He folds his arms across his chest. The guy is attractive, thick blonde curls and a jaw line that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover ofVoguemagazine. I wonder if being attractive is as big a problem for him as it is for me. He doesn’t look the least bit frightening. I mean, he’s a tall guy, well over six feet, but rangy. More like a swimmer than a boxer. His shirt hugs his wide shoulders.
His face feels out of context with his Outlaws cut, with blue eyes that suggest he’s harmless.
But I learned long ago that nothing is ever as harmless as it seems.
He huffs. “That’s barely an answer at all, Wren.”
I shrug. “Yeah. Well. It’s all I’ve got.”
Catfish sighs and steps closer. “Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure what I am, to be honest.”
“I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into whatever this is.”
I glance out the window at the gray and ominous clouds. “One more thing happening to me isn’t the worst of it. I’m gonna head back to work.”
“Work?” Catfish asks.
“The money, remember? I’m finding leads. That’s why I haven’t slept.”
“You’ve been working on it without me?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. “We’re meant to be finding it together.”
Maybe he has an ulterior motive in staying involved. For all I know, he could have stolen the money and is now shitting his pants because he knows I’ll find out it was him.
Maybe he’ll attempt to kill me in my sleep.
I try to remind myself of what King took me to one side and told me on the airplane. That it was highly unlikely Catfish or Grudge had taken the money, but on the off chance I found that anyone within the club had, I was to get myself to safety and call him directly to let him know.
“Unless you’re capable of physically walking into a Tier III data center in Iceland, plugging a hardware tap into an air-gapped rack, and replaying encrypted traffic from inside their backbone with your charming personality and a wrench, this part is mine. You want in on the missing-money hunt? Great. But your factory setting is ‘intimidate people’ and ‘lift heavy things’. I’m currently interrogating a botnet that thinks it’s in three countries at once, but I think I’m really close to getting some of your money back. You wanna trade?”
His eyes follow my lips as I speak. “Fine. I get you don’t trust me. But here’s the thing: I’m all you’ve got out here. King and my club trust me to keep you safe. So, if you can’t trust me, you can’t trust anyone.” His eyes scan my face, but whatever he is looking for, he doesn’t find it. “I’ll go do a patrol.”
When he puts his boots and outerwear on and finally leaves, I let myself sag against the counter as I try to tamp down on aphysical response that always makes me dysphoric. One of the few natural feminine responses I struggle with.
Tears.
I swallow, run my tongue over my teeth, and bite down on the inside of my cheek. The tears sting and burn my nose.
I will not cry. But the panic is so loud in my ears that it drowns out everything else.
I don’t want to be here. I’ve been dropped into the middle of half-written stories. The drama between Lucy and her father. The club’s missing money. It’s confusing. Disorienting.
And I don’t need Catfish telling me I can’t trust anyone. That’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over.
But in New Jersey, I found a group I could.
So, I pad to my room and video call one of them.
“Dude, you look like shit,” Niro says as he props his phone on the worktop in his garage. He’s wearing a thick, fleece-lined jacket and is holding a large knife.
And the bluntness of his assessment generates a watery smile. “I think it’s fair to say the inside matches the outside right now.”
“You didn’t send me an invitation,” he says, sliding the knife back and forth over a stone to sharpen it.
“An invitation to what?”
He grins. “To your pity party.”
