“Are you fucking with me?” he said, almost asking himself the question.
“Find out,” I told him. He had to put the pieces together himself, or this would never work. He didn’t know me, didn’t know if I was a liar. “Go look it up. There’s a boarded-up Sav-Mart on the edge of town. I’ll be in the parking lot at four o’clock tomorrow morning, my bags packed. If McMurphy finds out I’m gone, he’ll come after me and kill me. So be there, and save my life, or don’t be there. It’s up to you.”
Three
Cavan
Be there, and save my life, or don’t be there. What a fucking choice.
I didn’t have time to say anything else, because McMurphy came back—early, probably hoping in his black heart to catch me with my cock deep in his old lady so he could do us both some damage. Doing damage was McMurphy’s favorite hobby. But all he found was me with my dick in my pants, finishing up the bird tattoo as Dani stared silently at the ceiling.
I finished the tattoo, disinfected it, bandaged it, gave her some antibiotic cream and told her how to take care of it. She nodded, not meeting my eyes, playing the cowed girlfriend to perfection. And all the time my brain was buzzing, the words she’d said going
off in there like fireworks. You’re Devon Wilder’s brother.
She was right. I was. Devon and I had grown up like weeds on the streets of L.A., our father long gone and our mother checked out. I was the older by two years, and I’d looked out for him, not that Devon needed much looking out for. He was smart, my brother was, and tough. He saw through people. Nothing got by him. I’d acted out, done stupid shit, but Devon never had. He was forged in steel, my brother, even when he was a kid. The truth was, I’d admired the hell out of him, even though he was younger.
Then everything had gone to hell, and I’d let him down.
Fuck, that was a long time ago.
When Dani and McMurphy left I cleaned my instruments, thorough and methodical, just like I always was. You don’t fuck around with your instruments when you’re inking the Black D—any biker with an infection, even a minor one, is likely to put your teeth out.
I lived in the tiny rundown apartment above my ink studio. The building was a shabby one, an old house that was owned by the club and had been converted to a studio downstairs and living quarters upstairs. The living space was a little one-room dive that fit me, a few pieces of furniture, and not much else. The club didn’t pay me for my work, but in return I lived rent-free. I could take on other clients—paying ones—and pocket the money, but the club’s requests had to come first, and I had to be on call for them at all times. If you don’t think a biker ever wants a tattoo at two in the morning, you haven’t spent much time around biker clubs.
So in a way, the Black Dog MC owned me. And in other ways, they didn’t.
Like now. Now I had some free time and no other appointments booked, so I walked upstairs to my place and pulled out the years-old laptop I used to watch the odd movie and not much else. I lived an unplugged life—no email, no Facebook bullshit. Definitely no daily news. Still, the thing worked, so I got on the internet and did what Dani had told me to: I looked up my brother.
What came up made my head spin. The top result was a story from a San Francisco news site, with the headline Local Ex-Con Becomes the City’s Latest Billionaire. With a picture of Devon, right there.
There was so much in those few words that I had to close my eyes for a minute. Local—Devon was in San Francisco. Ex-Con—Devon had done time. And that last word, the biggest one—Billionaire. How the fuck was my brother a billionaire?
I opened my eyes again and looked at the photo. My head spun again. I hadn’t seen my brother in ten years, and there he was. Dark hair, green eyes—Dani was right, our hair and eyes were different, but we probably had the same face. I wouldn’t know, since I hadn’t seen my brother’s face for a decade until today. To me, it looked nothing like the face I saw in the mirror.
Then again, I didn’t much like the face I saw in the mirror.
In the photo, Devon was wearing a suit—a motherfucking suit!—and coming out of the doorway of some expensive-looking restaurant beneath an awning. I made myself scan the article. Each sentence hit me one by one, like punches.
Devon had inherited an estate worth nearly a billion dollars from a grandfather. A grandfather? We didn’t have a fucking grandfather. Our mother had been a runaway and our father had come from God knew where. He certainly hadn’t come from money—we never had any. But this article said our father’s father had been wildly, obscenely rich.
It also said that our father was dead. That was news to me. Rest in peace, asshole.
So with our father dead, when our grandfather died it all went to Devon.
And, apparently, me.
It was right there in the article: Wilder shares the inheritance with his only brother, Cavan Wilder, who he has not seen in ten years. “I’m looking for him,” Wilder said. “I’ve hired people to look for him. That’s all I’m going to say.”
I rubbed my eyes. Holy fucking hell. I was rich.
On paper, according to the internet, I was filthy fucking rich.
And Devon was looking for me.
I looked around my shit apartment and tried to process this, but my cell phone rang. It was the club. They were the only ones who had my number. “Wilder,” came the voice on the other end. “It’s Trinidad.”
“What’s up?” I said, keeping my voice cool, like I wasn’t looking at my only brother’s face for the first time in ten years right this minute, like I hadn’t just learned I had a grandfather and, apparently, a sudden fuckload of money.