Read Blood in the Water (Kairos) for Free Online Page A

Max’s answer to that request was to combine the two things he cared most about in life, his love of riding and his family, thus the Priests motorcycle club, based in Absolution, Louisiana had been born.
     
    Samuel had always called Absolution his home.  He’d put on the Prospect patch the day he’d turned eighteen, and for almost twenty years his life had been devoted to the club and the town.  He didn’t like the big city, where people passed each other on the street like shadows.  He liked that everyone in town knew each others’ names and most of their business.  It was a touch inconvenient occasionally, but it felt like family, like home.  However, Samuel did prefer to live his life at a faster pace than most people; he figured it was genetic, passed down in his DNA from his daddy.  He had no problem at all with the outlaw road that his father had taken the club down in a bid to keep earning at the level required to support so many families.  He’d always liked action and excitement; hence his decision to marry Moira.  No sane person would’ve married Miss Lebeau if they’d wanted a quiet life. 
     
    As a child growing into a young man, he’d watched fellow townsfolk, civilians, wither and die without ever knowing just what they could have wrung from their lives.  That wasn’t for him, getting up at the same time every morning to spend five days of his week cooped up in an office slogging his guts out for someone else to take the credit, only to spend his weekends squeezing in chores to keep the house going and barely ever having enough money to make ends meet, only to die at the end of it all with a shitty retirement present and kids that didn’t hate you if you were lucky.  No, that life was not for him; it wasn’t what any of his brothers or predecessors in the club wanted.  Samuel had seen his father and his contemporaries roaring through town, their bikes so loud that the sound literally vibrated through his body.  They left the ordinary people bobbing in their wake like so many corks in the ocean in the wake of a passing ship.  That was the life that Samuel wanted, and if that meant breaking or ignoring a few rules that someone he’d never met or known had made, then that was just fine by him.
     
    They pulled up to the clubhouse, a long low red brick building set on its own land on the other side of town, almost in the bayou.  The isolation meant their business stayed private, and so did their leisure.  Just as Terry had described to him, Samuel noticed that the garage attached to the clubhouse had been extended and refurbished.  It was a small operation which mainly existed for the club to repair and restore their own rides, but the business it brought in from the town made it one of the club’s useful legitimate fronts.  The sign on the gable wall at the apex of the roof showing the club patch - two hands, palms together in prayer, wrapped in a rosary with the cross depicted in rifle bullets - had been renewed and the gravel around the building had been replaced maybe a couple of years ago.  It was brighter than Samuel remembered, but not shiny new.
     
    There was a large amount of the gravel and the clubhouse that Samuel could not see because anyone even remotely associated with the club had gathered to witness his homecoming.  His extended family, from babes in arms to grey haired old-timers were arrayed at the front of the building cheering and clapping like Christ himself had risen.   Samuel’s heart swelled up from his chest into his throat at the sight of so many faces, unseen for years.  But it was the joy radiating from his wife and children that brought the tears to his eyes.  If they were angry with him for removing himself from their lives for so long, it wasn’t visible.  They were the very paragons of pure happiness.  Even Dean, at twelve years old, who usually tried so hard to affect a burgeoning teenager’s casual indifference to everything, was