I liked the sound of it but I didn’t want to say so in case he hadn’t meant it literally.
“Unless you want your own room?” Jagger asked.
“I’m good if you’re sure there’s enough space for us in one room,” I said.
Jagger’s gaze darkened. “I’ve started considering close quarters an upside.”
Heat rushed between my thighs with the possibilities.
“You know what this tea needs?” Vigo asked, opening and closing cupboards. “Booze.”
“You know what I need?” Hawk said, his footsteps heavy on the old wood floors. “Food.”
My stomach rumbled. “I’m starving.”
We’d had snacks on the plane — all served by a slender attentive guy wearing slacks and a white button-down — but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a meal.
My phone buzzed on the counter. I picked it up and saw Bram’s name, then set it down again.
“You didn’t tell him you were leaving the country, did you?” Jagger asked.
I shook my head. “He would have tried to talk me out of it.”
The problem of what to do about Bram was becoming an ever-present one.
How much to tell Bram about the people who’d killed our parents?
How much to tell him about my feelings for the Hawks?
And another question, this one for the Hawks: how much to admit — to them and to myself — about my growing feelings?
They were all loaded questions, but my problems with Bram were an ocean away. The Hawks were right in front of me and the fact that my ninety days with them were up in less than two weeks loomed like a storm cloud in the distance.
Jagger reached for my hand. “You can’t keep what’s happening from him forever.”
“Bram deals with things his way,” I said. “I deal with them mine.”
“We all know how Bram deals with things,” Hawk said.
Bram’s penchant for violence was far from a secret in Blackwell Falls.
It was a necessary deterrent.
Setting aside the missing girls, the town I’d grown up in had its share of bad stuff. There were drugs — obviously — and I’d even heard rumors of gun trafficking through the local MCs.
There was probably more, things I hadn’t heard about thanks to Bram’s efforts at squirreling me away on the north side of town.
But one thing I did know was that it all worked because of Bram, Poe, and Remy. They were the ones who kept drugs from being sold around schools and the ones who made sure any violence between the street gangs or MCs didn’t spill out into the town.
The Blackwell Butchers — my brother and his two best friends — ran the town with quiet iron fists and the one and only reason Bram hadn’t gone on a killing spree after my accident was because he didn’t yet know who to kill.
If I told him about Dimitri Kaprolov — about Irina Sokolov and the money sent to the Rooks or anything else the Hawks and I were still figuring out — he’d go on a bloody rampage.
Like a cut-off-heads-and-ask-questions-later kind of rampage.
His contacts inside the Blackwell Police Department wouldn’t be able to keep him out of prison. Then I’d have lost every single member of my family to the shadowy group behind the sex trafficking ring.
There was a time for my brother’s brand of justice but that time wasn’t now, when I was still trying to untangle the web of powerful people who were responsible for what had happened to our parents.
