Bullet withdrew his gun, causing his men to do the same. “You sure that’s the stance you want to take?”
Usually, I wouldn’t care if I got shot. But the guns weren’t pointed at me. Not only that, though, but I thought about the phone call I’d have to place to Aria if I wound up in the hospital. I knew she’d stay up and worry about me until I called her. I knew she’d panic if she didn’t hear from me in at least a couple of hours.
All of a sudden, I had something to live for. Someone who gave a shit about me outside of my men.
“Well?” Bullet asked as he pivoted his gun toward my chest. “You got anything you want to say to your sorry excuse for a president?”
Fangs glared at the profile of my face. “Yeah, got any more shit you want to say?”
I peeked over at him and I knew he’d hate me for what I was about to say. “We have to be men of our word.”
Fangs gnashed his teeth together. “It wasn’t my word that got us into this situation.”
“Do you trust me?”
He drew in a deep, silent breath. “Always. It’s why you’re my V.P.”
I nodded. “Then, we have to be men of our word.”
Bullet chuckled. “Yeah, Fangs. Be a man of your word.”
I turned toward the pathetic excuse for a human being. “Keep your mouth shut or we’ll gun you all down before you can unload anything into us. Got it?”
Bullet raised his nose into the air. “You’ve got five minutes to give me those fucking keys.”
Fangs grabbed my arm and dragged me into the middle of our crowd of guys. We all fell back to the other side of the road while the Devil’s Rage kept their weapons trained onto us. They all looked at me as if I were their Judas. And in some respects, I was.
But I had a plan mounting in my head to take all of them down if I could get my guys to listen.
“You’re a serious fuck-up, you know that?” Goose glowered.
“What the hell are we doing? Let’s ambush those fuckers,” Angel hissed.
Reaper pointed his finger in my face. “You had no right to make that decision in there for some bitch we don’t even know.”
I smacked his hand out of my face. “She has a name. Use it or shut the fuck up.”
Fangs shook his head. “You’ve fucked us over. You know that, right?”
I cracked my neck. “I know that I stepped in it, but it was the only thing I could come up with that got me and Aria out of there with our heads intact. They had her tied to a chair with her legs spread open, Fangs. What the hell would you have done?”
“Simple,” he said without missing a beat, “I would’ve killed them before I dragged her ass out of there.”
“Even if you were surrounded by seven men? Not including Bullet?”
His eye twitched. “I take it you have a plan to make this right?”
I nodded. “I do, yes. But right now? Those assholes aren’t giving a shit about civilians in this town. Aria’s life is at stake as well as anyone else’s life that gets tangled up with ours right now. If we don’t follow through with our deal? They’ll kill her, they’ll try to kill us, and then there’s nothing standing in the way of them and our town. You know that, right?”
Fangs shoved his hand into my chest. “You’re talking like I would’ve ever let his happen in the first god damn place.”
I held my hands up in the air, signaling that I wasn’t about to fight. “Either way, this doesn’t end well if we wrangle the club away from Bullet. For now, we have to turn over the keys.”
Our president jammed his hand into his back pocket, pulling out the keys. “Go finish the shit you got us into, but know this: I’m not done with you yet. I don’t know if I want your leather cut or your fucking head.”
He dropped the keys into my hand and the guys parted as if I were some sort of pariah carrying a disease they didn’t want to catch. Bullet’s grin made me want to vomit all over myself, but I kept my cool as I walked the keys up to him. If the keys were what he wanted, then he’d get them. And as I dropped them into his callused, crusty palm, he turned around and showed his own men the keys.
Before they erupted into glorious applause.
