Craving Lily (The Aces' Sons 4)

“I wouldn’t let that happen,” she rasped, her IV covered hand rising up to smooth my hair back. “I’d never leave you like that.”

“If anyone else had been watching the boys,” I ground out, shuddering.

We both knew the answer to that. If anyone else had been watching the boys, there was no way they could have found them in the smoke. After Lily had been taken away in the ambulance, I’d heard a couple of the firefighters talking about it. They had no idea how she’d managed to make her way from the kitchen to the office. Most people would have been too disoriented in the smoke to get themselves out the front door. It would have been impossible for them to find the boys inside a locked room.

“You’re sure he’s okay?” she asked again, shifting a little so that Gray was pressed more firmly against her.

“He got an all-clear from the doctors,” I said, kissing her forehead. “He’s just tired and freaked out.”

She nodded and then laid her head back on the pillow, her face filled with exhaustion. “Don’t leave, okay?”

“I’m not goin’ anywhere.” Sitting down at Gray’s feet, I rested my hand on her hip as she rolled to the side and curled around us, her knees resting against my back.

I stayed that way for a long time after she’d fallen asleep.

* * *

“What’s the word?” my dad asked after slamming his gavel angrily on the table.

It was a few days after the fire and we were in church, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. Once Lily had been able to describe what had gone down in the house, every man with connections had been on the phone and taking meetings. We’d been searching non-stop for the last two days and I was losing patience with how little we knew. It just took one connection to get to the truth, but we had to sift through hundreds to find that one.

“Sokolov,” Gramps said, pushing his way into the room with a small scrap of paper in his hand.

“You got news?” Casper asked, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. I didn’t know how the guy was doing it, but he’d been at the club every day since the fire, pouring over shit we knew and shit we didn’t, trying to figure out what had happened. He must have been swallowing massive amounts of painkillers.

“Two boys, Sokolov, flew into Eugene from Russia, one week ago. Talked to a friend at a bar near the airport four days ago.”

“The fuck?” Will asked in confusion. “We didn’t even kill that fat fuck! What the hell do they want?”

“Don’t know, but they were askin’ about the club,” Gramps replied. “Contact at the bar said they were askin’ him questions and didn’t give him the option of keepin’ his mouth shut.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Our guy says he gave them Cam’s name, because he was sure that was one place they couldn’t get to.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tommy muttered, tossing the pack of cigarettes in his hand across the room.

“He tried to warn us,” Gramps said quietly. “But the number he had was one of Casper’s burners. I’m thinkin’ probably the one that was lost in the accident.”

“The perfect goddamn storm,” Grease muttered, shaking his head. “You got a place we can find these fucks?”

Cam and I were on our feet before Gramps could finish rattling off the address of the cheap motel.

“Take Will,” my dad said, not bothering to argue with us. “He’ll make sure you don’t act like fuck-nuts.”

It didn’t take long to get to the motel, which was a pretty standard throwback from the sixties. All the doorways faced one direction and it was only two stories.

From the minute we stepped off our bikes, each one of us was on high alert. No way that the Sokolov boys hadn’t heard us coming, but there was no way to know if they would run, or try and make a stand OK-Corral style. It could go either way if they were feeling froggy, and since they’d already burned down my sister’s house and punched my woman in the face, I was betting they were feeling pretty damn froggy.

“Boris and Hank,” Will called, his lips twitching at the nickname we’d come up with, since none of us knew how the fuck to say the guy’s name. “You in there, boys?”

Oddly, the door opened wide, and there stood a big guy with a scowl on his face.

“What you want?” he asked in heavily accented English.

Cam grinned and punched the big guy, knocking him flat on his ass. We stepped around him and into the room before the littler guy could pull his weapon.

“I’d keep your hands visible,” Will said, pointing his gun at the little one. “I don’t take chances and my woman would be pissed if I got shot.”