“Good,” she said before she yawned again. “Love you.”
“Love you too, Nadia.”
“Night.”
I sighed. “Night, night.”
I hung up the phone and ended up falling asleep on the couch. When I woke up at ten the next morning, a renewed sense of vigor washed through my veins. I had my first story. I had my firstinvestigativestory. I just had to have the balls to chase it.
And since I had an entire week off work…
“Steel Scorpions, here I come,” I murmured as I shoved myself off the couch.
The first thing I did was I rushed over to my laptop. I ripped an iced coffee out of my fridge and flopped down onto my bed where I searched around on the internet for anything I could get my hands on. I found several articles praising the club, oddly enough, for improvement projects around the Twin Bays area. I practically choked on my coffee when I came across a round of news stories out of Los Angeles about the good they always did whenever they came into the community.
I also thought every single article written was a load of horseshit.
“They’re a gang; how nice can they be?” I whispered.
I clicked around to find something—anything—that signaled that they were the club I thought they were. But nothing popped up. Every article, blog, and side note praised them for their efforts. For being different. For protecting and standing up for those that didn’t have anyone to stand up for them. It was like a fucking feel-good piece on a news segment, except it went on for pages and pages in internet searches.
So, after polishing off my coffee, I knew there was only one thing to do in order to get the truth.
“Guess I’ll have to do some investigating myself,” I murmured.
FIVE
BENDER
“All right, everyone here?” Fangs asked.
It had been a long night, the sun cresting the horizon and we still had yet to wrap shit up regarding the death of that billionaire in our fucking club. A sea of heads nodded and grunted because we were all too tired to deal with church or any of Fangs’s bullshit. But we also knew that we needed to meet.
We needed a game plan for going forward.
“Okay, so,” Fangs said as he cleared his throat, “we’ve got a dead bartender, a dead escort brought in by the billionaire, and a dead billionaire with ties to the mafia. No bullet wounds. No points of entry for a knife. Just bleeding out of every orifice and damage to the throat. Do we all agree that it signals poisoning?”
A sea of heads nodded, including my own.
“Great,” Fangs said as he cracked his knuckles. “I’ve already met with the dead billionaire’s people. You know, not the clean-up crew of black suits, but the people that actually matter. The people handling this man’s estate. And while they obviously want compensation for what’s happened, they also want us to work as hard as we can to keep all of the details—and I mean all of them—out of the media and away from the police. They want this settled in-house, which means no actual cooperating with anyone. Understood?”
“So, the usual,” I said with a shrug.
Fangs shook his head. “Not the usual. This isn’t just any death that’s happened. I’m almost positive that the Devil’s Rage are responsible for this man’s death. And they need to pay for what they’re attempting to do.”
Reaper nodded. “Nothing major happened at Clutch this evening. I spotted them, they eyed me down a bit. A few of them tipped over people’s drinks at the bar. Enough for me to signal to you guys that I needed backup.”
Fangs pointed at him. “Which split us up for the night. That was their goal. And if they have anything to do with this—"
“When do we talk to Bullet?” I asked.
Bullet had been the President of the Devil’s Rage for years now, and ever since he had taken over, he had tried to take us down. We still didn’t know what the fuck his beef was with us, other than the fact that their strip clubs suffered because our clubs were more appealing. We were greater in numbers than them, we ran better businesses than them, and we had a better relationship with the community. There was no way in hell they were ruining us.
And yet, they were trying.
Fangs sighed. “This evening, technically, since it’s six in the fucking morning. The meeting is set for nine tonight. I’ll text you when I know who I need for backup just in case, but I don’t want all of us going.”
Angel furrowed his brow. “Why?”
