I don’t think I’d ever seen the neon open sign turned off at Rusty’s. It was one of those beacons you could see while driving down the highway. A welcome wagon when you hit the city limits of Babylon. The street sign was still lit up and spinning slowly, but the windows were dark, and the building looked strange. Lonely. Although I doubted that would be the case when the motorcycles were all parked outside. They had a way of making places look crowded.
I stepped inside and looked around the dark interior, yet another unfamiliar sight when it came to Rusty’s. But this had been done for the club, and I wasn’t going to dwell on the fact that this felt wrong and weird.
“Is it true?” Janette squealed as she burst through the swinging doors from the kitchen.
I pushed my hands onto my hips and turned up my smile. “Well, that depends on what you heard.”
“Let me see that ring.”
“That’s a yes then,” I mumbled and rushed forward to bounce around with her. She caught my wrist and studied the stunning yellow diamond of the ring for a long time. Her eyes welled with unshed tears as she twisted my arm left and right to see it from every angle.
“Where is he?”
“He’s helping the guys load the van. Deeks is just riding out real quick to make sure no one is hanging around. Tate is bringing Sloane in on the back of his bike to help, just to make it look genuine.”
“You mean so he has an excuse to ride his bike.”
“That’s what I said. Like he needs an excuse. He’s always on the damn thing these days. I should have waited to give it to him as a graduation present.”
“Leave the boy alone,” Rusty said, pushing through the doors and scooping me up without warning. “Just be glad he’s not making you an aunt.”
“Wait, what?”
“Jesus, Rusty.” Janette growled, rolling her eyes. “Are you really trying to get the award for most inappropriate shit to say, or is it a God-given talent?”
“Talent,” Rusty grumbled, dropping me to my feet and heading out the front to my truck, still muttering under his breath.
“That’s his way of saying congratulations,” Jan shouted at his back before the door could swing closed again. Shaking her head, she looked to me with a wide smile. “I’m yours to do with as you will. What do you need help with?”
“Just setting everything up and making sure everythingis in place. Libby said she was going to pick up a few engagement decorations on the way over, something Tate is happy about. I’m not sure he was sold on being the center of attention, you know.”
Rusty pushed into the diner and dropped a couple of boxes on the table before heading back out again, and I went to start sorting through them. I’d barely pulled open the top when I saw the stiff piece of paper inside with two words written on it:
Vultures circle.
What the hell did that even mean? I read the note three more times until my silent reticence became too much for Janette to handle.
“What you got there, hon?” she asked, surprising me enough to have me spinning to face her.
“Oh, nothing. I guess it got put in here by accident. It’s just a doodle.”
Of all the things to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, this stupid note with two words on top was it. This plan, this situation, this setup... I trusted Drew and his strategy; it was just Jacob I didn’t trust, and the Navs who scared me shitless. They were the variables we couldn’t predict, and the whole situation was beginning to come together leaving just hours before we were supposed to pull this all off.
“I need some air for a second,” I whispered, and sidestepped Jan to slip out of the door and into the cool air of the early afternoon, just as Drew pulled up to the front of the building on his bike and parked next to my truck.
He was clearly still high from the night before and this morning as he swung his leg off the bike, readjusted his cut and walked over to me. As soon as he got close enough to seemy face, his smile faltered, but not his swagger. There was barely a flinch of a frown before he corrected himself and came to a stop in front of me.
“Everything okay?” he asked, brushing my cheek with his knuckles.
I smiled up at him, leaning into his touch. “Having a moment.”
“Talk to me.”
“I don’t trust Jacob, and his association with the Navs scares me. The usual, I guess, but I’ll be fine once I don’t have time to think about everything too hard.”
“Listen…” He dropped his hand from my cheek and picked up my newly accessorized finger, staring down at the ring before he looked into my eyes again. “It would be stupid of me, and naive as fuck to stand here and tell you everything is going to be fine. We both know how things can go wrong. What I need you to do is to not think about all that until it happens. This is just a party. There’s a chance not even Jacob will turn up. There’s a chance we might not get a hint of who hurt Sloane. There’s a chance every Nav within a three hundred mile radius of this place is asleep, tucked up in bed already, too fucked from the night before to even think about taking part in today. But if they do turn up, we wait for them to approach us, okay? And when they do, we’ll be ready. All of us. Including you. You’ve never been stronger than you are right now. You’ve been trained by the best.” He smirked.
I was leg tapping like a tweaker as I looked up and met his eyes. Seeing that assuredness in his eyes always seemed to help. But the unpredictability was what worried me the most. Drew would be the main target if anything went wrong, but then again so was I. That shouldn’t have been comforting,and yet, it was. I knew what to do in a crisis. I knew what was expected of me tonight, and those were the things that settled my scrambled thoughts and anxiety.
