“It wasn’t your fault.” Jinx sighs. “You could give that man the evidence in black and white, darlin’, and he’d still pin it on the Kings. The hate runs too deep for him to ignore, let alone acknowledge. We’ve slipped by him enough times that it’s a matter of pride to put us all behind bars now, nothing to do with truth.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper again. “I didn’t mean to make things worse.”
He rises from the seat and then leans down to kiss me on the top of my head. “You could never make things worse.”
I swallow back my bubbling emotion as he heads for his bike.
“Let me know when you’ve made your decision, Kyra. You know where I’ll be waiting.”
THIRTY-NINE
JINX
It doesn't seemeasy to imagine now, but there was a definite time in my first years as a fully-patched member of the Kings that I found these kinds of rides to be thrilling. Nobody ever knew what to expect from the night; only that it would be unpredictable and dangerous.
But as I've grown older, a shift started within me. Don't ask me to pinpoint when—it wasn't a particular event or anything anyone said that set it off. There just came a moment when I recognized a tension in my midsection that only showed up when I was on these jobs. A tension that grew, and gained weight, until it became a boulder in my gut, pressing against my lungs and forcing me to shift on my seat to dislodge the uneasy urge to go home.
To forget about all this shit and kick my feet up. Let it be somebody else's problem.
It's not the potential conflict that I have an issue with; I've never been afraid to speak my piece. I don't even think it's the dubious morality around the reasons for what we do. It's more of a feeling of just being tired. So damn tired.
No matter how many times we lay down the law in our parts, there'll always be another fucker who wants to try. Who thinks he can do better than the last guy.
And I'm over it. Fucking dead tired of pushing the same damn message into ignorant fucking minds.
Trying to reason with the unreasonable.
"You need to loosen up," Fang teases through the intercom. "I can see how white your knuckles are from here."
I glance at him riding on my right. "I get any looser, and you'll be trying to stick your dick in me."
“Ha fuckin’ ha.”
"Play nice, kids." Chaos throws his left arm down to shake out an ache. "How much farther is it?"
"Two miles," Darko chimes in from behind us all. "Take the right turn after this one."
"Did you not put it in your GPS?" Hammer asks.
Chaos sighs at our tail gunner's question. "May as well slap a note in my app to say what we're doing there, too, hey?"
"Fancy leading the fucking group and not knowing where you're going," Hammer quips right back.
"That's what Darko is for."
"I thought I was here because I can tell you where everyone is."
"Well, I hope it's not far for two reasons," I gripe. "One, I can't be fucked with a fight tonight, and two, I'm already hangry, so it won't take much for me to be the one to start it."
"You should have fuckin' eaten before we left, then," Chaos says.
I throw him a middle finger that he catches in his mirror. "Like you would have waited around for me to."
"Not my fault that you decided to fuck around when you were supposed to be gearing up."
"I wasn't fucking around."
"What were you doing, then?" Hammer quizzes.
