Dream & Dare (29 page)

“That’s a risk. If Sam sics the Perros on us over it, we’re through.”

“You’re right, son. But I don’t think he will. Showing Santaveria he’s losin’ control of his own club don’t do him any favors. Okay. Let’s get the legwork done on this as fast as we can.”

~oOo~

A few weeks later, the whole club—families, sweetbutts, and all—were gathered in Hoosier and Bibi’s house. On lockdown. Homeless. Sam had turned their compound into a smoldering crater.

The leader of their own club had blown his most profitable and highest-profile charter off the map. And if Bart’s friend Rick hadn’t alerted them, he’d have taken God knew how many lives down with it.

But after the Vegas meet, where Hoosier had announced the LA charter’s intention to secede, and in which the entire club had made a vote of no confidence in Sam, they’d been on the lookout for trouble. So when Rick had sent up the flare, they’d gotten everybody clear—and even most of the bikes from the shop. They’d lost the rental inventory, and a couple of custom projects that hadn’t been fit to move quickly, but all the customer bikes and the most valuable show bikes were saved.

Sam had shown his hand, and all he’d accomplished was to destroy a major revenue stream and to solidify his opposition. He was done for. Nothing left now but for him to realize it.

And to be ready for whatever hell he rained down on them before he did.

~oOo~

“Isaac is taking it to the table. It’ll be his last new business before he and Len go inside.”

Bart handed Hoosier a beer and took a seat on the sofa across from him. Behind him was the biggest Christmas tree Hoosier had ever seen in a house, and it nearly groaned under its burden of glitter and shimmer.

He wondered whether he’d ever get used to the opulence that was his new VP’s life. He and Bibi had done pretty well for themselves, he thought, but Bart was married to a bona fide celebrity.

Such a strange thing this MC life had become.

Right now, they were only a group of guys. LA had broken away from a club which was crumbling, and they were in limbo now. Or maybe it was free-fall. Either way, they had no patch, no affiliation but each other. The question before them for weeks had been whether to form their own new club and, if so, what that club would be.

Then Bart had suggested becoming Night Horde.

Hoosier’s initial reaction had been aggravation: yet again, Bart was pining for his old home. But the Horde were allies, stalwart allies, even when that condition hadn’t been mutual. Moreover, they had all decided to put the outlaw life behind them. With a strict focus on legit work, they could use the boost the Horde’s name would give them. They needed to get the bike shop back up and at full speed right from the line.

As Bart had made his case, he’d convinced the whole table. So now the question was in Missouri hands.

The question lingering for Hoosier was whether being in any way beholden to yet another distant mother charter was the right direction to lead his men.

~oOo~

Hoosier didn’t want fanfare; he was not convinced it was the right decision or the right time. His speech remained slow, and sometimes he still needed a cue before he could catch a memory. It also stuck in his craw to be riding at the front while he was on three wheels instead of two. But the club had been adamant, and, truth be told, he’d been gratified by their insistence. More than that. He’d been moved beyond measure. And he’d been persuaded.

So one morning in midsummer, many months after the fire he still had no memory of, Hoosier walked into the closet of the new house he shared with his wife, and he pulled a kutte off its wooden hanger.

His kutte had been destroyed in the inferno that had taken away his past, so this was new—new leather, new patch, new flash, all gleaming and untouched. He remembered telling his son, long ago, that a man needed to earn the stains and tatters on the patches that showed his commitment to his club. Holding up the stiff leather, eyeing the pristine patches, running his hand over smooth embroidery without pulls or snags, Hoosier wondered if he had time enough to earn them again.

He supposed he’d find out. Ignoring Bibi’s free-standing mirror, he shrugged on the kutte, then went out to kiss his wife goodbye. He had a meeting in the Keep to lead.

~oOo~

“You look well, Hoosier.” Dora Vega gestured toward a fussy upholstered chair, and Hoosier sat, with Bart and Connor following and seating themselves.

“Thank you, Dora…I’m…feeling well.”

She cocked her head. “You still struggle with your speech?”

The pressure to perform always made the problem worse. At home, when he wasn’t thinking about it, he could sometimes get through several sentences without losing a word. But once the problem was mentioned, thoughts and words decoupled.

“The…thoughts are there. Words come slowly. Sometimes.”

A thought in his head at the moment was how La Zorra knew so much about his problems and recovery. He didn’t bother spending much time with it, though. If she wanted to know something, she had the means to find it out.

“Good, good. I am glad to have you back.” She shifted her regard to Bart. “I think your second and I do not see eye to eye so much.”

Hoosier took a drink of the Jameson one of her men had handed him. He should have known the guy’s name; he was familiar—one of her closer associates. He’d ask Bart later. For now, he used a long drink to compose his words.

“I chose a second who’d see eye to eye with
me
, Dora. I hope that our…
partnership
is strong.”

She smiled and sipped her own drink. “You have come back strong. Stronger than I was led to expect.” Her eyes shifted past them to the men standing behind them. “This is good. I admire you, Hoosier Elliott. And I like you. You are a man of honor. It is difficult to be honorable in the world we live in. I think you know this.”

Hoosier didn’t shift his attention from La Zorra, but he could feel, in the way he’d always been able to feel, the change in the men at his sides. They had heard what he had heard: she was telling them that she would not guarantee she would always act honorably, that she would sell them out if she had to. Or if she decided she wanted to. The partnership was strong only so long as the Horde were valuable to her as partners. And she was giving them fair warning.

He liked and admired her, too. She was strong and tough, and smart as hell. She had brought a whole country full of powerful, misogynistic men to their knees before her. And then she’d lopped off all their heads. Though she was ruthless, she had also been reasonable, and she had changed the culture of the cartels.

But she had continued to amass power, and with every attempt to unseat her or assassinate her, she gained a new level of resolve. Hoosier could remember coming back from a meeting when he’d felt a shift in her, and he’d understood that the only difference between her and every other power-hungry megalomaniac he’d ever crossed paths with was that, to gain her power, she’d had to scrap harder, be more extreme, more bloodthirsty, less forgiving.

And thus, when ambition finally overrode reason, as it always did, she would be more devastating an enemy.

Hoosier felt sure that a fight with La Zorra was coming. And he knew that, one way or another, it would be his last fight.

SEVENTEEN

Hoosier parked his trike on the street outside the ranch house he and Bibi had bought in a gated community in Madrone. He hated the gate, and their neighbors weren’t remotely their kind of people, but he wanted Bibi to feel safe. She had nightmares now. She hadn’t had nightmares since she’d been taken, more than thirty years ago.

Madrone wasn’t really the kind of town that attracted a lot of people like him and Bibi or any of the Horde. It was the kind of town where mid-level executives put down stakes, withstanding a punishing commute into L.A. so they could have a nice big house with a pool, and quiet streets for their kids to play.

Not that kids played outside these days.

Bibi had been heartbroken when they’d moved from their L.A. house. They’d left that beat-up old piano behind, donating it to their buyers in the same way it had been donated to them: because it was trapped in the living room.

And her garden. Years of work and love had gone into that yard and that house. Years of memories—some terrible, but most of them good. She’d hated to leave it all.

And just as she was getting her next house to fit her the way she wanted, it had been taken from her, too.

So they were starting again. Here in the waning sunlight of their lives, a few weeks from their forty-third anniversary. He was tired of starting over. And he was tired of finding out that, when he did, nothing really had changed. The same fights, the same struggles.

Still, some things had changed. Good things. He’d had to park on the street because the wide driveway was full of vehicles: Bibi’s, Faith’s, Pilar’s, and one he didn’t recognize, an old import compact. He had a guess whose it was: Renata, Pilar’s grandmother. Inside this unfamiliar house, he knew, he’d find a gaggle of women and, he hoped, his grandkids, too. This new home, still bare of mementos or memories, had been teeming with women almost since they’d first pushed the key into the lock.

They were all planning a wedding, and it was coming down to the wire. It had taken Connor to the age of thirty-seven to find the one who really understood his worth, but he’d found her. They were getting married within a week of Hoosier and Bibi’s anniversary. The club planned to party for that whole week, a celebration of Hoosier and Bibi and Connor and Pilar: the past, the present, and the future.

Before he even got the door open, he heard feminine chatter and laughter, and he grinned. This was worth it. This was good change, the future looking long and straight and bright.

His road had never been straight. Every twist, every turn had been a challenge, and every challenge had been more demanding than the one before it. But he had never backed down. He’d stood up and dared life to break him.

So far, it had not. Hard as it had tried, he was still standing. He’d chased what he wanted, and he’d fought for it. And he’d achieved it.

There was life yet to be lived. Family to love. Joy to be had. If it came with sorrows and struggles, so be it. Sorrow was what made joy taste sweet.

The kids were watching a movie in the living room, and he went by them unseen. The women didn’t notice him, either, as he came into the kitchen, where they were all sitting around the new oak table, yakking in the way only women could. They were looking at photos of flowers. He went straight to Bibi and lifted her right off her chair.

“Hooj! What—?”

He didn’t need to speak to answer her. Grinning, there in front of the women closest to him, women who made him and his brothers strong, he bent his wife over his arm and kissed the shit out of her.

The room was silent around them. When he finally pulled back, Bibi was flushed and breathless. Speechless, too. “Hooj? I…I…You…”

She sounded like him. But he knew what to say. “Love you better, baby.”

THE END