Creed’s Honor by Simone Nicholls
My parents were anything but saints. Perhaps it was their sinning blood that drove my worse actions. My father’s lack of control and my mother’s boiling rage flowed in my veins.
Just like it flowed in my brothers’ veins. My father believed that no real club was powerful unless they ruled countries, not states. So Khaos Kincaid, one of my brothers, led Satan’s Bastards in the United Kingdom where my other brother Thanatos Kincaid ruled over the Satan’s Bastards on American soil.
Right now, in the small hours of the night, I sat in front of a computer monitor, the line secure. This was the first time we all had met face-to-face virtually.
Thanatos and Khaos were quiet, waiting for why I had called the meeting.
“We going to sit here and act like Hades hasn’t called a country war over a patch member?” Khaos barked.
In that instant, I knew he must have had a member there, informing him. Only made sense. Same as I had one at their club.
We trusted each other, but a watchful eye was always needed.
“Creed Winston, he’s Winston blood, Hades, fuck him off.” Khaos growled.
“Creed is not the problem,” I muttered and leant forward. “I’ve called war because they threatened our family.”
“What! One of my nieces married this bastard!” Khaos roared, and my speakers crackled.
“No, Khaos,” I snapped back at him. “The Winstons and Hydes, two family trees that are similar to ours, but with one difference. They share a common goal.” Creed came from a bloodline just as deadly as ours. Perhaps darker. Because even I drew lines on how far we would go.
Both families ruled by having control over human trafficking. Something our clubs, our blood had nothing to do with. Like I said, I drew a line in the darkness.
Khaos remained quiet. Thanatos was never big on speaking, to begin with.
“They killed our father and mother,” I said, staring at the computer. “They strung them up and hanged them…” I saw the pain flash across both my brothers’ faces. “We never made it even.”
“So now is the time to call war?” Thanatos moved, uncomfortable. “We always said we would make it right.” Then he added, “But is now right? We haven’t recruited in months. Is now the time, brother, to even a debt that has been pending for decades?”
I felt the vile flood me. “I’m not doing this in the name of Vix and Arrow. I’m doing this because I stand by the reasons they went to war against them, to begin with. Humans are not to be sold. Women are not be sold.” I looked at the computer. “I will die bloody, I will die in pain, but I will not die living in denial.”
Thanatos’s eyes were the ones that narrowed because he knew that now we were making what happened to Onyx, his daughter, right.
“We do this for the millions of human slaves. We do this for the women that are pumped with drugs so they can’t put up a fight as weak men rape them. We do this because no other bastard will. We do this for my niece that was taken and sold. We do this for our parents, who were hung. We do this in the name of Kincaid!” I felt my blood boiling. “We do this so no other woman knows what it is felt like to be traded on the black market.”
Silence followed my speech.
“We die bloody, and we die slowly. So be it, brothers, we have lived.” Khaos leant forward. “Let them come. The United Kingdom joins Hades’ movement of war.”
I had thought Khaos would have been the harder one to convince. After all, Thanatos had his daughter taken and sold on the market, but it was Thanatos who remained quiet. Thanatos ran his hand down his beard.
“I look in my daughter’s eyes, and I never see happiness. She’s alive, but she is not living,” Thanatos said. He had kept Onyx’s recovery very private—and we knew better than to ask. “They robbed my daughter of life. But vengeance will not serve her. It will, however, help another family from experiencing what we have.” He leaned forward. “The United States of America will join the movement of war.”
If I had known I was calling a war that I couldn’t lead, then, perhaps, I would have reconsidered. Because this war, it was personal. It was in the name of decades of hate towards those two families. The level of hatred I had for the Winston and Hyde families was unimaginable. So how could I have let a member of their blood patch into my club? Because I knew hate when I saw it. And there was only one emotion that filled Creed’s eyes when he spoke of his blood. That was hate.
I called the war, but I was not to know that it was not my war to lead.