Page 118 of Resilience

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

A few days before Thanksgiving, Sam was drinking at the bar in the clubhouse party room, with his dad on one side and Duncan on the other. The other Bulls were clustered around as well. They were waiting for Eight; he’d called a meeting.

They’d discussed Gunner’s progress—he’d been discharged the week before—and had given Sam plenty of shit about beginning to apprentice auto-body work. They’d moved on to peppering Dex with questions about Ethan, whose leg was going to be fine, and Kelsey, who was healing up well from her C-section, and Tildy, who wasn’t sure she liked the stranger who’d taken over her house, when Eight came in from the hall that led to the kitchen and the side entrance.

“Let’s go, fellas,” he said as he came through the room. They all fell in and headed to the chapel, dumping their phones in Apollo’s bin before they went through the door.

Out in the kitchen, some of the women were putting together a meal for after the meeting. Athena wasn’t among them; there was a student production at her school tonight, and she was one of the advisors for it.

While the patches had waited for their president, they’d also talked about what was on the agenda—the things they knew they were meeting to discuss and the things they figured would be on the table. Sam had sat and only listened to the conversation. He hadn’t been at the table long enough yet to feel like he had anything of value to say about most things.

The big thing everybody knew they had to talk about: Eureka, California.

And that was how Eight opened the meeting when they were all seated.

He glared at the center of their table as he began. “I guess everybody’s heard that the Nameless told us to fuck off again. They don’t want the patch. Niko says it’s got to be them, and you know we’re on his hook over Laughlin’s fuckup with their prospect and the sheriff.”

“That means what?” Duncan asked. “Are we really gonna start a war in fuckin’ California?”

“No,” Eight said, staring straight at him. “We are not gonna start a war in fuckin’ California.”

When Duncan frowned and opened his mouth to ask more, his father cut in. “Eight means it’s not going to be a war,” Maverick explained. “We’re gonna go in, end them, and take over.”

“Jesus. Really?” Jay muttered.

“You got something productive to say, JJ, or you just gonna sit there and snark?” Dex asked.

“I’m not snarking,” Jay answered. “I think it’s fuckin’ stupid. Blowing up assholes who did us dirty is one thing, but the Nameless are nothin’ to us.”

“You don’t—” Eight started, but Jay threw up his hand and talked right over him.

Sam was seriously impressed. That took some balls.

“I know they were some kind of big bad back in the Eighties or whenever, but as far as I know, and I asked my old man about this, we never crossed paths with them. And now they’re barely hanging on. All they have is their name and their rep, and obviously it means something, because they’d rather have that than the bank they’d earn after a patch-over. If somebody came at us wanting to rip the Bull off our backs, we’d tell ‘em to fuck off, too. We’d probably send the message with a rocket launcher.”

“Are you saying you’re worried about hurting their fuckin’ feelings, kid?” Eight snapped.

“No. I’m saying I get why they don’t want the patch, we have no reason of our own to go to war with them, and we’re doing this because Niko wants the Bulls there so he can turn north again. Right?” When he got enough nods to that question, Jay added, “I think it’s fuckin’ stupid to think we can go in, erase a club that’s been there for decades, and then stay around and set up fuckin’ shop in the hole we made. We’ll have fifty different targets on our chests before we can get the locks changed. The whole reason we were looking to patch somebody over is we don’t have to start from scratch like we did in Laughlin. Seems to me, taking a club out like this is worse than starting from scratch. It’s literally starting in the hole.”

Having made his point, Jay sat back. The chapel remained silent for quite a while after. Sam figured the others were working through the same things he was: shock at how forcefully Jay had made his point, admiration for how well he’d made that point, and then working through the truth of it all. He was completely right.

Which was probably why Eight was so obviously angry when he responded. “Don’t dive deeper than you can swim, kid. Get back to the shallow end where you fuckin’ belong.”

“That’s out of line, Eight,” Sam’s dad said. He turned to Jay. “You’re right, Jay. It’s a bad situation. But we’re behind it on this one, because we owe Niko. We try to keep things balanced between us and the Volkovs, but the shit in Laughlin put us in the hole. And that’s the bigger hole.”

Eight slammed a fist on the table. Then he took a deep breath and managed something like calm. “Look. Yeah, kid. You’re right. It sucks, and it’s a dangerous way to establish a charter. But Laughlin fucked up. They didn’t handle their shit, and they brought a fuckin’ mole into their clubhouse. Son of a bitch was feeding intel straight to that damn sheriff. What’s a mess for Laughlin is a mess for us, and we gotta clean it up.”

“What’s a mess for Eureka’ll be a mess for us, too, right?” Monty asked. “So if we start messy, that’ll make problems for everybody. Doesn’t Niko see that?”

When, instead of answering, Eight put his elbows on the table and began rubbing his bald head with both hands, Maverick jumped back in.

“Niko’s no idiot. He sees it as clear as we do, and he’s knows things are difficult for him when they’re difficult for us. But the situation is getting complicated again, brothers.”

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