Give Me Grace (Devil's Right Hand MC #5)

Chapter 5

Blade's POV
Present Day, August 10th, 2022

"How the fuck did this happen?" I growl as I twirl a pen in the my hand to keep it from smashing something.

"Bullet says infection," Smoke replies. 

The man in my office is a literal mountain. He spent the bulk of his 20s in the Marine Corps and that time shaped him into the hard core asshole in front of me. One who hides his emotions almost as well as I do.

One that is almost as pissed as I am, right now.

"Are we all fucking amateurs? This is the whole reason we have a fucking club medic." 

I'm trying to control the rage roaring through my veins but failing miserably.

The second Smoke leaves I'm going to smash something. Or shoot something. Or throw a knife at something.

I haven't lost control like this in a long fucking time but I've never been in this situation. A situation where some monster hurt my child and we just lost the last lead we had to him. We were climbing the ladder, slow and steady, and we were making progress until we met Taco. The fucker was a lot stronger than we thought he would be which means he was farther up the hierarchy than we thought.

But the stubborn and loyal son of a bitch died this morning after being in our shop for 6 days.

6 fucking days and we didn't get a damn thing out of him.

It only took 6 days for him to die in our care.

"Who was the last one in there?" I ask with a deep breath through my nose. I have to calm down, but it seems like anger has been the only emotion I can feel lately. I walk around numb unless I'm pissed off.

Is anger better than feeling nothing?
Probably not.

But it's the one emotion I am comfortable with. It's the one emotion I have sat with. Anger and I are old friends. It's the one emotion out of the hundreds swirling in my brain that I have felt before.

I know how to handle anger, but right now it is handling me.

"You don't want me to answer that, Pres. It was the infection that took him out," Smoke says with a shake of his head.

Oh, I know exactly who it is, but I need him to confirm it.

"Who was it?" I ask again. This time, he knows it was not a suggestion. Smoke is a military man, he knows what an order sounds like.

He's silent for a beat, but then he says the name I thought he would. "It was Skillet." 

Goddamn that kid.

"I told him to be controlled," I growl under my breath.

Skillet has always been impulsive, but I thought he'd grown up. Especially when the idiot decided to fall in love with my daughter, but here we are with a dead body and no answers.

"Not many people would be able to, Pres," Smoke sighs. "You know it takes years of practice to stay calm in these situations."

Calm.

Is that how my boys see me?
Cause I sure as hell don't feel very calm.
But they don't need to know that.
They need to see me as confident and in complete control.
They need to believe I'm calm.

"Hmph," I grumble after a beat of silence.

Realistically, I know it probably wasn't only Skillet's fault we lost Taco. And even if it was, I remember what it feels like to be young and in love. I know what it's like to have the person who hurt your person in the palm of your hand. I know that fire that is inside of him right now.