Logan: Grim Riders MC Series, #4

By Molly Black

This career was all I had ever wanted. And Logan's case was the best I could have dreamed for.

I understood him. In part because he and I were so similar. 

Not that I was going to tell him about all of that. 

I was the therapist, and he was my patient. My past was strictly off the table. 

But then again, so was sex. Yet here we were, tangled together in the middle of my kitchen.

This could ruin me, but I couldn't seem to keep things strictly professional. 

And Logan wasn't exactly helping matters. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: MB
• Release date: Aug 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393268185

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Chapter 1

Logan 

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Monday’s meeting dragged on, and I couldn’t help but tap my fingers against the arm of the couch I was sitting on, barely resisting the urge to look at my phone and see what time it was. I respected Otis as the leader of the Grim Riders MC, and I knew he was far from long-winded compared to other people, but in some of these meetings, it felt like things went on and on and on, without there really being any reason for the meeting in the first place.

Well, I knew what the reason for the meeting was: Otis wanted to make sure we were all on the same page, and this was his chance to tell us all what we were going to be working on for the week ahead. It was good for club solidarity and yadda, yadda, yadda. But the truth of it was, when things were going well with the club, they basically amounted to him saying as much and then urging us to keep it up. And when things weren’t going well, it generally meant something like the sheriff sniffing around in our business again, and that we needed to be on our guard.

He could have told us that in two seconds. It wasn’t worth coming all the way to the clubhouse, but I knew Otis liked the routine of the meetings, and a lot of the other guys liked the chance to meet up and chat.

I had tried to get more involved with the other guys in the club lately, partly at Otis’s hinting. I guess I had always been kind of the lone wolf in the club. But what made me distant from them was also what made me good at my job as collector for the club. I couldn’t let my feelings get in the way of my interactions with anyone else, not in life and definitely not where club business was involved. And if that transferred over into how I acted around the other guys, I couldn’t help it.

Not only that, but it was partly in how the other guys in the club treated me. You’d think with enforcers like Dax and Kane wouldn’t be afraid of another tough guy. This was a motorcycle club, after all, not some prissy sports club or something. But the other guys’ respect almost bordered on fear of me. And to be fair, I was a bit of a loose cannon. I knew I let my temper get the better of me sometimes, but I wasn’t the only one in history to ever make brash decisions.

It was partly the damned mismatched eyes, I knew. One green, one blue. You wouldn’t think that would matter so much in this day and age. It wasn’t like I was a fucking wizard or something. But there was still such a stupid prejudice against heterochromia. People fucking stared at me all the goddamned time, and I had noticed more than one person giving me a wide berth in the streets, not wanting to get too close to me.

Probably another part of what made me so successful as a collector for the MC. No one wanted to have anything to do with me. If they were thinking of not paying, they just needed to take one look at me and realize that I wasn’t the person they wanted to fuck with. That had a certain magic all of its own.

Well, that, the heterochromia, and the scars that littered my face, my hands, other places that couldn’t seen, hard-won from the fights I’d been in over the years. There had yet to be a client of the MC who’d gotten away without paying us. As long as I was on the job, I swore it would never happen.

That was why I got the respect I did from the other guys in the club, including Otis. But unfortunately, all the respect in the world couldn’t spare me from these boring-ass meetings. Otis respected me for the work I did for the club, but he wasn’t scared of me.

Sometimes, I wondered what sorts of things Otis had gotten up to in his earlier life to become president of the Grim Riders and command the level of respect that everyone—even some of the other motorcycle club presidents—showed him. But that wasn’t the kind of thing you could just come out and ask a man.

After the meeting, as everyone else started to trickle out of the clubhouse, Otis jerked his head at me, indicating that he wanted to see me in his office. I frowned and followed slowly after him. It was unusual for him not to tell me my assignment in the middle of the meeting with everyone else. That could only mean one thing: this collection was special in some way. I thought back over some of the clients the club had had recently. We had protected everyone from local workers to a congressman.

But we were on top of most of our payments. I couldn’t think of any other non-routine client Otis might want to talk to me about. Didn’t mean anything, though. There was no denying that I wasn’t always good about paying attention in meetings, and I wasn’t the guy protecting our clients from whoever they thought might be after them. That was Xander, the nominal face of the club, or else someone like Dax or Kane, the enforcers.

I was just the collector. I didn’t need to know what they were up to; I just had to wait until their jobs were done and Otis told me to go get the money.

I dropped into a chair across from Otis. What’s up? I asked.

Otis shrugged one shoulder. Same as always, he said. We have a client we need to collect money from, but the bastard is trying to get out of paying.

Sure, I said slowly. What else?

Otis flashed me a fleeting grin. You’re going to have to be careful with this one, he cautioned me. This guy seems like the kind of guy who might get someone else to protect himself from us.

I rolled my eyes. Fuck, didn’t Victor do his research on this one? I asked. It wasn’t a fair thing to say, and I knew it as soon as the words left my mouth. Victor was our researcher, our resident hacker, the guy who found out as much as he could about our various clients and helped inform Otis as to whether they were legitimate or not. He’d figure out whether they would pay us or whether they would land us in more trouble than it was worth.

He was great at his job, but nobody was infallible, and there were other things about our clients that could raise red flags, things that Victor didn’t find out about, things that we never knew until it was too late. That was why they had a collector like me, after all. I wasn’t just some wussy government debt collector; I was just as ready to throw down as any enforcer.

Otis, sure enough, gave me a look. I thought you and Victor were getting along better, he said.

We are, I assured him. Otis had reasons of his own for wanting me to get closer to the guys in the club, but I knew that part of it was that at the end of the day, we were all brothers, and he thought that I would feel more included in the club if I were better friends with the other guys. I didn’t care all that much, but you didn’t go against Otis when he asked you to do something.

And truthfully, Victor was a cool guy, great with bikes, and just good for a conversation over a beer or two. He and I were becoming friends lately, so I didn’t mean to say something dickish about his ability to gather information on our clients. Especially not since he had helped me track down one of the only elusive clients I had ever had.

The words had just slipped out. And it wasn’t like Victor was here to hear them, anyway. No harm, no foul.

Otis continued to stare at me, and I could sense he was disappointed with what I had said. But I wasn’t going to apologize to him for saying something like that about someone else, and I wasn’t going to duck my head in shame. Anyway, Otis knew there was no apology coming because he continued.

At the time we took on this client, we had every reason to assume he was grateful for our protection and that he would pay, Otis said. It’s only recently that things have come to light about his potential ties with the Savages.

I frowned. The Savages were the other main club there in the area, and we had always had an uneasy relationship with them. After all, there wasn’t that much territory to go around, not in this part of western Massachusetts or anywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard. Clubs took what they could get.

Of course, they were never going to be able to take over our territory. But at the same time, they could definitely be a nuisance. They had proven that time and time again.

Was I worried? Sure, I guess. There was always the possibility that each client I went after could be the last. They knew we wanted our money, and if they knew to look for us for protection in the first place, it was sure as shit that they knew what their other options were.

The thing saving me, most times, was that guys like that didn’t want to do their own dirty work. They didn’t want to be involved in the fight to begin with. That meant I was dealing with guys who maybe weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.

But at the same time, there was the chance that someone would bring a gun or a knife to a fistfight and that would be the end of me. I tried not to think about that. I definitely didn’t let it bother me.

Otis looked out for me and the other guys in the club. And I knew that no matter how tentative the rest of the guys were around me, no matter how much distance there was between us, if it really came down to it, every single one of those guys would have had my back. If I told Otis that I felt uncomfortable about any of the missions he assigned to me, he would at least assign me backup, if not tell me to forget about it.

But I could never forget about it. I hated the idea of even taking backup into most of the collection duties that I had assigned to me. It was just one person to worry about, and anyway, I should be able to handle one man on my own.

At the end of the day, there was only one man that I was after: our client. Whoever else he brought into the picture, I had to forget about them. Neutralize them. Make sure they couldn’t cause me any harm.

At the end of the day, it was just the client and me. That was all.

I’m not sure I want you going alone to this one, Otis said after a while. If the Savages are involved—

"Then they can only maybe have one person on this, I said, shaking my head. Anything else would draw attention that they don’t want. The sheriff has already cracked down on them after everything with his daughter."

True, Otis said, but I could tell he still looked unsure.

Look, why don’t I go scope it out, I finally offered. I’ll see if there’s any threat I can’t handle. If so, I’ll come back, and I’ll get help. But I don’t think there’s going to be an issue.

Otis trusted me to know my limits, and he trusted me to not get myself in over my head. I appreciated that. Not that I was going to come back to him begging for backup, but I truly didn’t believe I was going to need it in this case.

I’ll have the money by the end of the day, I promised him, and Otis gave me a nod. He trusted me to know my limits, and he trusted me to set fair expectations about what I could do. He trusted me to know when I could get the job done.

So who is it, anyway? I finally asked.

Otis frowned at me. You remember that murder you helped cover up?

I scowled. Of course I remembered it. Wasn’t in my fucking job description, but it wasn’t like the guy really needed protection. He’d needed someone stealthy to help him out, and Dax had been otherwise engaged at the time.

Most of the stuff the MC did was aboveboard. No crime in letting people pay us to protect them. And really no crime in having local businesses pay us for our patronage and protection. That might be considered bullying, I guessed, but it was just good business sense.

But there was a darker side to the Grim Riders as well. Either guys who got too much in the way or guys who we helped who maybe didn’t have the cleanest reputations, themselves. Had I done things I had never imagined I would do? Yeah, probably. Was it worth it in the end, though? Yeah.

Otis would never ask us to do anything we really shouldn’t be doing. I had firm faith in that. Partly because the sheriff would be all over our asses if he sensed even the slightest bit of real misdoing there.

So I didn’t dabble enough with wrongdoing to forget about one specific mission. I knew exactly who Otis was talking about as soon as he said it. Hell, I could practically still feel the slippery blood on my hands, see the dirt beneath my fingernails.

I might not have killed the guy, but it still weighed on my conscience in a way that I could deal with. I didn’t know who the man was or who he had been. But he had been a man, and that meant something when now he was just worm food, nothing more. I didn’t let my conscience rule my life, though.

Still, going back to this guy, reminding him that he owed us, was going to be easy enough. Because I knew exactly what it had cost the MC to help him cover up the stranger’s death. More than he was contracted to pay us, that was for sure. Especially since