Unholy: The Unholys MC Read Online Free PDF Page A

what might be our only hope for surviving the Berserkers. Stitches obviously couldn’t see me through the phone, but despite initiation being over, there were still several members of the club hanging around.
     
    Maybe they weren’t really watching me or paying attention, but if they could see how nervous I really was, they would start watching me. It was important to not show weakness to these guys. Most of them wouldn’t do anything drastic over it, except for a few loose cannons, but I didn’t want to have a reason to test that. And besides, if a leader was weak, the club was weak, too. I didn’t want my guys to be weak.
     
    After what felt like an hour of waiting, Stitches finally got back to me. “Alright. Let’s talk business.”
     
    “We need to discuss the expansion…”
     
    The Berserkers were technically our rivals. They had started as a relatively small group, completely non-threatening, at least to us, and in the time of the Reverend, they weren’t big enough to be a concern. “Let them be,” the Reverend used to say, and we did, because no one expected any trouble for them.
     
    Maybe that’s where we fucked up; we should have been watching them. More than that, we should have been flexing our authority over the whole thing. How were we supposed to hang on to our territory and strength if we just let a bunch of fledgling hooligans creep up on our turf?
     
    But it was too late to worry about that. Fact of the matter was, the Berserkers had gained a following and they were growing pretty rapidly in size. Worse, we’d lost a lot of members in the last few months. Many left because they couldn’t deal with the Reverend’s death. Though these were the toughest of guys, many of the older ones had softer centers. The Reverend was important to them and when he died—when he offed himself—a lot of the older members gave up.
     
    The lifestyle wasn’t for them anymore if the Reverend wasn’t leading them.
     
    I tried not to take it personally. It was no secret that I was next in line for the position of club leader. Sure, a lot of the guys whispered that it was because I’d been sleeping with Charlotte, the head honcho’s daughter, since high school, but that wasn’t it. The Reverend was important to me before I’d ever even met Charlotte and I knew and he knew before I’d ever even joined that this life was going to be for me.
     
    I didn’t really care what people thought of me and how I got the position. All I cared about was whether or not they listened to me when I had to bark an order at one of them. For the most part, they did, but there had been a few who couldn’t handle the change. Not for any particular love of the Reverend, but because they didn’t think some young punk should be in charge and giving them orders.
     
    That was the other reason we were losing a lot of members. Our size had gone down by at least a forth, maybe even closer to a third, and it was starting to cost us.
     
    Money was short, tempers were shorter, and pulling us up by our bootstraps was getting awful hard these days. In the end, I made the call I had to: work with the Berserkers.
     
    “Yeah, we agreed already, didn’t we?” Stitches asked in irritation, the coarse sound filling his voice and making it come out nasally. “You’re just gonna have to trust us, Johnny boy.”
     
    I grit my teeth. I didn’t like the nickname and I didn’t like Stitches. And more to the point, I didn’t fucking trust him. Not with anything and certainly not with my boys’ lives. Unfortunately, he was right. I was going to have to trust him if I wanted this to work.
     
    I sighed. “Yeah, sure, sorry, Stitches. We’re finishing up here, so gimme an hour or so. We’ll meet at the warehouse.”
     
    “Alright. Fine.”
     
    We hung up and I tried to quell the anxiety that shot through me at the thought of meeting with the Berserkers. Strictly speaking, the Unholys were a pretty straight group. We owned a