Borden stared at the commotion in front of him. Bikers everywhere. Self-entitled little shits wreaking havoc like it was second nature to them. All over his club, hands up the legs of countless dancers. Glasses were smashed, curses were screamed, and even a brawl broke out between two patched members that resulted in blood and two broken tables. But…why? Why did it have to get so nasty? He didn’t fucking get it. Especially when the Neanderthals reconciled moments later, laughing with bloodied mouths, like what they had just done – beating each other to pulps – wasn’t absolutely Palaeolithic in nature.

Borden gritted his teeth. This was a bad idea.

“This isn’t a bad idea,” he heard Hawke suddenly say, reading his mind like usual. He stopped next to him, looking too at the chaos before them. “You need them. We need them.”

“Maybe,” Borden muttered in distaste. “Maybe not.”

“You don’t want to take a chance. There are too many threats now, Borden.”

“I’m aware of that, Hawke, so don’t fucking reiterate shit we’ve already gone through before.”

“Just repeating the facts so you don’t end up shooting somebody in the face tonight.”

“It would be for a just cause.”

“It wouldn’t be worth the effort.”

“They’re fucking up my place.”

“Think of the big picture.”

Borden nearly growled as he stressed for the second time, “They’re fucking up my place.”

“Chill.”

He didn’t want to fucking chill. He wanted to shoot bullets and get these guys to stop fucking up his place. These savages had no idea how long it took for him to have this place up and running when he first got here. He built Owls from the ground up, and now they were trashing the club like it was their nasty ass clubhouse.

Where was the fucking respect? That was all he wanted to know. Did it even exist to begin with? Or were they feral in that aspect as well?

Hearing a startled cry, he turned his head and watched a random woman get led out of the club with a biker whose grip was around the back of her neck. She looked horrified, her raccoon eyes glistening with unshed tears, her Botox lips puckered out as she whimpered helplessly. The biker didn’t seem concerned by her tears as he wiped his nose clean of whatever powder he’d just sniffed up it.

Fucking medieval, this shit.

“Just a biker slut,” Hawke assured him quickly. “One of theirs. Not ours.”

“I can’t believe you want me to be in league with a gang of rapists.”

“They’re not rapists. She’s club slut. They use her the way they want and she gets her next fix in return. Tit for tat.”

“You defending this shit, Hawke?”

Hawke frowned. “No, I’m just explaining it to you, Borden. If I was defending it, wouldn’t I be on that side of the fucking room right now?”

“You were once upon a time, were you not?”

Hawke’s face darkened. “Thanks for the reminder, but I kind of didn’t need one. I’m explaining their way of life to you, and it doesn’t have anything to do with what we have in mind. You have to keep to the goal. Don’t think about this shit. Think about Emma. This is about her, right?”

In a flash, Borden pictured Emma being led out in a similar manner, and his vision blurred with red-hot rage. If anybody so much as touched her in that way, or even looked at her with wanting eyes, he’d happily decorate his club walls with their brains.

“Where is she?” Borden then demanded.

“Still with Graeme in the office. She hasn’t gone anywhere or else I’d have known about it. Do you want me to get her? Maybe seeing this shit would be good for her stubborn ass.”

Borden shot him a glare and saw the humour in Hawke’s eyes. Like fuck did he want Emma out to witness this shit.

“Come on,” Hawke added on a shrug, “you have to admit, it might shut her up for once. She’s been giving Graeme a hard time lately, asking questions, trying to get us to lay off her. I’m tempted to take his place just to keep him sane.”

Borden’s lips twitched. Emma could be a headache, but that’s the way he liked her. He loved that invasion of privacy, loved her potty mouth and shit attitude. Loved every fucking inch of that tiny little body too, including the soul that sat inside it.

“She could handle this debauchery,” Hawke carried on, motioning to the room with a concealed smirk beneath that thick beard of his. “She’d probably stab a fucker if he came a foot too close, though.”

“I’d stab the fucker,” Borden corrected, feeling a wave of possessiveness come over him. And that was the problem: he wasn’t handling his possessive nature well. Well meaning not at all. If Emma remained in the office, he wouldn’t have to constantly look over his shoulder, babying her and everybody else that orbited her.

It would end in a bloodbath, and he knew it.

Hell, everybody knew it.

Mostly, he was pissed that he was in this situation at all, and that he even had to think along these lines. But he couldn’t keep doing what he was doing, not when there was a genuine threat out there.

Just then, he remembered that night that started all of this, and what had happened after he got that godforsaken text two weeks ago.

They’d immediately left after he’d found that phone in the alleyway. He’d packed a few of Emma’s clothes, picked her up from the bed, and they drove to his place. She hadn’t returned to her apartment since, and he wouldn’t let her anyway. There was somebody out there that would jump at the chance to do her harm.

She has a face with a bottom lip I’d suck happily while chained in my cellar. That line ran through his mind every single day since he read it. He felt queasy knowing some sicko had such sick thoughts of his woman.

He’d sent men out on the streets, tried to gather as much information as possible, but he came up with nothing at the end. The person truly had been smoke, scattering from sight. Borden had never come across a threat that had kept their mouth shut so long. It was exhausting, to say the least. That was why the dirty ass bikers were here now. And looking at them once more before he returned to Emma, he fucking wish they weren’t.

Yeah, he would totally stab any fucker that got a foot too close to her.

“I would too,” he heard Hawke mutter under his breath a few moments after he’d said it.