someone and fall in love. Buy a house. Have a family. His parents had never been quite average—both a little eccentric and wild—but they still had rigid ideas of what happiness should be, and Jude had always felt a bit suffocated by that.
He knew, at least for him, that happiness wouldn’t come in the form of a picket fence and a dog and chubby-cheeked toddlers. But he also knew that this life had no hope of bringing him peace or contentment, no matter how hard he tried.
He was not a miserable man—he was just…a little lost.
The tea began to work through his veins, so he jumped into the shower and scrubbed the last bits of that young man from his skin before he slipped into more formal clothes. He hated the way they made him feel—all stuffy and buttoned-up. Eliah had always loved looking prim. It made him feel proper and mature where Jude wanted to rip the sleeves off every single button-up and cut holes in his jeans.
But he’d grown used to it now, and it was easier to avoid accusations of impropriety than take a stand over a bloody t-shirt.
He was perched at the end of his sofa tying his shoes when his phone rang, and before he even looked at the screen, he felt it. There was something wrong. He tasted danger on the tip of his tongue, and his hands shook a little as he reached for it.
His brother’s name was on the screen, and he had a feeling this phone call was about to change everything.
3
Kicks fucking hated driving south. Anything farther than Daytona set his teeth on edge, and most of it was that he didn’t like being so far from the club in case shit went down. But the rest of it was the heat, humidity, and the people. He hadn’t been in Florida as long as Smokey or Gunner, but it hadn’t taken him long to feel comfortable where he was at, and he didn’t like being outside of his bubble.
The drive was only two hours, but he felt like he had a demon nipping at his heels as he wove through traffic. There were enough bikes on the road that his neck got sore trying to see whether or not they were wearing a cut—and whether or not he needed to take cover, and he never did shake the feeling that he was being watched.
It almost felt too easy when he pulled up to the shitty little hotel attached to a roadside diner and gas station, and he checked his phone again for the room number before he stomped up the rickety stairs and down the little walkway to the door. Swiping his palms down his jeans, Kicks curled his fist and knocked, waiting impatiently as he saw the peephole darken with an eye.
“Uh. Smokey sent me,” Kicks offered through the door when it didn’t budge. He knew he didn’t have the friendliest face, but he also knew that Smokey had chosen him because he could pull off something like normal better than anyone else in the Chains. Of all the guys in the club, he was the one strangers rarely looked at twice. Though, he wasn’t sure that was helping his cause at the moment because the guy wasn’t letting him in. “Look man, I really don’t want to cause a fuckin’ scene here, but if you don’t let me in…”
His words were cut off when the door swung open, and he came face to face with the professor’s brother.
Kicks hadn’t really been sure what to expect from the guy. He knew that he was a rabbi and that he worked at a synagogue in Port St. Lucie. His experience with someone like that came from shit on TV where they wore wide-brimmed hats and had curls by their temples and long beards.
This man was none of that.
At all.
He stood there with a towel around the back of his neck, his brows dipped in a faint scowl. He was about as tall as Kicks was, with neatly trimmed, wet dark curls that were dripping water over his forehead. He was probably somewhere in his forties judging by the lines in the corners of his eyes, but he wore it fucking well. He looked like he’d dressed in a hurry, his jeans still unbuttoned, and his t-shirt rucked up on one side, and Kicks took a long minute to stare at the well-defined biceps before he got ahold of himself.
“Uh. Can