Keegan is standing to the side, waiting for his dad to come and pick him up, Lee is hanging out with him, keeping him company.
"Y'all gonna be okay out here?" I ask. "Devil and I need to go talk about some shit in the office."
"Yeah," Lee answers. "I'll hang out with him until his dad comes to get him."
"I'm not a fucking child," Keegan argues. He reminds me so much of Ransom that I have to grin over at him.
"We know you're not a fucking child, but Ransom will have our asses if anything happens to you, so let us protect ourselves, yeah?" He nods, and I clap both of them on the shoulders. "Y'all need anything, let us know? We'll be right inside."
Devil and I walk into the office, and as soon as the door closes behind us, I can feel the tension ratchet up. He pulls out his phone again, reading the message for what has to be the tenth time.
"Not enough fentanyl," he says, his voice flat. "That's bullshit."
"Complete bullshit," I agree. I pace to the window, looking out at the garage. "We handed him a sample directly from Ethan. The leader of the Rebels personally gave us that product. There's no way it didn't test positive."
"Unless Harrison's lying to us."
The words hang in the air between us, heavy and dangerous. Accusing your commanding officer of lying is serious business. But we're both thinking it, and there's no point in pretending otherwise.
"Why would he lie?" I ask, even though I think I already know the answer.
Devil sits down in the desk chair, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. "Because he knows."
"Knows what?"
"That we're too deep. That we've gone native, that we care more about this club than we do about the badge." He looks at me. "He's trying to buy time, trying to figure out how to handle two undercover officers who might not want to come back in."
My stomach twists because he's right. I know he's right. Harrison isn't stupid. He's been running operations long enough to recognize when his officers are getting too close to the life they're supposed to be infiltrating.
"So what's his play?" I ask. "Keep us under indefinitely? Hope we eventually remember we're cops and not outlaws?"
"Or he's building a case that doesn't rely on us. Getting evidence from other sources so when he does move on the Rebels and the Clarks, our cover stays intact." Devil runs a hand over his face. "Which would actually be smart. If we testify, if our involvement becomes public, we're dead. The club will know we've been feeding information to the cops this whole time."
I lean against the wall, my mind racing. "Storm, Lee, all of them. They trust us. They've welcomed us into their family, given us a place to belong. And we've been lying to them the entire time."
"That was the job, Dime. That's always been the job."
"I know that. But it doesn't make it easier." I look at him. "Does Dani know you're struggling with this?"
"Yeah. We've talked about it." He's quiet for a moment. "She knows that when this is over, I'm going to have to make a choice. Stay a cop or stay with the club. I can't do both."
"And what did she say?"
"She said she'll support whatever I choose. That she loves me, not the badge or the cut, just me." His voice cracks slightly. "Which somehow makes it harder."
I think about Allison, about the way she looked at me when I told her my real name. The acceptance in her eyes, the understanding. She told me she'd love me no matter what I chose, and I believe her. But that doesn't make the choice any easier.
"There's going to come a time when we have to make a decision," Devil says. "Even if that decision isn't what we believed it would be when we first went under."
"I know."
"Do you? Because from where I'm sitting, we're both pretending like we can keep straddling this line forever. Like we can be both cop and criminal, keep everybody happy, never have to choose." He leans forward, his elbows on his knees. "But that's not how this works. Eventually, something's going to give. And when it does, we need to be ready."
I cross to the desk and sit on the edge of it. "What if we chose wrong? What if we became cops for all the right reasons, but somewhere along the way, we found something better?"
"You mean the club."
"Yeah. The club, the brotherhood, the life." I pause. "My mom chose drugs over me. Every single day, she chose getting high over being my mother. And I became a cop because I wanted to stop other people from making that choice, from destroying their families the way she destroyed ours."
