Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 64917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64917 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
The attraction was real, but the man’s intentions were anything but pure.
She was entangled in a war of men and didn’t even realize the battlefield had become her heart. Torn between the life she knew and the life she was being shown, IvaLeigh didn’t know what to believe anymore.
Gonzo had one focus: make the judge who locked his son up pay. IvaLeigh was nothing more than collateral damage … until she wasn’t.
There was something about her the outlaw couldn’t resist. Try as he might when push came to shove, the Saint’s Outlaws MC owned him and her family was on the wrong side of the war. No matter how much the young woman twisted the man up inside, the club, his family, they always came first.
Yet, IvaLeigh accepted this part of him like no one had before. Somehow in the mess their worlds had become, they began building something altogether different and completely their own.
Chapter 6
Gonzo
The first time I ever laid eyes on a coffin draped in SOMC colors was twelve years ago. I wasn’t even patched yet—still a prospect scrubbing oil off the garage floor and scraping gum from under the pool table at the clubhouse.
Back then, I thought the cut draped across polished wood looked like armor. A shield that could stop bullets. A symbol that meant you were untouchable, even in death.
But standing here now, a decade later, staring down at a coffin draped in Pop Squally’s cut laid over his earned American Flag, it didn’t look like armor anymore. It looked like a wound that would scar us all.
Pop Squally wasn’t just my president. He wasn’t just the man who sat at the head of the table and banged the gavel. He was my compass. My anchor. The son of a bitch who taught me to survive when the world was set on chewing me up.
When the wild man inside me was testing the waters of the Marines, it was Pop who sat me down and got me on the straight and narrow. When the cops shoved me face first onto the hood of my car it was Pop who showed up dragging me out of the county jail for the drunken behavior at a strip club when I was twenty-one. It was Pop who went to my court-martial hearing for getting in trouble off base when I wasn’t authorized to leave quarters. The man not only saved my career, but he honestly saved my life. And when I earned my final rocker as a Saint’s Outlaw, it was Pop Squally who sewed that patch on my cut.
And his words that day have carried me ever since. “Brotherhood ain’t blood, Gonzo. It’s bone deep. You break it, you’ll feel the pain forever.”
Now his bones were about to be in the ground separated from us forever.
The Saint’s Outlaws stood in formation around the grave. We carried him with a Marine guard escort since we weren’t using them for pallbearers. Every patch gleamed black, teal, and beige in the sunlight. Leather creaked as brothers shifted, boots heavy in the wet grass. Our bikes circled the cemetery like steel beasts, engines still warm from the ride in.
We’d thundered through Dreadnought that morning in a procession so loud windows shook and dogs barked for miles. It wasn’t just a funeral—it was a warning. This town would never forget Pop Squally’s last ride.
But for me, for us—it wasn’t just about grief. It was about rage. Because Pop didn’t die of age, or chance. He died of betrayal.
And the reason for that betrayal stood across the graveyard, dressed in a black silk dress with a veil shading her tear-streaked face.
Hampton Stanley’s wife.
As much as I wanted to choke the very life from her body and feel her last breath in my arms, it wasn’t what Pop would have wanted. She fell in love, he was in lust. They weren’t destined to be something, but she wouldn’t leave Stanley, and his pride was too much to have a whore for a wife that fucked around with a biker.
The preacher’s voice droned, but I barely heard him. The bugle piped in playing Taps before the guns fired his twenty-one gun salute. With a nod from the presentation Marine, I removed the cut from the casket, draping it over my arm. Two Marines flanked the casket at the head and foot to remove the flag. With practiced precision they fold the flag and present it to Pop’s nephew as that was his only blood family in attendance. The preacher piped back up and the ache in my chest grew tighter. His words about eternal rest and God’s plan floated like smoke, meaningless against the roar inside me. What the hell did God know about Pop Squally? About what it meant to bleed for a brother, to keep a code when the world offered you nothing but rot?