Gathering intel.
Trying to come up with a plan.
It was just that the job was happening before I could set anything in motion.
Curtis was looking a little rough. The years had matured me, but aged him. Which wasn’t surprising, given that he’d been a good ten or twelve years older than me at the time. He was still big, still strong, things he could control with the gym. But his face was getting lined and redder than before. His blond hair was taking on a lot of white.
And, from the looks of things, someone had tried to stab the fucker in the eye, but missed and gave him a nasty-ass scar right beside it instead.
He probably lived just long enough to regret trying to make a move, to feel more pain than any human being should be forced to endure.
I bet he’d welcomed death.
That was why I had to do this, to play this close to my vest. Because I couldn’t let that kind of shit happen to any of the guys or their families.
This was my mess.
I had to be the one to clean it up.
“You’re late,” Curtis snapped as soon as he saw me.
“I’m exactly on time,” I shot back, not willing to go meek, to cower like I once did before him. When I’d been a kid, as green and weak as could be without having my family and the club to fall back on for strength.
“Watch that fucking attitude, kid,” he growled before spitting on the ground at his side, narrowly missing the shoe of one of his men. “You forget who you’re talking to?”
I didn’t forget.
I’d seen the bodies.
I’d buried the bodies.
All of them marked with the tip of his blade, dying with terror in their open eyes.
I knew exactly who I was talking to.
A bully I was now old enough and strong enough seasoned enough to take on.
Life had come swinging with both fists at me on the road after getting away from Curtis and his bloody reign. It had forced me to grow up and trust my instincts, to learn to fight, even if it meant to the death.
Then I’d joined up with Voss, someone who taught me even more about how strong you needed to be existing alone in the criminal underbelly.
If there was ever a time that I felt confident that I could take Curtis on, it was now.
I just had to find the right time.
Because, lord knew, I was never going to catch him with his guard down again, with uncovered drinks and averted eyes.
“I know exactly who I’m talking to,” I shot back, giving him the kind of eye contact that no one else would, because they knew he would see it as a threat.
That was okay.
He could see me as one.
I was a threat.
He just had no idea how much of one.
He didn’t know about the hotel room I had been renting. The one with a roof that overlooked his current little hangout spot. The one that I’d been funneling guns and rounds of ammunition into for days. The one with the list of members of his crew that I’d need to take out along with him, since faces had change a lot over the years.
I wonder who he’d forced to bury those bodies.
“So you’ll remember what happens when you give me lip,” he said.
I didn’t let my gaze go in that direction, but, yes, I did know. Because a man standing to his side once thought he could get smart with Curtis. And he’d gotten his damn tongue cut out for it.
I’d been there.
It was maybe the first time I ever thought I’d be sick from witnessing some sort of violence.
But not the last time.
“I’m just here to do the fucking job, man. Are we heading out now?” I asked, waving toward my bike.
“We are,” he said, but shook his head at my bike. His arm lifted as he moved back a step, waving at a black van just as one of his guys pulled the slider door open.
An unmarked black van.
Something was telling me at that moment that I might not be walking away once this job was done after all.
But it was too late to back out now.
I was surrounded.
As I got myself patted down and my weapons taken from me, then climbed into the van, and heard the door slam closed, shutting me inside with half a dozen psychopaths and their even more deranged leader, all I could seem to think about was her.
And how I wished I’d gotten to explain myself to her.
And tell her that I’d never, not for one fucking day, stopped loving her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Louana
I had no real direction in mind when I’d sped out of the clubhouse lot.
All I knew was I needed to get away as far and as fast as I could.