Something told me that was a little more than merely hired muscle.
Slowly but surely, their priorities revealed themselves to me. There were smaller payments scattered throughout their accounts. Payments from city hall and other personal bank accounts. Outgoing payments to two restaurants in the city I recognized and a bar I didn’t. I jotted down the names of them. They had to be side businesses. Legitimate hustles. And I bet if I dug far enough, I’d find them laundering and cleaning their money through these things. It was almost too easy, picking apart this club with what I knew.
I still didn’t find much on Colt, but I was at least able to nail down some basic details. His full name. His date of birth. Where he was originally born. His social security number. Enough to know the man existed, but not much else.
I leaned back in my chair and ran my fingers through my hair. I couldn’t get Maverick off my mind. Sure, sometimes I chased a lead down a rabbit hole to find a little more information on Maverick and his club. But every time that happened, he popped into my mind. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, allowing my mind to swirl for just a second. Allowing my mind to dip back to him before I got back to work.
I still felt his kiss on my lips. The way his soft touch commanded my body. It made me shiver in my seat to think about his tongue between my legs. And oh, how his cock filled me. It made me cross my legs and squeeze my thighs simply thinking about it. Another ride with him--both on his bike and on his body--would be worth compromising my identity.
But when that thought rolled through my head, I got up and walked away from my computer.
I needed to take a break. My mind was too clouded, and I had become too emotionally invested in this entire thing. I needed to take a break from researching and find a way to stop my feelings for Maverick.
And I had just the trick.
I needed to convince myself that I was doing the right thing. That my family’s business was doing the right thing by taking down this club. Once I could reassure myself that the Black Hornets were nothing but another bad guy to take down, I’d feel better about all of this. Hell, if I could figure out that Maverick was some psychopathic murderer that used the club to cover up his own evil doings, that would be better.
He’d be easier to write off that way.
I made my way down to my father’s office and closed the door behind me. I had always been in his office as a child. None of my other sisters were allowed in there often, but I was. From a very young age, he talked me through the things he did. The schedules he ran. The meetings he had. Sometimes, I’d even hide underneath his desk and hide my giggles while meetings were going on. Sure, they weren’t anything significant. Some talk about monetary margins and transportation of the product. Boring things I’d eventually have to do with my own life. My childhood was filled with those moments. Filled with learning my father’s craft and him slowly opening up to me some of the realities of what he did.
I closed my father’s door behind me and looked around the room. Sometimes, I didn’t understand my father. His office was set up the way a professor’s might be set up. He had bookshelves lining his office walls with books on them that didn’t look as if they’d been touched. Ever. He had this massive wooden desk with multiple drawers in it, and all of them were locked with a key. Thankfully, I knew where he kept that key. I’d peeked through the crack of the double doors one time and saw him stowing it away one evening. We were allowed in his office, but none of us were allowed in his desk.
However, the contents of his desk were what I was after.
I got down onto my knees and looked underneath the chair. I saw a small zipper compartment that took me a while to toggle open. But when I did, the key fell right into the palm of my hand. I smiled at my victory and scrambled from my feet, then sat in my father’s chair and began unlocking the drawers on his desk.
My father always kept meticulous files about the business. He had always said that it was his way of staying organized with all the business deals that the company handled. So, I knew any information that I wanted to find out would be in those folders. I pulled out files and flipped through them, my eyes scanning the names. I didn’t need to see all of the files. Just ones that pertained to what I was doing. Past operations and past clients and past enemies didn’t matter. Only the present ones. That was one of the things my father had taught me. One of the rules he drilled into me from a very young age. Nothing mattered except the current targets. Everything else could be dealt with at a later time.
Finally, I pulled out a file that had a familiar name on it. ‘Rodriguez, Leti.’ Furrowing my brow, I pulled it out of my father’s files and leaned back into the chair. I found myself growing more curious by the second. I flipped open the file and looked over the information. I took stock of Leti’s picture, memorizing how she looked. This was the woman who had murdered my uncle in cold blood. This was the woman about to marry the Vice President of the Black Hornets.
But the second my eyes fluttered across one specific line, I felt my heart drop to my stomach. ‘Brother, Nicholas Rodriguez, killed upon kidnapping. Use life as leverage.’
Killed? Kidnapping? Leverage!? What the hell did that even mean? Why did my father have something like this? I put Leti’s file on top of my father’s desk and went fluttering through the names. It didn’t take me long to come across Nicholas’ profile, but when I did, I ripped it out so quickly that other files came tumbling out. I ripped open the top and started looking through. Nicholas Rodriguez. Nineteen. Arrested for supposedly stealing product or something in high school. Blah blah blah. It was odd that this whole file read like a police report. However, I would deal with that later. None of that mattered to me right then.
“Come on. Where is it?” I murmured to myself.
Then, I found it. The one statement that sent shivers running up my spine.
‘Nicholas Rodriguez, dead upon kidnapping. Orders were given by Sebastian Elizondo. Blackmail subject for one, Leti Rodriguez.’
I felt the breath of my lungs dissipate into nothing. That couldn’t be right. Not by a longshot. Uncle Sebastian kidnapped and killed Leti’s brother? I needed to find Uncle Sebastian’s file. I had to be missing something. I stuffed his file and Leti’s file away before picking up the files that had tumbled out from the floor, and I quickly looked through them. The small tidbits of information I found were disturbing, at best. Family members that had gone missing. Pictures of blood and gore that made my stomach turn. Proof of deaths that made tears rise in my eyes. Women and children. Men pleading for their lives. Corpses lying on the ground in pieces.
Why the hell does my father have all of this information?
I finally managed to come across Sebastian’s file, which was so big there were three of them. My hands trembled as I sorted through the pages. And by the time I was done reading through it, I found myself throwing up in my father’s office trash can. He had a list of kills a mile long, and some of the names I recognized from the community. Kelsey Hightop, a friend of mine’s mother from high school. Isaiah Mullish, a father from the Catholic masses we used to attend. Barbra Languish, the preschool teacher up the road that used to come to my middle school and teach us about art in her spare time.
I wiped away my tears and quickly got myself together.
The RD corporation was the cartel, and my father’s files just proved it.
I did everything I could to cover my tracks. I put the files back where they were and locked up the drawers. I put the key back and cleaned out the trash can. I sprayed some air freshener to the smell of vomit was no longer in the air. I put everything back the way it was and turned his office chair back to face the window as it had been. But when my eyes looked up and caught sight of the dusty books sitting on the shelves, my curiosity piqued again.
And I wished it hadn’t.
It only took one book. One opened spine for me to see that everything my father had taught me had been a lie. A fallacy. As I held ‘War and Peace’ in my hand with
the front hardback cover opened, I looked into the rectangular cut out-dug into the pages.
There, nestled in the pages, was a bloody knife.
I put the book back and took another off the shelf. I flipped it open, and there was a gun, the butt of it covered in blood and hair. Another one, filled with brass knuckles that didn’t even look brass any longer, they were caked in so much blood.
I slapped the covers closed and slid the book back.
“Oh my gosh,” I whispered.
I looked around at the walls. The books that filled the shelves. Top to bottom. Side to side. In every corner and every crevice of the room. I rushed over to the opposite corner and pulled out a book. Just a random book that couldn’t have been more than an arbitrary choice for me. I slowly opened the cover and held my breath, hoping I wouldn’t find what I did. But as my eyes beheld the bloody pair of scissors that had one of the points chipped off, it took all I had to put the book back on the shelf without it tumbling from my hands.
I was surrounded by instruments of murder.
I stumbled out of my father’s office and closed the doors behind me. Bake. I needed to bake. I needed to make something that was exact and precise. Something intricate. Something that took my mind off all this. I needed to focus on the measurements for flour and baking soda and powdered sugar. I needed something to help steady my hands.
I pulled out all of the ingredients for my infamous lemon bars and got to work, but the distraction didn’t do what I wanted it to do.
Tears fell into the dough for my lemon bars. I sniffed back snot so it wouldn’t taint the lemon curd topping. I preheated the oven too hot because I wasn’t paying attention and my trembling hand kept spilling powdered sugar into the mixing bowl prematurely. Maverick wasn’t on my mind any longer. That much I had accomplished.
What was on my mind, however, was how wrong I had been about my family.
I finally got my botched lemon bars in the oven and pressed my hands into the kitchen countertop. I drew in deep, wheezing breaths as my knees collapsed from underneath me. I fell to the floor. I dropped to my knees and cried into my hands. All of the people those weapons had killed at the hands of the cartel. All of the manipulation Leti Rodriguez had experienced at the hands of them.
No wonder she killed my uncle.
Hell, I wanted to kill him right now. And he was already dead.
As I pressed my back to the hot oven, I put my face in my knees. I allowed myself to sob and shake, releasing emotions I hadn’t taken the time to process in years. And as the intense emotions melded into one, his face popped up to the forefront of my mind. Maverick. With his kind blue eyes and his dirty blonde hair and his body that loomed over the mind. My heart raced for him. My hands ached to touch him. I felt myself being filled with guilt at what I had done to him.
I wanted him there to hold me through this. To comfort me through this time. But more than that, I wanted to tell him what was going on. I couldn’t explain it, but he was the only person I trusted. I wanted to warn him so he could get himself and his club safe. So, he could get Leti safe.
And maybe, just maybe, he could get me safe.
Chapter 15
Maverick
I stormed out of the bar before any of the guys could stop me. My fists curled so tightly into one another that my jagged nails dug into the palms of my hands, causing them to bleed. How the fuck could I have been so stupid? How the hell had I not seen that? She gave me her real fucking name, for crying out loud! And the way she was so eager to stuff everything back into her purse all made sense. Holy shit, that was why she didn’t want me going back to her place. For all I knew, she didn’t live with her parents at all.
I now had a grasp of the situation the club was in, and it wasn’t good.
I raked my hand through my hair, pulling apart the pomade that kept my hair standing on its ends. On the one hand, how the hell was I supposed to know who she was? She was just some hot chick at a bar that wanted my dick. Nothing more, nothing less. How the fuck was I supposed to know she was working for the cartel?
On the other hand, I should have known. I shouldn’t have let her pussy cloud my thoughts. It’s my fucking job to know this shit.
I hopped on my bike as the guys called out after me. But, I left them in my dust. I needed to go on a bike ride to clear my head. To blow off some steam. To get my mind off this and figure out how the hell I was going to cover up my tracks when it came to the daughter of the fucking cartel.
As I rode, our conversation over lunch came swirling back to me. And it only served to make me angrier. All of her damn questions about my club. About the guys I considered brothers. Holy shit, she’d been phishing for information. And there I was, sitting there hoping to get my dick wet thinking some hot little piece of ass was just curious about what I did. No woman was curious about what we did. Not really. So long as we fucked them well, fed them right, and took them on a bike ride, they never asked questions. Live fast and die hard. It’s what we did, and it’s what the women we fucked did as well.
When she started asking me personal questions about the guys, I should have stopped. That should have been a red flag. We got questions all the time from girls, but it wasn’t about what we did for a living. They never outright asked us if we were fucking guns for hire. Holy hell, how had I not seen any of this? Gabby hadn’t been asking about my scars. She’d been asking me for details.
“You’re such a fucking idiot, Maverick!”
I rode down the stretch of deserted highway as quickly as I could. I kicked up dust in my wake, and the more I rode, the angrier I grew. The only saving grace was that I hadn’t given out any last names. Only first names, or nicknames of my guys. But still, having their first names along with the club they belonged to went a long way in digging up more information. And if Gabby was some sort of undercover operative for the cartel, there was no telling what she was able to dig up on us.
What kind of information she was handing over to the higher ups in the damn organization.
I had to confront her. I didn’t know how I was going to do it or when, but it was my only option. I needed to talk with her and ask her what the fuck her problem was and figure out what kind of information she had dug up on all of us. And then I would have to convince her to keep her mouth shut. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to do that, but right now the safety of my club was more important. This was my mess to clean up. I wasn’t involving any of the other guys unless it was absolutely necessary. I had been the idiot at lunch giving up all sorts of information, which meant I needed to turn into the smart one that fixed this mangled mess of shit.
The only ace in my pocket I had was the relationship we had supposedly built. I may not have known much, but I knew when I had a bond with a woman. I knew Gabby, and I had shared some serious moments. Moments that couldn’t be faked or overcorrected in any way. Whether or not she was undercover, I knew I had hooked her at least. Like she had hooked me. It killed me to admit it, but I did enjoy Gabby. Our time together. Our connection. It was unlike none other, and it was the only string I had with her to tug.
I saw how she looked at me over lunch. How willing she was to take my dick. How she leaned into our kiss before I sent her on her way earlier. That couldn’t be faked. No one was that good.
Not even her.
I had to use that bond to convince her that giving our information to the cartel was not in her best interest. I needed to convince her that it didn’t matter who she was or who her parents were or how long she had been involved with this work. They’d kill her without a second thought if it suited them. I didn’t know how I was going to do that. I didn’t know how I was going to pull from her the information she had dug up on us. What I did know was that I didn’t have any other choice. As I rode through town looking at all the shops and the people crossing the roads, it only reinforced what we were doing. Who we were protecting. Why we had a dog in this fight in the first place.
I had to get to Gabby and t
alk with her. And I had to do it fast.
Chapter 16
Gabriela
As I stared down at my failed lemon bars, I swayed on my feet. I shoved them to the back of the stove and turned the oven off. I needed to let them cool before I threw them away. If my parents walked in and saw I had messed up a recipe that was second nature to me, they’d start asking me questions. Asking me what was wrong, and if I wanted to talk, and if someone had threatened me. My father could read me like a damn book. And that fact only made a shiver trickle down my spine. What once used to comfort me now sent me on high alert, and I hated it.
But it was the sound of a motorcycle pulling up outside that caused my heart to stop.
My head whipped over to the front door. I heard the bike pull into the driveway before coming to a stop. Heavy footsteps sounded outside, and I took off down the hallway. I kept my feet light. So, he couldn’t hear me on the other side. I saw a looming shadow being cast on the porch before a heavy knock came at my door.
I didn’t have to peek outside to know who was standing there.
Holy shit, Maverick must’ve seen the address on my license as well. Panic rushed through my veins. What was he doing here? Had he figured it out who I really was? Had he come to kill me? Holy fuck, what was I supposed to do? I didn’t have a weapon nearby I could grab. My gun was all the way upstairs, and I didn’t want him cornering me in my room. I looked over at my father’s office. That place was crawling with weapons. And thinking about it made me sick all over again.
But when another knock came at my door, part of me settled down. If he wanted to kill me, wouldn’t he merely burst into the house? Or at least try to see if the front door was unlocked?
I slowly made my way for the door and placed my hand on the knob. Maybe he was merely coming back because he couldn’t get enough of me. Then again, wouldn’t he have just called me? He had my number. Oh shit, had he traced my number? He probably could have gotten my address that way. In which case, he was here for blood. He had to be. I had a choice to make. I could run and go get my gun, or I could open this door and trust him. Trust he wouldn’t level his own weapon to my head and blow my brains out without a second thought.
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