Chapter One
DREW
We traveled down the highway with the future suffocating us. Even unable to breathe, I’d never felt more alive with her wrapped around me and the wind whipping over our skin.
Ayda’s arms tightened around my waist, her legs squeezing me as she sat on the back of my bike—the one my father had dropped off to us on Sinclair’s land before he told us to get the hell out of there.
“What the fuck has happened to Jedd, Slater, and Deeks?” I barked, watching Eric saunter casually toward me outside Sinclair’s burning home.
Ayda was standing strong, her hands down by her sides and her legs parted, like some kind of formidable she-warrior who didn’t care about the dirt and disease crawling over her skin as a building blazed behind us.
Eric took one look at Owen’s home, and that was it. After that, his attention was solely on me.
“They’re taking care of business,” he answered with no emotion whatsoever.
“By turning themselves into the feds?”
“We had to conjure up some magic, Drew. It’s all aboutdistractions.”
I searched his eyes, wondering how he remained so calm at every turn. The sound of wailing sirens far off in the distance caught my attention, making me look up at the crows squawking and fleeing overhead.
“You need to get out of here before those sirens head this way. The sky’s ablaze,” he said calmly, and when I looked back at him, he was smirking. It should have made me angry. Instead, it calmed my soul. A smirk from an arrogant asshole like him only meant one thing: he knew what the fuck he was doing.
“What did you do?” I asked him quietly, my fingers flexing down by my thighs.
Eric glanced at his watch. “Tick tock, Tucker. Time’s a wastin’. You need to take your old lady and that precious cargo she may be carrying and get her the hell out of Babylon.”
“Out of Babylon? Are you fucking crazy?”
“You’re meant to be out on a ride together, unaware of the shit happening on our own porch step. If you rush home now, you’ll look guilty, panicked… like you’ve got something to hide. You’re the president of The Hounds of Babylon MC. Do I need to remind you of that? If you march into Sutton’s building and tear that ATF woman to pieces, demanding to see your men, you’ll look like you’ve been in on it all along. You need to staycalm, Drew. Like you’ve switched off your cell to go and enjoy some quiet time with your future wife, and that’s why nobody can get hold of you. Not like the whole club is in chaos because they’re about to get proven guilty.”
“You want me to walk away?”
“We fuckingneedyou to.”
I glanced at Ayda whose eyes were bright with adrenaline and, more importantly, faith. She had faith we would handle this—faith that we could find our way out of this tangled web we had weaved.
Grabbing her hand, I pulled her to my side.
“How long for?” I asked, turning to Eric.
“A few hours at most.”
“But they know we chased after Owen when we left Walsh’s rally because we wanted to kill him.”
“They know you wanted to kill him?” Eric arched a brow. “How?”
I scowled again. “Walsh. He’ll have told them.”
“You think Walsh would confess to ATF that he knew Sinclair was a rat? You think he’d admit to having intel he hadn’t shared with them already?”
Shit. My father was right. Winnie may have seen disruption in our club when we jumped on the bikes and followed Sinclair, but they wouldn’t know why we were chasing him. All they could do was assume.
A case couldn’t be built on assumptions.
“Are they at least safe?” I asked as the sound of the sirens grew more distant instead of growing closer. “Are my men safe?”
Eric’s eyes narrowed. “Do you trust me?”
