Equilibrium (Marauders #4.5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

on the other hand, had been a cuddly girl who’d hugged and touched anyone who gave her a chance, but she wasn’t anymore. She kept her distance.
    He was glad she was getting out more, though, even if it was just to the clubhouse or to her rehearsals. He’d used to barely see her before, since she was always out with friends, and even if it had annoyed him, it had been nice to see she had a life. The Eliza that had been brought back to them wasn’t the same girl as had been taken—not even close. He understood, and he was more than willing to give her time, but he missed her. He knew Eliza missed that girl, too,
    Today he’d seen the first real glimpse of her. She’d been laughing. He knew for a fucking fact that it was the first time he’d heard her laugh like that in over six months, and it had been with Roach. Not that he gave a fuck who made her laugh, it was more that she was laughing, but he realized that he didn’t know much about Roach. Or, he knew about him, but he didn’t know him.
    He decided to do something about that.
    Roach visibly tensed when Brick approached him, and after he’d put his cup down on the bar he braced himself, as if Brick was, in fact, going to rip his face off.
    “Give me a cup of that?” Brick asked when he sat down on one of the stools.
    “How do you want it?”
    “Black with two sugars.”
    Roach was on loan from New York, and as much as Brick knew they needed the manpower, he didn’t like loans or transfers. When a guy went from hang-around, to prospect, and finally a member—if he got that far—he grew into the club while he grew into a member. It gave him another connection and a place in the club in a different way. In short: he gained his role and earned his respect.
    When someone was transferred or on loan, they’d earned their respect once, and they had found their role as a member. Fitting that role into a new club was like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Sometimes it worked after the worst edges had been worn off, but most often it didn’t, and they went back to their original club. The charters in the Marauders were quite different, simply since the brotherhood in a club depended on the members, each one unique and creating an even more unique mesh of people.
    Family was important in the Greenville Marauders, and not only because a lot of them had families, but mostly because they were all close as hell. Brick even had both his sons as members. He’d known Bear, his VP, since before they’d joined, and the members who’d joined after that had to some extent joined because of what the club was like. As opposed to a lot of the other clubs, they didn’t have many ex-military men. That had proven to be a flaw when they’d ended up in the middle of a cartel war. Roach, Ahab, and Slug had been in Greenville when it happened, and along with Ahab, Roach had said he could stay behind until it was sorted. Dawg, another member and Brick’s brother-in-law, had known Ahab, who’d been in the army. Brick had initially had no fucking idea why New York had sent Roach when he asked for experienced members. At first Brick had called up to New York and asked them if they were so fucking stoned they’d sent the wrong guy. Roach was just a few weeks short of twenty-two, and Brick had a hard time seeing how the hell that made him experienced in anything but jerking off.
    ‘He’s a street kid,’ had been the answer. Roach was short for cockroach, because he tended to always survive. He’d grown up on the streets of New York, so even if he hadn’t actually been in a war, he had an uncanny survival instinct, and he knew how to fight.
    Brick had decided he wanted to see that first hand, so he’d asked Tommy, a former Marine, to take him up in the ring. Even if Roach hadn’t won, he’d made it a helluva lot longer against Tommy than most before him. Brick had asked Tommy about it later, and apparently the kid had anticipated most moves, had a more than basic