Damaged & Dangerous: The Sacred Hearts MC Book VI by A. J. Downey

stuck with a
public defender and this was absolutely not Neo’s first offense.
    So not only was the club out yet another
member, they were out most all of their drugs as well. Griz ordered Ace and
Deuce to go on a run to the supplier after shaking down just about all of the
club members for enough money to make another purchase. The Sacred Hearts
blowing up the local meth lab had hurt Griz’s operation badly and I couldn’t
help it… the thought made me smile every time.
    What didn’t make me smile was when Griz and
Pig-Pen got into it over how much of the profits from the club’s drug trade Pig
had smoked. He was officially cut off and hurting, which made him extremely
temperamental and dangerous, a level of crazy I’d never before seen. I did what
Thirteen told me to do. I stayed sharp, but staying sharp was only half the
equation where Pig-Pen was concerned. In order to deal with him you had to have
your crystal ball in perfect working order and unfortunately, I wasn’t a mind
reader. Not at all.
    The twins, Ace and Deuce, were leaving on
their run and both were intense and nervous. They were both tall and lanky,
with brightly colored mo-hawks. They always did their hair in two or more tones
and opposite each other so you could tell them apart, this time around Ace’s
mo-hawk was red toward his scalp and yellow at its spikey end while Deuce’s was
red at its ends and yellow towards his closely shaven scalp. I never understood
how anyone mixed the two up when they had their cuts on near constantly with
their name flashes prominently displayed, but I guess it was a testament to the
level of some of these biker’s intelligence that it still happened all the
time.
    “Okay we’re out of here. See you, Rac,” Deuce
said, I forced a smile and nodded.
    “Ride safe,” I told them quietly, but silently
I cursed them to death by road rash.
    Ace winked at me and I forced my smile just a
little bit more. I turned back to mopping the floor, biting my lips together,
trying to forget. Ace and Deuce were unbelievably cruel. Just unlike Pig-Pen,
they were quiet about it. Well, not exactly quiet . They just seemed to be
more selective about it, didn’t indulge in a constant trickle of small acts of
cruelty like Pig but rather saved it up and when they finally tapped it… I was
grateful I had never been on the receiving end. There had once been this girl,
Marissa, a club slut who was pretty much in to anything once you got her high
enough. She’d gotten high with the twins and they’d raped her half to death.
Cut her face up so bad that no one would ever be able to call her pretty
anymore.
    I wrung out the string mop and dropped it with
a wet splat to the floor, swiping it across the dried beer spills that had gone
tacky on the club room floor, and tried not to look at the Sacred Hearts cut
nailed to the wall above the air hockey table. Those two had had their heads
together for days, talking in murmured and low, reserved tones. Stopping cold
their conversation anytime anyone drew near. Finally, a couple of nights later,
they’d come in laughing and boasting and had presented Griz with their trophy,
which reeked of their urine.
    Pig-Pen had praised them, Griz had nodded and
quietly rewarded them with a new girl, who’d spent the rest of the night
screaming. I closed my eyes, bile rising in a stinging acid wash in my throat.
It had been Pig’s idea to nail the cut up on the wall. His idea too, to take a
can of black spray paint and add three hash marks down and to the right of it.
One for every dead Sacred Heart.
    I’d heard one of those hashtags was for an Ol’
Lady of theirs that had died when Joker, Rowdy, Snake, Danimal, Nord, and
Reefer had gone to the Sacred Hearts clubhouse, guns blazing, expecting to find
just one or two men and all of their women. I’d been frightened after I’d heard
Gordy and Pipes talking about it. Fearful that The Sacred Hearts would come
looking for an eye for an eye.
    Griz had seen the