Knight (104 page)

“Red, what are you doing here?” I spoke before Brew got too close. My cousin hovered too near the stairs, within range for a fatal fall. “Are you okay? Did something happen?”

He swiped the edges of his blonde hair from his face and offered me the book bag over his shoulders.

“We don’t have a lot of time. Tell Noir to calm down before he gets my foot up his ass.”

Brew’s voice lowered. “I’d love to see you try, kid.”

“Careful, old man. Don’t slip and break a hip.”

“Christ.” I took the bag from Red and the men followed me, but I wouldn’t need the keycard to get into the room if they punched each other through the wall.

Brew chained the door, and Red headed for the bottle of vodka on the table. I pulled the laptop from the bag.

“That’s the laptop Kingdom gave Noir to trade,” Red said. “I grabbed it.”

“Oh, God! You’re the best!”

Brew frowned. “Why the hell would you bring that here?”

“I had an opportunity. I took it.” He unfolded a post-it from his pocket. “Sam keeps his guns in a cabinet with two locks, but he tapes his passwords next to the computer.”

“Does he even know how to use it?” I asked.

“Hell no.”

The laptop was old, but functional. I pressed the power button, and Red tossed me a USB flash drive.

“Get everything off it you can,” he said. “I’ve gotta get it back in an hour.”

“Stealing from your own MC?” Brew’s words were cold. “You’re on your way, kid.”

Red stared him down. “And how many of your tattoos have you blacked out?”

“Stop it.” I typed in the password. “How is it at home?”

“Forget about Sacrilege.” Red’s gaze focused only on the bruise blossoming over my cheek. “What the hell happened to your face?”

“I’m fine.”

He didn’t buy it. He sneered at Brew. “You do this to her?”

“You think you could stop me if I did?”

“You think I wouldn’t slit your throat for touching her?”

Brew loomed over him. “I don’t see Goliath bleeding out anywhere.”

“Fuck you—”

I waved a hand. “Enough.”

The laptop booted slow as hell, but I peeked around the desktop. The normal icons offered me nothing—recycling bin, a printer driver, the browser. But a .txt file pushed into the corner. I opened the document and stared at a dozen series of numbers, dates, times, and locations.

“What is this?” I jammed the flash drive into the laptop. “It’s like...a schedule.”

Red stopped measuring his dick with Brew and moved behind me. “Something like that.”

“Are these serial numbers?”

Red squinted. “VIN numbers. Like, for vehicles.”

“Trucks?” I scrolled through the file. The data was hastily pasted from a spreadsheet, but most of the columns and rows still lined up. “It spans multiple days. What’s it for?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Is Sacrilege knocking over trucks?”

“I doubt it. The club is getting old. That shit is too risky for Sam and his generation. They’d need me and the prospects to do the heavy lifting.”

“And you’d do it?” I arched an eyebrow.

Red shrugged. “Med school was expensive, Tini.”

“Brew, any ideas?” I asked the questions dozens of times and got nothing out of him, but I had to try again. “Anything at all? Why is this information so valuable?”

“I wasn’t paid to ask questions,” Brew said. “The drop was time sensitive, that’s all they told me. I didn’t care about anything else.”

I scrolled through the numbers again. “These dates are for next week. Look. The seventeenth and eighteenth. These trucks haven’t gone out yet. And most of them are going to California.”

Brew hesitated. I didn’t like his frown. “California?”

“Yeah. Three of them are heading to...Dantry.”

Brew grabbed the computer from me, accidentally minimizing the file. He swore, clicking around the desktop.

“Taskbar, Grandpa,” Red said. “They didn’t teach your generation how to work a computer?”

“No, I was out getting laid.” Brew scrolled through the list. “This ain’t good.”

“What?” I whispered.

“California’s not Kingdom’s territory,” he said.

“No shit.” Red tried to take the computer. I smacked him away. “Whose is it?”

“Temple MC.”

My chair flipped as I stood. “Are you serious?”

“That’s my backyard. Dantry, Cherrywood Valley, Roth. Those trucks are heading to our territory. They’re Temple’s trucks.”

“You know them?” Red asked.

“Yeah. I’m real familiar with them.”

“Then what the fuck are they doing here?”

“Take a guess,” Brew said. “The lake? The pissant MCs out here are guarding one of the easiest border crossings. Temple controls the trade in the southwest. They want a slice of the northeast.”

I tabbed through a few other files. Most of the computer was clean, designed specifically to house only the schedules. The laptop didn’t even have a wireless card to access the internet.

“So, Kingdom gives Sacrilege Temple’s trucking schedules.” Red paced the room, heading to the vodka. Brew passed a tumbler as Red took another swig from the bottle. “The trucks are probably carrying some sort of freight to look authentic, a way to hide the drugs.”

Brew nodded. “Usually.”

Red exhaled, thinking out loud. “So…Kingdom hires Sacrilege to rob the trucks, get the drugs, and take a cut of the profit. It looks like a small club getting in trouble. It keeps Kingdom off the radar while it fucks over their rival.”

I opened the laptop’s email program. For a computer without internet access, someone had written a lot of emails. Ten drafts waited in a separate folder—an easy way for people to pass messages without copies generating on a server.

The first email coiled my stomach.

The next broke me into a sweat.

“It’s not the drugs,” I whispered. “Why would Kingdom give sacrilege intel on Temple’s officers?”

Red narrowed his eyes. “What kind of intel?”

“Pictures. Addresses. Occupations and family and last known aliases and likely places where they can easily be found.” I swallowed. It didn’t help. I stared at one of the photos. They labeled the file as Ramirez—Sergeant-At-Arms. “This is the man from the diner, Brew.”

Brew didn’t have to look. Red dove for the computer.

“Christ. This is their entire operation. It’s like a damn FBI registry!”

“It’s all Kingdom’s intelligence.” Brew didn’t thumb through the emails. He exhaled. “Everything they have on their new rival, Temple MC.”

“Why the fuck are they giving it to
Sacrilege
?” Red asked.

I knew the answer.

I didn’t want the answer, but it was the only reason five headless bodies stashed in a cottage only hours after we were chased by three members of a west coast MC.

It was the reason why Kingdom was so desperate to find us.

We were witnesses to a conspiracy far bigger than Sacrilege.

I backed away from the table. I wished the mystery remained a secret. Whatever game Red and I played, whatever burning curiosity we had about the new money in the club or the hushed secrets passing around the officers, it got too dangerous and too real too quick.

Brew figured it out the instant he heard the location. He didn’t say it. His brow furrowed, and his cellphone was already in his hand. Texting his brother.

Preparing Anathema for war.

“Temple MC killed the Kingdom members at the cottage,” I said.

“A premature retaliation,” Brew said. “They were careful. Kingdom hired me to act as an intermediary between them and Sacrilege, to try and keep the clubs separate. But they were watched by Temple MC the whole fucking time.”

I crossed my arms to hide my trembling hands. “And Temple recognized you.”

Red interrupted us with a sharp profanity. “Forget that for a fucking minute. If Temple killed these douchebags, then I’ll find Sam and he can tell Kingdom where to point their guns. We’ll get the heat off Noir since he’s supposed to be watching over you, making sure no asshole punches you in the face.”

Brew’s words cut through Red like a knife to the throat. “You tell Sam, and we’re all dead.”

“What?
Why
?”

“Because that computer was given to Sacrilege for one reason.”

“What reason?”

“It’s a hit list.”

The words curdled my stomach as the walls and floor began to tilt. I sucked in a breath, pretending I was still on Brew’s bike, and the bumps in the road weren’t bodies hitting the floor.

Brew’s voice hardened. “Kingdom MC knew Temple was edging into their territory. So they hired Sacrilege to murder Temple’s ranking officers, men who created one of the most dangerous MCs in the fucking country.”

“Shit.” Red leaned over the table.

“And guess which member they left in the dark to clean up the scene and hide the bodies without realizing what went down?”

Red’s fists curled over the chair. I hoped it wouldn’t launch through the window.

Brew nodded at me. “Darling, you were Sacrilege’s collateral, but they weren’t waiting for money.”

The thought chilled me. “Kingdom planned to keep me until Sacrilege assassinated Temple’s men.”

The sickness rose in my throat. I sweated, but my teeth chattered. I needed to sit down. Brew set me on the bed before I fell on my ass.

“Sam wouldn’t sign on for this,” Red swore.

“Goliath would,” I said. “And he’d be the first in line to put a 2x4 through someone’s skull.”

“Doesn’t have to now,” Brew said. “Temple took out Kingdom first.”

“Fuck this.” Red pulled his phone. “I’ll go to Kingdom and tell them Temple killed their men.”

“And then you singlehandedly start the bloodiest MC drug war in history.” Brew’s eyes darkened. “Temple and Kingdom go to war, and every club with allegiance to either of them will get dragged into this fucking nightmare. Including Sacrilege.” He glanced at me. He worried about Anathema too.

“So what do we do then?” Red ran a hand through his hair. The leather of his jacket creased hard, dusty from his ride. His member patch didn’t carry much weight, but he loved the club as much as the officers. “I won’t be part of a conspiracy to mass murder. And I won’t be the one hiding an entire crew of bodies from every goddamned Fed in the country.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“Like hell.”

“If you tell Kingdom that Temple killed their men, the MCs go to war. You’ll get hunted down like a fucking dog, and you’ll die. If you tell Sam what you learned, Goliath will put a bullet in your brain. If you go to Temple and tell them you were part of a plot to murder their officers? They’ll flay you alive and leave you in the desert for the scorpions.”

I shivered. Red sighed, head in his hands. I should have reached for him, either of them, but I had nothing to offer. Every second that passed just chiseled our names on our tombstones.

Red reluctantly spoke, his words edged out between his teeth. “...Or? You got another plan?”

“I take the blame. Kingdom and Temple target me.”

“Why the hell would you do that?”

His voice deepened, but he didn’t look at me. I didn’t like the finality in his gaze, the sudden stoicism of a man readying for battle without the comfort of weapons or armor.

“Because I’m the only one who can get Martini out of this alive.”

Brew promised to protect me.

It’d be a great trick since he wasn’t talking to me.

We ran to our third hotel room in two nights, and I was exhausted. My arms ached from clutching the bike’s gas tank instead of Brew, and my eyes scratched dry from a severe lack of sleep. I forced him to stop and rest. He agreed with a grunt.

I checked out my healing cheek as soon as we got into the room. When covered with a bit of foundation and a practiced hand for disguising bruises, it didn’t look too bad. A little powder, a kinder light, and I was good as new.

But for the past two days, Brew hadn’t looked at me. He didn’t repeat any impassioned declarations to keep me safe. He risked his life to keep me out of the line of fire, but he still treated me as if we were strangers, as if we hadn’t shared enough traumatizing moments to bind us together in tragedy.

It wasn’t because he was stressed.

It wasn’t because he worried about finding a safe place for the night.

It was the goddamned bruise on my cheek.

He couldn’t look at me because I was
hurt
.

I had enough silence to last a lifetime. I wasn’t a girl who let circumstance stomp on her feet when she wanted to dance.

I was just the one who tied a pink scarf around her neck to hide the biggest mistake of her life.

Brew tossed a handful of aspirin. I handed him a bottle of water. He slowly accepted it, like he knew it wasn’t going to be a fair trade. And it wasn’t. I pointed to the mark on my cheek.

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

“Christ.”

“If you saw how I retaliated, you’d be congratulating me.”

Brew claimed his bed, slipped out of his jacket, and ran a hand through dark hair that fought the beginning of grey around his temples. His jaw shadowed with stubble. He never tended it. He’d probably rock a goatee, but everything worked on him, including the casual inconvenience that permanently etched his lips in a scowl.