Raeleen
The next morning I couldn’t stop smiling, walking hand in hand with Pyre as we made our way upstairs into the main part of the clubhouse. My smile faltered a little as every eye settled on us as we came through the door. Nerves danced in my stomach as Cypher approached us.
“Rae. We’re all glad you’re safe.”
“Thank you, Cypher,” I replied. “Thank you all for coming to help me.”
“Pyre mentioned last night that you’d seen a man named Forge.”
Seen. Fought side by side with. I was still worried about him, though Pyre said his brothers hadn’t found his body when they’d cleaned up the old saw mill, which meant he was alive. I wondered again what they planned to do with so many dead bodies. But they seemed to have experience in these matters so I didn’t ask. What was strange, or should have been strange, wasthat I didn’t find it surprising. Maybe one day soon I’d know a bit more about their club. If Pyre was willing to share. For now, I wasn’t going to pry. They’d also saved my life and I was nothing if not loyal. I wouldn’t breathe a word of what I saw to Owen or the deputies. “I did.”
“Would you be willing to tell us what he said?”
Frowning, I thought back to last night. Amazingly, I had only woken up with one nightmare. Pyre had quickly chased it away. Then I slept peacefully for the rest of the night. “Nothing was very…” I paused as I remembered what Forge had said about the man at the covered bridge. “The man that Owen and I were out at the bridge for originally was supposed to be taking a shipment to Idaho. To sell to someone for a lot of money. He said Dolan needed that money. He also kind of implied that he was the one who’d killed the man. I’m only guessing that it was him who took the shipment, too, since none of the other men found what they were looking for.”
“Did he say what the shipment was?” Cypher asked with a neutral expression on his face.
I looked over at Pyre because he’d stiffened when Cypher asked that. I could feel the tension travel down his arm and through where our hands were locked together. Forgehadtold me what was in the shipment. I opened my mouth to answer but Rotor beat me to it.
“It’s got to be the Ecstasy.”
Pyre stiffened even more, and now every brother was either glaring at Rotor or looking at him with this dumbfounded expression.
Rotor looked around, motioning with his beer. It was eight o’clock in the morning. I blinked a couple times at his beer.
“What else would it be? It’s all that damn E they’ve been cooking up. Like the shit in Owen’s perp in the morgue,” Rotor continued.
There were a couple stray groans at his declaration.
Motion caught my attention and I looked over where Pyre was making a slashing gesture at his neck.
“What are you doing? What is that? You want me to slit a throat?”
“I’m going to slityourthroat,” Pyre growled. “What the fuck, Rotor? It means shut up, we can invade an island nation with you with only hand gestures but you don’t understand when to shut up?”
“We don’t need a gesture for that when we invade, we’re already quiet…”
I focused on Rotor. He looked perplexed that everyone around him was groaning in unison. “At the morgue?”
His smile began fading at my question. A realization began to spread over his face. “Uh… I meant-”
“How do you know we found Ecstasy on the man in my morgue?” I asked, turning to Pyre. I slipped my hand out of his as I searched his face. A sinking feeling inside my chest was making it hard to breathe.
“Uh… Owen must’ve mentioned-” Rotor cut off the lie when my head snapped toward him.
“That’s a key piece of evidence in an ongoing investigation, Rotor,” I said, my voice clipped. “The sheriff wouldn’t have freely shared that with anyone outside of law enforcement. Donotlie to me. Not about things I’m very well-versed in.”
Rotor swallowed whatever else he’d been about to say and took a long drink from his beer. When he lowered it, he didn’t say anything else, but the look he shot Pyre said, ‘Sorry about that.’
My eyes landed back on Pyre. “How do you know about the man in my morgue?” I wasn’t sure whether I was more angry, confused, or hurt.
Plenty of men had lied to me in the past. Those men had mostly been after sex. My ex-fiancé, well, all I could conclude was that he’d wanted to change me, and when he couldn’t he left. But Pyre… I didn’t think he’d been in this for anything but me.
I swallowed hard. “Pyre.”
He sighed. “Let’s go downstairs-”
“No,” I snapped. “We’ll do this right here. How did you know?”
