WITHOUT SHAME: Babylon MC Book 4

by James, Victoria L.

  I didn’t have the heart or inclination to correct her as I held out my hand in greeting, following Drew’s lead and shaking their hands in the order they were introduced to us. Elise pointed to a small bench in invitation. Hand in hand, Drew and I followed her direction and sat on the short stone bench, feeling increasingly more uncomfortable.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said quietly, taking the lead as I think Drew wanted me to do.

  Every one of them nodded automatically, but Paul was the first to speak, his features twisting in hatred as he leaned forward, his elbows planted on his knees. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. Even Dad knew it was coming.”

  “Paul,” Elise pleaded, her heart in her voice as she sank to the small brick wall that contained some kind of plant. Paul just shook his head and ran a hand over his mouth, barely containing the cry that seemed so desperate to escape. I felt awful being here with a family that was slowly crumbling into grief, but we were here for a reason. Now that Clint was dead, I knew Drew would see that through to the last second. He would honor whatever promise he’d given the man who’d helped Harry in his final days.

  “What? You want me to sugarcoat it now, Mom?”

  “Paul!” It was Martha correcting him this time. “Enough.”

  “It will never be enough, Grams. Not now. He’s gone.” Paul lifted his gaze and found Drew. “Those bastards were more crooked than Lombard Street. Dad knew not many of them would get out of there alive. We know why you’re here, Mr. Tucker, and I will give you everything I have to make sure someone pays for this.”

  Drew leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees and clasping his hands together. He looked tired before he’d even started. Drew could barely manage his own grief, never mind that of others, but I knew he would find a way to do this. That’s just who he was. He looked down at the ground, more than aware that everyone’s attention was on him before he glanced up through heavy eyes and directed his focus on Paul.

  “It seems like everyone knows why I’m here but me,” he said quietly, his voice somehow commanding. “Do you have any idea who’s done this to Clint?”

  Paul held his gaze, unblinking with his intensity. “You don’t know?”

  “I have a feeling I should. I saw your dad while he was in the hospital, Paul. I know what he did to save my brother, Harry. He was in hospital because of us. To help save my club.”

  “Only because he wanted to be. Harry and he, they forged a brotherhood of their own in there, Drew,” Elise interrupted. “I spoke to him. He told me how much Harry meant to him. He even wrote about it in some of his letters.”

  “Letters?” Drew raised a brow.

  I could feel the atmosphere change as the four of them exchanged glances with one another. My hand went to Drew’s leg and rested there, feeling the tension in his muscles. I didn’t know what they were talking about it, but it was big enough to change everything as they stared at us.

  “People talked to Dad,” Paul said cautiously. “He had a kind face. The kind people wanted to be around. He could make friends with a stranger after thirty seconds. People told him their life stories like he was some kind of priest they could offload their sins to.”

  Drew stared at Paul, his face stony and unmoving as he waited for him to continue. He was good at that, extracting information out of people without having to say a word at all.

  “People told him their secrets wherever he went. It’s been both a blessing and a curse in his life,” Paul added.

  “Do you mean Harry said things?” Drew asked flatly.

  Paul looked at his mum before he settled back on Drew. “How close to Harry were you?”

  The question should have insulted Drew, but instead, his response came out quickly, filled with assurance. “He was like a father to me. I loved him with all my heart, and he loved me with even more of his. But that idiot kept me in the dark for a lot of reasons.”

  “To protect you.”

  “What I didn’t know couldn’t kill me in Harry’s eyes.”

  “But it killed him. And it got my dad killed, too.”

  Drew’s eyes searched Paul’s, assessing him.

  “I wish I’d known Clint the way Harry did,” Drew said softly. “But in the ten minutes I found a way to spend time with him, I saw an honorable man. A man of conviction. A man of worth. I wish I could have known more and done more to save him, but I can assure you, if there were things that could have done that, I didn’t know them then. I don’t know them now. All I know is that something shady and corrupt is going on in my town, and I sure as shit need to find out what it is.” He looked at Elise. “Sorry,” he said, excusing himself for the cursing. “I’m here, and I want to do something that’s going to stop everyone from losing the people they love the most. But I need your help with that if you can give it to me. I’m just a man in the dark, trying to figure out all the riddles everyone is putting in front of me.”

  I searched the eyes of everyone. Each of them was haunted in their own way, and full of grief that Drew and I were more than familiar with. Paul wanted payback and retribution, but like most people in modern society, he had no idea how to pull that off without fucking himself and his family up in the process, and it was clear he didn’t want to end up making the same mistakes of his father. He was hurting, though. We wouldn’t have to push hard to get what we wanted from him. He would give it to us gladly.

  “My husband was a good man,” Elise said before Paul could continue. “But he knew too much, and they couldn’t let him out with the information he had, so they killed an inmate and set him up to take the fall. He got almost thirty years added to his sentence for something he didn’t do just to guarantee his silence. We became collateral damage if he fucked up.” She looked at Drew and shrugged at her cursing, letting him know he didn’t have to edit on her account.

  “I have one question,” Drew said quietly.

  “And that is?”

  He exhaled heavily, turning his palms over and shaking his head. “Who the fuck is this they everyone keeps talking to me about?”

  With one look at each other, both Elise and Paul rose from their seats.

  “I think you’ll understand Clint’s letters better than we do.”

  I frowned and watched as the two of them made their way toward to the house, their heads together as they discussed things quietly. My gaze turned to Clint’s aging parents, the sadness emanating from the two of them so brutally that my fingers curled into Drew’s leg. They didn’t say anything to us. Their eyes just rested on us as though they were waiting for a profound revelation of some kind.

  One we couldn’t give.

  When the sliding door to the house reopened, Paul appeared with a large Amazon box in one hand, the other helping his mother from the house as she carried a tray with two mugs and a mountain of food on it. They approached quickly, Paul barely saying a word as he handed the box directly to Drew. He turned to his grandparents, helping his grandmother from her seat with gentle concern, and huffing as the older gentleman batted his hand away when he tried to do the same for him.

  Elise set the tray on a table and smiled at the exchange before straightening again. She was the chosen ambassador now.

  “We’ll be inside if you need us. Please, if you need more coffee, feel free to come and get it. Take all the time you need. We have to get back to everyone inside.” She glanced to her son and in-laws. “I don’t know how much more help we can be, but anything at all you need from us, I will gladly give to help stop whoever the hell is behind all this.”

  I nodded, clasping the woman’s hand in both of mine before releasing her and keeping my silence as she rushed around the pool to follow her family inside.

  “This keeps getting weirder and weirder,” I said to Drew as the door was pulled closed.

  “You ain’t kidding.”

  Drew opened the box to reveal a mountain of opened letters stacked on top of one another. Some on white paper, some on blue, each one clearly h
aving been read a hundred times already. A yellow post-it note was stuck to the lid. Drew pulled it out and scowled at the words that were scribbled on there. “Upset equals set up,” he read aloud. “Bugs equals rat. What is this?” Drew scowled, handing it to me.

  I studied the short list. It was like reading convoluted directions. Words meant certain things, and patterns indicated others. “This is how he got messages to them. He was giving them his secrets as insurance.”

  “Because the letters are read before they leave Huntsville. He had to talk in code,” Drew breathed out as things slotted into place for him. “He knew Taylor would read his shit.”

  “There have to be hundreds of letters here.” I looked into the box at the stack and back up at the one Drew had picked up. Inside the box, there was a legal pad with a pen that the family had obviously used to decipher whatever secrets Clint had given them. “Jesus, Drew. How deep does this shit go?”

  “I don’t know. All we know is that what Helen Taylor told us about Jon, The Navs, and the Mayor was only the tip of the iceberg.” He stared at me, his face ashen. “And I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that I’m in the center of all this, Ayda. They were coming for me. Harry, Clint, and everyone else were collateral damage. I know I don’t know that for sure, but there’s too much shit surrounding the club and me. Everyone seems to know about it but me.”

  I hated the thought of another sizable target being on his back; on our backs, but Drew wasn’t alone in this anymore. The problem was we didn’t know why these ghosts were coming after him. What reason was there to make him the center of this insanity? What did he have that all these people wanted? It couldn’t have been money. Most of his cash was tied up in the club. He had power, but that wasn’t something you could take from him. It was natural.

  I leaned over and picked up a random letter from the stack in the box, unfolding it carefully. The paper was thin and cheap—the note scrawled untidily in pencil. Some passages sounded like rambles, the handwriting untidy, and different to the rest of the letter in small, unobvious ways.

  Holding the page out to Drew, I flattened it gently between us as I slipped the post-it from his fingers. I studied the thing for almost ten minutes before I managed to get something out of it, and even then, it only made half sense until I mixed it with some of the real facts in the letter.

  “This can’t be right,” I said quietly. “Clint is saying they used the prison laundry to wash cash?”

  Drew stared down at the letter. “It’s Huntsville, Ayda. You could tell me they were boiling babies in there, and I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  I bent over to grab another letter and scanned it, handing it to Drew before diving in for another. The ones I plucked out had some new information in along with some of the particulars Helen had fed to us. The fact that Clint seemed to have a more detailed account meant that either Helen was holding back or Clint heard more while inside than he was ever meant to.

  “Drew, this is insane.”

  He was too lost in scanning letter after letter, searching for something neither one of us knew we were searching for. That intuition of his had taken over, and I knew he wasn’t going to stop until he found whatever it was he was looking for.

  “Jon Taylor,” he said, placing down a letter. “Mayor of Babylon. Mayor of Dawson, Mayor of Purdon, Mayor of Silver City, Mayor of Navarro Mills. No surprise there, but fuck.” He placed down a letter after he spoke each name, his movements getting quicker as he scanned line after line of Clint’s ramblings. “Name after name of people Clint had seen in Huntsville, cozying up to Taylor and his men. I get there’s corruption in power, but what I don’t get is what I have to do with—”

  All at once his face froze and his words caught in his throat.

  Everything else fell away from him, except the one letter he was now clinging to with both hands, his fingers shaking around the edges and his face turning ghostly white as his eyes darted from left to right over and over again.

  I leaned in closer, reading over his arm, scanning, scanning… my eyes flicking between the words and the cipher. Then I caught the first line of it, my eyes reading over and over and over again. The coffee and donut I’d eaten while searching the letters turned to acid in my stomach.

  I don’t think I breathed for a full minute. Even out in the open, I couldn’t find enough oxygen to take a breath.

  Drew turned to look at me, disbelief taking over, his lips parting and his eyes searching mine wildly, silently begging me to tell him he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing.

  But it was there, and there was nothing I could say to make it untrue.

  “Drew—”

  “The Hounds,” he croaked. “My club. We have a fucking rat.”

  Chapter Thirty

  DREW

  “I’m on my way back to Babylon,” I told Eric on the phone, my voice as cold as my blood. “Be there.”

  “You got it. Everything okay?”

  “I’ll be back as quick as I can.”

  I ended the call abruptly, using Ayda as my anchor. As long as I looked at her, I could stay in control—remain grounded. Couldn’t I? Fuck, I hoped so.

  My club had a rat. That’s what Clint’s letter had implied. Harry had known. He’d known there was an infestation among the Hounds, and I had a feeling that’s why my father had returned when he had.

  Ayda told Elise, Paul, and the others that the letters had been useful, but we had to leave. I was too far gone to be polite, so I remained silent, my jaw ticking and my eyes burning with a need to get inside my own club, weed out the traitor, draw their last breath from their body, and hang them in the yard for everyone to see.

  No one betrayed The Hounds.

  No one.

  It was treason, and there was only ever one punishment for that: execution.

  I waited on the bike, staring forward to the road ahead while Ayda reassured Elise that we would be back, that she would ensure the family’s protection somehow, and how they should contact her if they came into trouble or they suspected anything at all. She was natural in the role, a concerned woman with a heart so huge and pure that she could fit the whole world inside it and still have room to love some more.

  She was the woman who wanted everyone to live and be safe.

  At that moment, I was the man who needed someone to die.

  The ride back to Babylon was the exact opposite of the ride to Dallas. I was stiff, hardened by betrayal and a need for vengeance.

  Was it Kenny?

  Slater?

  Jedd?

  Deeks?

  Moose?

  My own fucking father?

  I didn’t want to believe it of any of them, but somehow, deep down in my dirty soul, I knew it was true. How else would the Navs know about the Emps’ body we’d buried on their land? How else would The Emps have known where Ayda and I were the night of the warehouse nightmare that almost led to our deaths? How else would everyone on the outside seem to know what was going on on the inside… like when Cortez rode into the yard that first time after I’d been released from prison, and he somehow knew that Ayda was working her way into my heart, even before I’d known it to be true? The maid, he’d called her. He’d known she was getting under my skin. How could he have known unless…?

  “Fuck!” I cursed quietly to myself all the way home. Ayda never reacted. Her arms didn’t even tighten to reassure me I wasn’t alone. I could feel the tension and need for answers pouring off her as much as they were pouring off me.

  The dots were connecting more and more, but there were still questions. The first one I needed answering had to come from my father.

  It was afternoon when we arrived in Babylon, and I made damn sure everyone on those streets could feel the president of The Hounds was back in town, and he was pissed.

  Anger curdled my blood, and as we turned on to the street where The Hut and the yard sat proudly, I realized it was the first time I’d ever looked at it in a way that made me feel sick. There was
no calling it home now. An enemy was inside that building. Someone I trusted was hurting my men while looking them in the eye with a smile on their face and false love in their voice.

  I.

  Was going.

  To end him.

  The bike kicked up dust as I tore into the yard, skidding to a dangerous halt and feeling the way Ayda tightened her arms around me as came to a shaky stop. Turning my head to the left, I saw my father standing outside the pawnshop. He was wearing a blue and black checked shirt with a dark T-shirt underneath, his jeans torn at the knee, and his thick, brown boots more worn than his gray-bearded face. When he saw me, his face remained calm, but ever the man of power and dominance, he merely crossed his arms over his chest and tilted his chin to the sky, waiting for me to make my move and go to him.

  My nostrils flared, and I struggled to drag in enough air, my chest bouncing as I stared at the man who’d created me, not knowing if he was an enemy or a friend. Not knowing if he even thought of me as his son at all.

  Every drop of blood I’d ever shed had been because of him, this life, and the need to be what I’d been created to be.

  Should I regret that? Should I hate him for it? Or should I revel in the power I felt within me, burning like a weapon that could tear anyone apart if it had to?

  Revel, I thought with determination.

  Ayda practically jumped from her seat, her bag falling to her feet with a thud as she tore the helmet from her head and dropped it to the back of the bike. Her eyes darted around the yard at some of the men who’d heard our approach and seemed curious about the mood we’d brought back with us.

  I couldn’t concentrate on any of them. My eyes were fixed firmly on my father as I swung my leg over the bike and stood tall beside it. Every hair on my body rose to attention, willing me to fight, to go now. Now! But the raging in bull in me knew when to strike, and I had to get closer. My feet started moving slowly—heavy footfalls no one could feel but sure made me feel like the earth was shifting beneath my feet.