Locker brought his gaze upright. “Never do harm to those who don’t deserve it.”
Axton shoved himself upright. “Exactly. Do you think that woman down there deserves this?”
“No.”
“Well, at least you’re smart enough to answer your own questions nowadays,” I murmured.
“Shut up,” Locker spat.
I placed my hand on Axton’s shoulder. “Let me be her interface for now. Whatever you need her to know, or even say to her, I can do on your behalf. But it’s our best and only shot that we’ve got. We’ll need all hands on deck to figure out where in the hell this woman’s sister is, anyway.”
Axton simply nodded before he stormed out of the room, and I knew that wasn’t good. The only other time he had ever walked out of a church meeting before dismissing us was when we had lost our first-ever crew member under his tutelage.
And as he slammed the door behind him, my eye twitched.
“All right, everyone,” Dante, our Enforcer, said as he stepped up to the plate, “here’s what’s gonna happen: we get back into our A-B-C patrol groups and start them back up. As far as I’m concerned, we’re back at square one. So, we act as such. We keep up patrols, we keep digging around town for information, and as long as we’ve got her sister with us in this clubhouse, we know that whoever we run into will be the woman we’re looking for.”
“That bitch deserves to pay for what she did to Luca,” Rocker grumbled.
Dante’s gaze sharpened. “Which is why we’re gonna find the bitch. No one takes out a president of ours and gets away with it.”
“Axton knows that none of us could have possibly known, right?” Wolf asked. “I mean, a twin? It’s almost like a comedy sketch.”
“And yet, there’s nothing funny about any of this,” I said flatly. “About beating up an innocent woman for information she doesn’t have.”
“We can’t just let her go, though,” Dante said as he slid both of his hands into his tight-ass pockets. “You guys know that, right?”
That rendered the table silent once more.
“As long as she’s in our grasp, we have to wait and make sure she isn’t gonna run to anyone and everyone who will listen. We’re in a precarious position, so we have to tread lightly while watching our backs.”
The sea of heads around him nodded, but I could tell they were all off in their own little world. This was a first for us. We’d never snatched someone off the street that we hadn’t meant to take. It felt odd. Wrong, even. And it gave me a stark reality check with my own conscience.
Not enough to leave, of course.
But enough to know that we had to tread lightly, otherwise we’d all go down for what happened.
“A-team, your patrol is up. Run our back roads for two hours, then run the main roads for the other two hours. B-team, you’ll switch out with them after with the same pattern, but C-team?”
“Yeah?” Rocker and Locker asked in unison.
“I want you patrolling our delivery routes. I want to make sure none of our outside operations have been compromised by us being distracted for the past few days. By that time, I should have an indefinite schedule of patrol times, routes to take, and things to check off while you’re out and about on the road.”
I drew in a deep breath. “Guess I’ll go break the news to her.”
The door slammed open, revealing a very pale Axton. “I can do it.”
“Uh, what?” Dante asked.
“Dismiss church and get on with the patrols,” Axton called out as he headed for the stairs.
Dante looked at me. “Mav?”
I bolted for the door. “I’ll take care of it.”
Dante clapped his hands. “Church dismissed, everyone. Get to your jobs. We’ve got a fuckton of work to do if we want to catch up.”
6
