author's note: thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed and put the story on alert. please let me know what you think of this nextchapter!

Jax deliberately broke off from the pack, skirting Teller-Morrow, heading for the hills. Chibs spared him a backward glance but none of them followed and for that he was thankful. He needed a few minutes to himself.

He stopped nowhere in particular, just a spot where the grass grew long and tall by a nice oak tree that gave some shade. Lit a cigarette. Looked out over Charming. Same rooftops, same winding roads. A few more houses over the past year but not much else was new. Few things changed in Charming. Comings and goings mostly.

"You left Chicago because you were afraid this guy was going to hurt you."

"One of the reasons."

Just one of the sweet little conversations he'd had with Tara, that he'd played a million times over in his head. About coming and going.

Loaded questions.

"Did you come back here cause I knew I would hurt this guy? Do what the cops wouldn't do?"

Loaded answers.

"No, I had no idea he would follow me here. I didn't even know you'd still be here."

How could she possibly not know he would still be here? He'd given up what they had, given her up, to stay. How could she not know?

Another time she had told him: "This was the only place I felt safe."

So who or what made her feel safe? This town with its flimsy houses? Its collection of outlaw groups and groupies? Unser, for God's sake? Hale? What did he really want her to say anyway? Did it really matter? Kohn was dead. Whether or not Jax Teller was the reason Charming felt safe to Tara Knowles, it was him she had called. And now Kohn was dead.

A sudden desolation came over him. He hadn't had a minute to himself since it happened and there hadn't been time for desolation before. Time or inclination. But it was here now, brought to the surface by this new menace and it was threatening to overwhelm.

It had been almost too easy, the circumstances almost too ideal. Kohn was AWOL, Charming police themselves had put him on the plane back to Chicago. No reason to look for him. Nobody til that girl, that small slip of a girl with her too-calm air, her too-straightforward gaze. She had made him all kinds of uncomfortable. No, dammit, she had made him squirm. What the hell did she want with Kohn? Were they lovers? Was she looking for him because he didn't come home? Whatever her reasons for hunting Kohn, she was Trouble, karma, his very recent past coming to haunt him. It had been so nice to pretend. Not even that they had gotten away with it but that it hadn't actually happened. Except for a brief exchange with Tara ("You're in shock. How can I help you?"), he hadn't had to discuss it with anyone. Circumstances had made it easy to sink back into a semblance of normalcy (whatever 'normal' was).

Until the damned girl had come along.

SAMCRO: Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original.

Jackson Teller

Robert Munson

Alex Trager

Filip Telford

Juan Carlos Ortiz

They were all on file. Joshua Kohn had been looking into the goup and not just because their VP was into Tara Knowles. Literally and figuratively. But the sixth guy, the one she had knocked out, was not in Kohn's file. He'd been wearing a couple of patches different from the others. One had said "Unholy Ones".

Sara leaned back in her chair. She flicked a fly off her keyboard, knowing it would be back in a bit. She couldn't be bothered to chase it just yet although she would need to if she wanted to get any sleep later on. She had too much to figure out right now.

Each of the guys had a rap sheet, some longer than the others. If she looked hard enough there would be one somewhere with the sixth guy's picture on it, for certain sure. But so what? Knowing this wasn't helping her find "her Joshua" ("I'm your Joshua, don't you ever forget it"). She should've been asking Tara Knowles if he'd come around here telling her he was her Joshua.

Sara knew enough to know that very few people were as they seemed. Things went on in the dark of night , behind closed doors and encrypted internet connections, things even the people closest to them would never suspect. Was it that way with Tara Knowles? Her background was freaking puritanical : honor student, top of her class; the drunk father bit throwing in just enough damsel-in-distress to get the here-I –come-to-save-the-day going in just about any hotblooded male. Did she have a dark side? Her involvement with Joshua Kohn was no deep, dark secret but how exactly it had turned sour was. Suddenly, a restraining order had appeared out of nowhere, that had hurt Kohn "truly and deeply". And then something else that Sara was sure almost nobody knew about: the abortion. Tara Knowles had aborted Joshua Kohn's baby and though life went on, there was no way of knowing what that had done to his head. The wheels of Joshua Kohn's mind did not all grind in the same direction. The mechanisms in there were in a tenuous state of equilibrium and it did not take much to throw them off-kilter. Tara Knowles's abortion had been a leviathan-sized wrench thrown into that machinery and her leaving Chiacago had been…. well…

Again she toyed with the idea of confronting Tara Knowles. Would it be productive? Or counter productive? It was a safe bet that the good doctor with the permanent furrow between her eyebrows was not going to give her any straight answers. Especially since she definitely had something to do with the fact that Kohn was nowhere to be found. It had taken one change of expression on Jackson Teller's face to tell Sara that.

Going after the doctor would likely accomplish two things: no increase in information and the alienation of Jax Teller and his MC. He had, after all, told Sara to leave the doctor alone. Would doing as she was told earn her any brownie points? She was not naïve enough to think it would. But the SOA still loomed as a better chance for her to find out what she needed to know. Better than Tara Knowles anyhow.

Sara sighed. She needed to find "her" Joshua. Soon.

"The murders we had here last week, this all points to the Sons."

Charming Deputy David Hale was having a conversation with ATF Agent Stahl and he was pleased at the direction it was going. SAMCRO had been a thorn in his side for the longest time and he had waited a long time to put them away. His father had worked to the same end before him.

"Yes," she replied. "And I've got shit to convict. It's all circumstantial, that's why I'm going to use RICO. We need to prove that the Sons of Anarchy is an ongoing criminal enterprise."

RICO. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It ensured penalties for being part of a criminal organization. Great in theory but it hadn't helped Hale's anti-SAMCRO campaign one bit.

Stahl rambled on about how she planned to dig up dirt about the past by using the SAMCRO women. Using Luann Delaney's arrest as a bargaining tool with her jailed husband Otto, a fully-patched SAMCRO member. Going after those who had the most to lose - "job" (Tara Knowles), "family" (Donnna Winston), "freedom" (Cherry Parker). Hale's gut rebelled a little at Stahl's putting Tara in such company and he told her so.

She only shrugged and thrust a photograph at him, one of the good doctor standing in the Teller-Morrow parking lot. "Well we've had surveillance on the club the past four days and Tara has spent every night there." She looked at him a little too closely for comfort. "Kohn was right. He pushed her straight into Teller's arms."

Joshua Kohn's own words echoed in Hale's head. "I'm not stalking Tara, I'm protecting her. C'mon. we all know what happens if she hooks up with Teller. "

Yes, Hale thought in dismay. They did.

"And there's a new face in the picture, it seems," Stahl added, bringing him back to reality. She tossed out another photograph, one of a small slender girl apparently in deep conversation with Jax Teller. "We don't know anything about her yet except for her name. Sara Taylor. Probably connected to SAMCRO judging from how she was talking to Prince Jackson. Came around the station looking for Kohn. Potentially interesting, don't you think?"

David Hale wiped his hands over his face. Like he didn't have enough on his plate.

A day or so later Jax was standing in the parking lot at the projects. An ordinary everyday thing to do, standing around, except he wasn't just standing around, he was standing around waiting for Opie to carry out a hit. Apprehension was a tame word for what hung in the air at the moment. He had a bad feeling about this, a really bad feeling. Opie's first real assignment since he'd gotten back and Jax had a Really Bad Feeling. It was a revenge hit. Payback was the holy grail of inspiration for such an act but something else was driving Opie, something tied to the showdown Jax had witnessed between his best friend and his best friend's wife in the parking lot that morning. It was money, it was life, it was being a father who couldn't support his kids, and those were all Really Bad Reasons to be doing this.

And him - why was he doing this? Why was he here? Opie had said he had something to prove. Did he? And whatever it was he had to prove, was he really going to do it by standing here waiting to finish the job if something went wrong? What did that prove? That he had Opie's back? The club's?

What about his back? He had to worry about that, too. A Fed was dead, he had pulled the trigger and he'd thought burying the guy had been enough. His mind was changing pretty fast about that. And about other things….

It all happened as if in slow motion: The target coming out into the open, Opie freezing, Bobby coming up behind the guy and putting four bullets in him. Next thing Jax knew he was driving them away, away from all of it, away, away from culpability, away from any guilt. Covering the club's back.

Not much later he was standing over an open grave in the dark, attempting to cover his own back. And Tara's. He poured gasoline over Kohn's trussed up corpse, tossed in a lighted match, watching as the flames ignited and began to slowly eat away at the body. And at his guilt? He should be so lucky. After a moment he tossed a pile of papers in with it. His father's manuscript. John Teller was messing with his head from the grave and the last thing he needed right now was to add another dimension of conflict to the inner war he already had going on inside him. He watched the flames, hot, hungry, restless. Just like him.

God, he needed a change.