A chair scraped somewhere behind me. Nervous movement. Another cut opposite me shifted his weight, knuckles whitening where his hands clasped. I felt it then,that undercurrent beneath the bravado. On the surface, it was business as usual. Underneath? Everyone in that room knew the same truth. This wasn’t posturing anymore. This was a countdown.
My mobile buzzed inside my pocket. Once. Message. Easing it out, I read the preview before opening the message.
‘There’s a car outside. Someone watching.’
‘I want to know who it is.’I typed back.
“This is what I need from you,” Indie’s voice continued to rumble round the room, every face turned on him. “You report any sightings of the Notorious, the Aces or the Hand. I want to know if any other patch or club comes through our territory.”
“We’ve been fucking doing that for months already,” Tomahawk grumbled, rolling his eyes. One of only a few of the other clubs in here that weren’t afraid of us.
“I know,” Indie answered. “And it’s appreciated. We all do the same now. Every club. Understand?”
My phone buzzed again.
‘It’s a woman. Dunno who she is. We’ve brought her in. Says she knows you.’
‘Coming down.’
Prospects stood in a semicircle near the door of the pub. Leather cuts with a bottom rocker. That was all. No patches. No other marks. Just the bottom rocker that read Newcastle upon Tyne. They moved as I got closer, clearing space for me, creating a gap so I could see her through it.
Brown hair tied on top of her head in a ponytail. Tight curls falling from it. She looked up at me, grey eyes catching mine as I approached. Stopping me mid-stride.
Sophie.
Chapter Nine
The man tapped the glass again. Forceful. Impatient. For a moment I stared straight ahead, not sure whether to look at him or pretend he wasn’t there and hope he would go away. Go away. I was parked right outside their clubhouse. The man in the leather cut wasn’t just going to go away.
He tapped the glass again. I breathed out, a little swirl of cloud forming where the air was growing colder around me. Then I cracked my window, pressing the button on the door handle until it opened a couple of inches.
“Can we help you?” His voice rumbled. Polite, but there was an edge there.
“I… I was just passing.”
“Passing? This is a dead end. Nowhere to pass.”
“Yeah. Got a little lost.”
I tried not to wince. Not to show that I was clutching for any excuse I could find to explain why I was here and staking out an outlaw motorcycle club.
The man in leather looked over his shoulder at someone, and that someone approached. Another in leather. Their cuts different from what I’d seen Ryan in. Plainer. The rectangular badge on their left breast read ‘prospect’. Trainees. That’s what my dad would call them. And he’d tell me they were no less dangerous than the fully patched ones. More. They were the ones who had something to prove.
“Gonna need to know who you are and what you are doing here, sweetheart,” the other said.
The word wasn’t kind the way he said it. It was clipped. A warning. It should have sounded harmless; instead it sounded like a threat.
I stared ahead a second longer. I could push my foot to the floor. Run. Take off toward the dead end, reverse, shuffle around in the middle of the pothole-riddled road and screech off past them like a lunatic. And then what? Hope I’d run into Ryan another day?
“I was just passing. Looking for an old friend, I guess.”
The prospect tilted his head sideways. The one beside him fiddled with his mobile, then nudged his friend, pointing the phone towards him. The man now resting his hands on my door nodded.
“We’re gonna need you to come inside while we verify who you are.”
A shiver brushed my skin, but I nodded anyway. My dad would be furious. I could hear him in my head.
‘Never let them take control of the situation,’his voice echoed. ‘Once you step inside, you’re playing by their rules.’
