product with none of them being the wiser. In his goddamn saddlebags. Jesus, could he have made it any fucking easier to get robbed?
Torch scrubbed his beard and paced around, questions rapidly firing through his head. There was one in particular he was pretty sure he didn’t want the answer to. “If you were using this to pay off debt, where the hell did you get a hundred grand to buy it in the first place, brother?”
Buddha grimaced. “Cora.”
Torch threw his hands up in disgust. “You borrowed money from the goddamn Lucifer of loan sharks? The guy with a fifteen-strong, armed collections department made up of trained mercenaries? That Cora? Jesus Christ, Buddha, I’ve heard of that motherfucker amputating hands over a c-note, a hundred grand buys us at least a car bomb.” Suddenly, an even more sickening realization hit him. “Should I even ask about the interest rate?”
“It was more of a profit-share agreement, half the gross for fronting the buy.”
“Fuuuuck,” Torch groaned, his head a minute away from exploding as he did the math. Mace wasn’t far behind, he whistled and muttered some shit under his breath.
Feeling like somebody had taken their steel-toe boots to his lungs, Torch crouched down and rubbed his forehead. Like that would somehow help him think better; all it did was make his head spin faster. He scowled and looked up. “You’re telling me we owe Cora a hundred and seventy-five grand? Do you realize how fucking fucked we are?!”
“I owe Cora a hundred and seventy-five grand. I’ll figure something out.”
He sneered and shook his head, forced himself to stand back up, and pointed at his bike laying on its side. “Yeah, I see how good you are at figuring shit out. You got some more stupid fucking ideas rolling around in that skull? Good god, man, who the hell do you owe seventy-five grand to on top of Cora? What kind of debt do you have that you couldn’t tell me of all people?”
Buddha looked away and rubbed his temples. “Like I said, it’s… personal.”
Personal? He could go suck a fucking dick right now. Payday loans, credit card debt, that shit was personal. A sitting MC president getting himself on the hook for almost two hundred grand to a son of a bitch who made the notorious “Mad Sam” DeStefano look like a pussy, that crossed a fucking line. Actually, it crossed a thousand lines. What the hell had he been thinking? Buddha was all about club code, he’d lived and breathed the Serpents his entire adult life. It just didn’t make a shred of fucking sense.
If Buddha couldn’t be bothered to give a shit about protocol, neither could he. Torch grabbed him by his cut and yanked him so close he was probably spitting on the man. “It quit being personal about five minutes ago,” he hissed. “You don’t think that psycho’s gonna come after the entire club over that kind of money?” He gripped the leather tighter and shook the shit out of Buddha. “Why?”
Buddha turned his head away but didn’t try to fight back.
Torch shook him again. “Answer me!”
“Cancer,” he muttered.
“What?” he croaked, pretty sure he’d just misheard the old man say something that sounded a hell of a lot like—
No way. His hearing was just fucked up from the gunfire.
Pres took a deep breath and looked back at him. “Cancer, son. Lymphoma. My insurance is shit and the bills are starting to stack up. The money from the coins was supposed to help pay for treatment so the club didn’t have to.”
Stunned, Torch reflexively released his hold and took a step back. He sized up a down-and-out Buddha standing there, all the signs and symptoms finally coming together and staring him right in the fucking face. Always tired, a shaved head and face, dark rings under his eyes, weight loss, spending less time with the boys… Jesus, it had all been right in front of him. “How… When did you find out?”
“A couple months ago. I did a round of chemo about a week before we went and picked up Liv from the pen.”
Two months? He’d been dealing with this shit alone for two damn months? And how the hell had he managed the ride to West Virginia and back after a round of chemo? He was either the strongest or the stupidest motherfucker alive. “How bad is it?”
“Late stage,” Buddha muttered. “I faked a trip and had my lymph nodes taken out while you were off on