPTERTHIRTY-THREE
RIFF
Prez calls for church. The men start to file into the room, but I stay back, searching for Byron. He isn’t hard to find, he’s behind the bar, cleaning up a bit. Clearing my throat, I jerk my chin in his direction.
“Keep a close eye, yeah?” I ask.
The last thing that I want to do right now is let her out of my sight, but this meeting isn’t something that I can skip. Too much has happened today alone. We need to talk and to make some decisions.
Closing my eyes, I suck in a breath as I turn and walk away from the women. I don’t look at Tanner, knowing that if I do, I’ll want to fuck her again. It’s only been a couple of hours, but after the threat of losing her, I want to be inside of her as much as humanly possible.
She’s an addiction that I can’t fucking shake. Although, I don’t want to shake her, I’m good with being addicted, so I’m okay with it all.
Prez slams his gavel down, starting the meeting and everyone effectively shuts the fuck up. Sinking down in my chair, I look over at him.
“As I’m sure you’ve all guessed, the club from Louisiana is here,” he announces.
There’s a moment of silence where we stare at him and wait for him to speak again. “They were given the girl. We were told she was kidnapped by the president of our patched-over affiliate club. This was a lie. He was a liar, and he’s been taken in by the cops. The club no longer wants anything to do with him or any of the men that were into the sick shit he was into.”
Sitting back, I watch the men around me. Country sits up a bit and clears his throat, lifting his hand in a small wave. Prez rolls his eyes to the ceiling with a sigh and looks over at him. “You have the floor, Country. Tell the class what you know.”
It’s Country’s turn to roll his eyes, but it doesn’t stop him from saying what he wants to say. “We’re just going to let this new club join, why? When is enough, enough?” he asks. “When do we say we aren’t adding any more clubs because we can’t handle the ones we have?”
There is a moment of silence, one where the men shift their gazes from one another and then eventually all look up to Prez. He doesn’t say anything, not immediately anyway. Then he lets out a sigh as if we’ve annoyed the fucking shit out of him with our questions.
“I’m not going head-to-head with the LA Mafia without as many fucking bodies behind me as possible. That plan is still in motion, right?” he asks the room.
Country grunts, and I hear several men say yes as their affirmation. “What happens then? We just keep gathering people that we don’t know enough about? People like Sinks who look okay on paper, but are pieces of shit in real life?”
“Any fucking person you know can fall in that category, Country. Anyone,” Prez states.
“And the ones who are shit on paper that you demand be killed, they could be perfect fucking humans too. What’s your fucking point?”
Prez narrows his eyes on Country, and I wonder what the actual fuck is going on here? Why the fighting? Why does it all matter so goddamn much? Prez has a fucking plan and while this time it was all kinds of fucked up, that doesn’t mean that it’ll always be this way.
“I’m not perfect, nobody is. But if I allow baby abusers, and I know they exist, to be patched? If I allow that shit, it’s no different than me being the actual abuser and I won’t stand for it,” he announces. “I want the LA Mafia to pay for what they tried to do to my family, what they threatened to do to the rest of the people here. The only way to do that is with numbers.”
“They’ll pay,” I say, standing tall. Sinking my teeth into my bottom lip, I know that I’m speaking out of turn, but I do it anyway. “The men that we’re bringing in, they seem like good people. I think that we’ve gotten rid of the bad ones. Uno and Rollin have buried whatever animosity their clubs once had between one another, and they’ve moved on. We should do the same. What I want to know is what happens to Paige?”
The entire room is completely silent. All eyes are on me. Prez lets out a chuckle, but he doesn’t say anything immediately. He watches me for a moment, maybe waiting for someone else to speak, but nobody does.
“Spoken like a true leader, brother,” Prez begins. “Riff knows who these men are. He’s spent a little time with them, and I trust his judgment. I’m also going to get Bans on a background check. But they didn’t hurt the girl when they could have. They didn’t do a lot of things when they could have.”
“Uno killed his own man right in front of us, no fucking hesitation,” Frogger says. “He didn’t know about the girls in the basement, I have a feeling he would have ended Sinks right then and there.”
“I know I was ready to do just fucking that,” I grumble.
“And Rollin’s woman works with victims or some shit and has those girls safe,” Frogger adds. “I got no qualms letting him in under the Nasty Bastards’ name, I’d be proud to call him a brother.”
“Me too,” I say in agreement.
Prez dips his chin as if he’s happy to have our input. Normally, I think he’d just rather I keep my fucking mouth shut, but this circumstance is different than most.
Plus, I usually don’t give much of a shit what happens around here anyway. This I do though, probably because it affects my woman so much, but what the fuck? I think everyone is that way. Nobody gives a fuck about shit until it affects them personally.
Prez asks for everyone’s votes and thankfully they all agree that Rollin’s club can be allowed to become part of the Nasty Bastards, pending Bans’s research. Prez doesn’t say anything on that, instead, he shifts to Sinks and Brianne.
The rest of the conversation is about how to handle that. Brent took Sinks away, so Prez asks opinions on putting in a hit while Sinks is locked up. The vote is unanimous of course. Though this is something we don’t typically like to do, sometimes it must be done.
