“It does seem that way, doesn’t it,” I said with a sigh. “You should call Satan. Tell him to come here so I can tell him as well.”
It wasn’t like I enjoyed being the bearer of bad news. But I did enjoy the idea of us taking this seriously enough so that I could live for the next several decades.
“I’ll shoot him a text, but I want to know what’s going on now. My girlfriend nearly got killed by that fucker.”
I had to stop myself from saying anything. Chasing love had been the worst decision my father and Spawn could have made once King showed up. It gave him another weak point to attack—one he had, in fact, and very recently. I wasn’t against love, but I was against love at a time when the enemy was in our own house.
But arguing against it was the fastest way to turn my father and the club’s SAA against me.
“I know, fair enough,” I said, drawing a breath. “So we know there’s ten of them roaming around the streets, right? Well, we based that number mostly on the fact that those were the ten on bikes, who wore King’s Men uniforms. I managed to capture one and interrogate him.”
“You did? I’ll be damned. And you’re not in trouble for that?”
I shrugged.
“I think you’d be surprised how many of those guys are under King’s rule by fear and not by choice.”
Besides the information, that had been the thing that stood out the most to me. The biker had not only told me everything, he’d seemed eager to do so. Favor for King was not high within his own ranks, but fear of King was far too high for anyone to do anything about it.
“Anyway, so first thing I learned. You remember that messenger guy you beat the ever-living shit out a few months back? Asher?”
“How could I fucking forget?” Spawn said. “I mean, I didn’t memorize the dude’s name, but you don’t forget beating the fuck out of someone like that.”
“Well, turns out, he never went back to the King’s Men. They’re trying to find him badly. I’m thinking that if we get to him first, we can take him in and use him for information.”
“If he’d give us that info.”
“Heneverwent back, Spawn. We’ve all gotten our ass beat. But how often have we refused to return to our clubs? The second thing I learned…and I didn’t learn it from him, but I saw it with my own eyes. And it isn’t as favorable to us as the first. King knows we’ve gotten our shit together some. So he’s bringing in the big guns.”
“And that would be?”
Spawn didn’t know? Granted, sergeant-at-arms wasn’t a position that mandated a lot of research, but I figured for a situation as dire as this one, people would want to do their own investigation. Maybe I was too full of expectations, but fuck.
“The King’s Men sergeant-at-arms, Crush, and their vice president, Prince.”
“Heh, King and Prince.”
Fuck. Spawn was really out of the loop.
Was my father as well?
“They’re family. And more importantly, they’ve got about a hundred bikers coming down.”
At a minimum, from what I know.
“Combined, with all of our forces, we might have sixty, seventy. We’re badly outnumbered, and that’s not even including any mafia or undercover crime bosses King can pull in. I think King’s starting to turn this into an actual war, or at least preparing to. And I have no idea, with those numbers, how we’ll have a shot in a normal war.”
“Normal war?”
I nodded.
“It’s time to start thinking differently, Spawn,” I said. “It’s time to think like the enemy does.”
Spawn pursed his lips and nodded. I was making sense to him. But he wasn’t really the person I needed to make sense to, at least not in the end.
“We need to fight undercover,” I said, continuing. “Use mind games. We won’t win this fight putting rifles in our hands and doing drive-bys.”
“You know Satan won’t like that.”
