Devil's Own (The Devil's Keepers #3)
Author: Megan Crane
Chapter 1
The last time Ryan "Chaser" Frey had been inside a high school was way back in the hectic blur of his mostly drunken senior year in Georgia, sometime before his last and final suspension, which his aggrieved principal had agreed to call an early graduation as long as he never, ever came back.
He'd been a little rambunctious back in the day. Back before the Marines kicked his ass and the desert nearly killed him. Twice. Back when he was young and foolish and hadn't yet figured out that quiet, deadly competence was far more intimidating than a whole lot of noise and bullshit.
Chaser was a lot scarier these days, something he prided himself on and utilized daily in his role as an enforcer for his beloved Devil's Keepers Motorcycle Club, and yet here he was anyway. Prowling through the overly shiny corridors of a sad, stuffy high school in Lagrange, Louisiana, on a blisteringly hot fall evening when he'd much rather be halfway into a bottle of whiskey with a stripper on his dick.
But his kid's fucking teacher would not stop calling him.
And Chaser was nothing if not a dedicated and dutiful parent to his surly sixteen-year-old daughter, the lovely pain in the ass Kaylee, who had clearly inherited the Frey family's genetic disposition toward fucking up her own life as much as possible, whenever possible. If what the obnoxiously chipper and relentless woman had said in all seven of the messages she'd left him over the past twenty-four hours was true and Kaylee was following in her old man's footsteps-showing up at school wasted and belligerent-Chaser would deal with it.
Just as soon as he dealt with the do-gooder teacher who was up on his jock like a low-rent stripper looking for a big ass tip.
Chaser didn't like being told what to do, in general, unless he respected the person giving the orders. He didn't much like asshole teachers, and he liked even less being called into a parent-teacher meeting like he was a member of the PTA instead of the PTA's worst nightmare. More than that, Chaser was tired. It had been a long, hot summer full of the club's usual business and some serious extra bullshit besides, and he'd capped it off by spending the last two weeks up in the club's North Dakota mother charter. And Chaser certainly felt more than a little reverence for the birthplace of his club, which was also the first place he'd lived as a full patch brother after prospecting there for a year. But the truth was that the original Devil's Keepers clubhouse was way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere, twenty miles south of anything resembling a town and a good two hours north of the biker mecca of Sturgis in South Dakota. Way out in ranch country, in other words, where there was nothing to do but choke on club politics and wait for winter to come kick your ass when summer was done punching you in the balls.
Chaser had bounced around a few other club charters as the traveling eyes and ears of North Dakota's president for a time before he'd settled in Lagrange, where the serious DKMC business went down, thanks to the town's prime location in the middle of a cartel corridor from the south straight on through to points north. But he was always called back up there every summer to reacquaint himself. And choke a little while he was at it.
Chaser didn't particularly like choking on anything, whether it was memories or club drama, something he'd had ample time to chew over on his long-ass ride home. He'd rolled into Lagrange all of twenty minutes ago, after the solid twenty-four-hour ride down into southern Louisiana from North Dakota, which he'd done with only a few extra hours for sleep here and there. He was cranky, to put it mildly.
Luther, president of the mother charter and therefore the national president of the DKMC, and everyone else in North Dakota had wanted him to explain how the Lagrange president's son, the much disliked but still fully patched-in brother Whale, had disappeared without a trace. He'd last been seen heading out of the clubhouse on one of his increasingly frequent and questionable secretive missions, but he'd never returned. The general assumption was that he'd finally proved himself to be the punk bitch the whole club had known he was from the start. Because only a punk bitch would run away from the DKMC, and Whale had shown signs of heading in that direction ever since he got a pity vote into the club on account of his father. His disappearance just proved it, the brothers muttered to each other.
But Chaser knew the truth. He'd watched his brother Uptown take Whale out when Whale was about to hurt Uptown's woman, and Chaser was prepared to defend it as a righteous, necessary shoot. But he didn't like it. Brothers killing brothers meant war. There was no way around that. Which was why he and the other brothers who had been there that night were doing the right thing in keeping the particulars to themselves. But Chaser hated it.