Gang Up: A Bikerland Novel by Nadia Nightside

would have them do the more important work: learning positions of attack. Forming up ranks. Mock-battles and studying tactics.
    There were more than seventy-five soldiers who followed him, and another hundred attached to those soldiers as whores, merchants, life-partners, or just otherwise hangers-on. Nearly two hundred mouths to feed needed only one thing more than food, and that was discipline.
    So, he trained them.
    A man with a belly full of food and a mind full of chaos was the most dangerous sort of person underneath a leader. Contrarywise, a man with an empty belly and a disciplined mind could be reasoned with—food is coming, you could say. Just follow me a little longer. It had saved Brall’s life in the long, famine-prone journeys in the wastes on more than one occasion.
    Brall felt drained, unloaded, but somehow more full than he ever had been in his life. Sated for the first time since he didn’t know when.
    She’s different. She can take me.
    That was always the problem. Finding a woman who could stand up to his desires, his mercurial attitudes, his need to relief every last ounce of stress in his bones and muscles through rampant lovemaking. And Brall had a lot of bone, a lot of muscle, and so a lot of stress that could build up in his body.
    He would meet her tonight, this time behind Farner's tavern. A darker place. More time for privacy. He couldn't wait. The only thing that kept his mind off of Robin was training, and so he kept training.
    Brall continued the training.
    At the side entrance, he saw Carthage leaning against the door. He picked out Garner from the crowd of training men, and told him to continue the practice. A good man, small and wiry and covered with tattoos.
    When he was sure that Garner would do the men justice, he turned to Carthage.
    “Did you get your money?”
    “No. Taught him a lesson, though. And I learned something.”
    “What’d you learn?”
    “I learned who you want. I learned she’s into it.”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    Brall would never admit it, but he felt some self-awareness and even embarrassment at the suddenness of his affection for Robin. She was everything to him. She eclipsed Abigail in every possible way.
    But just yesterday he had been telling Carthage that Abigail was everything.
    His passions ran deep and dense, and he could not explain them; without being able to explain them, he did not want to be held accountable for them.
    But this was all deep beneath his surface. All Brall truly knew was that Carthage asked about his business, and Brall found no reason to oblige his questions.
    “It’s that Family girl, isn’t it?”
    Brall felt a glimmer of fear enter his heart. The wrong words whispered around his men would end him.
    “What?”
    He pushed him out of the gym and they walked back toward the tents, toward Temple.
    “Ah, yes now. Come, my friend!” Carthage clapped his back, squeezing his shoulder tight. “You need not hide such understandable wants from me. She is a beauty. A fine, fine beauty. You'd be doing right to make her yours, that’s true enough.”
    Brall eyed him, suspicious still. “No one knows about this. How do you know about this?”
    “What are you, some double? Some doppelganger stolen in the night to replace my old friend?” Carthage was laughing. Brall’s deadly serious look made him stop. “I...you’re serious? You’ve been talking about her for weeks, now. Weeks and weeks. I didn’t know it, of course. It was always ‘the blonde, the blonde, the blonde.’ But it is her, yes? It could not be another.”
    “...no.” Brall shook his head. “The one I spoke of is...nothing. Old news. Not for me. My heart belongs to another.”
    “Shit. I don't believe that for a minute. The words you said, friend! The way you romanticized!” Carthage let out another big belly laugh. “There ain't no way she's just been cast aside for some other.”
    “I’m telling you the truth, now.”
    “Of course you are.”