Atonement (Angel's Halo MC 5)

Fuck, I would need at least a week to show her everything I knew.

Instead, I was at the bar, where Bash and Spider were already sitting at the Original’s booth with the uncles and Hawk. Colt was behind the bar, grabbing drinks for everyone, and Jet was pulling up a chair for us before taking his own seat.

The sight of my oldest brother once again in his cut pulled at something deep inside my chest. The brief time he had been in prison, followed by the months he had refused to rejoin us in the MC, had fucked with my head. Before all that bullshit had happened, Jet had always been a part of the club. He was the biggest reason I had looked forward to becoming a member. Then he had become president after our father had died, and the club had felt even more like home.

Now he was just a regular member, having turned the reins over to Bash, but it still felt good to see him back in his cut and sitting front and center for a briefing on a run that suddenly needed to happen.

All eyes lifted to me for only a few seconds as I took my place at the table. Colt dropped a beer in front of me, and I found it hard to look him in the eye.

Shit. With everything that had happened with Quinn, I hadn’t really thought about what would happen with my brother if he ever found out. For years, he had made sure I understood that Quinn was hands off, and I had respected that. It had been important to him, and I had accepted it as much a law as the one we had always had beaten into our heads about no one ever touching our sister.

That didn’t mean the hands-off rule hadn’t been bent a little as I had fought my need for that sweet, little beauty. And watching Colt with her over the years had caused more than a few quarrels between the two of us. I didn’t want to admit it had been jealousy, but there wasn’t any other word for what I had felt—what I still felt—whenever I saw Colt and Quinn together.

“I thought we took care of the trouble with the Italians,” Uncle Chaz said as he practically slammed his half-empty mug of beer on the table in front of him. His dislike for anything that had to do with the Italians evident on his wrinkled, old face.

My ears perked up at the mention of our biggest enemy. By Italians, he had meant the Santino crime family. They liked to think they ran the West Coast, but they weren’t much to talk about, not compared to the Vituccis, one of our biggest customers, when it came to security runs. Few men scared me the way Vito Vitucci and his men, Ciro and Dante, did. They were cold, dark machines who could turn their emotions on and off with a flip of a mental switch. I respected them all, but shit, I didn’t want to deal with them often.

We had recently dealt with them when Carlo Santino Junior had shot Hawk and taken Gracie. Our trip had been extended for weeks when Gracie had gotten sepsis from a gunshot wound to her arm and we had attempted to locate Junior in New York and even Chicago. The bastard had slipped through our fingers. I was still itching to get my hands on him.

No doubt, so was Hawk.

“Dante is still in New York with Vitucci,” Bash spoke up, drawing every eye effortlessly to him. When the pres. spoke, everyone gave him their attention. “He’s been going back and forth from there to his base in Chicago, which has left his businesses … vulnerable. His men have been dealing with it, but he has asked us to join the effort to ensure his assets remain intact.”

“Vulnerable to who?” Razor asked with a snort. “Dante De Stefano is a scary-ass mofo. Who has the balls to fuck with his shit?”

“Enzo Fontana,” Jet supplied the answer for him, and it was like the temperature in the bar dropped ten degrees as my blood turned icy.

Enzo Fontana was an evil sonofabitch. Worse than Carlo Junior, whose favorite pastime was beating women into a bloody mess before raping them. I didn’t need my brother to explain to me why Enzo was causing trouble; I alr

eady knew the answer. Fontana’s brother had been Junior’s right hand man, and easy pickings when we had needed answers.

Hawk, and then Andre Volkov, had tortured him for hours to get the answers we had needed. I didn’t want to know what river the man was floating around in now, but I knew he had been a container of acidic human juice by the time Ciro Donati had finished with him. Before that, he had been a whimpering shell of a man from the mess Volkov had made of his body.

So yeah, Enzo had a vendetta against anyone who had been a part of his brother’s disappearance.

Dante hadn’t been present during the torture, but with the underboss traveling so much from Chicago to New York, he was currently the more vulnerable of the Vitucci clan.

“Colt, you and Raider take six brothers and give De Stefano a hand,” Bash commanded. “Whatever they need, make it happen. I don’t have to tell you how invested we are in this.”

I nodded my acceptance. “Will do.”

Colt reached over and squeezed Hawk’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, brother; if we find Junior, we’ll save him just for you.”

Hawk popped his knuckles, one at a time, but didn’t say a word. The look in his green eyes was plenty enough for us. Maybe I should have pitied Santino for what was to come should my brother get his hands on him before Vitucci’s men did, but I didn’t. If anything, I looked forward to watching the bloodbath that was sure to ensue.

After another half an hour or so of being briefed, we were dismissed. Colt and I could pick any six men we wanted, but we tended to depend on a selected few. Tanner, Matt, and Onyx would have been my three, but Matt had fucked up his hand in a fight the week before and couldn’t ride with the way his hand was casted, let alone shoot. So, I decided Clutch, Onyx’s son, would be a good replacement.

Colt had his own go-to team, which usually included Trigger, Creed, and Warden.

With Onyx, Clutch, and Trigger gone, it would leave Uncle Jack short at the garage, but he was used to it and would be able to pull an MC brother in to assist if he needed the help.

After sending out a text to my three, I watched as Colt did the same to his before lifting his phone to his ear. I clenched my jaw so hard my back teeth started to ache, yet I found myself listening a little more intently than I usually allowed myself.

“Hey,” his voice had changed to the tone he always used when he spoke to Quinn, and I noticed his eyes had softened, making him look slightly younger.

Once, and only once, had I heard Flick tell Raven that she thought Quinn was Colt’s soulmate, but she didn’t understand why they were only friends. After that, I had made sure never to listen in when they talked about either Colt or Quinn.

“I’m going to be gone for a little while. You got everything you need?” There was a pause on his end as he waited for a reply.