1
Chance
I haven’t worn a suit since my graduation a million years ago. I wouldn’t have then, but my mother made me. I think this is the same suit. The tie is choking me, the sleeves of the black jacket are too tight across my back and biceps, and I’m pretty sure I heard the inner lining rip when I exited the car.
My mother is also solely to thank that I’m attending my court date in a car and not a prison bus.
I am not thankful.
As much as everyone keeps telling me I should be.
My father, Cross, my mother all the time. Hunter. Without whose intervention, I’d probably be facing life and there’d be nothing my mother could ever do to prevent it.
I should be grateful, just like my mother’s been telling me all morning.
I’m not.
She’d still be talking about it now if I hadn’t gone back down to the sidewalk to smoke this cigarette, leaving her at the top of the courthouse stairs, standing next to the huge heavy double-sided wooden door.
She’s wearing a very smart pants suit, her red hair pulled into a tight bun at the back of her head, but the wind has caught it, loosened a few strands, making them dance around her face. Just like they do when she’s talking into the camera, in one of her interviews or a documentary on abuse victims. She usually frowns from the screen in this exact same way that she hasn’t stopped frowning at me since me and Jax did what we did.
I want more for you, Chance.Has been her favorite thing to say to me lately.Your dad does too,is another.
My father Tank is the VP of Devil’s Nightmare MC—a notorious motorcycle club that hasn’t lost much of its legendary sheen. They used to be killers for hire, mercenaries, unbeatable, undefeated, and feared by all. Now they sit back and sell guns and we all have it made. We’re just none of us anything for the Devil to have nightmares about.
I’ve been a full member since I turned eighteen.
I want more. I want the life my father describes in his stories from before he met mom, the life of hard partying and high stakes, of life and death missions, of adrenaline never stopping.
The club is what they all wanted for their retirement. It’s not enough.
It’s barely nine in the morning. I can still taste the whiskey I got wasted on last night in the back of my throat. I could easily do without this cigarette I’m smoking. But I could do without my mother’s judgy eyes and stupid questions more.
She’s been joined by my lawyer at the top of the stairs—a tall, willowy brunette with brilliant blue eyes who looks like every man’s fantasy of a perfect woman. Until she opens her mouth. Then she shows her true colors, reveals what she really is—a shark.
A shark that will get me community service for a crime that should’ve carried at least eighteen months.
That’s what Jax got.
Because he didn’t have a beautiful shark for a lawyer.
Because he’s not the VP’s son, only a foster kid who never got a break.
Because he deserved it.
And so do I.
“Let’s go, Chance,” my mother yells from the top of the stairs. “It’s time.”
I toss the cigarette on the sidewalk, crush it into dust under my boot and jog up the stairs, taking two at a time.
Best to just get this over with.
As it is, I’ll probably never live it down. Or forget.
Or be forgiven, if my mother’s stern look is anything to go by.
She wasn’t thrilled when I decided to follow in my father’s footsteps and join the MC. She was livid when I veered off the cushy path he’d laid for me by going on the solo mission with Jax, which went to shit before it even got started.