Walk Through Fire (Chaos, #4)(12)

But the tents were bigger, more expensive.

And there was not one but three tricked out RVs parked facing the campfire and two deluxe travel trailers set up as well.

When I knew Chaos, they did well and this well didn’t entirely come from their custom car and bike garage and the automotive supply shop they ran but other not-as-legal enterprises.

Clearly, things had gotten even better and I knew part of that was Ride becoming outlandishly successful, something you couldn’t miss even if you tried since everyone in Denver knew about it.

I just wondered if the other part also kept going.

We’d never had RVs.

Or, I should say, they never had.

I was no longer someone who could refer to Chaos as “we” and they were sticklers about that kind of thing, so I knew I shouldn’t even think that way.

I stayed removed and watching, seeing brothers I knew. Even though they’d aged, I recognized them immediately. Boz, Hound, Big Petey. There were brothers missing, including Arlo, Dog, Brick, Hop, Black, Chew, Crank, and, most surprisingly, Tack, who was one of the more intense members of Chaos, but he seemed more Chaos than the average brother and considering they were all in—blood, guts, and glory—that was saying something.

Logan had been wary of Tack, telling me when I’d asked, “Good man, good brother. But Tack’s got ideas and the way shit is, my best bet is to lay low, see if he decides to play ’em out, and if he does, how.”

Logan had not shared these “ideas” with me. That was brother business and he’d gently but definitely, firmly shared that brother business was not my business.

I was okay with that. My man was far from stupid and I knew the brothers that made up the brotherhood by then, so I knew why he was in it.

And I trusted him.

The last was the bottom line, really.

In the end, I’d needed a lot of trust.

But it had never wavered.

Not once.

Though, he didn’t know that because I didn’t share that.

I’d shared the opposite.

I set those thoughts aside and studied the rest of the Chaos crew. There were more than a few younger guys I didn’t know, some of them with women I also (obviously) didn’t know.

This shouldn’t have been surprising, even though it was. The Club recruited and did it regularly. When I was with Logan, they were looking into opening another auto supply shop in Fort Collins and only brothers were involved in that (or anything to do with Chaos).

However, the sheer number of new, younger men shocked me. They outnumbered the members I knew and that made Chaos—something that was so familiar to me, once a part of my life with me being a part of their family—unfamiliar and that caused a pang of hurt I knew was not my right to feel.

Though, one of the girls I suspected I knew except when I knew her she was a whole lot younger.

Tabitha Allen. Tack’s daughter.

Like she had back then, she looked just like her dad, except female. She was just as beautiful as he had been handsome. And she was clearly with one of the brothers, a tall, lanky, good-looking one who was also very with her.

But no Tack.

And no Logan.

This meant I had to go in search of him.

This was a daunting prospect. The rally had grown over the years. It appeared triple the size it used to be. And I knew by some of the flags flying or pinned to the sides of RVs that the clubs there were not just from around Colorado but from other states as well.

Wild Bill was likely raking it in.

But I had all weekend. Wild Bill opened it up for setup Thursday at noon with the rally officially beginning with a concert on Friday evening.

It was now Friday night, nearly ten o’clock, when all the brothers should have arrived and started kicking back and letting loose.

However, watching them around the campfire, although there were beer bottles, smoking of two kinds, whisky being passed around, this was not the Chaos letting loose I’d been used to way back when.

Chiefly, there wasn’t a single outsider approaching them to buy weed.

On this thought, I moved away knowing from the prime location of their camp that they’d either sent a recruit in the early hours Thursday morning to camp out on the road and then move in to stake claim to their space or the recruit had actually camped out by the side of the road Wednesday night to do it.

And their spot was prime. They were far enough away from the music they could hear it but it didn’t drown out conversation and you could bed down and it not bother you much, or perhaps in those RVs it was drowned out completely. Also, they were on the other side from Wild Bill’s kitchen tent (which I’d noted when driving in was now four big tents), so the smells of cooking—no matter how good they were, they were also constant—didn’t permeate the air.

However, the Chaos camp wasn’t too far you couldn’t wander to what was known as the Trench.

The Trench was the area in the middle of the activity close to the stage where you went only if you didn’t know better, were too drunk to care, you were so badass you could handle whatever was thrown at you, or you had your man with you who was so badass he could take care of whatever was thrown at you.

I’d loved being in the Trench. It was heaving. It was out of control. It was loud and crazy. And to be in it, you had to let go, give in to the flow or you’d panic and be lost because you didn’t get out until the ripples of the Trench naturally spewed you out.