I moved to stand behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re not giving anything away. And they’re not taking anything from us that we don’t want to give.”
Two years ago, Hawke’s wife had left him for a Knight. She’d been sneaking around behind his back before clearing out their apartment and moving in with her new biker boyfriend. In Hawke, the betrayal still ran deep.
He looked at me and then around the table. Then slowly he nodded.
“Aye,” he finally said and the other Kings banged their hands on the table in approval. It would’ve been hard for him to give his approval, and we all knew it. “Now can we dry some of this fucker out and get to smoking it?”
Three days later, the deal with the Knights was in place. We would cultivate and supply the marijuana for a tidy sum. And they would create extra security to ensure no more heroin or other chemicals made it into our town.
Our deal wouldn’t end drugs in Destiny.
But supplying weed was the lesser of two evils.
“Nicely played, Caleb,” Bull said, cupping my shoulder and patting my back as we left the deserted cinema where we’d made the deal. It was located on neutral territory and was the perfect location, out of town with no one around. “You just made the club rich, and I’m pretty sure when Sybil calls you her favorite grandson, from now on she might just mean it.”
CALEB
It took me a month to set up the weed fields.
Bull put me in charge—with Grandma Sybil’s help, of course.
It was four weeks of organizing land clearing, procuring reliable staff, sourcing equipment and labor for the construction of a lab, and cutting a deal with our friendly, albeit corrupt, sheriff.
We were using almost four-and-a-half acres of land the Kings had purchased out by the watermelon fields. Back in the sixties and seventies it had been a canning factory, now the old warehouse was a massive hydroponics lab.
With everything in place, I was able to take a step back. Setting up the weed fields had been an interesting and rewarding project, but tattoo artistry was my real passion. I was pleased to hand over the cannabis production to our newly employed project manager and get back to what I enjoyed more.
It also meant I could spend more time with Honey. It felt like weeks since I’d spent any time with her. She was just over five months pregnant now, although in some dresses she wore you could hardly tell she had a baby bump. She was still insisting we kept things platonic, while I still prayed she’d wake up from that madness and want more someday. I won’t lie. It’d been weeks since I’d had sex, and my balls were aching for it. So when I saw her and she looked all glowing and beautiful, and when she smelled so good and felt so soft, it was like my balls were in a vise. My left hand was getting boring. My right hand had retired from overuse.
Now I was back at work in the studio, and things were getting back to normal.
Today was my first day back, and I was completely booked. Once people heard I was back, Pandora said the bookings kept coming.
This morning had been all about simple designs that required very little expertise. Now I was working on something a little more fun. The tattoo was intricate. An elaborately detailed crown that tested both my creativity and my dexterity. But I pulled it off, just like I always did, with absolute fucking skill. I’d been a tattoo artist for almost ten years and there wasn’t a lot I couldn’t do. Give me a picture of what you wanted and I could create a masterpiece.
This beauty belonged to Maverick. It was a skull wearing a crown, and beneath it were the words I wasn’t given my kingdom, I took it.
I was just wiping it off when Pandora walked in, dressed in a tight rubber dress and looking more like a dominatrix than the office manager of a tattoo shop. The dress was new with a neckline cut so low you could almost see her nipples.
“You almost done, Caleb?” she asked. “You have a visitor.”
“Who?” I asked as I dressed Maverick’s tattoo.
“Brandi.”
Both Maverick and I looked up at the mention of Brandi’s name, and Maverick raised his eyebrows because he knew the trouble that might walk through that door.
When my ex-girlfriend and I broke up a few months earlier, she didn’t handle it very well. Actually, that’s an understatement. She didn’t handle it at all. There were a lot of tears and meltdowns and tantrums, with middle-of-the-night phone calls that swung between tearful and sad to angry and accusatory. One night she turned up at the clubhouse naked beneath her coat and cornered me in my room, begging me to fuck her. When I turned her down, her meltdown was epic. She slapped my face, kicked over my bike, and told me my cock was too big.