“Undoubtedly,” Delilah agreed. “Alas, the first rule of the sisterhood—”
“Is there’s no talking about the sisterhood?”
“Is that all rules will remain unwritten,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken.
“Figures.”
“So what happened to Samantha and the Basilisk?”
“Samantha sped away in her car,” Christian said, helping Ozzie struggle to stand. His bad leg hummed with pain. The electricity Samantha had shot through his body had forced injured muscles to contract.
Speaking of contracting muscles, amazingly, Ozzie’s Beretta was still in his hand. He thanked his lucky stars for the training the navy had ingrained in him, especially the part about never curling his finger around the trigger until he was ready to pull it. If he hadn’t been holding the trigger guard when Samantha tased him, there would have been nothing he could do to keep from firing off a wild shot. “The biker knocked off down the alley and—”
That was all Christian managed. The roar of a big bike coming to life sounded from somewhere around the block. A few seconds later, the Basilisk buzzed by the parking lot, his motorcycle eating up the asphalt like a wheeled beast.
While the Black Knights rode fantastical creations of steel and chrome, the Basilisk’s bike was bare-bones. Lackluster design elements aside, it was obvious from the well-tuned growl of the engine that the motorcycle was meticulously cared for. And fast.
It was this last bit that had fear grabbing Ozzie’s heart and shoving it against his rib cage. Samantha’s name whispered through his brain like a call to vespers as he took two painful steps toward Violet, his custom chopper. “He’s going after her.”
“That would be my guess,” Christian agreed. “Are you keen to ride? That jolt gave you crazy eyes.”
“I’m okay,” Ozzie assured him, his skin itching from latent electricity and a prickly sense of foreboding. “I’ll follow you.” He motioned to Christian’s car. The Brit was the only one of the Black Knights who refused to saddle up on a steel horse, and his sports car looked decidedly out of place in the biker bar’s parking lot.
“Brilliant.” Christian nodded, pulling his key fob from his jacket pocket. “Now the only question that remains is…follow me where? Where is she likely to go?”
Even though a normal person would probably head straight for the local police station in a situation such as this, reporters, in Ozzie’s experience, were far from normal. Whatever mess Samantha was involved in, it would end up on the front page long before it ended up in a CPD report.
It was obvious Delilah and Christian were thinking the same thing, because after a second, they all answered in unison, “The newspaper.”
Chapter 3
Tribune Tower, Michigan Avenue
“He won’t tell you anything!” Donny called as Samantha hopped into the elevator. “It’s an ongoing investigation!”
She slapped a palm against the edge of the closing door and stuck her head back into the chaos of the Chicago Tribune’s bullpen. A sea of messy desks and bright computer screens met her eyes. The sound of clicking keyboards and people yelling good-natured obscenities accosted her ears.
In many places, newspapers were a dying breed, with people getting their daily dose of the world’s woes through the nightly news or streamed straight from the Web onto one of their many mobile devices. But lucky for Samantha, who had never wanted to be anything other than a newspaper reporter, the Chicago Tribune was holding its own both digitally and in print. And even at this late hour, plenty of her colleagues were racing to meet their deadlines.
“He might not come right out and tell me anything!” she called back to her best friend and professional rival. “But I’ve got mad skills when it comes to reading between the lines!”
“Trouble with that, sweetie, is you can’t print something you’ve scooped from between the lines!”
Before she ducked back inside the elevator car, her indolent shrug said, We’ll see about that.
She’d gone back to the Trib to do two things. The first was to write down—with shaking fingers and a heavy heart—everything she knew about the Black Knights, including what Marcel had told her this morning, as well as to document all the bad business that’d gone down outside Red Delilah’s biker bar. The whole sordid tale was tucked in an envelope secured beneath a paperweight on Donny’s desk, only to be opened if something bad happened to her. And by bad, she meant kidnapping, assault, and/or death.
This wasn’t the first time she or Donny had gone after a story that was just as likely to put them six feet under as it was to see them in the running for a national journalism award. They had an understanding that should one of them pay the ultimate price for shining a light in the places that dangerous and powerful people would rather keep dark, then the other would do their best to see that justice was ultimately served.
The second reason she’d gone back to the Trib was to suss out which Chicago police detective had caught Marcel’s murder case. She couldn’t go home. Ozzie’s duplicity and her raw emotions would get the better of her there—plus, he knew where she lived. Which left only work. Work was good. Work kept the heartache at bay.
After a couple of calls to her sources within the CPD, she had a name in hand. She was headed to one of the South Side’s homicide divisions to see if she could squeeze anything out of Detective Curtis Carver.
“Hey, Sammie?” Donny called just as the elevator doors were about to slide shut.
She stopped their progress with a quick jab of her hand through the narrow gap. The rubber bumpers squeezed her forearm in an ungentle vise before sliding open once again, this time with a high-pitched ding-ding-ding of irritation. “What?” She poked her head back into the bullpen.
