Gunnar

by Aiden Bates

  “Fold,” Gunnar said gruffly, and dropped his cards face-down at the foot of the bed.

  Gunnar was taking his duty seriously, and he had remained posted in my room like a sentinel. He’d either loomed in the corner, or perched in a chair, or stood silently outside the door. But he hadn’t spoken to me directly. Not since that night. Technically we’d spent the entirety of the past three days together, but we hadn’t had a single private moment together.

  I felt like an idiot for thinking the blowjob changed anything. It must have been a fluke. Temporary insanity. He’d probably just felt bad for me and wanted to give me a little gift to make me feel better. Why had I thought that meant we’d have anything real together?

  But… He was sticking around. He could’ve had the other enforcers help keep watch. But it was only him, the whole time.

  I tried to quash these little bursts of hope whenever they appeared. What Gunnar felt for me was the same thing he felt for the other members. We were a brotherhood. It wasn’t anything more than that. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes as last time and chase after him, thinking his small gestures meant something more than they did. This was at least better than it had been since I’d gotten home from college.

  “All right, show ‘em,” Siren said.

  “Full house.” I dropped my cards face-up.

  “Ooh, almost.” Siren grinned, catlike. “Four of a kind.”

  “Every fuckin’ time,” I grumbled as Siren gathered the chips.

  “Sorry,” she said in a decidedly unapologetic tone. “Consider it revenge for all the pool games. All right, I gotta get ready for church. You’re coming?”

  I nodded. I was dreading it, but I was going.

  Siren left with a jaunty salute. Gunnar stood up to follow her.

  “Gunnar—”

  “I’ll be right outside if you need me.” Gunnar followed her out the door and closed it behind him.

  I huffed in frustration. Gunnar had been so warm and kind to me—for Gunnar, at least—as I’d recovered, making sure I always had what I needed, or that someone was with me. I’d started to see glimmers of our old relationship, and I’d started to hope that maybe we could be cordial again. Friends, even.

  But then he’d do something like this—walk out and ignore me—and leave me feeling hurt and confused about where we stood. I climbed out of bed and got dressed slowly. I still had to take care with my bruising, so I sat at the edge of the bed to pull on my boots. Gunnar’s cards from the poker game still lay face-down at my side. I flipped them over.

  Straight flush. The winning hand.

  “What an ass,” I muttered.

  Someone rapped on the door. “Hope you’re talking about yourself there, boy.”

  “Hey, Pops.”

  Pops stepped into my room and closed the door behind him. Maybe I was just imagining it, seeing things as a way to cope with my guilt, but it looked like he’d aged a lot in the past weeks. The crow’s feet around his eyes looked deeper, and I thought the silver streaks at his temples were more defined.

  And he walked with a little more heaviness to him, like it was a little bit more challenging to move under the weight of the world. Pops had spent more time at my side this week than anyone other than Gunnar—and he was the only other member of the club who hadn’t chewed me out for what I’d done.

  Pops’ lack of anger hurt worse than any of the arguments I’d gotten from the other members. He hadn’t been angry at me—he’d been afraid. And the fear I’d seen in Pops’ eyes when he first saw my wounds had sent shame coursing through me.

  So I’d told him. Everything. Last night, when Gunnar had taken a break to shower and Pops had been alone in my room with me, I’d told him about the emails, the cops, the medics, the witnesses—everything. I’d watched as the color had drained from his face.

  It was well within his rights to demand action immediately. But Pops believed in the club, and he’d called for a church meeting instead.

  “Our brothers deserve to know,” he’d said. “I won’t make any decisions without them.”

  And now he was here, ensuring that I wouldn’t be late. Did he think I’d bitch out? That I’d try to hide instead of showing up at church?

  Pops sat down on the foot of the bed next to me and sighed.

  No. Of course not. He wanted to be here with me—so we could support each other. I leaned against him, and he wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

  “How you feeling, son?”

  “Tired,” I admitted. “But better.”

  “You know this won’t be easy.”

  “I know.” I ran my hand through my hair. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I waited so long.”

  “I am, too, son,” Pops said. “I wish—I wish I understood why you thought you needed to hide this from us. From me.”

  My heart twisted at the pain in Pops’ voice. “I thought I was protecting the club. I didn’t want to sound the alarm before I knew I had something. And… I wanted to figure it out. I wanted to avenge Dad’s death myself.”

  “You have nothing to prove to the club. We’re a family, Raven. We help each other. We don’t face things like this alone.” He squeezed my shoulder hard. “Your Dad wouldn’t have wanted you to face this alone.”

  I pressed my lips together, fighting back the sob that threatened to escape.

  “When you’re hurting, or confused, or lost, that’s when you need the club most,” Pops said. “Don’t turn your back on us, okay? Because we’ll never turn our backs on you.”

  “I know, Pops.” My voice was choked. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t need you to be sorry,” Pops said kindly. “I need you to understand. You understand you scared us? You won’t do anything like this again?”

  “I won’t, Pops.” I blinked my eyes clear of the tears and met his gaze steadily. “I won’t.”

  “Good.” He pulled me into a tight hug. “Let’s go to church so you can confess your sins.”

  I didn’t have to go far. Church was held in the clubhouse kitchen, with all senior members of the Hell’s Ankhor inner circle sitting around the kitchen island with coffee mugs and frosty beers. Blade had a highball glass of bourbon in front of him and a scowl on his face. Gunnar sat to his left and Pops on his right. I sat where Blade pointed me—the seat directly across from him. The enforcers, Tex, Coop, and Siren, were all there, as well as Maverick and Logan.

  I sat with my laptop closed on the island in front of me. Blade glowered at me, irritated, like I was a petty criminal caught at the edges of the territory.

  “All right, everyone,” Blade said. “We all know why Pops called this meeting. Raven.” He fixed his gaze on me. “You’ve kept secrets from the club and engaged in a rogue investigation into enemy territory, bypassing the official channels and avoiding the required backup. Your actions risked our relationship with the local citizen law enforcement as well as endangering your own life.”

  I didn’t often hear Blade speak so sternly and formally, and when I did, it usually wasn’t directed at me. I felt exposed under his assessment, like he could see every flaw I had, every mistake I’d made. But it wasn’t unkind—it was thorough. I had to face head-on what I’d done, with all the senior members there to see it.

  “This behavior is not like you,” Blade said. “In a disciplinary hearing, I’m not typically interested in excuses or complaints. But in this case, since this behavior is so out-of-character, I want to give you a chance to explain your side of the story.”

  He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. His gaze never left my face.

  This was a test. I wanted to pass. I wanted to make Blade proud. I wanted to make Dad proud.

  “I made a mistake,” I said. A lump rose in my throat, like my grief was trying to claw its way out of my body.

  Everyone watched me intently. Even Gunnar.

  “I… haven’t been in my right mind.”

  I met Gunnar’s gaze. He narrowed his eyes and looked away.


  “I received an email.” I took a deep, steadying breath. I tried to stay professional. I fixed my gaze on the ceiling, because if I saw any of the members’ reactions, I’d break. “The night Logan was patched in. It came through an encrypted account—the security was beyond me. And I couldn’t let it go. I didn’t want to bring this issue to everyone’s attention until I had something more concrete, like the source of the email, at least. But I got in too deep. I let my personal feelings dictate my behavior, and I turned my back when I should’ve asked for help.”

  I risked a look around the table. Gunnar wouldn’t meet my eyes now. But this wasn’t about him—even though it was our fight in my bedroom that had pushed me to ride back to El Acantilado, this was all on me. I looked to my Pops, and he nodded his approval.

  I opened my laptop. I didn’t want to see that goddamned photo ever again. I’d spent so much time studying it I could nearly draw it from memory. And what had I gained from all the work and investigation?

  An ass-beating. Pops’ disappointment. And this chasm of grief, reopened.

  I turned the laptop around, revealing the email to the club with the email’s text beneath it.

  A beat.

  Then the room exploded in activity. Everyone began shouting at once, asking questions, trying to get closer to the laptop.

  “Fuck does that mean, ‘no accident’?”

  “How did they get this photo?”

  “Did they send anything else?”

  “Settle!” Blade roared, and slammed his fist hard on the kitchen island. “Settle the fuck down, everyone!”

  Everyone fell still, but the room seemed to vibrate with unasked questions.

  Blade motioned for the laptop, and through the hands of the other members it made its way toward him. He and Gunnar examined the email. Pops looked away.

  “This is what you were doing?” Blade asked. “Investigating the source of this email?”

  I nodded. I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff, just barely hanging on to my composure. And Blade was about to push me over.

  “And you didn’t bring this to the club sooner?” Blade said coolly. “Why?”

  Rage shot through me, sudden and hot like an internal flame.

  “Because it’s my fucking Dad!” I shouted. I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes and took a deep breath. “I was so angry. I wasn’t thinking long-term, I just started acting. I couldn’t even—” I had to stop to clear my throat. “If I told everyone else, that made it real. If his death was a murder… How am I supposed to live in a world where my dad’s killer walks free?”

  “You think there’s merit to this, then?” Gunnar asked.

  His gaze was soft when it landed on me. His mouth was twisted in concern.

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s more.”

  I showed them the second email and explained why I was in Viper territory. “There’s a turncoat in their ranks. Someone close to the Vipers wants me to have this information.”

  “Priest,” Blade said. “Your take?”

  Priest nodded at Blade, and then addressed the rest of the senior club members. “My son came to me with this information last night. I’ve been just as in the dark as the rest of you. I think we all know how grief clouds the mind.” Nods all around. “Raven handled this improperly. But that doesn’t mean the Vipers can get away with assaulting him.”

  “Damn fucking right,” Logan said.

  “And what Raven has dug up suggests the Vipers are involved with my old man’s death. And in this club” —he beat his fist on the patch on his club leather—“we protect our own, and we avenge our own. I say let’s go to war.”

  Blade mirrored Priest’s motion. “War it is.”

  The rest of the club shouted their agreements. The energy in the room was oddly high, a mix of anger and determination and club solidarity.

  The roar of the club, like one immense voice, relieved some of the pain I’d felt. Despite my mistakes, my family still had my back—and Dad’s back. As long as Dad was avenged, I didn’t care what punishments I had to endure.

  From across the island, Gunnar stared me down. “We better start making a plan.”

  On his face I saw an odd combination of disappointment and admiration, but I couldn’t fully read him. When I met his gaze, he nodded, and the small acknowledgement was enough to ease my fears.

  For a moment, the room seemed to move in slow motion, with Gunnar’s gaze on mine as the club rioted around us. Whatever was going on between us, I knew this much: the Vipers would pay. And for now, that could be enough.

  14

  Gunnar

  Over many more coffees and a few more beers, my enforcers and I began to hammer out a plan to deal with the Viper’s Nest.

  Raven’s confession had stunned me into silence. It’d pissed me off that he was hiding something, but I’d had no idea it was something of this magnitude. If Ankh had been murdered… That changed everything. It changed the club.

  Raven was usually so stoic and controlled. He had a guarded demeanor, and always had a snarky joke or rebuttal if things got too serious, or if someone got too close. He’d never broken down in front of the club members before, let alone in church. But when he’d tried to explain how receiving the email had affected him, he could hardly get the words out. Tears had shone in his eyes. He’d had to pause and compose himself.

  I wanted to fucking kill every last Viper in California.

  And until we had this under control, I wasn’t letting Raven out of my sight. Not again. If the Vipers got another shot at him, they wouldn’t leave the job half-finished.

  The majority of the club filtered out of the clubhouse to start preparations, leaving Blade and me alone with Raven.

  “Okay, let me explain the tracking program.” Raven had his laptop open in front of him with Blade peering over his shoulder. I stood on Raven’s other side. I wanted suddenly, crazily, to touch the back of his neck. To comfort him in some way.

  “So, I pulled the header from the email to find the IP address of the sending location—but the header was forged, so I had to crack the encryption on the email to get the actual header. The IP address was somewhere in Sweden, which is a super obvious VPN locale—that clued me in to the fact that they were using a VPN, maybe multiple, to bounce it between servers and throw me off the scent.”

  Raven opened the tracking program he’d written and walked us through it piece by piece, explaining how he’d pinged the various servers the email had bounced around, looking for a certain response. It was all completely over my head.

  This was the future of the club. Soon our territorial scuffles wouldn’t be solved by fistfights at the border or intimidation rides through enemy areas. It’d all be online. Surveillance, hacking, all this shit I didn’t fully understand. Maybe the next big issue we had with the Vipers wouldn’t be their presence in our territory, but their noses in our servers.

  The old guard like me was going out of style.

  Raven had written this insanely complicated code while in the throes of grief and anger. He’d barely been able to think straight, and he’d pulled this off? He was so smart—how could I ever hope to measure up?

  Leaning over his shoulder, the faint floral scent of his shampoo filled my senses.

  This was the kind of intimacy I didn’t deserve from Raven. I shouldn’t know the smell of his shampoo, or the way his face scrunched up when he first woke up in the morning, or the low murmur of his voice in sleep.

  The blowjob was supposed to have been just that—a blowjob. Nothing more. A brief loss of control. A blowjob didn’t have to mean anything. I’d given tons of guys blowjobs.

  None of them had been as gorgeously responsive as Raven, though, the way he’d fidgeted against the mattress, trying to stay still as I’d instructed. None of the other guys had known how much I liked nails raking across my scalp. No one tasted like Raven, felt like Raven.

  And I’d felt so fucking guilty about him getting jumped. I sho
uld’ve been there. It was my job to protect him, and I’d let him run off alone to seek out the Vipers—I’d all but pushed him into their arms.

  Then, on top of all of that, he’d started talking down on himself, like he’d deserved to be jumped.

  I’d just wanted him to know that I didn’t think of him like a dumb kid. I’d wanted to make him feel good, even if only for a moment, and show him I didn’t feel the way he thought I did.

  Words weren’t my strong suit—and neither were relationships. In the moment, I’d stupidly thought it’d be the perfect solution to boost Raven’s self-esteem a little bit, and cut the tension between us, so we could talk about this Viper problem without our own issues getting in the way. Maybe even repair our friendship a little, so that disastrous night I’d pushed him away wouldn’t be breathing down our necks.

  Of course, things couldn’t be so simple. Because instead of making it easier for me to be around Raven, now I only wanted him more. I’d finally experienced how he tasted, how he moved and gasped and sighed my name, and I wanted that again. I wanted it all the time.

  “Thanks, Raven. This is good info, even if you went about it the wrong way. Good work.” Blade squeezed Raven’s shoulder warmly, and then he straightened up and met my eyes. “I need to go talk to Logan, hash out some details.”

  Raven nodded seriously, and then Blade left the clubhouse.

  And Raven and I were alone in the kitchen.

  Raven sighed and closed his laptop with a definitive click. He turned, leaning against the kitchen island, and faced me with his arms crossed over his chest. Not a defensive position, but resigned. There wasn’t a whole lot of distance between us, and I remembered that day at Ankhor Works, when he’d let me box him up against his car.

  I cleared my throat.

  Raven met my eyes, eyebrows raised expectantly.

  “I know you know you shouldn’t have been keeping secrets like that,” I said.

  “The club didn’t exactly feel like the most welcoming environment at the time,” Raven said. “But I know. It was stupid to go all lone wolf. I knew it was stupid when I was doing it, but I just couldn’t stop myself.”