All it really did was pour gasoline on a fire that was already burning too hot.
Tension inside the club climbed another notch after that.
Outside it too.
Because everyone knew what was coming.
War.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But it was circling us like a storm building on the horizon And you never knew what someone as crazy as Preacher would do when he was pushed too far.
I’ve stayed away from the compound as much as possible since that night. Only going back to sleep, but I didn’t get much. My dreams… nightmares all about her. So I stay away and I look for my wife.
The DA still had their claws in Four.
We finally found out direct information, that someone from the club fed them information and an “informant” magically came forward at the same time backing up what the source's evidence claimed. They moved on Four without enough cause and now the DA and his pet were scrambling to save face. But Four still had to play by the terms of his release. Which meant we had to dig into our own problems while half the county watched us.
Two missing women, traitors from within out free and a brewing MC war. And the sheriff and DA waiting for us to make one wrong move.
The tension hadn’t lifted from the club either, over a week of this feeling like one wrong move and the whole place would blow under the tension and concern.
Meg was still staying with Dani and Four, but Marisol had left andwas staying with her sister, after a confrontation that I was told did not go well between her and Axel. They haven’t spoken since.
Axel, Torch and Ledger all took turns staying close to my side while I searched for any clue as to where Bex may be. Cypher barely left the club and we all knew that was causing tension with Meg, because she refused to go back.
It didn’t take long before some of the other women packed their bags too and every one of them leaving made the tension worse.
Something is going to give. It has to.
It’s like everyone had been happily living in ignorance, towing the line of ‘clubs are different than the rest of society’. But Bex tore down our principals, what we thought was loyalty and now everyone is deciding what kind of man they want to be or what kind of man they want to be with.
Some nights I sleep like the dead, others I wake up with the image of Bex standing in the middle of that room burned into my brain. Or I hear Angel telling the entire club about the trafficking ring, the one involving young girls disappearing across county lines.
That night keeps replaying in my head in a loop, a form of punishment I deserve.
So eventually I asked Cypher about it, he leaned back in his chair and shrugged.
“Angel asked me to dig into old rumors, said he heard something that triggered the memory,” he said. “I barely had surface information.”
He told Angel to hold off on using it until he knew more, but Angel thought it might push Bex into cracking.
The truth is… None of us even knew what we were accusing her of. Just that everything seemed to circle back to her somehow.
Cypher told me he’d dig deeper into the girls who were taken, see if anything lined up with what we knew about my wife.
That night I had stopped him on his way out to Four’s, because Meg had had enough of not seeing him.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “About what?”
“Bex.”
He studied me for a moment and then nodded.
“Do… Do you think she was one of those girls?”
He didn’t answer right away, like he was weighing the merrit of the information he had. Finally he said, “Hard to tell, brother. But I can say this… her past is scrubbed.”