Page 7 of Undone

CHAPTER ONE

Restless

Late August, Seven Months Earlier…

IWAS TIRED AS ALL HELL as I popped the top of my beer. My heavy boots clanked on the back porch of our clubhouse outside of LA as I took a seat. It was hot, but it was also twilight and a soft breeze swept across the valley. Being the Prez of Creed, one of the most badass MC’s on the West Coast, has its perks, but it also comes with a shit-ton of responsibility. The decisions I make, changes lives or ends them. If I choose wrong—one of my own could end up buried in the dirt. Most of my days are spent seated in the back office of the clubhouse holding council with my most trusted men as we talked out potential threats to our Club or our women. It’s my responsibility to ensure the safety and stability of everyone. Especially since the MC has a history of going down the wrong road.

A few years back, the men were led astray by Zach, the worst Prez who was ever picked. He craved the old days, when Creed rode from Canada to Mexico trading guns, drugs, and girls. The original members made bank the bad way. There was no one their dirty money couldn’t buy and in the days before electronic surveillance—no easy way to shut them down.

Zach watched too many MC shows on TV, thinking that shit was real and only he could bring the club back in time to their glory days.

But that shit is fiction.

It can’t exist anymore.

Besides, Duke and some of the other men didn’t want to go back. He wanted the MC to be about brotherhood. Sometimes we’ve had to step in where law enforcement couldn’t. I’m alright with that shit. We are the good motherfuckers fighting the bad.

Hell, I’ll never forget the night of the coup.

I was in-between Duke and Will as we crept on our bellies up the rocky mountain terrain to an abandoned cabin to rescue a few girls Zach stole from a rival MC. He was planning on taking them to the border to hand them over to human traffickers. Duke might be a mean mother-fucker raised rough, but he was a marine—I was army.

That shit doesn’t fly with us.

Military men live by a code. Hurting women and children is a hard-limit for us both. Still is. We got the women out under a spray of gunfire and returned them to Cortez, making his MC friends with ours for life. If I ever need to call in that favor—I will. There’s no other club fiercer than the MC Cortez runs.

He captures more cartels and gang members from south of the border than the Feds and returns them home in pieces. He wanted Zach, but we got him first, taking out our own Prez by sheer luck.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe it was fitting how Zach met his end on the kitchen floor of an original founding member of Creed’s house.

I shook my head, swigging down the last of my beer. Those were some dark days. This club was almost destroyed from the inside for the second time in its history, but my best friend, Duke, stepped up. He set shit right, then handed the gavel and the Prez patch over to me after he got hitched.

I met Duke ten years ago at a fundraiser for wounded Veteran’s. We hit it off talking sports, bikes, and car engines. I worked for him as a manager at his body shop—never thinking that one day, he’d give me the Prez patch of the MC his father founded. I didn’t want it at first. But I’d do anything for my brother, including taking on the responsibility of the Club he brought back from the brink of extinction. Duke did his part and now it’s my turn. Once he took a wife, the Club took a backseat to the new life he was starting with his woman, Shanna.

Married.

Hell, I can’t even imagine feeling the kind of love that would make me put a band of gold around a women’s finger while I looked in her eyes pledging all kinds of shit I’ve never felt.

Maybe once.

Only once was I ever close to feeling the kinds of things for a woman that might lead down the path of forever. Like a fool, I believed her when she said she’d wait for me. I was in Afghanistan, clearing remote villages and trying to broker peace as enemy snipers fired from high above us as they hid in rocky crevices; disappearing into caves we couldn’t see.

I sent half my pay home, to her—Mandy.

She was living in a dump outside of Culver City, trying to find work in cheaply produced films. I was worried she was one step away from ending up on some sick fuck’s casting couch with him between her and the door. So, she moved into my place. With the extra money I was sending her, she could survive waiting tables in the trendy restaurants off Santa Monica Pier and going on more respectable job prospects.

That woman tore my heart out of my chest and ate it for dinner.

She sent me letters, the good-old-fashioned kind spritzed lightly with her perfume and leaving the impression of her lips above her signature sometimes in pink, but mostly in the bright red lipstick she wore that was my favorite.

It left marks on my dick, but looked hot as hell as she hoovered me, giving me head so good—I would groan, fisting my hands in her thick hair, spilling my seed deep in the back of her throat.

We pored our hearts out to each other in writing countless letters, sharing hopes and dreams for a future that would never be.

Mandy was one hell of an actress. I’m surprised she never got more work. She was taking my money and supporting her druggie high school sweetheart; while screwing him in my home while I was on the other side of the world taking incoming fire behind enemy lines.

I only found out when I got leave a few days earlier than expected. I wanted to surprise her, but I was the one surprised as I keyed into my place, finding some suit with his trousers around his ankles, going balls deep into my girl, whose ass was on the edge of my kitchen counter. I dropped my bags to beat the shit out of him while she just screamed with her legs still spread and dripping.

---