“What the fuck’s going on?” an older man in the back yelled.
“That’s what I’m about to tell you, Tom,” Larkin said, “so hold your fucking mouth.”
The boys all laughed, and Larkin looked grim.
“At a routine buy this morning, some of our boys got ambushed.”
There was a murmur in the crowd. Ford looked at me, his face grim.
“Some of you heard, some of you haven’t, but Tyson is dead.”
There was a sudden outrage. Anger spilled out.
“Tyson?” I asked Janine.
“Nice guy,” she said, looking sad.
“We know who did it,” Larkin yelled over the mass of people. He gestured at TomTom behind the bar, and TomTom handed him a piece of cloth.
Larkin held it up. It was the back of a leather jacket with a patch of a snake spitting fire.
The room exploded. Men were yelling about revenge, war, murder. Some were wondering why the hell they were even attacked to begin with.
“Who is that?” I asked Janine.
“Snake Spit. Another big club from Dallas.”
I frowned. “Why would they attack us?”
“Who knows?” she said. “Club business, probably.”
“It’s war, boys,” Larkin yelled, and then he slowly climbed down off the bar.
It was all-out chaos. Men were standing, yelling, shouting, and more and more were drinking. Ford looked at me.
“Happened this morning,” he said. “Out of nowhere, an ambush.”
“Why?” I asked him.
“Not sure. Could just be that they want to push into our territory.”
“But you think it’s something else.”
He shrugged. I looked to his right and saw Larkin coming right for our table. He gestured for me and Ford to follow him. We stood, my stomach nervous, and quickly waded through the crowd, disappearing into the back room.
Larkin sat down with a sigh behind his desk. “Dark times,” he said.
Ford grunted. We sat down.
“Listen,” Larkin said. “We’re moving up your wedding.”
I felt a spike of panic. “What?”
“Tomorrow, you two are getting hitched.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said.
“Sorry, girl, but with this shit, I want to tie up your loose end fast.”
“Okay, prez,” Ford said impassively.
I looked at him but couldn’t read him at all. Did he really want to marry me? I couldn’t imagine that he was okay with this, and yet he was going along with it. I looked back at Larkin.
“And do I get any say in this?”
He laughed. “Not at all. We’ve done shotgun weddings before, and we’ll do another if we have to.”
I frowned and looked down at my feet.
Ford, my husband, the asshole biker.
“Okay,” I said.
“Good. Now get out of here,” Larkin said.
Ford stood and I followed him out of the back room.
So much had happened in such a small space of time. The Demons MC was at war, and now I was getting married the next day.
I could barely come to grips with it all.
Chapter Eighteen: Ford
The whole damn chapter was in absolute chaos.
The boys had gotten fat, dumb, and happy. Most of them hadn’t been around for the war back in the day that had grown us from some two-bit backwater to the dominant force we had become. They didn’t know what it meant to bleed for your club.
Though many of the old-timers knew it, and knew it well, they didn’t want war because they were tired of fighting.
But they hadn’t been there. They hadn’t see Tyson get gunned down. They hadn’t seen the Snakes try to come at us. They hadn’t seen the grenade that blew them to pieces.
We spent most of the day at the clubhouse, talking with people, organizing, trying to figure out what our next move was. Larkin spent most of the morning with the council, talking strategy or whatever else they talked about.
And then there was Caralee. I kept thinking about what she had looked like in the morning when I’d gone to wake her up, that cute fucking yawn, her sexy as fuck body. I wasn’t sure she really understood what she did to me, or what she would think if she did.
And now I was marrying her. The very next day. I had hoped I had at least a week to be a fucking free man, but I had made my choice. It was happening faster than I wanted, but that didn’t mean I’d back down and leave her hanging. I was going to marry her just like I’d said I would.
Hours passed that way, and eventually I sent Caralee back to my cabin. I had to stick around a while longer and talk with the boys, especially since I was a part of the crew that had been attacked. Caralee didn’t argue for once and actually seemed a little relieved that I was sending her home.
I was sitting at the bar with Clutch, Spoil, Thade, and Rutt. Caralee had left an hour ago, and I was well into my third glass of whisky.
“Seems to me,” Rutt was saying, “that we need to hit back and hit them hard.”