He gives me a crooked smile. “Then we’d better get moving.”
I curse under my breath, but I’m already reaching for my keys. “You’re lucky I love you, old man.”
“Damn right I am.”
We head out together, the night air cool against my skin as I fire up my bike.
I told myself I’d keep my distance from Eli…told myself it was better for both of us.
But as Knuckles climbs onto his bike, pale and coughing, I can’t bring myself to say no.
Maybe I’m doing this for Knuckles.
Maybe I’m doing it for myself.
Either way, I know one thing for certain…
I’m about to wake up the one person I’ve been trying like hell to stay away from.
With a quiet curse, I pull out my phone and open the garage’s employee records. My thumb hesitates over Eli’s name for half a second before I tap it and type his address into my GPS.
“Got it,” I mutter.
Knuckles chuckles weakly beside me. “You sound thrilled.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, sliding my phone into the holder on my handlebars, “it’s hard to be thrilled about waking up a man I’m trying not to want.”
It takes fifteen minutes to get to the dark apartment complex Eli lives in.
“I know the owner of this place,” Knuckles says as he swings off the bike. “He’s a fucking ass.”
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Rob Dorsen,” he answers.
I file the name away just in case Eli ever tells me his landlord so much as looks at him wrong.
I have zero qualms about making that man, or any man, suffer.
Knuckles notices the corner of my mouth twitch. “Why are you smirking?” he asks, standing beside his bike.
“Just thinking about burying the man alive if he hurts Eli,” I say, my voice low. “Maybe send him off with an hour’s worth of oxygen so he can wallow in that slow, constant fear before it runs out.”
Knuckles doesn’t laugh. We both know I’m not joking.
“Come on, brother,” he says, walking through the doors that had zero fucking security attached. “I need to apologize so I can go home and sleep.”
Worry nags at my heart at the utter defeat in his voice.
“Don’t stop fighting, man,” I tell him.
“No use in it, Skip,” he says. “I can fight all I want, but it won’t slow things down. It just wastes my energy. I’d rather save that for you fuckers.”
“Who the hell are you?” someone calls from a crack in one of the apartment doors.
“Doesn’t matter who the fuck we are,” Knuckles says, voice hard as steel. All weakness completely gone from his voice. “We’re looking for Eli Waddell.”
“What the hell do you want with that loser?”
