Ryker by Jeneveir Evans
Chapter 7
He who spares the bad injures the good.
~Publilius Syrus~
Ryker
September 26th, 1999
South Dakota
Once again I was sitting on my porch drinking a beer, only this time I was thinking about the fucked up mess that my life had been in my early twenties. I’d made so many damn mistakes and I had no one to blame except myself and my desire to be the president of Hell’s Retribution one day. I had been so fucking immature and stupid. I didn't have a care in the world. The only thing I’d thought about was doing whatever run was needed for the club, hanging with my brothers, drinking, and fucking.
I was the product of a club whore trying to trap my dad into making her his Old Lady. It hadn’t worked. When the bitch who had me realized that Dad wasn’t going to claim her, she’d abandoned me. I had been two days old when she got out of the hospital, came to the clubhouse, packed her shit, dropped me off in Dad’s room, and left.
With a little help from some of the other club whores, Dad had learned how to take care of me. He could have so easily handed me off to someone else, but he didn’t. He hadn’t shirked what he considered his duty. He’d let me know that even though I wasn’t a planned child, that he loved me unconditionally and was glad that I’d been brought into his life. He’d been an awesome dad and I’d wanted to be just like him.
My old man Thor had loved this club and my earliest memory is of me wanting to become a member of it one day. Even at a young age, I knew the club was into all kinds of illegal activities, running guns, drugs, prostitution, racketeering, to name just a few, yet for me it wasn’t wrong, it was just what the club did.
If Dad hadn’t died in a drug run that had gone bad when I was twenty-one, then shit would have been so much different for me. I knew Dad had kept King from letting the club become too dark, too hardcore.
As it was, after Dad was gone King had taken the club deep into the underground world of supplying whatever anyone wanted as long as they were willing to pay his asking price. He didn’t care who ended up hurt in the process. That was how he managed to keep everyone in the club under his thumb. He either promised or gave them what they wanted. And for the majority of the men at HR, it has been money, drugs and women.
Since he had lost his second in command, King named Hitman as the VP. He’d promised all the brothers that when I had a little more experience under my belt that he’d make me VP just like my old man had been.
A couple days after Dad’s death, King had hit me at my weakest. He conned me into making his daughter my Old Lady. He’d privately promised if I would take her as my woman that one day the VP spot would be mine. I knew that would have made my old man proud, so I’d reluctantly agreed.
King’s way of staying on his throne and the favored Prez was the Old Lady and VP bullshit he pulled. I don’t think he actually planned to make me the VP. Instead, he gambled that he would have my dad’s men’s loyalty converted to him before the issue came up. Up to a point, it had worked.
When I was thirty, Hitman had died in a bar fight. The brothers brought up King’s promise and held him to it. That was how I finally became the VP. It had pissed King off to no end to be forced to keep his word. He definitely hadn’t wanted me in the position.
Even though the men had stood up for my right to the VP spot, they were still behind King’s continuation of illegal shit. He tried his damnedest to keep me as nothing more than a flunky but the brothers had called him on his shit. They said that I should have the same responsibilities as Dad and Hitman had.
He’d reluctantly let me do the majority of my job and I reveled in how much it infuriated him. Since he didn’t want to rock the boat, he wasn’t about to do anything that would take away the faithfulness of the brothers.
From day one I had despised having Layla as my Old Lady. To me she was nothing more than a cum dumpster. A despicable piece of shit. I hadn’t tried to hide how I felt about her either.
Brawn knew how much I hated her and he knew what she was like. Hell, everyone had hated her. Yet that hadn’t stopped the men from fucking her, for them she was simply a place to bust a nut.
If I hadn’t wanted kids so bad, I wouldn’t have touched the bitch. But I did, and that fucking black-hearted cunt had admitted to aborting four of my children. Who the fuck knows if that was all she got rid of? If I had to guess, I’d say it was more, probably not all mine.
I’ll never forget the day I walked into our room at the clubhouse and found her bleeding out on our bed. She’d begged me to take her to the hospital, but I knew something was up. She’d never bled that heavy before. I told her if she’d tell me why she was bleeding so bad that I’d take her. Layla admitted that she’d just had an abortion and something must have gone wrong this time.
An eerie calm had come over me when she said that. I asked her, ‘What the hell do you mean this time?’ She realized as soon as I spoke that she’d fucked up. I asked her how many abortions she’d had. Layla said it had only been one other time. I’d leaned over, putting both of my fists on either side of her head, and said, ‘Don’t lie to me, you fucking cocksucking whore. How many of my kids have you murdered?’ She confessed to three others. I didn’t believe her. We’d been together for five years. I had a sick feeling it had been a lot more.
I almost killed her right then but decided that was too good for her. I walked out of the room and down the hall until I came to the opening into the main room. I leaned against the wall with my arms crossed. What happened next will stay with me until my dying day.
“What’s wrong with her?” King asked as he glanced furtively down the hall.
“Bitch is dying,” I replied.
“What do you mean she’s dying?”
“Just what I said, King. The slut is dying, she’s bleeding out.”
“Bleeding out from what?”
“From murdering my baby,” I spit out.
His eyes widened, he swallowed hard. Men’s voices started grumbling behind him. Everyone knew how much I wanted kids. They all knew what she had just stolen from me.
“You’re just gonna let her die?”
“You’re god damn right I’m gonna let the spiteful, malicious slut die. I fucking hope she’s in agony. I want her to fucking feel every single damn second of pain. And when she’s gone, I pray she rots in eternal damnation.”
“Ryker, you can’t do that,” he growled angrily.
“The fuck I can’t. She’s my Old Lady. No one gets between a man and his woman.”
He heard agreements coming from the men in the room. Men who might be loyal to him but were more loyal to the stance of the MC - club first, then brothers and bikes. Women weren’t even on the list.
When a brother took an Old Lady, his word for her was law. King knew this. He was the one who insisted on this bylaw and it was unanimously voted in by the men who founded the club. It is one covenant that is adhered to unequivocally.
“That’s my daughter, god dammit,” he yelled.
“She’s my Old Lady. The one you insisted I take. It’s your fucking rule,” I roared. “She fucking stole my legacy. She killed my children.”
He turned, took roughly five steps, then spun around with his gun in his hand. Mine was pointing at him.
“You fucking go ahead and shoot, but just know that you’re riding to hell with me,” I snarled.
The veins in my neck were protruding. I was so infuriated that my body was shaking. Yet my arm was steady as a rock, my aim true. If he wanted to push it, then we’d both burn in purgatory together.
He knew what was happening was my right, regardless of the fact that it was his daughter. He wouldn’t have stood for it and hadn’t. Hell, he’d killed his Old Lady when he caught her fleeing the compound. She had his four-year-old daughter Lorelei with her.
Even as a child, Lorelei had hated King, but no one blamed her. She’d watched while King killed her mother. Over the years, she’d heard the retelling of the story of what he’d done and it had stayed with her. The day she graduated high school, she took off and no one has seen her since.
Layla had always been a daddy’s girl, her mother’s death hadn’t bothered her at all. Her mother hadn’t even attempted to take her when she tried to leave. She’d already known that Layla’s heart was as black as King’s.
I believe King would have attempted to kill me at some point that day if he hadn’t feared that the men who revered my dad might turn on him if he tried. I think that's still the only reason King hasn’t tried to have me killed. He feared losing the loyalty of his men.
A noise pulled me out of my morbid memories. I watched as Brawn pulled into the driveway, dismounted, and made his way toward me. He’d always been in my life, some of my first memories were of things he and I had done together.
I knew the bastard well and something was weighing heavily on him. I knew he’d been summoned yesterday to a ‘secret’ meeting that King had set up with several of the members. King had no clue that I was aware of him trying to go behind my back to pull off his latest goal.
“What do you think?” I asked Brawn as I handed him a beer out of the cooler that was sitting next to my chair.
“I think if we don’t figure a way out of this shit, we’re fucked is what I think.”
I blew out a deep breath as I looked at my best friend. King thought Brawn was in his hip pocket. Brawn was King’s sister’s son and the jackass thought that was enough to keep Brawn loyal to him. Why the bastard thought that was unbelievable, especially considering he’d put his own sister to work in his prostitution stable.
King thought he owned Brawn too and, years ago, he’d told Brawn to stay close to me, to let him know if I ever said anything about making a play for his spot. Brawn was also to let him know if I tried to do anything behind King’s back.
While our asshole Prez thought Brawn was his spy, what the motherfucker didn’t realize is that Brawn would be loyal to me until the end of time. Brawn hated King with a passion for what he’d forced his mom to do, and if that hadn’t been bad enough, she’d been killed when Brawn was twenty-three. A customer had gotten too rough and snapped her neck.
King hadn’t done a damn thing to the customer either, although a couple months later Brawn did. Man disappeared and was never found. He never would be either. We’d made damn sure of that. Brawn had wanted to kill King then but he knew that the men loyal to King would have killed him and he knew that I needed him at my back.
So for years he’d been biding his time, hoping a situation would present itself where we could get rid of King without fingers pointing at me as the main suspect. They would have thought that too because everyone knew I hated King.
There had been many times over the years where I’d almost said, ‘Fuck it’ and just gone for it and eliminated King. If he didn’t have the majority of the men behind him, we’d have already gotten rid of him. Damn the fucker’s hide, the men loyal to his cause still outnumbered us three to one.
While Brawn thought the men would stand behind me if I killed him, I wouldn’t chance it. There were too many people I stood to lose if we were wrong. The main reason was my children. They needed their old man and I fucking needed them.
That left Brawn and me continuously playing King over the years. We only got away with it because of two things. One was his arrogance that everyone but me was under his thumb. The second one was he didn’t think I had anyone loyal to me. That had played well for us. This let us plan accordingly for every possible scenario and outcome for the shit that King had the club involved in.
Anymore, the majority of our runs had me sweating bullets because he insisted that Tor go on most of them. Since Tor became a patched member, acid steadily ate at my stomach. I was worried as fuck about Tor, and with this new shit that King wanted to drag the club into, that left me with a deep seated fear of losing my son to death. There was also another possibility that had me scared. I feared that King would deliberately orchestrate something that would land Tor behind bars. Either way would take my son from me and I knew that King coveted that. That would be his ultimate revenge against me. Me losing my son.
~***~