Fuck.
“What happened?”
Hawk huffs and scratches at his beard. “Shipment is gone. Third one from the last set that we sent out the day King got home. There’s a pattern going on.”
Fuck.
Rue steps up to park his ass next to Hellion and starts scouring over the pages with him, cursing over what’s there. I sit next to Hawk and keep my eyes on King.
I want to know what he’s thinking about this shit more than I need to know the details right now. I need to know what sort of a Prez we’re serving under so I can plan out my own recon accordingly.
Vic’s death has told me a little, but not everything.
King’s eyes are intense as he slowly takes each of us in. The twitch in Hawk’s fingers as he flicks the ash from his cigar, Hellion’s piercing scrutiny on each and every document on the table, the frown on Rue’s face as he joins the dots together, and me.
The stiffness of my shoulders as I sit there and wait for his instructions. The death already etched into my face and the stillness of my body as I wait. I’m ready to shed blood for my club and to bleed for my family. Whatever the cost, I’ll pay it.
Rue starts fucking losing his shit and slides a page over to me, rubbing a hand over his face like he wants to scrub it off. Hellion grunts and leans back in his chair too, looking over at his brother-in-arms and blood as he waits for his decision on this shit too.
King says nothing, waits for me to see the evidence put forward.
I look over the note Rue’s passed over, the times and details, and it takes me a half second to see that there’s a pattern to where the information is coming from.
Church.
More specifically, the chapel itself because that meeting only had the senior-most members of the council, and the meeting with the route only had my blood which means someone has bugged the fucking place. I don’t know how they got that shit past us but it’s fucking serious shit.
I meet King’s eyes and he nods at me like we’ve come to an agreement. We have.
I’ll fucking find this surveillance.
“We gonna go ahead with the meeting? Even with the chance we’re being watched?” Rue says slowly, like he’s thinking real fucking hard about his word choices.
I keep my eyes on King and he nods. “We go ahead with the meeting and keep our eyes open. Keep our shit under wraps until we can sort out the shipments. We can reconvene later, make a plan once Tomi’s had a chance to go through the place.”
Hellion grunts and sweeps the entire chapel with his eyes like he’s got laser vision and will see whatever bugs have been planted. “Keep shit on topic with Luis, make sure none of our boys let anything slip. I’ll let Luis know too.”
I nod at him. We coulda really gone to town on these assholes if the other charter wasn’t here. Could’ve made up some stories to throw them off and catch them out, but we’d have to throw Luis and his boys under the bus for that shit and that just isn’t King’s style.
Integrity and brute fucking force to the end.
Rue and I have a little more planning and smarts but that’s for later, for when we step up and make this shit our own. Not for now. Now we’re here to shut our mouths and follow orders, learn everything we can from our fathers, and then rule this place when our time has come.
If we make it, that is.
When church finally lets out I’m ready for a fucking drink before I have to go deal with the bullshit down at the bar. Rue has a mountain of jobs lined up at the garage and looks about as happy as a kick in the balls about it. He’d spent the last week trying to avoid both biker bitches from both charters and Diego, Luis’s son and a royal fucking pain in both our asses.
We’d managed to keep Poe the hell away from the clubhouse but now she’s fucking pissed as hell and ready for blood.
All I have to say about that shit is thank fuck I don’t have a woman because Rue always looks fucking miserable and that’s not the life I want.
I want to drink my way through every bar, fuck my way through every stripper I ever meet that catches my eye, and then wake the hell up and do it again tomorrow.
Fuck being ‘struck.
I grab a beer at the bar and ignore the bitching Axe and Speck are doing over the hot stripper again.
“You sure she’s not just playing hard to get? Fuck, I think I’ll go fucking bankrupt if I keep going down there. Never seen a woman do that shit with her legs before.”
Speck shakes his head and he looks serious as all get out for once in his life. “She’s dead serious and she’s making enough green that it’s in the club’s best interest to let her do her thing.”
I park my ass down with Axe and give Speck a look. “Since when do you speak for the club’s interests, prospect?”
I shouldn’t rag on him like this.
Not when Rue’s bitch fit at King is still ringing in my ears, clear as a fucking bell, about what it means to be a Callaghan in the Unseen. But it sounds like he’s fucking smitten with this girl and that spells out fucking trouble. Not even patched in yet and already getting into fights over a piece of ass?
Jesus fucking Christ.
The doors to the chapel open again and King walks through with Luis and they both clap each other on the shoulder as they part ways. There’s a lot of respect there, even if they’re not that close anymore thanks to King’s time in lock-up. I finish off my beer but before I can flag Speck down for another Luis meets my eye across the room and motions at me to follow him into the parking lot.
I do it without question.
I’ve known this man for fucking years, long before he took over the Shreveport charter and began cleaning it the hell up but from the second he took over he’s kept me in the loop.
I took a bullet for him a few years back in an arms deal with the cartel gone wrong and that’s something his pride can’t ever forget. I was twenty-one and a prospect, a prince of my club and un-fucking-touchable, and still, I dove in front of him to get him the hell outta the way of that shot. Barely skimmed me but it woulda been nighty-night for him if it had’ve hit true.
He takes his phone out of his pocket, stuffs it in his pack on his bike, and starts the engine. I frown at him and do the same with mine, only I balance it on his seat.
Then we walk into the trees, close enough that I can keep an eye on the door and who might come looking for us but far enough away that our voices won’t get overheard or recorded.
Unless he’s wearing a wire.
Even after years of mutual respect, I don’t completely trust anyone but my blood.
“Shit’s getting busy around here. More eyes on us all.”
I shrug at him. “That’s the life. If you thought King’s release would make shit better around here you haven’t been paying attention.”
He huffs out a laugh at me. “You sure you’re not gonna push to be Prez someday soon? You’re too smart to be a VP to a grease monkey.”
Someday there’s gonna be a reckoning because they all have Rue wrong, every last one of them has decided I’m the brains of this next generation.
Rue didn’t go to college because that woulda meant leaving Poe.
We talked about it. We planned that shit out together and made an agreement on how the hell we’d be moving forward long before either of us ever prospected and patched in. There’s never been a question in my mind about Rue’s presidency.