Jack (The Kings of Mayhem MC TENNESSEE series, book 1) Read online

  Jack

  Kings of Mayhem MC

  Tennessee Chapter Book 1

  Penny Dee

  Copyright 2021 Penny Dee

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real events, real people, and real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, organizations or places is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved. This book is intended for the purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author. All songs, song titles, and lyrics contained in this book are the property of the respective songwriters and copyright holders.

  Disclaimer: The material in this book contains graphic language and sexual content and is intended for mature audiences ages 18 and older.

  Editing by Kaylene at Swish Design & Editing

  Proofreading by Nicki at Swish Design & Editing

  Book design by Swish Design & Editing

  Cover design by Marisa at Cover Me Darling

  Cover Image Copyright 2021

  All Rights Reserved

  What doesn’t kill me had better start running…

  Life as I knew it ended with a bullet.

  It stole my brother from me and destroyed my family.

  From the ashes, I rose stronger and meaner, to exact the kind of revenge best served bloody and cold.

  I took out every single person I held responsible.

  Except one.

  He’s a phantom, but his days are numbered.

  Because I won’t stop until I’m done.

  Then she shows up.

  The forbidden fruit.

  A light to my darkness.

  I should resist her because what I touch, I destroy.

  And my feisty wildflower deserves more.

  More than this.

  More than me.

  But there is a monster lurking in the shadows.

  A psychopath.

  Watching her.

  Watching us.

  His threats torment her.

  And they make my black heart burn.

  But he should know,

  you don’t ever mess with me or the people I love.

  JACK is book one in the Kings of Mayhem MC Tennessee Chapter.

  For Jason,

  For holding my hand through the good times,

  And holding me up through the bad.

  Earl Dillinger & Petal Hyde

  Jack Dillinger

  Petal Hyde & Unknown

  Cooper Hyde

  Earl Dillinger & Maggie Littlemore

  Faith Dillinger

  Jack Dillinger & Rosanna Paton

  Bam

  Loki

  Hope

  Kings of Mayhem MC

  Tennessee Chapter Members

  Jack (President)

  Shooter (VP)

  Ares (Sergeant at Arms or SAA)

  Banks (Treasurer)

  Doc (Medic)

  Bam

  Loki

  Paw

  Dakota Joe

  Ghoul

  Earl

  Boomer

  Venom

  Wyatt

  Gambit

  Merrick

  Munster

  Gabe

  Alchemy (Looks after the Still, the club’s legit business)

  Prospect one

  Prospect two

  Dolly (Clubhouse Bar Manager)

  TJ (Tends bar)

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Path of Family

  Tennessee Chapter

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Connect With Me Online

  About the Author

  JACK

  Five Years Ago

  Everything changed the day before Thanksgiving.

  It started the moment my brother surprised me by coming home from college for the holiday.

  I was in the clubhouse with my Kings of Mayhem brothers playing pool and talking shit when he walked in, his duffle bag over his shoulder, his clean-cut face and short back and sides out of place in amongst the beards and long hair.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” I said, walking over and pulling him into a warm embrace.

  Cooper was more of a son than a brother. We shared the same mother, a mountain girl by the name of Petal, who got swept away by the desolate tides of poverty and addiction and drowned in the bottom of a whiskey bottle by the time she was thirty-three.

  I was just eighteen years old and a father to two-year-old twin boys when she dropped Cooper on my doorstep and told me she didn’t want him anymore. He was just three years old and severely undernourished, a sweet kid in dirty clothes and no shoes.

  Thirteen years earlier, she had abandoned me to my father the same way when I was only five years old. But this time, she didn’t know who the father was, and if I didn’t take him, the foster system would have to. And I wasn’t going to let any of my kin end up there.

  He was lucky.

  He was too young to remember her.

  Unfortunately, I could.

  Despite the strain on our already threadbare wallet, my wife, Rosanna, and I made it work. Our little house busted at the seams with children and bills, especially after the arrival of our daughter, Hope. Suppertime was raucous, and mornings were a nightmare with four kids to send off to school, but it was a happy household full of love and laughter, and the kind of warmth that made you feel secure and loved.

  Seeing him home for the holidays was like a breath of fucking fresh air.

  “You came here before stopping home to Rosanna? Boy, you got some kind of death wish? You know she’s going to sing like a banshee about that ‘til your ears bleed.”

  “The clubhouse was on the way.” He shrugged, and I pulled him in for another embrace.

&
nbsp; “It’s good to see you, buddy.”

  We sat at one of the booths near the jukebox. Across the room, a dancer from our strip club, Candy Town, was working on her dance routine to Metallica’s “Sad But True,” twirling her lithe, muscular body around the pole using moves created solely to drive a man to sin. From the bar, two of my Kings of Mayhem brothers, Ghoul and Dakota Joe, watched on, impressed.

  Cooper looked around the club as he sat.

  He was a good-looking kid. At nineteen, he was a respectable six foot with a strong muscular body born from years of football training. We shared the same navy-blue eyes and slight cleft in a strong chin. But that was where the similarities ended. My hair was a nut-brown mess hanging past my shoulders while his was bright blond and shiny clean.

  The girl twirling on the pole had her eyes fixed on him, but he didn’t pay her any mind. He didn’t pay any girl any attention.

  “So how long you in town?”

  “Just for the weekend. Thought I could hang out for a bit. Go fishing with the twins.”

  “Everything okay?” Despite his smile, he seemed to be wrestling with something.

  “Does something have to be wrong for me to come home for the holidays?”

  “No. But I know you, kid. Guess it has something to do with that whole raising you from three years old thing.” I cocked an eyebrow at him. “If you need someone to talk to, I’ve got a set of ears.”

  His smile faded.

  Yep.

  He had something on his mind.

  But he changed the subject.

  “Clubhouse is looking good,” he said, looking around the bar.

  Our clubhouse was an abandoned hotel on the outskirts of town. Back in the 1920s, it was where the rich and social elite came to stay on the river. But when the economy collapsed and Flintlock lost its shine, the guests stopped visiting, and the resort fell into decline.

  The old building was still rundown in places, but we’d managed to repair and repaint it over the years without destroying its days-gone-by charm.

  It was the perfect mix of old and new. And with more than twenty luxury rooms, as they once advertised in the newspapers, we had plenty of space to accommodate our growing club.

  Not that we all lived onsite.

  The clubhouse was for my single brothers.

  It definitely wasn’t the place to raise a family and keep an old lady.

  The two club girls making out on Ghoul’s lap were a testament to the kind of debauchery that could take place here.

  Rosanna and I still had our little home a few miles away, but if club business kept me late, or I had too much moonshine to get home safe, I had my own room.

  “You bring Bronte with you?” I asked Cooper.

  Bronte was his best friend. Until she’d gone away to college the year before, she used to live next door to us. She and Cooper had grown up together and were inseparable from the moment they’d met. They were like two peas in a pod, always running around the backyard together, catching crawdads in the pond, and escaping into their own creative world beneath the house where they’d built a tepee out of worn blankets and bedsheets.

  Rosanna and I always thought their friendship would someday turn into something more, but it hadn’t. He loved her like a sister, nothing more.

  “No, she met a guy and went home with him for the holidays.”

  “Is he a good guy?” I asked because Bronte was family.

  “Seems to be. Won’t last, though.”

  “Yeah? Why do you say that?”

  He gave me a sheepish smile. “You know, Bronte… always looking for the next adventure.”

  “She’s young.”

  “And slightly crazy.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “Only slightly?”

  He smiled. “She’ll settle down one day. Find some handsome doctor somewhere and make a hundred slightly crazy kids. But for now, she’s happy.”

  Life with a doctor? I doubted it. Bronte was a free spirit. No man was going to tame her wanderlust. Life in the ‘burbs wasn’t ever going to satisfy her wild heart.

  I looked at the woven bracelet on Cooper’s wrist. Bronte had made it for him before she’d left for college. Eighteen months older than him, she had left when he was a senior in high school. She’d made them matching bracelets to remind him of their bond, and he never took it off.

  “What about you?” I surprised myself with the seriousness of my tone. “Are you happy? Anyone special you want to tell your older brother about?”

  An awkwardness fell between us.

  Cooper never talked about girlfriends.

  He shifted uncomfortably, and I noticed his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed thickly. “No.”

  I saw a chance to bring up something that had been on my mind for some time and took it. “Cooper, if there’s something you want to tell me…” My knowing gaze found the dark blue of his. “You know… I just want you to be happy.”

  He paused, and I saw the fight in his eyes as he wrestled with something. Like he wanted to tell me something but was struggling with it. It was a look I’d seen on his face many times before.

  But the moment passed, and he cleared his throat, shifting in his seat. Cooper looked at the watch on his wrist. “Hell, is that the time. You’re right. I’d better get home before the MC grapevine reaches Rosanna, and she finds out I came here before seeing her.” He stood. “You going to be long?”

  “A couple of hours. Give Rosanna some time to fuss over you without me getting in the way.” He grimaced, and I winked at him. Rosanna was going to be thrilled he’d made it home for the holiday. There was always room for one more around our table, no matter how tight things were.

  I walked him out of the clubhouse, across the parking lot, and through the high gates that protected the compound from the outside world. It was cold, and the air swirled with frost.

  Damn, it was good to have him home.

  “I’ll see you at the house later.”

  I grabbed him by the nape of his neck and pulled him in for an embrace, wrapping my arms around his body. I didn’t see my brother nearly enough, so I held him a little longer.

  That was the moment the van rounded the corner.

  That was the moment—while I was hugging my brother goodbye—a piece-of-shit thug rolled down the window of his van, took aim at us, and fired. Gunfire snapped in the air, short little bursts of sound, barking into the cold night. There was no time to react, and it was all over in a matter of seconds. With a squeal of wheels, the van sped off.

  Time seemed to stop.

  The world became a vacuum.

  Cooper went limp in my arms and pulled me to the pavement with him as he fell. His eyes half-open, half-shut, his mouth slack, his lips parted. The death stare. I’d seen it more times than I cared to remember. I grabbed him by the collar and yanked him to me, terror tearing up my spine.

  No, no, no, no, no.

  This wasn’t possible.

  My brain seemed to tilt on its axis.

  Not my brother.

  “Coop!” His body was heavy as he slumped forward, his face falling against my chest. “Coop!” Panicked and desperate, I put his face in my hands and begged him to wake. “Brother… please… please… don’t do this.”

  I knew he was gone.

  But a part of me refused to accept it.

  He was so young. His life was just starting.

  Suddenly, it was chaos around us as my brothers ran out from inside the clubhouse. There was yelling, so much yelling, and I was only vaguely aware of what they were saying. The world slowed down, and everything passed me by as if it was happening to someone else.

  In a matter of seconds, everything had changed.

  Someone tugged on my shoulder while someone else tried to pull Cooper from my arms, but I wouldn’t let go of him. I clung to him as if I was somehow keeping him safe. But it was too late for that. I had already failed him.

  Seconds passed, maybe minutes. More people came, and the sound of a
n approaching ambulance wailed in the distance.

  The world sped up again as reality hit me in the face, and my body began its own fight for life. My shirt stuck to me, sticky and cold, and I realized I’d been shot. Blood spilled from the bullet wound in my chest, and I could feel my life draining from my body. But I felt no pain. I was numb. So fucking numb. I clutched my brother’s lifeless body to me, not wanting to let him go.

  Shooter, my best friend, dropped to his knees beside me. “You gotta let him go, brother. We need to get you some help.”

  Not wanting to hear it, I pushed him away and began to scream with broken-hearted agony.

  But it was only a matter of time before I finally succumbed to my wounds, and my world faded to black.

  One Week Later

  It was raining. Fat raindrops beat against the top of the coffin as I watched with dead eyes while they hit the gleaming shell and exploded like glass. Rain poured down my face in icy rivulets and dripped from my parted lips. I was barely breathing. I was barely existing. One day out of the hospital and here I was, burying my kid brother—the kid I was supposed to protect.

  The man who murdered him also shot me in the chest. I was lucky, they said. It could’ve done more damage. Things could be so much worse.

  But I felt nothing.

  No pain.

  No discomfort.

  No gratitude for being alive.

  Because I was fucking dead inside.

  Beside me, Rosanna was barely holding it together beneath her umbrella. She was wearing sunglasses, despite the rain, and her tears dragged down her cheeks, and her chin quaked with heartbreak. Next to her, our thirteen-year-old daughter, Hope, sat between our twin sons, Bam and Loki. They held her hands, their faces stiff, their determination to be strong for their sister apparent as they vigilantly fought their own tears.

  Behind them, Cooper’s best friend, Bronte, sat as still as a statue while tears plowed down her young face, the crown of wildflowers in her hair sagging beneath the weight of the rain.

  The graveside was full of family and friends and my Kings of Mayhem brothers, the rain not deterring a single one of them. Umbrellas dotted the gloomy afternoon in splashes of color. Grown men with stiff faces and sunglasses stood beneath the downpour.