“You don’t know shit, you’re right,” he seethed, but there was a wealth of self-hatred and grief in his eyes. “But I got more skin in this game than you think. I got somethin’ to prove to Cress, and I got people here I care ’bout.”
There was a commotion down the hall as a door opened and a young strawberry blonde woman spilled into the corridor, stumbling slightly on her high heels before she righted herself and slammed the door shut behind her.
Instantly, Lysander went on alert, arms at his sides, heavy weight balanced on the balls of his feet.
I looked slowly between him and the girl teetering toward us, but I didn’t recognize her until he growled, “Honey, what’d I tell you?”
The girl looked up at him with glassy eyes and frowned in confusion. “Sander! I dunno, what did you tell me?”
He sighed and stalked toward her, but the moment he reached out to steady her arm, everything about him turned gentle.
“Told ya to stop goin’ back to Cisco. Can’t help you, you don’t help yourself by gettin’ clean,” he murmured, bending his knees so he was eye level with the smaller, almost delicate girl.
And I realized with a start that Honey wasn’t an affectionate nickname.
Honey was Honey, King and H.R.’s estranged half-sister, the same one who had gotten tangled up with the Venturas.
My heart clenched at the sight of her, strung out yet still so lovely, looking at her felt like admiring a Monet painting.
“Hey, girl,” I said softly, moving over to them. “I’m Lila.”
Honey looked over at me with pale brown eyes like sunlight through maple syrup, and I almost caught my breath at how pretty she was, how much she looked like Harleigh Rose, just smaller, more refined.
“Do I know you?” she asked, her words slightly slurred.
I beamed at her. “Not yet, but you will. I work here now, and I have a feeling you, me, and…” I looked up at Lysander, at the way he studied Honey with blatant concern, and I knew he wasn’t here to screw anyone over. Regardless of the details, he was in bed with the Venturas for the same reason I was.
To take them down.
“..and Lysander are going to be good friends.”
The man in question looked over at me with a heavy knot in his brow. “You’re workin’ here now?”
I nodded curtly and patted his shoulder. “Better believe it, bruto. Now, why don’t both of you come inside and help me?”
“This somethin’ for the club?”
“Yep.”
“What is it?”
I grinned wolfishly and tossed my hair. “I need your help setting up the camera. I’m making my debut as a camgirl today.”
Lysander and Honey both blinked at me, the former in shock, the latter drunkenly.
“Fuckin’ Fallen MC,” he said finally. “I’m startin’ to think the women might just be crazier than the men.”
I laughed. “You can count on it.”
NOVA
“She’s gone.”
“She can’t be,” I blinked, tryin’ to wrap my head around the idea of Cressida takin’ off. “She wouldn’t leave her family without a word.”
“She did. Took King’s bike and left,” Zeus said, starin’ at the brothers gathered in church for the first time since he’d gotten outta prison.
Released ’cause his son, King, had set up Staff Sergeant Danner, and his son’s wife, Cressida, had helped dig up evidence the bastard cop had hidden that exonerated Zeus.
Fuck, but it was good to see the mammoth man at the head of the table again, wearin’ his cut Lou’d polished special so it gleamed in the low light spillin’ through the stained-glass window Priest’d installed at the front of the room.
He looked right there.
Buck had tried to take up the mantle, but he wasn’t a leader, not really.
King’d done a bang-up job, but the kid wasn’t Zeus, and he wouldn’t have been without years more experience.
Straight up, there was no one like Zeus Garro, and not one’a us had been spared from feelin’ the agony of his incarceration.
It shoulda been a time to celebrate, but too much shit was goin’ down, as it always seemed to be, and we had problems to address.
Like Cressida Garro, newly widowed, disappearin’ into the fuckin’ night.
“I’ll find her,” I offered.
Priest snorted. “Anyone’s gonna find her, it’s me.”
I stared at the redheaded brother, the one who’d been torturin’ and killin’ our enemies since he was seventeen as if he was born of death and lived to deliver it.
I knew he was right.
“Bat or Kodiak would do a fine job too,” Smoke rasped in his ravaged voice, havin’ smoked two packs a day for forty years.
This was also true.
Kodiak was the best tracker we had. I’d never seen a man move through nature like him. He claimed his Alutiiq First Nations grandfather had been the best tracker in their community in Alaska, and he’d passed down everythin’ he knew.
And Bat, well, Bat was an ex-Marine with so many skills, some of which were straight up terrifyin’, that I didn’t doubt he’d be able to find Cress.