I guess if you were going to have a reputation, that wasn’t a bad one to have. Especially when it came to women.
“That’s me.”
“I used that pillow spray last night,” she told me.
The pillow spray I’d bought Raff when he showed up after a few weeks on the road with a nasty head cold in the fall. It was supposed to help clear his sinuses.
“I didn’t have my allergy meds on me. It helped.”
“Glad to hear it. Is that… a chicken?” she asked when one of the hens started singing her egg song out in the backyard.
“Yep.”
“Bikers… who have chickens…”
“We contain multitudes,” I told her.
“Oof. That’s a big word for this small hour,” she grumbled into her coffee.
“Hey, anyone up to go to the diner, I’m—oh, hey, pretty lady,” Raff said as he came into the kitchen, shirtless, hair bed-messy.
“Diner sounds good,” the woman said, leaning in slightly when Raff planted a quick kiss on her temple.
“You game?” he asked.
“Sure,” I agreed. “But we gotta talk,” I said, holding the piece of paper from Slash between my two fingers.
“You wanna go borrow something to wear out of the upstairs hall closet?” he asked the girl, who made a mumbling sound, but took her coffee and walked off. “Job?” he asked when she was gone.
“Drop. Tomorrow night. Near L.A.”
“You and me?”
“Slash wants a third. But it can’t be Saint.”
“If it can’t be Saint, then it can’t be Syn, either.”
“Your brother?” I asked.
“It’ll be like old times.”
Except, of course, it would be nothing like old times.
And we wouldn’t be hanging out in Los Angeles after either.
Instead, we’d be dragging our bloodied bodies back into Shady Valley…
CHAPTER TWO
Dylan
The lancet pricked the side of my finger, and I dropped it into the trash to reach for the test strip, letting it soak up the drop of blood before inserting it into the meter.
“I heard you, girl,” I called to the whining chocolate lab at my feet. “Alright. You were right,” I said to myself when my sugar came up low.
I should have noticed the sweaty and shaky sensation before she’d needed to warn me.
I tossed the test strip and walked through my kitchen to reach for my glucose tablets, only to remember I’d run out two days ago and hadn’t gone out to grab more.
