“Fashionably late?” Soul grinswhen I walk into church ten minutes late.
I got distracted by Willa showering and lost track of time. This girl is my obsession, and I can’t stay away from her.
“Yeah, I was really worried about my T-shirt matching this.” I flip him off, and he chuckles.
Like he’s one to talk when he’s usually the last one here.
Steel waits for me to shut the door before continuing what he was saying. “Zane’s trying to force us to make a move since the Feds aren’t any closer to pinning the Iron Sinners incident on us. He thinks if he pisses us off bad enough, we’ll slip up and do something reckless with the Feds watching.”
“He’s probably the one who has them still watching,” I point out, dropping into my seat. “They were outside the compound when the shooting started. I wouldn’t besurprised if he’s the one who told them something was going down that night.”
“You’re probably right. But we can’t retaliate without it causing more problems.”
“Not with force, anyway.” Legacy taps his thumb on the arm of his chair.
“You’re saying to hit him financially?”
“That’s how you hurt rich assholes.”
Steel leans forward. “We could barely put a dent in his accounts last time we tried.”
“He keeps most of it offshore and spread out. Even if we could track down all of them, the accounts are unbreachable,” Ghost adds.
“It was an idea.” Legacy shrugs.
“What if we don’t go after his bank accounts?” I suggest. “We go after his income stream instead. Disrupt it at the source.”
“We already shut down his strip club.”
“That was nothing to him in the legal sense. It stopped the trafficking ring, but that’s not where most of his money comes from.”
“You want to hit his casinos?” Steel asks.
I nod. “With the Feds watching, none of us can touch money we didn’t earn legally. It’s too risky, and that goes both ways. I bet Zane is feeling the pressure as much as we are and relying heavily on his casinos right now. We need to put pressure on the money keeping him afloat.”
“How?”
“The same way he’s fucking with us. Surprise inspections. Shutting down our businesses for stupid shit.”
“We don’t have the city backing us like he does.”
“So we find a different way to do it,” Havoc says. “Dealing with the Iron Sinners isn’t enough. We need to take care of Zane, or this shit never ends.”
“It never ends either way,” I say, knowing that eventually a new club will try to pop up now that the Iron Sinners are gone. “But taking him down might at least give us a little bit of a break.”
Steel leans back in his chair, considering the proposal. There’s never peace. But at least we won’t be dealing with this asshole.
“All right,” Steel agrees, scanning the room. “Come up with a plan to take down Zane. Something that won’t make the Feds more suspicious. We’ll deal with the next shit when the next shit comes. For now, I want him out of my fucking city.”
“Will do.”
“Got it.”
We all nod in agreement.
But Steel still hasn’t taken his eyes off me. “You had something else you wanted to talk about?”
Soul is the first to look over at me, his eyebrows pinched. He and I are always telling each other shit before everyone else. But I’ve been too busy with Willa the past couple of days, so I haven’t seen much of him.
