He grunted but otherwise said nothing.
It wasn’t my favorite thing, torturing people, but this asshole left me no choice. “All right, pants off,” I said calmly. “Let’s stop pretending.” I turned to Vandal and held out my hand. “Knife.”
The kid went totally still, so still he even stopped breathing.
“Is ten grand worth your balls, because if it is just tell me now because I’ll happily take this problem off your hands.”
He swallowed and then shook his head. “Look man, do what you want but this guy is bad fuckin’ news. He threatened my sister. She’s sixteen man,sixteen.”
Something cold and ugly twisted in my gut. Threatening kids was a line that never blurred.
“And if I kill you right now, what’s stopping him from going after her anyway?” I felt for the kid, but not enough to let him off the hook. “Tell me whatever you’re keeping from me, and I promise you won’t die here today. Deal?”
He stared at me, weighing his options. I saw him trying to calculate if I was more dangerous than whoever the fuck Syko was.
I searched his pockets until I found his wallet and tossed it to Falcon. “Send his name to Slate and find out where I can find this sister of his, maybe then he’ll talk.”
His eyes went wide. “You wouldn’t,” he gasped. “Word is that you’re asshole outlaws, but you don’t hurt innocent people.”
“When we can help it, yeah, we prefer to leave civilians alone. Right now though, I need intel. I need to find out who the fuck is targeting my club and you’re standing in my way.”
Falcon was already on the phone, loudly spelling the kid’s name. “Yeah, he said she’s sixteen.”
“Fine! Fuck! Okay!” He was breathing hard.
I did. “Now talk.”
“He didn’t tell us his name, and he wore a bandana over the bottom half of his face. It was clear that he was trying to hide his identity.”
“Why do you say that?” Dagger asked.
“It’s been hot as fuck lately and he had on a leather jacket. It was plain though, which I thought was weird since he rolled up on a big-ass Harley. But when he pulled out the cash, I saw it, a patch that said Syko, and I remember thinking is it psycho or sicko. That’s how I knew his name.”
“Any clue what MC he was from?”
“Nope. His orders were to fuck this place up as much as we could.”
That didn’t make sense. Out of all the places we owned, why the tattoo shop. “Anything else?”
He hesitated.
I groaned. “Kid, do you really want more pain? Just fucking tell me.”
“Okay,” he sighed. “It’s just, I don’t know, I didn’t get the sense that he hated you or that he cared about what we did.”
“Elaborate,” Rebel demanded.
“I’ve done this kind of shit before, ya know? People pay us to make a mess, usually to convince people they need protection. When that happens the person givin’ the orders is explicit, angry, like theywantus to do a lot of damage. Syko said it but it was like he didn’t really give a fuck.”
Like someone paid him to do it. “You ever heard of Chaos Raiders?”
He frowned and shook his head. “No. I swear, never heard of ‘em.”
I nodded once. “See, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?”
The moment I stepped back, my brothers released him and he fell to the floor.
Dagger bent down, grabbed him by the hair, and yanked his head back. “If I see you or your friends around here again, I will personally rip your balls off and feed ‘em to you, feel me?”
