“If Harris didn’t have a reason to take us down before, he sure as fuck does now,” Edge says. He’s sprawled out in his chair, a pose that looks harmless, bordering on lazy, but no one in the room doubts the deceptive, latent power in his long limbs.
“Maybe if you hadn’t stuck your dick in someone young enough to be your daughter, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.” Harley puts that out there so calmly that I almost can’t believe she said it at all.
I finally turn to look at her, but she’s not looking at me. The rest of the room stays silent. No one around that table moves. I wonder if all my brothers are thinking the sameshit. That I’ve let my dick be our ruin. They can’t understand. They can’t possibly understand. How can they when I can barely understand it myself?
“She’s just like all the rest. Just another bitch trying to sink her claws into you. They always have an agenda.”
I am fucking floored when Harley’s lip curls up, and she bares her teeth like a fucking warrior about to go into battle. She never showed much interest in the women I dated. Though if I’m honest, I’ve never been one for girlfriends. More like hookups, well out of my daughter’s sight. Maybe I should have been more open? At eighteen and ready to live her own life, her being jealous, would not have been on my bingo card.
“Harley,” Edge snaps. She’s studying him, so he waited to speak until she could read his lips. “That’s enough.”
Edge stares at her, and she stares back. Something passes between them, and to my amazement, Edge clears his throat and looks away, backing the fuck down. Since she left town to go to college, she’s not had much to do with the club. But seeing her here, surrounded by my club brothers, I realize my little girl is no longer a little girl. She’s a woman with her own opinions. Even if I don’t like her tone when she’s talking about Leah, I’m proud as hell of the person she’s become—especially as everything’s always been much harder for her.
“Because of her, my dad is probably going to jail,” Harley says clearly. No one doubts why she’s sitting in on this now. This concerns her too. She’s my daughter. She has to be here. She has to be here to hear firsthand what I’ve done. Harley was raised tough. She’s loyal to the bone, born and bred to defend any one of her family. But I hate that she feels that she has to be the one defending me.
“No one is going to jail. Leah doesn’t know anything about club business. She’s a fucking adult and can do what she wants. So sure, he might not approve of me, but there’s nothing he can do about it. Harris doesn’t want to get the cops involved. We’ve already established that. What he wants is far worse. This isn’t gonna change anything. It might just prompt him to show his cards sooner rather than later.”
“So we could be looking at a war very shortly.” Edge’s voice echoes through the silent room.
His words hit me square in the gut, but I keep my face straight. I refuse to show an ounce of fear in front of my brothers. They need to see their leader strong, impenetrable, a man who can get them through anything.
I swallow and let my gaze roam around the room. A few of the brothers shift uncomfortably, but no one says anything. They don’t look away when I meet their eyes. I know they would support me to the death, but in this case, there isn’t anything they can do.
I wish I could talk to Leah right now. Why the fuck didn’t she just come and see me if she wanted to talk?
Oh yeah… because I told her he had to keep the fuck away from the clubhouse or my home. Damn it!
Edge’s lips tighten into a thin slash, but I cut him off before he can say anything in my defense.
No matter what part Leah and I played in this, things were already rolling long before tonight. Donovan Harris meant to break us. It’s war he wants. Nothing is gonna stop him. When I clear my throat, I know that some of the brothers already know what’s coming.
“I guess some of you might have already heard, last night, the Black County Sinners hit a warehouse that belonged to the Renegade Daggers. A couple million dollars’ worth of blow went for a bath in the ocean. The Daggers don’t know for sure who hit them. There are a couple of clubs in Miami they can pin the blame on, but I know it was them. They’ve been on a fucking streak lately, hitting other bigger clubs. Stealing shit from warehouses. Torching what they can’t take. They didn’t want to sell that blow—since they could have been caught with it and that would have been game fucking over for them. This is bigger than that. It’s clearly a message to the other clubs.”
“That what?” Brick asks carefully. He is leaning up against the wall like he’s using it to support him. “What kind of a message?”
I’m exhausted. Fucking weary. I’m worried about Leah. I have no idea how I’m going to get her back. If she’ll even want to come back. I feel like I’ve just been punched in the gut. Edge glances at me. He knows about this shit with the Sinners. He picks up where I left off.
“That they’re not small-time anymore. They’re only an hour away. They were content with what they had and what they were doing. Until they weren’t. Until they were told that they could have our piece too. Until they were given a promise…”
“By Donovan fucking Harris,” Snake pitches in.
“They’ve got financial backing. Probably have for years. He’s been working on this for a long time,” Edge agrees.
“Donovan Harris,” Wolf snaps. “Has to be him and his fucking band of pussies. He’s wanted us out for a long fucking time. You were right, Edge. We were all right to vote on using his daughter against him, trying to get information. I guess that went fucking south real fast.”
“No one here’s responsible for what happened,” I clarify, so things don’t get out of hand. “It happened. End of fucking story. Leah Harris aside, we know who our enemy is. We just have to decide how we’re gonna handle this.”
There is a shuffling of feet around the room, and when I glance at Harley, her face is pale. I’m tempted to send her out, get her to wait in the lounge with the club girls, but she already knows enough about us to know what danger we face.
“So, what are we gonna do?” Shadow asks. As one of our enforcers, if anything goes down, then Shadow is usually front and center.
There are a few moments of tense silence while the brothers prepare themselves for the words no one wants to hear. The words that mean blood, death, and grief for so many of their loved ones.
I keep my eyes forward, unable to look at my daughter. Unable to allow the picture of Leah’s face to materialize behind my eyes. I promised to keep her safe, to keep her by my side, to free her and make her mine, to one day love her.
Now, she’s alone with her father, my enemy. I damn well know as soon as this meeting is over, I’m going after Leah. Every protective instinct in my body is screaming at me to leave a path of destruction until I get to her and make sure she’s okay. Snake seems to think her father would never lay a finger on her, but I don’t trust that asshole. If someone’s backed into a corner, then they fight dirty.
“Now,” I say through gritted teeth, “we wait. We have no choice. They’ve tipped their hand, and all it’s going to take is one false move on their part, one more fucking message, and we cut them off and cut them down. We go to war.”
