Cam crouched to help me. “I told him the truth.”
“Youwhat?”
“Easy.” Cam dropped a hand on my shoulder. “Jesusfuck, have we switched personalities?”
“Then fucking speak.”
Cam let his hand fall away. “I told him the truth as I knew it—that you and me had something shitty to do and no one else could know about it.”
“He didn’t ask what it was?”
“Not yet. And he might not if I can convince him he owes me one after his summer of crazy.”
It wasn’t crazy to do what him and Folk had done to eliminate the Sambini family. Terrifying? Yup. But it had been way too efficient to call it anything but goddamn genius.
I tossed Cam a tracker.
He passed me a phone.
Neither of us got up.
I sat back on my heels, a bewildered exhale escaping me. “The fuck are we going to do?”
Cam dug out his smokes. Rubbed along his bottom lip before sticking it in his mouth. “I don’t know.”
“We can’t rat.”
“Is it ratting if it’s coppers?”
I inhaled a lungful of second-hand smoke. Despite craving the burn in my lungs, it made me want to puke. And I didn’t know the answer to Cam’s twisted question. I didn’t know shit except the facts as I’d learned them tonight. Bear was a fed and he’d been hiding among us, in plain fucking sight, foryears.
He’d followed me to the Tap Lane drop-off and had photographic evidence to prove it.
What else did he have?
He has Locke.
Somehow, Cam read my thoughts. “I already told them it’s me on Locke’s bike.”
I snapped my gaze to him.
He shrugged. “Locke’s family. I’m not putting this on him.”
I breathed a slow breath, head spinning. “How long was Bear undercover in Porth Luck?”
“Three years.”
“Why River’s garage if they weren’t after us?”
“Honestly?” Cam tipped his face to the sky. “I don’t think they realised how clean River was. He didn’t take card payments for the first two years he was open—kept breaking the machine and forgetting to fix it. With his background and connections, and all that cash going through his books, pretty sure the feds had him pegged as a laundering front for the club.”
“So how can they say the club wasn’t... isn’t the target?”
“Because they’re saying it’s the money. The corruption. That’s why they were in Porth Luck in the first place. When we pulled out of there, Sambini moved in, remember? And their operation was six times the size of ours. That meant bribing a lot more feds, and that shit filters all the way up the food chain. Way they’re telling it, we’re small fry.”
My head spun hard. Grateful I was still on the ground, I rooted a hand to the dirt. “For them to know that means they looked, so they’re already fucking lying to us.”
“Of course they’re lying. We’d have to be naïve as fuck to believe they don’t know exactly who we are. Which actually makes me think they’re not playing us about what they want.”
