My head began to ache, but I was too enthralled to leave the table, so I just laid my head down on my arms and let their voices wash over me. After a while, I found myself in that place between wakefulness and sleep where I could hear everything going on but I wasn’t quite conscious. I felt the table move a little under me, and seconds later I felt Gram’s gnarled hands sifting through my hair.

“She’s had a rough night. There anything I need to know about?” she asked quietly.

“No. She should be fine after a couple hours of sleep.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t act like nothing happened. I’ve buried two sons. I’ve watched three of my children go off the deep end, and I’ve stitched their wounds myself after bar fights and car accidents. My granddaughter walked in here looking shell shocked and scared and I want to know what happened,” she told him shortly, her voice leaving no room for argument.

“Far as I could tell, she went to a party with a friend and got left there. Not sure what happened to the friend, but she was alone when I saw her. Looked like she’d been drugged—not sure with what. She passed out, but woke up about two hours after I’d gotten her out of the house,” he replied, sighing loudly at the end.

“You were at the party? Why’d you need to take her out of there? Why didn’t you take her to a hospital?”

“I wasn’t at the party. I had… business with one of the men there. She looked like she could use the help, so I took her with me.”

There was a long pause before Gram spoke, like she was sifting through his words in order to decide whether to believe him or not.

“She… they didn’t?” she whispered, her fingers tightening slightly in my hair.

“No ma’am. She was downstairs and fully dressed when I found her. Even had her purse draped across her chest.”

I heard a small gasp above me, almost a sob, as Gram’s hand came down heavy on my shoulder. My head was beginning to lose that dreamlike quality that I’d been enjoying and I started to move, but I froze when I heard the way Gram’s breathing grew ragged before she brought it under control.

“Thank you,” she told him strongly, her voice once again at a normal level. “You’ll always have a place at my table. You’re in town, I expect you to come see me, you hear?”

When Asa rose from the table, his chair scraping across the linoleum, I raised my head to watch him with bleary eyes. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stay awake, but I didn’t want to miss saying goodbye to him. Gram started bustling around the kitchen again. It was the way she coped with too much emotion, but I knew she was also trying to give us some semblance of privacy though she wasn’t ready to let me out of her sight.

“Thanks for bringing me home,” I rasped at him, my voice scratchy with sleep as I stood up from my seat. Once I was standing, the world tilted a little, so I braced the flat of my hand on the tabletop to get my balance. It didn’t seem to help, though, and I was swaying like a drunken sailor when Asa called out to Gram and reached for me, lifting me up like a baby into his arms.

He carried me in and laid me in Gram’s bed, kissing my forehead gently before walking out. I waited, listening to the sound of his motorcycle start up and drive away. The last thing I was aware of was Gram climbing into bed behind me and wrapping her arms tightly around my waist.

Chapter 5

Grease

I’d had an entirely fucked up night.

I was in California trying to hash out a distribution disagreement that my club was having with a gang in San Diego. I hadn’t been a member of the Aces Motorcycle Club for that long—only a couple of years—but my pop had been a member my entire life, and that gave me a little more clout than the other brothers who had gotten their cuts around the same time as me. I was happy to do what I could, but the whole fiasco had irritated the fuck out of me since I rolled into San Diego three days before.

The men I’d met up with were big fish in a small pond and they’d been pissed from the very beginning that Slider, my President, hadn’t at least sent the VP to deal with them. The entire thing had turned into a goddamn pissing match that they had no chance of winning, but that hadn’t stopped them from trying to piss the farthest and the longest. It was a fucking joke. The Aces controlled the gun trade over pretty much the entire western coast of the United States, and these jokers covered about a quarter of San Diego county. Comparing the two wasn’t even like comparing apples and oranges—it was more like apples and fucking maize.

Fuck, I have absolutely no problem with Mexicans. I don’t. I’ve met a lot of different Hispanic people that I liked a fuck of a lot. My half-brother is even a part of the Jimenez gang, which is part of the reason Slider sent me down there in the first place. Dear old Dad spent some time in California about twenty years ago, and when he came back he left a pretty little Mexican girl brokenhearted and knocked up. He took care of her until he died, and he took me down to see my brother Deke whenever he had the chance. We didn’t grow up close, but he was my brother—it was as simple as that. I had his back and he had mine.

So when we started having some payment issues with the Jimenez gang, Slider thought it would ease some minds if I went down to collect the payment. It wouldn’t look like we were trying to strong-arm them, even if that was our intention. It was a friendly reminder from the brother of one of their members; a warning to get us what we wanted.

Everything had gone down relatively well if I didn’t count the president of the gang beating his chest and trying to exert his dominance whenever I was in the room. The man was like five-seven and had to weigh less than a buck-sixty. I could’ve snapped him in two, but instead, I was fucking diplomatic and did my job. I wasn’t going to get pulled into some bullshit fight when my entire club was a good eighteen-hour ride away.