Phantom: An Alpha Male MC Biker Romance (Steel Knights Motorcycle Club Romance Book 1)

by Ivy Black

  The rumble of our idling bikes filled the air for a few brief seconds until we powered down, leaving us in a deafening silence.

  “It’s weird isn’t it?” Avery said. “Just four officers. I’m not paranoid like Nick, but even I know this isn’t good.”

  A few different thoughts crossed my brain, but I opted to keep them to myself. After everything I’d been through with the former Vice President and Nick’s daughter, Tess, and our brief, President-forced Secretary, Colin, my feelings on their sudden absconding together were complicated, to say the least.

  “How many spots does it leave open?” Avery asked.

  “Three, including Grim’s spot. We’re out a VP, a Sergeant, and a Secretary.”

  Avery sputtered out a chuckle as he climbed off his bike. “I didn’t even know Secretary was a position.”

  “Quite a useful one,” I said as I unmounted my bike and tucked my helmet away in the back compartment. “Though I can admit, it wasn’t until Nick suddenly nominated CJ to that spot that it even occurred to me that we didn’t have one.”

  “How come?” Avery asked.

  “That I don’t know.” With a tap on Avery’s shoulder, I started for the front door. “But I intend to ask.”

  The front door to Hoppa’s jingled as we walked through it, and as expected, only two other people were inside. It’d been a few weeks since everything had gone down with our rival gang, The Unchained Dogs, and Tess, Colin, and Taylor came to blows which ultimately ended Taylor’s life, but we’d been sort of ignoring and skirting the issue. Today was the first official meeting our President, Nick, had called since then, and I had no idea what to expect. All I knew was that it was a strange feeling not seeing Taylor, Nick’s late son, throwing me a psychotic gaze from the back corner, while I attempted to keep my own hateful glare from settling too long on his sister, Tess. Despite my thoughts about the former Vice President and Sergeant at Arms, there was no denying that their departures had left a couple of wide, deep crevices in the Steel Knights battalion, and Nick had done little to close them yet.

  “Hey, y’all,” Bernard “Bucky” LePall called over from the pool table that sat in the back-left corner of the bar. He was hunched over, aiming his stick at the white pool ball. “I’m just about done kicking Nick’s ass, then we can get started.”

  I looked to Nick, expecting a colorful jeer or counterstrike, but he looked more like a ghost sitting on a stool against the wall with a pool stick balanced between his legs. He was staring at the table, but it likely wasn’t what he was seeing. His short brown hair had, in the span of just a few weeks, started to sprout patches of gray, and though he normally kept his face shaven, he’d grown a budding goatee, which also had gray hairs poking through.

  Nodding my head in his direction, I called out, “Hey, Nick.”

  It was almost as if he didn’t hear us enter or hear Bucky address us. “Oh, hey.” He looked around the empty bar with sunken-in eyes and pursed lips. “I guess this is it, huh?”

  “For officers,” Avery said as he walked around the bar and pulled a couple of bottles of water from the small cooler that sat against the back wall. He tossed one to me before leaning over the bar and opening his own. “How ya holding up there, Nicky?”

  He shrugged. “I’m still here, ain’t I?”

  “Eight ball, corner pocket.” Bucky finally took his shot on the pool table, smacking the white pool ball, knocking it into the eight ball, which flew into the pocket he’d called. He chuckled with satisfaction. “That’s how it’s done, Squared.”

  Nick hardly seemed fazed. He set a few bills on the pool table, then hung up his stick and walked over to the bar. He sat down on one of the bar stools and I sat on one a few down from him. “Get me a whisky, Bullseye. Neat,” he said.

  Avery side-eyed me quickly, no doubt because Nick was requesting a drink, but I just shook my head, and Avery shrugged before pulling a bottle of whisky out from below the bar, along with a glass to pour it into. He filled the glass up about halfway and slid it over, but Nick didn’t drink it, rather just pulled it up to his nose and smelled it a bit, before setting the glass back down on the counter and just staring into the liquid.

  After a few seconds of silence, he took a deep breath and stood up off the stool with the glass in hand. “All right. Let’s head back.”

  No one protested as Nick walked around the bar and Avery waited for him to pass through the door to the kitchen first, before following after him. I stepped just ahead of Bucky behind the bar, but he was right on my heels, and we filed through the kitchen and followed Nick through the heavy, swinging metal door in the back of the kitchen into the warehouse in the back, in the center of which was our round meeting table. There were still several chairs situated around the table, but no one made mention of that as Nick sat in his regular chair and the rest of us situated ourselves at equal intervals around the table to not make it feel so empty.

  “First of all, gentlemen,” Nick started, “I need to apologize. Not just for these past few weeks of uncertainty, but for the way I behaved after Colin first arrived. I could try and make excuses for what happened, but the truth is, I let the fact that I’m a father overshadow the fact that I’m your President. I was nervous about things with the Unchained Dogs, yes, but I embarked on a course of action that was in direct conflict to our bylaws and dwarfed your jobs as members, simply because I liked Colin and wanted him to be close at hand.” He snickered. “I’m not gonna lie to you guys, I still fucking like him. He loves my daughter and I know he’s gonna take care of her, wherever the hell they are. I wish things had worked out differently. This all may be a different story.”

  “He was an Unchained Dog,” Bucky grunted.

  Nick nodded. “He was, but a little flip-flopping isn’t entirely unheard of in our world, though I might have trusted him less. Though maybe not, too. I don’t know. He’s a weird blind spot for me, that’s all I can say.”

  “He’s like you,” I interjected. “The last couple of months notwithstanding, you’re typically much more like him. Reserved, not super flashy, silently tough. You saw yourself in him.”

  A small smirk cracked across Nick’s face. “That was pretty insightful of you.”

  I shrugged. “I have my moments.”

  He crossed his arms. “You’re probably dead on there, Bullet. He felt like family already. Maybe that’s why. In any event, none of it is worth the way I behaved, so I apologize. As President, I have the responsibility to offer up my position. I believe any of you would have exercised better judgment than me, so if any of you would like to vie for this spot, I would respect that nomination.”

  Avery, Bucky, and I exchanged looks, and then I looked across at Nick. “Don’t be so dramatic,” I huffed. “No one is asking you to step down, just be a little more mindful next time.”

  The small smirk curved wider across his face. “Thanks, guys. I don’t want to step down, but… you know…” He shrugged. “Anyway. We’ll get through this, and I promise, I’m bylaw-bound from here on out.” The tension in the room immediately dissipated. Nick was wearing the stress of losing his kids like a brightly colored coat, but he at least seemed to be in a better place as far as the club was concerned, and that could only bode well for us. “Which brings me to our next topic of discussion. Obviously,” he motioned to the empty chairs, “we’re down a few bodies. Tess has left the VP position vacant, Colin left the Secretary position wide open, and Tay—”

  Just like that, the tension was back. We all watched as Nick rapidly deteriorated. Tears quickly welled up in the corners of his eyes, and his jaw clenched. Despite his best attempts to keep his emotions back, a couple of tears broke loose and slid down his cheeks. Apart from when he announced that Taylor had fallen to Tess, Nick hadn’t brought up his son once. Signs of stress aside, it seemed like he was holding it together well, but suddenly he was shaking and barely managing to hold himself up.

  Bucky held out his hand timidly and set it on Nick’s shoulder
. “Hey, Nicky, we know. It’s okay, man.”

  Nick wiped his eyes and then took a deep breath. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Avery said. “It was your kid.”

  Nick cleared his throat a few times. “Yeah. I know he was off his rocker a little, but—”

  “Nick,” I cut him off. “I’m not like a therapist or anything, but I don’t think it’s wrong of you to mourn your kid.”

  Nick nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.” A few more tears escaped his eyes, and he slapped his hands against his cheeks and shook his head. “Wow. Sorry. Okay. Well, you guys know. I mean you were fucking there. Point is, we have the VP, Secretary, and Sergeant at Arms positions to fill, so there’s going to be some changes internally probably. We have our member pool to pull from, but promotions from within isn’t off the table either and we do need to do some recruiting.”

  “Can I ask a question?” I asked. “The Secretary position, why didn’t we have anyone in that position before? We have careful records. I know because I’ve used them. Who was doing that?”

  After first taking a deep breath in and then out, Nick replied, “Well, we kind of did. I was breaking the rules a little bit before you guys, but this one I can’t take entirely on myself. You guys wouldn’t really let Tess do the VP stuff. None of ya.” He looked at Avery. “Well, hardly any of ya. Thanks, Bullseye.”

  “No problem, Nicky,” Avery replied.

  “Most of you wouldn’t take Tess seriously. She didn’t know as much, but in order to make sure she was actually doing stuff here, I gave her the Secretary duties as well. She was the one keeping all of our records. Actually, she went off and documented us to the best of her ability, all the way back to when my grandpa established us.”

  Bucky let out a hollow whistle and my jaw dropped as well. “That must have taken forever.”

  “Yeah, she worked on it for a year or more,” Nick said.

  Knowing how many times I’d referred to our club history for spending habits and audits, that realization was bittersweet. Tess and I didn’t really… get along. It wasn’t so much anything she’d done personally, but more my personal distrust for women. My experiences drove my feelings, but they hadn’t steered me wrong yet, so the guilt I’d slowly been developing regarding Tess was disconcerting, to say the least.

  “Well, hopefully, we’ll get a chance to thank her someday,” Avery said.

  Nick nodded. “Yeah. Hopefully.” He cleared his throat again and continued. “Anyway. I’m working on a plan right now. Got a few things in mind, but I really want to bang it out solidly before I present it, so have a little patience with me. I hope to have things chiseled out soon. If any of you have any thoughts though, please talk to me. Obviously, time is of the essence, but we’re gonna do it right this time. I do think we’re gonna have to go for open enrollment, though. The bylaws call for this, and my old man did it a lot, but it’s not my favorite method. I prefer recommendations from existing members, but shit, we lost three officers, plus Stag, the poor bastard.”

  Bucky turned his head down. “He had it coming, grabbing Tess the way he did, though. Dumb drunk couldn’t get out of his own way.”

  “He’s dead, Bucky, Jesus,” Avery hissed.

  “What?” Bucky replied. “Rest in peace and all that, but we were all smart enough not to piss Grim off that bad.”

  “He did not play games when it came to Tess,” Nick said. “I suppose, if nothing else, he looked after her, but she wasn’t really able to live her life.” He shrugged. “Truth be told, though, if Taylor hadn’t ended him, I was going to for putting his hands on my baby girl.”

  “A prospect didn’t make it through, too, right?” Avery said. “Didn’t one of them go toe-to-toe with Tess right before MiD?”

  MiD stood for Music in the Desert, the fundraiser The Steel Knights and our allied clubs hosted in the desert every year. I’d heard that one of the prospects got cut the day of, but I never knew the details.

  “Yeah, Aaron. I guess he tried to get snippy, so Tess cut him loose. Seth and Vil backed her up, so I respected her decision,” Nick explained. “That’s only happened once before.” He locked eyes with me. “Hopefully, it doesn’t go as bad as it did last time.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not worried.”

  He smiled. “Glad to hear it.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Anyway, I’m probably gonna get some posts out on social media and just see what comes walking through the door. We’ll have to vet everyone carefully, but I’m thinking we can pour a little booze into ’em and see who shows their true colors and go from there. Sound good?” Avery, Bucky and I all let out our own sounds of affirmation and then Nick finally broke out one of his typical, good ol’ Nick smiles. Everyone let out sighs of relief and then Nick clapped a hand against the table. “Well, does anyone else have anything else we need to cover?” No one responded so Nick clapped the table again, as if he was hitting it with a gavel. “All right then; meeting adjourned.”

  We all lingered for a few minutes longer, breathing in the silence of Nick’s words, but eventually, Bucky gathered himself up from the table. “Well, I’m starving. I know it’s only about eleven, but let’s go find someplace to hole up and eat.”

  Nick nodded. “I could go for that.”

  Avery and I looked at each other and then Avery nodded his head with a smile. “Yeah, we’re in.”

  Bucky and Avery led the charge out of the warehouse, while I stayed behind after noticing that Nick hadn’t moved. He was just sitting in place, smelling the glass of whisky in his hand. “You good, Squared?” I asked.

  “He liked whisky most,” Nick said, “Taylor did. Got that habit from me. Weird thing is, I haven’t brought myself to drink it since then. Keep pouring glasses and just...” He took a big sniff in and let the sentence die out. I didn’t say anything else. Loss wasn’t something I dealt with in the healthiest way, so I couldn’t really offer any sound advice. Eventually, he set the glass down on the table and looked up at me. “Hey. You ever thought about applying for a higher position?”

  Math and finances were something I’d always been good at. I went to college for it and loved being a bookkeeper. “No.”

  Nick didn’t press. He nodded his head as he stood up from the table. “Let’s go then. I’m starved.”

  We left the warehouse and made our way back into the main room of the bar, where the two newest and also youngest members of the Steel Knights had arrived and were packing up a game of pool. Seth and Vil had prospected for months before Colin showed up, and his fast track pulled them into membership a bit before they were meant to be. For those mistakes, they’d turned out to be worth their weight in gold. They were strong, not easily ruffled, and had been good additions to the club thus far. In short, I liked them.

  “Hey, Nicky,” Vil greeted, slapping hands with the man as he walked around the bar.

  Nick smiled. “There he is, Knuckles!”

  “Knuckles?” Avery asked.

  Nick slapped Vil’s shoulder. “These boys got nicknames last night,” he announced. “Vil here’s a bit of a scrapper, and a few disrespectful idiots wandered in at bar close and got a taste of his fists. I’ve never seen hands flying so fast. Called him Knuckles and it just stuck.”

  Vil smiled. “I acted fast.” He flipped over his left arm and revealed the new moniker tattooed down the inside of his forearm.

  “Whoo!” Nick said. “Look at that!”

  Bucky hooked an arm around the much more stoic Seth. “This one here, we call him ‘Dynamite’ now. He’s always off in some corner quiet as a bird, but the second those guys caused trouble—BOOM!”

  “True members now,” Avery said. “Welcome to the family.” Both Seth and Vil smiled at that. “To start, I need you young bucks to school Bullet over here.”

  I furrowed my brow. “I don’t need to be schooled on anything,” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “Can we go? I’m hungry.”

  Avery’s eyes narrowed. “Come on. You still have
a snit up your ass about that girl.” He looked at Seth. “He went out with this chick, right? Really liked her, but he hasn’t heard from her since.”

  Seth looked over at me. “Have you called?”

  My nostrils flared with frustration at the sudden intrusion into my business. “Of course I’ve called. “

  Vil raised an eyebrow. “Was she talkative leading up to when you guys went out?”

  I crossed my arms. “Yes.” Seth and Vil looked at one another and then back at me. “What?” I yelled.

  “Did you take her home?” Vil asked.

  My body burned all over instantly just thinking about it. “Yes.”

  Vil’s lip turned down at the corner. “And how long has it been since you guys spoke?”

  “The last time I talked to her was when she left my house the morning after,” I replied, “about three weeks ago.”

  Seth frowned. “Sorry, Bullet,” he said with a sigh. “It sounds like you were ghosted.”

  Bullet Preview

  Chapter Two

  Harry

  The sound of shattering glass sent my Calico cat, Chatterbox, skittering out of the kitchen, mewling as he went.

  “Sorry, Box,” I grumbled out loud, wincing at the shattered pieces of coffee mug now scattered across my kitchen counter. Very little had managed to abate my anger since Seth and Vil explained to me what it meant that I was being ghosted.

  Used and discarded? Who the fuck did I look like?

  I opened the cabinet under the sink that held a pull-out trash can and pulled it up to the countertop so I could swipe all the broken glass in. In my rage, I accidentally slammed the mug down on the countertop and destroyed it, fortunately before I had poured my morning coffee in at least. My head throbbed, thanks to the amount of liquor I drank at Hoppa’s the night before, trying to wash away my frustrations. Coffee was certainly needed if I was going to get through an entire Monday without crashing.