Crush was no one to fuck with. He was a biker’s biker. If Prince had been anyone other than the son of King, I would have met with him instead. I was left with meeting the devil’s henchman or the devil’s offspring. I wasn’t exactly swimming in great options here.
I sure was doing an awful lot of work to just save my ass.
“You,” Crush said with a sneer.
Us being in Starbucks was supposed to be a deterrent to getting my ass beat if it came to that. That was rapidly seemingly like a really fucking stupid assumption.
“Hi, Crush,” I said. “I’ve been laying low for a while. Sorry we had to do it like this.”
“Turn your face away from the windows,” he growled. “Last fucking thing we need is the fucking Black Reapers to figure out you’re here.”
At least, so far, he was playing the part of buying that I was on his side. He was never the sharpest tool in the shed. But did you really need to be when you were an indestructible hammer?
“The fuck were you thinking coming to a Starbucks?” he said.
Right. I’d forgotten that nothing was ever good enough for Crush. I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to turn that against King, because best I could do, Crush often said “not good enough” on behalf of King, not against him.
“You don’t think the Black Reapers might track my bike?” I said. “They may not follow me, but decent chance they’ve got something on my bike. You’d be a fool if you don’t think that.”
“Fine,” he growled. “Tell me what you know, Asher.”
I nodded.
“The attack on their clubhouse worked well. They’re demoralized.”
“Fucking right, they are,” Crush said with swelling pride. “I orchestrated that attack. Prince suggested we just wear them down, but he’s fucking soft.”
That was…intriguing. Maybe these two would crack in different ways.
Or maybe I’d made a really big fucking mistake going for the hot-tempered sergeant-at-arms first.
Or…maybe…this internal strife was exactly what I needed. For what good would Crush do leading an army of bikers when he could barely lead his own temper?
“It was quite the attack,” I said, inflating his ego. “They kept talking about how they’d never seen anything like it, nor did they expect it.”
“Of course they didn’t. They’re blind to their weaknesses,” Crush said. “Go on. Keep fucking talking. I love hearing this shit.”
In some sense, all I had to do was lie about how scared or nervous they were and I wouldn’t raise an iota of suspicion.
“It seems that they might be on the verge of destruction,” I said.
“Excellent.”
“I do wonder, though,” I said, drawing an immediate, preemptive snort from Crush, “if it might be better to have them under our wing than to destroy them.”
“The fuck? Why the fuck would I do that when I can crush them like a fucking cockroach under my boot?”
I drew in a breath.
“The name of the game is power, right?”
“Always has been.”
“Power that grows and expands, that knows no bounds. King gets more power; you get more power. That’s the way it goes, right?”
“Did I fucking stutter? Always has been.”
“Sure. And that’s a system that work, but…I…”
