Reign drove, the other Hailstorm guy in the front. Mina and I climbed in the backseat, both tense.
And while she was tense in general, she was doubly so then, her entire body ramrod straight, her hands flat on her thighs as her gaze focused out the window.
I got the distinct impression that, were it not for Reign demanding she come, she would have been much more likely to stay behind at the compound. While I was sure she had training, as all of Lo's people did, she seemed less likely to be someone who liked being in the thick of things.
And, quite frankly, I didn't like the idea of her being in the middle of a dangerous situation either. I wasn't overly protective by nature. I had been raised with a lot of fucked ideas, but true gender equality was one of the decent things my parents had instilled in me. And true gender equality acknowledged the fact that women were just as capable of handling themselves as men. Maybe most women didn't have the same amount of brute strength as men did, but with the right training, it could be made so that that didn't matter.
So it wasn't that I didn't know she was no worse off than the rest of us. I just would have preferred her back at the compound was all.
"Mother fucker," Reign growled as we pulled up across the street to find red and blue lights flashing outside the gym, two men being led out in handcuffs.
There went our leverage.
FIVE
Mina
Pretty much the last place in the world I wanted to be was in a car with a couple of hot-headed bikers. Our training, it generally taught us that operations were crippled by emotions. That was how you screwed up, got sloppy, made the kind of mistakes that could get you killed.
On top of that, I had extensive training, as Lo demanded, but was nowhere near as much of a natural at it as Lo was. She should have gone with them, been their voice of reason.
I was probably the only one in the car who felt relief when we first saw the police lights flashing.
Of course I also realized that it meant The Henchmen were back at square one. If they couldn't get their hands on the men, they couldn't extract information, and they couldn't find where the rest of them were so they could be taken out.
"You guys hang back," Reign started, reaching for his handle and Mitch reached for his as well.
"You're not going alone. Lo's orders," Mitch said and Reign made a low, growling noise in his chest, clearly not used to not being listened to.
"Fine. We'll see how much this fuckhead will give us," Reign said, gesturing toward the tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed detective.
"Lloyd," Renny said, exhaling hard.
"He's hungry to prove himself," I offered.
"Yeah, but what are the chances that he wants to do that by catching the people who are picking off another organization in the area?" he shot back.
"He wants his cases solved. But these guys will likely plead out to breaking and entering and maybe some weapons charges if they're carrying. They'll probably get little more than time served. They'll be on the street again."
"Yeah, in half a fucking year," he scoffed. "We could all be dead by then."
I felt my stomach clench hard at those words, realizing for the first time that I would care about that. Death was as big a part of my life as anything else. After a while, you almost become immune to loss. It stops being so Earth-shaking. It doesn't make it any less tragic, but I had long since stopped crying my eyes out every time we lost someone.
But hearing Renny say that they could be dead in six months, that got to me. It shouldn't have. While I genuinely liked all the people I had met within the confines of The Henchmen compound, they weren't exactly friends. If I didn't cry over the loss of people at Hailstorm, how could I feel so worked up over veritable strangers.
I had a gut feeling that the answer had less to do with the MC as a whole and a lot more to do with a certain red-headed, tattoo-covered, blue-eyed biker.
Which was insane.
Truly.
I barely knew him.
I knew less about him than anyone else in The Henchmen compound. Granted, now that I had a full name to go on, I was about to know a hell of a lot more.
But somehow, it almost felt wrong and invasive to look into him now.
That wouldn't stop me, of course. My drive to know was perhaps just shy of as obsessive as his own drive to know things. It would drive me half-crazy to try to go to sleep at night without having at least some answers.
Like who were his parents?
What had they done to him to make him run away?
That little line about a rat and the sticky tape was telling. While they may not have beaten him, they had obviously done some kind of irreparable damage, they had left wounds that might never heal.
"What do you think of this Lazarus guy?" he asked suddenly as we both just stared out the window, watching Reign talk to the detectives, shooting a look over at the cop cars every once in a while like he was trying to memorize the faces of the guys they caught.
"What do you mean?"
"Do you think his story pans out? He was just taking a fucking walk and just happened to see a break-in in progress?" he asked, his voice more guarded than the usual, laid-back Renny generally was.
"What? Do you think he was just trying to get inside? Gather more information?"
"Just think the timing is interesting. And I think his lack of concern for the guns and being taken prisoner for a while is..."
"Suspicious?" I supplied. "Maybe. Or maybe he was genuinely just doing a good deed and just so happens to come from a background in either military or crime that makes him immune to the threats you guys fed him. We'll know more when we get back."
"We?" he asked, and I could feel his gaze on me.
I knew I shouldn't have. Really, I did. But I turned my head to face him anyway and found his eyes lighter, his lips tipped up.
"Yes. That would be how you say more than one person, wouldn't it?"
"Nope. You want us to be a we. You just said it. No takes-backsies."
"What are we, five?"
"I think we should hold hands now," he went on, ignoring me. "If we're a we, I'm pretty sure we are supposed to be at the hand-holding stage."
And with that, the smooth bastard slipped his fingers between mine and gave me a squeeze and I just... couldn't seem to make myself pull away.
"Why won't you give up?" I managed to force myself to ask.
"Come on," he said, ducking his head to the side a little. "You and I both know that when this happens, not if, when, it is going to be fucking epic."
He wasn't wrong.
That was the sad part to me. I was denying myself something I knew would be amazing. I mean, in general, I had pretty much always had good sex. What was the point of doing it if you weren't going to do it with a partner that knew what they were doing? But I had a feeling that, like he told me when we first met, that two people like us, people who were intuitive and could read a lot into even the smallest of things, we would be explosive in bed.
I was starting to wonder if maybe I owed it to myself to experience that before I moved on.
But, at the same time, there was this small, almost inaudible voice telling me that once wouldn't be enough.
"You know I'm right, sweetheart."
"Don't..." I started, only to be interrupted by the opening of the doors in the front. Reign and Mitch hauled themselves in and slammed the door.
"Fucking Lloyd," Reign exhaled, shaking his head. "Like talking to a goddamn wall."
"Once they get booked, Alex can find their names and once we have their names, we can try to run their financials," I went on, trying to pull my hand from Renny's discreetly so the guys in the front wouldn't see. But he just held on tighter, grinning like an idiot as I kept trying to gently struggle. "Then from there," I went on, giving Renny a death-glare he only chuckled at, "we can see if they have used credit cards at hotels or restaurants around here and maybe track down some associates. Alright, enough," I snapped, reaching across my bod
y and digging my thumb into a pressure point in the crook of Renny's elbow, making him hiss and jerk away, releasing my hand.
"Fucking ow," he said, shaking his head at me, but his damn lips were still tipped up.
I could see Reign's eyes in the rearview, amused, and I knew he was probably smirking too. Like he knew what had just happened. Maybe he did.
"But what I'm saying is, we have a little more than we did. This might not be what everyone was hoping for, but it's not a setback either."
"Alright," Reign said, putting the car into reverse. "Well, you and Renny need to have a talk with the Lazarus guy anyway. So while we wait on booking and Alex, we can at least get something accomplished."
"The cops will be snooping around for another half an hour at least," Mitch piped in. "And then we need to get some people inside to check everything over too; make sure they didn't miss anything; sweep for bugs. The usual."
"Lo is gonna be pissed," Renny added, drawing my attention, head cocked to the side. "She and Janie are part owners of the gym. Actually, they have majority share over Cash. This was the first attack that didn't solely target Henchmen, but their allies as well. And that shit wasn't exactly kept under wraps; they couldn't have been blind to it. They just didn't give a fuck. That won't sit right with Lo and Hailstorm. They just fucked up."
He wasn't wrong.
Hailstorm was Lo's pride and joy. It was what she built out of the shambles of her old life. It was what was a constant for her, always there for her, always a safe haven for herself and all her little lost puppies. Me, in a way, included.
Threats in the beginning weren't rare. She was a newbie in the game; other more established organizations wanted to take her out before she got too big. She dealt with those threats, along with her small but highly trained team of ex-military and niche criminals, swiftly and mercilessly. And once she got the name on the street of a 'plain old crazy mother fucker', she branched out, expanded, made an empire that was so big that very few could or would be willing to fuck with. Sure, we lost men and women on missions. But no one came after us. Not anymore.
Really, it was a suicide mission.
Everyone knew that.
So the Abruzzos must have known that. They were either so large that they thought they could best all of The Henchmen and Hailstorm at the same time, or they maybe thought Lo was losing her edge, softening.
Which, well, yeah that wouldn't sit right with her.
No one would accuse Lo of being soft. While there was absolutely, at her core, a softness, a nurturing spirit- that was for her people at Hailstorm and her friends. When it came to enemies, she was still that younger, hungry, angry person with a point to prove, with a mission to never be fucked with again.
She was going to flip.
"And, fuck, when Janie hears about this..." Mitch added, shaking his head.
You didn't fuck with Lo because she was smart, capable, and had control over an entire lawless army.
You didn't fuck with Janie because she would, quite literally, blow your shit up.
And while she was hurting, while she was genuinely making herself sick living at the bedside of her unconscious husband, she was still Janie. She was still the most headstrong, resilient, badass woman I had ever met. She would not handle the news well that while the man she loved more than she loved the air in her lungs was laid up recovering from multiple gunshot wounds and head trauma, someone was coming after her. Even if it was inadvertently.
I wouldn't exactly put it past her to start building a bomb in the private bath in Wolf's room.
She was that level of insane when she was pissed.
"We aren't telling Janie," Reign surprised me by saying, breaking the silence in the car.
"Why the fuck not?" Mitch asked, clearly insulted that Reign thought he in any way had the right to make a decision for Hailstorm.
"Right now, Janie needs to worry about Wolf and her son. She doesn't need any more stress on top of that. In case you haven't noticed, she's not handling this fucking well. She's losing weight and she was a fucking rail to start with. Every time I see her, her eyes are red-rimmed from crying. This is fucking Jstorm we're talking about here, baddest bitch in the state and she's crying all the time. She doesn't need this. And we aren't going to burden her with it."
"You do realize," Renny cut in, brow raised, "that when all this blows over and Wolf wakes up and she gets briefed on this shit, that she is going to lose her ever-loving mind for being left out of the loop."
"And I'll be a fucking happy man to see her back to her normal self," Reign agreed, pulling into the garage at the compound and cutting the engine. "Because that means I have my best fucking friend back and it means that Malcolm has his father back and Janie has her protector back. So everyone is going to keep their goddamn lips shut if they see Janie, got it?" he asked, giving us all a hard look before climbing out of the car, slamming the door, and heading inside.
"You and me," Renny started when Mitch went out to follow Reign.
"There is no you and me," I cut him off, defensive, stupidly thrown-off by the whole hand-holding thing.
"Oh, there's a you and me alright," he said, smirking. "But I wasn't talking about that. Though, if you want to talk about that..." he said, jerking his head to the seat we were sitting on, "this row of seats lays down and we have the whole cargo area to prove just how much of a you and me there actually is."
An unexpected jolt of desire shot down to my core and my thighs pressed together instinctively to ease the ache as I swallowed hard before speaking. "What were you talking about then?" I asked, deciding it was safest to side-step the entire other comment. If there was one thing I had learned over the past couple of weeks, it was that Renny was capable of doing something that not many were able to- he could throw me off, surprise me, keep me on my toes. And when I was on my toes, I found that I stumbled. I lost ground. I gave ground to Renny.
I couldn't keep letting that happen.
Before I knew it, my back would be against a wall and there would be no escape.
"What I was going to say, sweetheart, is that we have a date with that guy you would normally be drooling all over if you weren't currently in the midst of a somewhat embarrassing attraction to a certain hot as fuck, charming as the devil, redheaded biker," he said, big grin in place.
"That ego," I said, reaching for my door handle, "something to do with your abusive upbringing?" I asked and watched as his eyes went guarded, as his smile fell and his jaw tightened. I was sure most people didn't know anything about his past and I was equally sure that those that did were not as cruel as to use it against him. I wasn't cruel by nature. And, unlike Renny, I didn't get my kicks by pushing buttons to see what they did. But I was apparently capable of being nasty when on the defensive and trying desperately to not lose the game.
I found I really didn't care for that side of me as I exited the car and made my way inside, followed the whole way by a silent, looming, angry Renny.
As I went down the stairs, I decided it was yet another reason that I needed to detach myself from the situation, I needed to get some space. In general, I tried to turn my profiling skills on myself as well as others. I wanted to know my motivations. I wanted to know what made me tick. And after so many years, I thought I knew everything about myself. I thought I knew of what I was capable.
So suddenly finding that I was capable of cruelty was not sitting well with me.
Fact of the matter was, I needed to leave.
And once we finished talking to the Lazarus guy, I was going to head out.
There was absolutely no reason for me to be there every day. I wasn't the most trained at Hailstorm. Other guys would have been much better for the job of helping to protect The Henchmen. I didn't need to oversee any more of the renovations which, yet again, I wasn't the most knowledgable about to begin with.
My specialty was specific. My skills were niche. And while I could manage well enough with the other things, why not step away and le
t someone else more capable take them over. Lo wanted me at the compound to get a feel for the guys, to see if they were the kind of personalities to make the kind of enemies who would come at them like someone was coming at them. Then, when I finished that, I was there to try to create a blind profile on the attackers by their actions.
Now that we had a name or, as it were, a list of names, I didn't need to be there. There was no reason. I would likely be able to make a better, more comprehensive profile back at Hailstorm working side-by-side with L who apparently was a crime encyclopedia. And maybe Alex who was currently banned from The Henchmen compound by her husband, something she railed against endlessly to the point where I almost felt bad for Breaker. But, then again, he brought that on himself. But she would be able to come up to Hailstorm and work with me.
I worked better from afar.
And I damn sure worked better when I wasn't constantly thinking about a certain redheaded, charming, impressive biker. I spent more time trying to think of ways to shoot him down and hide my ever-growing attraction to him than actually doing any kind of work.
I went to the bottom landing to find Lazarus sitting on a steel chair, ankles cuffed to the front legs, arms cuffed behind the back, making his chest widen. But he was slouched back, seeming as comfortable as you please despite the very uncomfortable position.
Repo gave us a tight nod as we walked up toward them.
"They didn't blow it up or anything did they?" Lazarus asked as soon as he saw us.
"Cops got them first," Renny supplied and Repo made a frustrated noise. "Go on up and talk to Reign. We have to have a few words with our new friend."
Repo nodded, clamping a hand on Renny's shoulder before heading up the stairs.
"If you guys are supposed to come down here to pick my brain," he started, tone casual, "let me save you some time. My name is Lazarus Alexander. I'm thirty-one. I live in Shane Mallick's apartment building because I like when people mind their own goddamn business. I've lived in Navesink Bank for two years."
Renny (The Henchmen MC #6) Page 5