Claimed By My Ex Husband's Biker Uncle

Be sure

Gabriel

I shut the dressing room door on her and stood in the corridor for a second with my hand still flat on the wood.

"She belongs to the club now."

I said it to make Roxy take her seriously. It came out sounding like something else.

I took my hand off the door and walked back out onto my floor.

It's a big room. Loud. A hundred men, most of them drunk, most of them carrying, every one of them mine.

When I walk through it, it changes. Not all at once. Like wind going across a field. Men stop leaning. Voices drop half a step. Somebody turns the music down without being told.

I don't ask for that. I earned it. Every man in that room knows what it cost.

The kid who handles our phones was waiting by the bar. "Sent it, Prez. The original."

"How many views?"

"Forty thousand. Going up."

Forty thousand people who now knew her face. Five hundred thousand dollars for anyone who brought it back to him.

I did the math. Everybody in that room could do the math.

"Church," I said. "Officers. Five minutes."

Church is the room behind the steel door. A long table with a chair for every patch. A wall of dead brothers watching you from behind glass. At the head of the table, my chair, and the gavel.

Grizzly was already there. Grizzly is always already there.

Sebastian Callahan, was his real name. Nobody has called him Sebastian since his mother's funeral, and he would break the jaw of any man who tried, except me. Grizzly was quieter and slower to anger. But when he does get angry, people spend a long time in hospital.

Venom was late. Venom is always late.

Dean DeLuca. My Vice President. If I go down, this club is his.

He came through the steel door buttoning his shirt, with lipstick on his collar and a phone number written on the back of his hand in eyeliner. He was the best-looking man in this club, and he knew it. He had slept with half the girls in that dressing room, and not one of them hates him for it.

That's the most dangerous thing I know about him.

He and Griz were the same age, both younger than me. Griz acts ten years older. V acts ten years younger.

"Sorry, Prez." Venom dropped into the chair on my right. "I was in the middle of a very important conversation."

"With who?"

"Candy." He thought about it. "Or Cindy. Something sweet."

Griz didn't smile. V smiled enough for both of them.

I put my phone in the middle of the table. The video was paused on my nephew's face.

"You have seen it."

"Everybody has seen it," V said. "Half a million for his runaway wife." He whistled. "I'd sell you for less, Cerb."

"You would sell me for a blonde and a bottle of tequila."

"Two blondes. I have standards."

Grizzly didn't look at the phone. He looked at me. "She is in the dressing room," he said.

"Yes."

"Liam Alison's wife. In the dressing room of this club." Grizzly said.

"Yes."

"With a price on her head bigger than everything we made last year."

"Yes."

Griz unfolded his arms and put both hands flat on the table. "Why?" he asked.

That was the question. Every man in the building was asking it. Grizzly was the only one who would ask it to my face.

"Because she asked," I said.

"Women ask you for things every night," V said. "You say no to all of them. It's very sad to watch."

"Dean."

V shut his mouth. I only use his real name when I mean it, and he knows it.

"Here's how it goes," I said. "Nobody calls that number. Not a brother. Not a prospect. Not a girl. Not the kid who washes the glasses. Anybody who even thinks about it, I'll know by morning. They'll be gone by lunch."

V spread his hands. "Nobody is calling, Cerb."

"Half a million says somebody will."

Nobody argued with that.

"No phones on the stage side of the bar," I said. "No pictures of her. Not one. If her face ends up online from inside my house, I find the phone. Then I find the hand."

"And when the husband comes?" Griz said. "Because he will come."

"Let him."

"He will bring lawyers. Cops. Evelyn." V said my mother's name carefully. "You made a promise, brother. Twelve years ago. You sure you want to break it for a girl from the side of the road?"

"I am sure." I didn't hesitate.

"Then put it to the table," Griz said.

I picked up the gavel. "The club protects her," I said. "She dances, she earns, she lives under our roof. Anybody who sells her to the boy answers to me. Vote."

"Aye," Griz said. No pause.

V sighed like a man being asked to give up dessert. "Aye," he said. "But I want it on record that she is trouble. The good-looking ones always are."

"It's on record."

I brought the gavel down.

It's an old one, heavy, the wood gone black from forty years of hands. The sound went round the room and out under the steel door. By the time I walked out, every man on that floor would know the club had voted, even if he didn't know on what.

V got up and left fast. Griz didn't get up. He finished his coffee. Then, he stood. At the door he stopped.

They always stop at the door. It's the only place in this room where a man can say something to my back.

"Be sure, Cerb," he said. "Once she is ours, we don't give her back. Not to him. Not to Evelyn. Not to anybody."

"I know."

"Do you?"

He went out before I could answer.

That was on purpose too.

I sat alone in church for a long time.

Then I picked up the phone and played the video again.

Liam at his desk. The charcoal suit. The soft, worried voice he has been doing since he was eight years old and wanted a second dessert.

Alina disappeared earlier today.

I watched it three times before I saw it.

His hair. He had combed it forward, down over his left temple. Liam has worn his hair back off his face since he was twelve. Evelyn made him. She said a man who hides his forehead has something to hide.

He was hiding something now. Something on the left side of his head.

Somebody had hit my nephew tonight. Hard enough that he needed a comb to cover it.

I paused it on his face and looked at it for a while.

I hoped it was her.

The phone buzzed in my hand.

No name on the screen.

I had never saved that number. I had never needed to.

Twelve years that woman hadn't called me. Not when I left. Not when I buried Bear. Not when the papers put my face next to the word outlaw.

She was calling now.

I let it ring until it stopped.

Then I turned the phone face down on the table and sat there in the dark until the bar closed.