He was loyal to us.
“How do I just stop knowing how much danger she’s in?” I asked, surprised by the level of weakness in my tone.
“You trust your brothers, and you trust me to keep her safe. That’s how.”
Viper and Fury would back me up if I said no. They would ride with me into an inferno if I said I wanted to risk it all. That was a given, we all would do that for each other. It was why we were so strong as a club.
“Okay,” I said, softly, barely audible.
Wolf nodded and headed away from us in the seedy motel room we had booked for somewhere to stay out of the way.
“We need to get back,” Fury said. “Shit’s going down with someone linked to the Broken Reapers. It doesn’t look good. The boys need us.”
I nodded and grabbed my overnight bag I kept on my bike from the end of the bed. We headed to our bikes, and I pushed everything about Darby out of my mind. She was my weakness and right now, I couldn’t afford to have a weakness.
I had to have faith in Wolf.
I had to.
She couldn’t die.
If she didn’t make it…neither would I.
NINE
Darby
Riagan held me beside him, his fingers digging into my elbow, hurting me. I tried not to wince, to show him I was in pain, but it was hard when he was crushing my skin under his fingers. Two men had come into the house and stood with guns on their hips. It looked like they were bodyguards, but I also knew by the look of them that they meant business and judging by the way my brother stiffened, he wasn’t expecting them.
“Where’s your boss?” he asked, angrily. “I was told to only hand her over personally and everything would be fine.”
They didn’t speak. In fact, they didn’t even look at us. They just stood there like we didn’t exist. Riagan was losing it. I could feel the sweat coming off him in waves. His eyes were frantic, like he was paranoid.
Fuck.
Since when did he do drugs? He’d always been the serious one, the one always looking after all of us…he never did drugs, or drank heavily. I hadn’t seen it before but now all I saw was a shell of the man I once knew and he was about to hand me over to someone he didn’t even know to pay off debts that had landed on his shoulders.
I should feel sorry for him.
But I didn’t.
I felt nothing for him.
A few moments passed, his fingers digging into me further, and the sound of click clack on the tiles of the floor filled the room before I saw a woman appear between the men and come to stand in front of us. Her hair was pulled back in a tight pony tail that still hung halfway down her back, super fine, straight black hair that looked fake yet somehow I knew it wasn’t. She removed her sunglasses and looked straight at my brother, no expression on her face, cold, uncaring eyes. If she hadn’t been human, she’d definitely be a shark with the way she honed inon my brother before they shifted to me. She looked me up and down, like I was meat on display for her.
Something about it had chills going up and down my spine. She was the apex predator and we were all food for her to rip apart as she saw fit.
“This is her,” she asked. Her Italian accent was heavy, but it was mixed with what I could only assume was Russian or German. I couldn’t quite tell which. “The daughter promised.”
“Yes…but she wasn’t promised to you.”
“Well, let me educate you, son of Alasdair. When a father dies, the duty falls on the eldest, does it not?”
Riagan physically blanched and his fingers loosened slightly. “He’s dead?”
“Yes, now…before you join him out of sheer annoyance to me, hand her over.”
“Who are you?” he asked. “I want to know who I am speaking with.”
