by Aiden Bates
I didn’t know, and I wasn’t about to ask, but it was nice to see him smile a little more often.
But we hadn’t kissed since that afternoon, either.
I wasn’t going to be the one to initiate. I wasn’t going to push Raven. This was operating on his terms. His safety was my first priority, and my own daily hard-ons weren’t going to get in the way of that. Even though we hadn’t kissed since, Raven was more receptive to a kind of casual closeness that went beyond just my sergeant-at-arms duty. When we walked into town for breakfast, he let his shoulder knock against mine. During late nights at Ballast, we sat side-by-side. Yesterday, when I’d dropped my keys, Raven had picked them up off the clubhouse floor and slipped them into my back pocket. The contact had me breathing hard like a teenager. Kid was fucking dangerous.
But I couldn’t get too comfortable. That much was extremely clear as I sat down at the kitchen island for a mid-morning church meeting, our eighth in just three days. And for what, I didn’t know. It’s not like we’d made any more progress on Ankh’s murder or who had contacted Raven with the information. The only progress we’d made on this issue was Raven’s progress—the investigation he’d done behind our backs. Now that the whole club was involved, we’d fully stalled out. I was a few minutes early, and the rest of the club members were yet to arrive.
“Incoming.” Raven’s hand grazed across my shoulder as he leaned over to set down a mug of coffee.
The rich smell of it drove the frustration from my mind—a familiar, spicy scent. I turned towards Raven, and he bit his lip as he flushed slightly.
“Where’d you get this?” This wasn’t the usual Elkhead Coffee house blend we kept around. This was my favorite coffee, a specialty bean from a roaster up in Washington State.
Raven shrugged. “From that place you like.”
“Where’d you get it, really?” I asked. I knew it was out of stock, because I’d run out and had been diligently checking to reorder it.
Raven shrugged again. “I may have gone into their wholesaler from the back end and had a batch routed here.”
I couldn’t suppress the smile spreading across my face. I didn’t even know he knew what my favorite coffee was. I was constantly underestimating how observant he was. “You hacked the coffee company?”
“It’s their fault. They have really bad security.” He touched my shoulder again, his fingertips brushing my bare skin at the collar of my t-shirt. “I just wanted to say thanks, I guess.”
“For what?” I hadn’t done anything special. I was just doing my duty as sergeant. If anything, I’d figured he’d get annoyed with me always hovering near him soon enough.
“It’s been hard,” Raven said. “Dealing with all this stuff with Dad. And the past three days, I mean—it’s been nice. With you. I was worried having protective detail would be a real pain in the ass. But you’ve made it really easy.”
I took his hand off my shoulder and gripped it tightly in my own. I suddenly had the crazy urge to kiss his knuckles—the same knuckles that’d given me a shiner just a few weeks ago. But this wasn’t the privacy of his room, and a kiss like that wasn’t appropriate, not in church, where everyone could see and comment and judge. He needed support, real support, and not the kind of interrogation that would follow if anyone saw us together like that, or any pressure from me to turn this into more than it was.
“’Course it’s easy,” I said. “You’re my friend.”
Raven’s face softened. His gaze flicked to my mouth. He squeezed my hand in return.
My stomach flipped. How did he do that? Make me feel like a teenager with just the smallest gestures?
Then the front door banged open and Raven stepped away smoothly, back into the kitchen to fix his own coffee.
Blade stomped in, his jaw set and his eyes blazing. I took a sip of my coffee. Delicious. And perfectly brewed. Blade glowered at me.
“You look happy,” he said accusingly.
“It’s the coffee,” I said.
Blade dropped into the chair next to me. The determined set to his jaw made it clear he was getting antsy. Blade and I were similar in a lot of ways, and I could tell from the frustration radiating off him that we still hadn’t made any real progress. Nothing frustrated Blade—and me—more than talking in circles without any action.
Logan followed soon after Blade, apparently in a much less volatile mood.
“You forgot this,” he said to Blade, depositing a Thermos in front of him. Logan kissed Blade’s temple, more an afterthought than anything, and then drifted into the kitchen to raid the fridge. Blade visibly relaxed.
Over the next few minutes, the rest of the senior members filtered into the clubhouse, all of them worn out. The meetings were getting exhausting and repetitive without any new information to disseminate.
Coop walked in, a little more upbeat than everyone else as per usual, and shot a questioning look at Raven. Raven tilted his chin down in a little nod.
“He made me pick it up from our PO box.” Coop nodded at the mug in front of me. “Can you believe that? I didn’t even know we had a PO box.”
“How did you not know that?” I asked.
“Enforcers don’t care about mail,” Coop said matter-of-factly. “If anything, Raven should be grateful I’m willing to do any favors for him after he ditched me at the pig pen.”
“You’re still going on about that?” Raven shouldered Coop out of the way to sit in the seat next to me.
Coop sat next to Raven on his other side. “Yes, I am, and I will continue to go on about it until I am adequately repaid.”
Raven rolled his eyes.
“All right,” Blade said. “Enough chit-chat.”
The room settled down and the senior members of the club took their seats around the kitchen island. Priest arrived last and sat at my other side. Logan sat next to Blade and slid an airplane bottle of bourbon towards him. Blade added it to his coffee Thermos.
The meeting started as all the other meetings had—reviewing the information we’d reviewed dozens of times, looking for some missed detail or new insight.
With a sigh, Blade read the printed copies of the mysterious emails yet again. “And you don’t think your brother is the one who sent this?”
Logan’s face darkened. He spoke with a bitter tone that suggested he and Blade had discussed this before, probably more than once. “No. He’s fully entrenched in the Vipers. Under my father’s—Crave’s—thumb. He didn’t do a damn thing when they had me.”
Blade grimaced. “He helped after you got shot.”
“That’s a really low bar for a Good Samaritan,” Logan said. “Just because he didn’t stand there and watch me bleed out doesn’t mean he’s not a Viper through and through.”
Blade’s grimace deepened.
“I haven’t heard from him since then, anyway,” Logan said, crossing his arms over his chest. “After everything, he just disappeared again. Like he always does. Luke—Rebel, whatever—would never care enough to betray the Vipers like that. It’s someone else.”
“’Like he always does’?” I asked. “Did he disappear a lot?”
Logan fidgeted. Clearly he didn’t want to have this conversation. “He’s sort of a mercenary. Dad lends him out to other clubs as muscle or investigation. He’d be gone for months at a time. Total radio silence.”
Next to me, Raven leaned forward, propping his elbows on the kitchen island. “Hang on. So he’d go into other clubs as an open Viper member and provide backup?”
“Yeah,” Logan said. “Dad always said it was part of Luke’s job to go out and improve the Viper reputation. I don’t know if that meant actually helping clubs or just tossing around threats. Since then, Luke was the one Dad sent if a club needed assistance. Easy way for the Vipers to make some extra money, or curry favors with other clubs.”
I could almost see the gears turning in Raven’s head. “That’s weird,” he said. “I’ve never heard of a club loaning members out. Has anyone else?�
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Around the table, everyone shook their heads.
“And no one else in the Vipers did this? Just your brother?” Raven asked.
“Just him,” Logan said. “I never thought about it, really. It just pissed me off that he was gone so much.”
He didn’t look pissed. He looked hurt.
“If he’s out running mercenary jobs like that all the time, is there a chance he’s not as entrenched in the Vipers as we think?” Raven asked carefully.
Logan pressed his lips together and said nothing.
“It’s a really odd practice,” Raven said. “And I don’t think we should discount the fact that he did step in to help you at the risk of Viper retribution. I haven’t been able to get any other leads on this. I think we should contact him.”
“Absolutely not,” Logan said.
Blade steepled his fingers. “And if he’s not the source, the Vipers will know we’re searching for their mole.”
“Well, obviously we don’t open with that. I’m not asking Logan to lay all his cards on the table immediately.” Raven rapped his knuckles on the table, suddenly full of vibrating energy, like he always got when he was on the brink of a breakthrough. “But we have to start somewhere. Even if I don’t get any intel directly from Rebel, opening a line of communication could offer other opportunities. Like tracking.”
Blade looked deeply unconvinced. “Gunnar, what do you think?”
All eyes turned expectantly to me. “How would we go about contacting him? What kind of encryption?”
Raven raised his eyebrows. “Since when do you think about encryption?”
“Since people started sneaking around online instead of trying to break into clubhouses the good old-fashioned way,” I grumbled.
Raven didn’t laugh, but his eyes sparkled with fond humor before he turned seriously back to Logan and Blade. “If you have a way to contact your brother, a phone number or email, I can set you up with an encrypted VPN so they can’t find its source. So if the message gets in the wrong hands, there won’t be anything to tie it back to us.”
“Other than Viper inferences,” Blade said.
“But we’re not sending a message to all the Vipers,” I said. “Just Logan’s brother.”
“What do you think, Logan?” Raven asked.
Logan grabbed Blade’s spiked coffee and took a long sip. “If that’s our only option, I’m willing to try.”
“I don’t love it,” Blade said. “Your encryption better be good.”
Raven snorted. “Please. It’s always good.”
Tense but satisfied, Blade nodded and adjourned the meeting. Raven drifted up the stairs toward his room, moving distractedly as his mind was clearly five steps ahead, already working on the VPN for Logan.
I trailed behind him as was my duty. Raven didn’t even seem to notice. He nearly slammed the door in my face as I followed him into his bedroom.
“Oh,” he said, blinking back into the present moment. “Sorry. I’m—”
“Already coding,” I said. “Get at it.”
With a small, grateful smile, Raven dropped into his desk chair and spun it on its axis, one excited full rotation before he unlocked his desktop and opened one of his many complicated software programs. It was all way out of my pay grade. I stretched out on the loveseat near his workstation, leaning against one arm, my legs kicked out over the other, and folded my arms behind my head.
“Shouldn’t take too long,” Raven said, his attention fully on the screen. “I already have the VPN built, I just want to add in some extra security—”
I waved off his explanation. “Don’t gotta explain it to me,” I said. “I won’t get it anyway.”
“Yes, you would,” Raven said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
His attention returned to his desktop. Over the time we’d spent together, I’d noticed the slight changes that overtook him when he was deep in a project. As his fingers danced across the keys, his eyes darted rapidly over his code, checking and rechecking what he’d written.
He usually worked with his legs curled beneath him in the large desk chair, leaning slightly forward over the desk so his body wasn’t against the backrest at all. A large stool would’ve served him just as well. But that was just like Raven—finding a different way of doing something, a way that might not make sense to me, but seemed to suit him just fine.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine all the work Raven had put in to develop these skills. I hadn’t even finished high school. As soon as I’d turned eighteen I’d left to join the armed forces. I didn’t regret that choice. College was never in the cards for me, and by the time I turned sixteen, I’d figured out that if I stayed in my hometown I’d end up in some dead-end job or a dead drunk in a ditch. The Marines were my way out—and for a while, it had been okay.
Life might’ve worked out differently if I’d stuck with the Marines. Maybe I could’ve been an officer by now, climbing up the ladder and bossing around my own crew of eighteen-year-old burnouts.
But I wasn’t cut out for the Marines. I had asked too many questions, and I’d had too much doubt. I didn’t doubt my brothers-in-arms, but I doubted our leadership every step of the way and the intel we were receiving. These were lives on the line, theirs and ours. And that day in Afghanistan haunted me. I remembered the look on the man’s face—
The small shadow in the corner—
I dispelled the memory. I forced it away and shoved it back into its box, where I’d done my best to keep it all these years.
And anyway, if I were still in the Marines, I wouldn’t be here in Elkin Lake, lying on this loveseat and watching Raven chew on his lower lip as he edited his code.
Every moment I spent with Raven built up my desire more and more, like I was slowly stoking a spark into a wildfire. Part of me had known from the start that if we began a relationship of any kind, I wouldn’t be able to keep it casual. That’s part of why I fought it for so long. It was an almost laughable idea, since I was pretty much exclusively casual and exclusively with strangers for the majority of my life. But now I just—I wanted him. All of him. I wanted him in my bed every night and to wake up to him every morning. I wanted to protect him, take care of him, learn from him.
I wanted to be his Old Man.
I pushed that thought down. Far, far down.
It was bad enough that we’d gotten this close. I didn’t need to start entertaining ridiculous fantasies like that. Raven was his own man, and as soon as he figured out I was more worn-out old road dog than the badass sergeant-at-arms he’d idealized me as, he’d undoubtedly get some sense and move on.
And that wasn’t even taking into consideration what would happen if he found out—no, I couldn’t even think about it.
But until then, I’d keep by his side as his protective detail. I’d give him what he wanted—I’d try to be the man I should’ve been since the beginning. And if Raven decided to move on… I’d figure out how to handle myself. I wouldn’t make a scene. Besides, for now it was one day at a time, at least until we got to the bottom of Ankh’s murder.
Raven pushed his office chair back from his desk with a heavy sigh and cracked his knuckles, a noisy series of pops from each hand.
“That sounds like it hurts,” I said.
He interlaced his fingers and stretched his arms overhead. “Feels great. It’s compiling now. Just gotta wait to see how many dumb errors I made.”
“Closest without going over wins,” I said. “I say… Nine.”
“Fifteen,” Raven said. “Bad bet. I have a serious advantage on you.”
“You have all kinds of advantages,” I said.
Raven rolled his eyes.
I sat up on the loveseat, clearing a space for Raven. “Take a break, then.”
He did, sliding onto the cushion and pressing his shoulder against mine. “You think this’ll work? Having Logan contact Rebel?”
“Honestly?” I tipped my head back against the back of the loveseat. “I don’t s
ee anyone else acting as a mole. Except potentially Bane.”
“Bane? The Viper VP? Why would he try to feed us info?”
“To get Crave out of the picture, I suspect. Bane seems the type to try to gun for the presidency if he sees a route to it.”
Raven scowled. “They really are sickening. So what happens if we contact Rebel and he isn’t the mole?”
“Well, with your encryption, hopefully nothing.”
“But what’s the worst case?”
“Rebel will try to set up another trap,” I said. “To get Logan alone. Try to use him as a bargaining chip again. That’s the worst case.”
“And Blade would never let that happen.” Raven nodded to himself.
“Exactly,” I said. “He’s not a guy you can fool twice.”
Raven relaxed slightly. “I hate this. I hate not knowing.”
“Me too,” I said. “We should start a support group. Control freaks anonymous.”
With a low chuckle, Raven turned his face into my shoulder and nudged me in a shy, animal show of affection.
I wrapped my arm around him and tugged him close. “How are you holding up?”
“Better than I was,” Raven said. “It still hurts—knowing Dad was killed. But it’s easier now that everyone knows. And that we have some semblance of a plan. And that I—hm. Never mind.”
“That you what?” I asked.
Raven paused. He exhaled hard, his warm breath rushing across my neck. “That I have you now.”
My heart clenched hard in my chest, as if Raven had stuck his hands into my ribcage and squeezed it himself. I’d set the intention that I’d be following his lead, letting him set the pace and decide how far we’d take things and when—but now the painful twist in my chest overwhelmed all my logical plans. I touched his chin, guiding his face to mine, and kissed him.
It was the only way I knew how to say: You do. You do have me.
Raven deepened the kiss for a few delicious moments. Then he pulled away just long enough to shift on the loveseat, crawling on top of me so he was straddling my lap. I skated my hands up his back, curling my arms around him to keep him close. Raven framed my face in his palms, his gaze meeting mine like he was looking for something. I felt stripped bare under his searching expression. I moistened my lips with my tongue, and his eyes flicked down to track the movement.