So, I got The Prince and how it could apply to my life, to this situation.
We had to be cleverer than our natures, unpredictable in a way bikers never really were. We had to be more if we wanted to get Z out of that stinkin’ fuckin’ hole and Danner dead or in there instead’a him.
Frustration boiled in my gut, barely doused by the second beer I was slammin’ back at an alarmin’ rate.
“You know,” Nova said as he dropped into the stool beside me. “Got your point in there.”
I cocked a brow, too tired to play games with the club’s Casanova.
“Serious as shit, brother, I feel ya. Buck’s been in the life a long fuckin’ time, sometimes man gets stuck in the sixties ’fore the headache and hassle’a technology made bein’ a rebel a fuckuva lot more complicated.”
“Could still do it,” Priest said from my other side, silent as ghost creepin’ up on us. “Take them one by one and force them to give us what they know.”
“Gotta know, brother.” Bat slapped his tattooed hands on my shoulder and squeezed, ‘Hell’ across one set of fingers and ‘Bound’ across the other. “We got your back.”
A sigh rushed through me, then made me chuckle because I sounded like my woman. “Appreciate it, serious as fuck.”
There was a loud screech of tires outside, alerting every single one of us, guns out of waistbands and knives in hands in a fuckin’ flash.
Seconds later, the clubhouse door pushed open and a small figure appeared in doorframe.
“Hello,” Susan Danner, soon-to-be Susan Hobbs again, greeted shakily as she told at the entrance to a biker club clutchin’ the string of pearls she was always wearin’. “I was wondering if King Kyle Garro might be here.”
I was up outta my seat before she’d even finished speakin’.
“Susan,” I said gently as I went to her and wrapped up in a hug. “What’s goin’ on? Are you confused?”
Susan had early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and I’d seen her around town sometimes starin’ blankly into space or holdin’ a can at Mac’s Grocer as if searchin’ for the answer to life’s question. I always helped her home in those cases, but I knew they were becomin’ more and more frequent.
Still, she had it together enough to divorce Harold Danner before she could be declared incompetent and get stuck with him the rest of her life.
Her shakin’ hands found my back and patted at me like birds afraid to land. “King, oh, honey, are you okay?”
I pulled back and bent at the knee to look her in the eye. This was the one woman in my life who had ever given me a modicum of maternal love and even though we’d grown distant as Lion and me over the years, I still loved her and always would.
“Worried more about you, Suse. What brings you to here?”
Her pretty green eyes filled with tears, and she brought her hand to her mouth as if to disguise the ugliness of her words. “I went to visit Harold because, well, it was stormy out on the ranch, and I got a bit frightened. He normally doesn’t mind because well, I think he’d like to come home to me. Anyway, well, I let myself into his apartment, and he was speaking with this woman.” She made a face of distaste. “Trashy, you know? And they were arguing very loudly so I could hear them even at the base of the stairs.”
My heart stopped beatin’ for one long forbodin’ beat. “What’d they say?”
Her lower lip trembled and her hands were flutterin’ through the air. “She was getting angry with him because he asked her to steal something from your father, and I suppose she didn’t know what he would do with it when she did…”
“What did she steal?” I bit out, tryin’ to stay calm, tryin’ not to scare her even though there was a howl in my throat and the urge to run down prey rampant in my blood.
She sucked a breath in through her teeth. “I think it was a gun.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Okay,” I said slowly, steerin’ her over the couches and movin’ an empty beer can so she could take a seat, aware that Nova, Bat, and Priest were at my back. “Did they see you?”
“No, no. I was so, well, overwhelmed by the whole thing. You know, Harold has always been so stern about the law, but over the past few years…Well, he hasn’t been the same. I’m worried, King,” she admitted, tears fallin’ as she looked at me with the wide confused eyes of a child in an older woman’s face. “I’m worried he did something truly awful.”
He did, I wanted to rage, he did! He put Zeus Garro in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
“Yeah, Suse,” I said instead, surprised by the cold, calculated calm of my voice, like ice cubes slotted into a glass. “He did.”