Hot wind slapped at his unprotected skin as he slowed to a crawl. His engine howled down the quiet street. People were still sleeping or crawling out of their dismal dens for work—those who actually held down jobs.
The fetid stench of trash day slapped him in the face. The distant, chugging garbage truck had barely started its rounds. Chaos in the quiet.
Where was she?
In that van?
He swerved to the right. The old rusted-out van was too obvious. They wouldn’t be so stupid.
Though here he was driving a motorcycle that probably cost as much as three of the houses on this block. If Jerry didn’t get him, some asshole with a gun would.
He kept his head down and dread rotted his gut the closer he came to the plot of land he’d razed. Sweat stuck to his back and belly as he protected the only thing of value to these people—including his own mother.
God, how had it come to this?
His woman and their growing child were beyond compare. They shouldn’t be touched by this. He’d worked too fucking hard to get out of here.
Distantly, he wondered where Aidan and his team was. Were they still miles away?
Was he truly all alone in this?
Nerves crawl up his spine and threatened to choke him. It was time. Past time as he rolled up to the shattered sidewalk. It looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it in a drunken rage.
Maybe he had one day.
Maybe his old man had done it.
Simon had rarely been sober when he’d been on this street. He’d been too worried about a flying fist or blocking out the wails of someone finding a similar fate in the next house down.
He pulled the bike up the curb, and the sidewalk crumbled under the back wheel as he pulled into the middle of the ruined plot of land that used to be his house—never a home. At least never in any true sense of the word. Maybe there had been some good there before his memories were merely nebulous drunken rages by the man purported to be his father. But he doubted it.
Seemed as if there were monsters on both sides of his family tree.
He flicked out the kickstand and climbed off, then unstrapped the bag of cash from the body of the bike and curled his fingers over the leather handles.
Across the dirt and gravel, beyond the weathered scrap of fence, a sleek black car pulled up one street over. His personal alarm system jangled and buzzed as the door opened and a booted foot came down on the cracked sidewalk.
The man was tall and broad, with closely cropped blond hair. Sort of a cross between Dolph Lundgren and Jason Statham. Both men had previous run-ins with fists—or boards—and their noses.
This guy? Probably more than a few.
Simon swallowed against the very real fact that he was there alone with a metric fuckton of money. From the opposite side of the car, another man emerged. He was much slighter, with a receding hairline dotted with sweat. He wore a suit that probably started off crisp, but even on a cool day in California, the heat was far different from England.
Assuming he was the British one. Or maybe they both were. Who fucking knew?
The two men came closer, their gait deliberately slow. Dolph scanned the area behind mirrored glasses, his arms at ease. Probably because of the bulge under his jacket.
Simon had never been about guns. He’d lived by his fists and feet for more years than he could count.
He was a million miles out of his league here.
“Where is she?”
Instinctively, he knew the shorter man was Jerry. The smarmy slickness came off him in waves. And the sweat on his upper lip told Simon that he wasn’t entirely about this life.
Instead of that knowledge making him feel better, his nerves jumped a few more notches from bone-deep fear to sheer terror.
A wildcard made things so much worse.