Page 49 of Hounds Ascend
I can’t blame him. I would’ve done the same thing had it beenLilly in there. No, I wouldn’t have. I would’ve gone after the stupid fucks that put her there once I realized she was okay. But Linc did what he was told. He wasn’t allowed to go after them at the time because there’s a time and place for it, and that wasn’t then. We needed numbers and we needed intel before we could make a move. I almost feel bad that Linc won’t be with us to participate, but he needs to be with Mindy. She needs him right now. A knock on my door grabs my attention and I open it to find Scott standing in the doorway.
“Hey, brother. I found the information you wanted.”
I step aside, inviting him in.
“Good. You’ll go with me for that one. We’ve both got the same amount of hatred invested here.”
Scott nods. “When do we leave?”
“Whenever we get the rest of these guys on their way.”
“That’ll work. You still got ol’ Suzie?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?”
Scott chuckles and shakes his head. “I shoulda known.”
We part ways. Scott disappears into the office, no doubt to help Snapper get guys set up on where they need to go while I head upstairs into a room that only Gater and myself have a key to. Since Gater is the Vice President, he’s the only other patch that has access because that locked room is our armory. There are illegal guns locked up tight in there amongst other weapons. Knives, hand grenades, ingredients for Molotov cocktails. I had stowed away some things from our previous dealings just in case. Good thing, too, because this is just the sort of rainy day Iwas saving them for.
I lock the door behind me once inside. It isn’t that I don’t trust the other members of my club, it’s simply a precautionary measure, especially since our clubhouse has been breached. From what Lilly said, though, no one ventured upstairs. But she was asleep and didn’t wake up until a gun was fired. The door didn’t seem to be tampered with, but once inside I notice that some of the things are not quite in their place.
The way that the room was set up is simple. It looks like a pantry on one side, cabinets covering the wall. The back wall is lined with shelves at the top and two safes below them. That’s where I keep the Molotov ingredients and hand grenades. On the other side, there are multiple desks, each one locked up tight with guns inside each drawer. There are codes that have to be put in along with a key to unlock them for them to be accessed and every drawer on the first desk is open…and fucking empty.
Anger rises inside my chest, heart pounding and mind racing. Calming my thoughts before I fly off the handle and lose track of what it is I came in here for, I unlock the safe that’s filled with hand grenades and load them into a duffle bag. I unlock the desk on the far end that contains ammunition and put them into a separate duffle. I know majority of the guys are carrying, so we will likely only need some ammo. Some of them probably don’t even need that, but I’ll have it on hand as a backup.
I toss the bags over my shoulders and lock the doors behind me. Storming down the stairs, I set the bags in our meeting room and head to the bar where everyone is gathered. Thecrowd is thinning out since Snapper was giving instructions. I search the main room for Gater but don’t have any luck. He must have already left on a mission.
Scott is seated at the bar while Leo and Shorty are working behind it serving drinks to those that remain. Clayton sits next to Scott, the two of them in deep conversation. When Snapper emerges from the office, I pull him off to the side.
“Hey, man. Gater been here tonight?” I ask.
The confused look on Snapper’s face makes my stomach sink. “You know, now that you mention it, I haven’t seen him all day.”
My face reddens as my hands begin to shake. “Someone find him. Rightnow.” I grit out through clenched teeth.
Scott and Clayton both stand up, walking over to me. “What’s going on?” Scott asks.
“We have a fucking traitor on our hands.”
Clayton’s brows furrow, his jaw set. “It’s that grimy VP of yours, ain’t it?”
“Not now, Pops. I don’t wanna fucking hear it.”
Scott looks back and forth between us for a moment before he speaks. “What makes you think he’s a traitor?”
“He’s the only other motherfucker with a key to the armory, isn’t he? We’re missing guns, a whole fucking desk full.”
“Yeah, but we were breached yesterday…”
“The door is perfectly intact and whoever it was would’ve had to have multiple keysanda security code to get into the desk. You know that. You helped me design the damn thing.”
Scott stares blankly ahead, realization slapping him in the face like a scorned lover. Clayton stands there, pissed off and smug. He had warned me that something about him was off. He was a fake. He wanted to be a one-percenter but when it came time to do one-percenter shit, he didn’t have the balls. I had noticed that he was slowly becoming less and less involved around the club, especially in the past few weeks, but I didn’t think anything of it.
That was normal behavior for Gater for the most part. He wasn’t the same man that I had appointed VP four years ago and sure as fuck didn’t have the same values.
“I should’ve noticed. I should’ve fucking noticed that something was off with him when he stopped coming around like he used to.” The conviction in Scott’s voice is wrong. If anyone should’ve noticed it should’ve been me, but I was so preoccupied with staking out the Moccasins and planning our retaliation that I’d failed to see Gater for what he was. A lying, conniving, snake in the grass.
“No, brother…” I rest my hand on Scott’s shoulder. “If anyone should’ve seen it, it should’ve been me. You can’t blame yourself.”
