Shane (Mallick Brothers 1)

Mo just signed his death certificate.

Metaphorically.

His body was never going to be found if I knew anything about these gun runners.

“Good to know,” I said, nodding and moving toward the door.

I stepped outside, drawing not only the attention of Reign and Cash, but the mammoth bearded man beside them. Now Cash was capable when he needed to be; Reign was deadly; Wolf, yeah, Wolf was a wild fucking animal when he got angry. He was a silent giant with freaky as fuck honey-colored eyes and a past that had the blood me and Reign spilled look like amateur hour.

“That’s it?” Cash asked, giving me a confused smile. “No wonder guys are welshing. You are losing your touch.”

“Reign, we got a problem,” I said, making him stiffen. “Actually, you have a problem.”

There was a short pause, Cash and Wolf getting equally as tense. “What problem do I have?”

“Mo seems to be playing it fast and loose with club secrets.”

“The fuck?” Wolf growled. Growled. I did mention he was a crazy fuck.

“Sniveling little Mo?” Cash added.

“Seems he is willing to trade his debt for the information on where your next drop is.”

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Reign barked, hands curling into fists, eyes blazing.

“I know loyalty is important to guys like us. Figured I would let you know you have a rat.”

Reign raised a hand, scraping it down his face. It was moments like this that you could see the weight of leadership literally weighing a man down. His shoulders lowered; his jaw got tense. He knew what had to happen. He knew it was necessary, but he didn’t enjoy that fact at all. He didn’t get off on spilling blood. But some things couldn’t be avoided.

“Fuck,” he said, resigning himself to the inevitable. “I appreciate you telling us this. I will have the eight grand to you by the end of the week once… things get handled,” he said, jerking his head toward the shed.

Just then, as if sensing or maybe overhearing what we were discussing, the door to the shed opened and Mo flew out.

See, there’s this thing I learned camping with my Pops and brothers when we were kids. If there was one thing you didn’t do around a wild animal, it was run. Across from me, Wolf let out a growl, his massive form moving faster than you would think was possible, tearing across the yard and snatching Mo up by the back of his neck and dragging, fucking dragging the screaming man back to the shed.

“I’ll leave you to it,” I said, accepting the hand Reign had extended to me, aware that his focus was on the shed, mentally preparing for what was to follow, and not on me. Cash gave me a chin jerk, all his laid-back, jocular lightness gone, replaced with Cash, the criminal biker. It was an almost unsettling thing to see as he moved back toward the shed.

“See you around, Shane,” Reign agreed, leaving me to see myself out as he moved toward the shed as well.

I left feeling heavier than I had when I arrived. I drove my bike back to my place, washing off the blood, throwing my clothes in the wash (ever conscious of the possibility of DNA evidence). I changed, paced my floors for a long minute, then tore back down to the parking lot, grabbing my truck, and heading to the God damn mother fucking home improvement store.

See, one thing that had been weighing on me since I heard Lea’s irate and obnoxiously sexy voice on my machine about her shower breaking, was the fact that she was living in a half-dilapidated building a stone’s throw from the Fifth Street gang and all the seedy people they got involved with. Alone. The fucking most gorgeous woman I had ever seen in my life, and I’d seen and put my hands on my fair share of them, lived alone in a ghetto without even having a fucking locking door.

It wasn’t that I didn’t give a shit about my businesses. But I understood my tenants. They laid low on purpose. If the place they lived in suddenly looked like the God damn Hilton, cops would get suspicious about how a bunch of seemingly unemployed people managed to pay the rent there. They would snoop. Then I would lose tenants. So I let the place fall into disrepair and literally never had one complaint about it.

But Lea wasn’t my typical tenant. She’d moved in because she was genuinely low on cash. For fuck’s sake, she had an empty stomach when I brought her to my parents’ house. She wasn’t the kind of woman who was comfortable living in an apartment building that offered her no safety whatsoever. She lived there because it was the cheapest place in the county. And that, well, it didn’t sit right with me. Not because she didn’t seem like she could handle herself; she seemed like a certifiable hardass. But that didn’t mean she stood a chance against some lowlife fuck who broke in to steal shit or because he got an eye-full of her and decided to take what wasn’t offered. That wasn’t a situation she should ever find herself in just because I didn’t make a couple alterations.