Empire of Savages (Savage Hunt MC #1)

1. Nick

Chapter 1

Nick

One week.

That’s how long I had left inside these fucking depressing walls. Seven days. One hundred and sixty-eight hours, and I was counting down each and every goddamned one of them.

“Is your old lady coming today?” I asked Hemi, watching him shuffling the deck of cards in his hands. C-pod was mostly empty because it was visitation day.

Hemi’s grin was instantaneous. He’d married Taylor—his high school sweetheart—the day before he surrendered himself to police. It was fucking fairy-tale shit, and the bastard was so in love with his wife that it was slightly nauseating to be around.

“She’ll be here at midday.”

My gaze flickered to the caged clock above the doorway into the pod. It was just ten in the morning, so we had a couple of hours to play gin while we waited. I never had any visitors. Didn’t want any. There were only a few members of the MC who were clean enough to come in here. All the others were wanted for other crimes and had no interest in coming inside Rookwood for a chat.

“How’s she doing?”

Hemi shrugged and started dealing. The cards glided against the steel table, and I stopped them with my hand. Without taking his eyes off his task, he finally spoke. “She’s getting hassled by the landlord.”

“About what?”

His gaze stayed on the table, his fingers restlessly straightening the deck. “He’s saying she’s not paid the rent on time, but she’s meticulous with all that.”

I frowned. The club would’ve been looking after her while Hemi was inside, so what the fuck was going on? “Did you tell her to take this to Rixon?”

Hemi finally lifted his eyes to mine. “She’s terrified of talking to Prez about something so small.” He shrugged, rearranging his cards.

I clenched my jaw, irritated by the motherfucking landlord even though I’d never met the guy before. I slid my cards closer and looked at what I had. “Tell her to speak to Gunnar if she doesn’t want to take it to the top of the chain. He’ll sort it out.” I picked up the card in the discard pile between us, slotting the two of hearts beside the three of diamonds.

“So, next week is it, huh?” Hemi said, picking up the top card from the stock pile. “Is Dimitri picking you up?”

Dimitri was my twin brother. I’d forbidden him from visiting while I was serving my time. I didn’t want him in this hellhole—even if he was only coming in to see me. “No,” I replied, picking up a card and relinquishing another. “I don’t want him anywhere near here.”

I was the fuck up of the family, not him. He had a future I had no right to dream about. D was different. Smart. So fucking smart. I was looking forward to speaking to him again—properly speaking to him, not just using vague language while talking on the monitored phones. He’d written me a couple of letters at the beginning, but after the first few, I refused to read them anymore and told him to stop sending them, too. He hadn’t asked why. Hadn’t been upset that I wanted him to stop. He simply knew that he was the one weakness I didn’t want anyone else to know about.

“Sobolev, you have a visitor.”

My head jerked up, the hairs on the back of my neck suddenly prickling with awareness. Running a hand over the back of my skull, I stared at CO Hart standing a few feet away. His hands were on his hips, and he was staring at me with a bored expression. Still, I didn’t move, trying to understand the feeling of dread that had suddenly come over me.

“Get your ass moving, Sobolev. I don’t have all fucking day,” Hart barked, glaring at me this time.

Hemi only raised his brows at me as I rose from the table. Hart led me out of the pod and down the hall, pausing at the checkpoints and waiting to be let through. Before we got to the last one, Hart stopped and reached behind him, pulling out a pair of handcuffs.

“You know the rules.”

I held my hands out to him, knowing it was all for show. I had the fucking run of this place. Once the cuffs were secured, he led me through the final checkpoint and into the visitation room. There were a dozen cubicles in front of me. Each one had a phone attached to the wall, mirrored on the other side, and glass between them. Eleven of the seats were already taken. My gaze slid along to the far right, and I prayed it wasn’t my brother coming to visit me as a pre-celebration of my release. Inhaling deeply, I blew out the breath and walked to the end cubicle, immediately stunned by who was sitting on the other side.

Lowering myself into the chair, I picked up the phone and pressed it to my ear.

Gunnar Morgan—my best friend and club brother—stared back at me. He picked up the receiver on his side.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I said I didn’t want any fucking visitors.”

For a long moment, he said nothing, and my heart lurched in my chest. There were only a handful of reasons for him to be here, and none of them were good.

“Nick,” he said, his voice far raspier than usual.

My hand tightened on the receiver, and I forced out a breath to release the tension.

“What is it? Did something happen to Rixon? Molly? The clubhouse?”

Gunnar looked tormented. He shook his head, running a hand over his blond beard a few times. “Nick… fuck , I don’t know how to say this.” He cleared his throat.

Even though I wanted to scream for him to spit it out, I remained in my seat. My hand was starting to ache from how tightly I was gripping the phone, my mind spinning with all the possibilities. “Tell. Me,” I bit out.

He finally looked at me. “It’s Dimitri.”

I felt like I’d just been stabbed in the gut, my patience leaking from my body in a torrent. “What the fuck happened to D?”

Gunnar skimmed a hand through his hair, tugging at the strands. I could practically taste his reluctance to speak to me. He must’ve drawn the short straw from the small list of people who could set foot in a place like this and not get arrested for their troubles.

“Gunnar?” I barked, seconds from going crazy. My blood pressure was fucking skyrocketing, whooshing through my ears at deafening decibels. A beat of silence passed between us. He stared at me, willing me to read in his eyes what he couldn’t bring himself to say.

I began shaking my head. “No.”

“Nick, I’m sorry?—”

My volume increased. “ No !”

“D is dead.”

“You’re fucking wrong. It’s not him. It couldn’t be him…” I was shouting now, and I didn’t give a fuck that I would be punished for it.

“Nick,” he said in a gentle voice. “I’m not wrong. I saw his fucking body myself. Dimitri is dead.”

The statement was like a rock being dropped into a still pond. After the rush of shock, the ripples of disbelief were cascading outward until I couldn’t ignore their echoes. Pain radiated out from my chest, and I peered down to see whether there was a hole punched there, right through my breastbone.

I stared at Gunnar, only able to conjure up one word. “How?”

“Shot while walking home from a college class.”

Swallowing thickly, I tried to piece Gunnar’s words together. This couldn’t be real. D was studying medicine. He was going to make his goddamn mark on the world one day, so he couldn’t be…

“You’re wrong.”

He had to be wrong. This had to be wrong.

He shook his head, scrubbing another hand over his beard. “Brother, I went to the morgue and ID’d the body myself.”

Denial felt like a noose around my neck. Moistening my suddenly dry lips, I stared at Gunnar through the glass, waiting for him to tell me he was lying—that it was just some sick joke. When he said nothing, I added, “I don’t believe you. You’re wrong. It was someone who looked like him. Looked like… us.”

I was beginning to draw the attention of the other inmates.

And the guards.

“Sobolev, keep it down,” one of the COs said, unaware of the news that I’d been delivered.

Ignoring the fuck, I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that my brother was dead . My world was unraveling, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. My chest heaved with my breaths, my lungs squeezing like a bellows to keep the oxygen flowing, my limbs going numb. My eyes swept the room, but I wasn’t seeing anything. I wasn’t hearing anything except for my harsh breaths warring with a shrill ringing.

“Nick?”

Jolting back into my body, I stared at Gunnar through the glass divider, all the other noise disappearing. Anguish was written all over his face as he looked at me, trying to give me the support he couldn’t physically share. It hit me then. This wasn’t a joke. This was my reality. My brother was gone—snuffed from the earth while I rotted in this godforsaken prison.

I swallowed. “Did he suffer, Gunnar? Tell me he didn’t fucking suffer.”

“It was quick, Nick.”

Knowing my brother wasn’t out there in the world anymore tightened my chest so much that I found it hard to breathe. Taking in a shallow breath through my mouth, I held Gunnar’s eyes. “When? When did this happen?”

“Four days ago.”

“Why the fuck did it take you so long to tell me?” I demanded, feeling finally starting to seep back into my limbs.

“You know why, Nick. It takes seventy-two hours to get a visitation slot.”

“And you couldn’t have called?” I demanded, slamming a palm against the cubicle desk.

Gunnar repositioned the receiver against his ear. “You wanted to hear this shit over the phone rather than in person?”

Fuck. No, I didn’t, but four fucking days? My brother had been wiped from the face of the planet four days ago, and I had no idea. I was in here, playing cards and shooting the shit with other criminals.

“Look, I’m sorry, Nick. Rixon thought you’d want to hear this in person.”

He was right. Hearing this news over the phone would’ve been torturous. But my torture didn’t end there.

Gunnar said, “His funeral is tomorrow.”

I croaked, “Tomorrow? No, Gunnar. I can’t apply and gain a furlough in time. Delay it!”

He shook his head, regret sitting heavily in his eyes like it was sitting on my shoulders. “I’m sorry?—”

I snapped, leaping to my feet. “I don’t need your fucking sorrys !” I barked.

“Sobolev, this is your second warning,” a CO said behind me. “You won’t be getting a third.” Like I gave a fuck about that. My twin brother was dead. And I didn’t know until now. Rage began to fill me, running into the cracks in my heart that Dimitri’s loss had created in the short span of time it took for Gunnar to say, D is dead .

“Find the motherfucking cunt who did this, brother. Find him so that when I get out of here, I can take my time with him. Make him pay for taking my brother away from me like this.”

“Nick, man, calm the fuck down,” Gunnar implored.

“Swear it!” I roared into the phone. “Swear you’ve got my back. That you’ll be by my side.”

His wide-eyed gaze moved nervously around my face. “Jesus, fuck, Nick!”

“ Swear . It.”

His throat bobbed. “I swear it, Nick. I promise.”

Before the echo of his words reached my ear, I pulled the phone from the wall and threw it across the other side of the room. My rage needed an outlet. It needed somewhere to go; otherwise, I was going to burn down this entire prison. My blood frothed with pure, unadulterated fury—an emotion I’d never experienced before.

The handset smashed into the wall near the CO’s head, making the bastard’s rage notch up. There was no way it matched mine, though.

Mutters of “What the fuck?” and “Shit just got interesting” abound as the two guards in the room rushed over, while the main door in and out of the visitation room slammed open. I couldn’t see them, though. All I saw was my rage. A weight latched on to my arm. Then the other. I had a CO on either side of me, wrestling me down to the table. I fought with everything I had in me to get back up again, snarling at the two men who couldn’t see that it was grief that was driving me berserk. I twisted my face toward the glass, seeing Gunnar mouthing the words calm down to me. But I couldn’t calm down.

Gunnar’s gaze shifted to something above my head.

And then…

Darkness.