In the cave, with Embry’s lips on mine, my heart had raced at light speed, banging against my eardrums. It slowed now, creeping towards death, and Nash’s voice seemed to come from another planet.
I followed him into the clubhouse. Cam, Alexei, and Rubi were at the table, maps spread out in front of them, routes tracked with pencil marks and Post-its.
Alexei was in my seat.
I fell into Saint’s without comment, jaw clenched so hard it ached.
“We don’t have up to date intel on the Sambini road purge,” Cam said. “So you’re going to have to wing it when you get past Nottingham.”
For a long moment, his words meant nothing to me. They were just sounds, his face a blur of brown eyes and scruff three shades darker than mine. I felt sick, the primal kind that wrenched your guts in so many different directions you met a new kind of pain. A deep, black ache that made me think of Embry and every day he’d suffered so hard, then brought me back to the unanswered phone calls burning a hole in my heart.
They need me.
“Hey.” Cam snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Wake the fuck up. You’re leaving when Decoy gets here, and I don’t want to waste time going over this again.”
Someone placed a coffee in front of me.
Saint.
I hadn’t heard him come in and he was good at fading into the background. Too good. His gaze snared me before I could hide from it, and he tilted his head, like him, Cam, and Alexei all did now they were in each other’s pockets enough to become one fucking person.
Fuck me. If there was one brother I didn’t want up my arse, it was him. On top of his own legit superpowers, he was the worst combination of Alexei’s intelligence and Cam’s empathy. If I fucked up, he’d see it. And Saint... he was unpredictable.
I leaned forward, gripping the mug hard enough to sear my palm, and forced my gaze to the maps. The routes were still blurry, and I was too fucking stressed to read Rubi’s notes, but I’d studied the maps enough over the past few days to know what I was talking about without needing much brain power. “These are toll roads. Don’t mean much when it’s a one-off payment, but it’ll fuck us over in the long run, especially when it’s eighty miles in each direction out of our way.”
“Agreed,” Cam said. “But we don’t have much option right now. I could live with pissing Sambini off, but we can’t guarantee that’s who we’d be fighting. Best I can do is mobilise the charters we have up that way to give you an escort.”
Alexei made a soft, derisive sound. “Not on noisy bikes in club colours. Your police will be all over your legitimate business if you make such a spectacle.”
“My police?”
“English police, biker boy.”
“I’m Irish,” Cam rumbled before he looked to me again. “Fuck’s sake. Anyway, he’s right. So no escort. Which means it’s even more important you stay out of trouble. It’s just the two of you and a couple of brothers in the Transit on the road. I can’t think why anyone would want to pop you, but there’s no guarantees.”
Course there wasn’t. That was the life. We couldn’t ship timber up north without crossing a minefield of territorial politics—other MCs, cartels, fucking mafia—and I was here for that. It was my job to keep Decoy safe. But fuck if it didn’t feel like a secondary concern right now.
Focus. I glanced at Rubi, quiet until now. And my attention seemed to surprise him. I’d been a dick to him from the very first night he’d kept Embry company, and I wasn’t bored of it yet. Still, he was the logistics man. The road captain. The best answer to this bullshit would surely be his. “What say you?”
Rubi considered me for a second. Then tapped his tattooed middle finger on a route I’d discounted for running through sixty miles of hardcore roadworks. “This one. It’s going to be boring as fuck when you get snarled in stop-start traffic, but there’s cameras all over that shit. Feds with speed guns on every bridge. You do this run out in the open, it shows we have nothing to hide.”
“Wishful thinking, ain’t it?” I dug cigarettes out of my pocket and lit up. “If we’re on the wrong roads, we’re gonna end up paying somehow.”
Cam stood and ventured closer to me, helping himself to my smokes. “Eventually. But the message is clear we’re not looking for a fight and we need to stick to that. Don’t know about you, mate, but I haven’t got it in me to see another brother hurt for the rest of my fucking life.”
I almost felt bad for him, but the teeny sliver of goodness in my heart belonged to other people. As it was, I took the common sense from his words and agreed with him. Without muling drugs and amping up our protection rackets, the club was counting on the haulage business to fill the gap. Which it was, but it was new money. Unstable. And we couldn’t pay brothers to fight a war for us with magic beans.
The chapel door opened. Embry strode in and claimed his seat, spinning it around and straddling it. Despite the pressure in my chest, it made me think of his weight on my legs. The sensation as he’d held me in place with his strong thighs, and the way I’d never questioned for a moment having a dude touch me like that.
Because it was him.
Forever and a day, it would always be him.
“I let Ranger go,” he said. “Gave him some nomad contacts up north.”
Nash glanced up from the phone he’d been tapping at while the rest of us had wrangled the maps. “Will he be safe up there? What about the Crow nomads? Locke said they aren’t worth much without Butch and McGif, but he might catch heat for switching alliances.”
“It’s a possibility,” Cam admitted. “But nomads ride to different rules. Chances are no one gives a fuck.”
