“How can it be useful for me when the only purpose you have in being here is telling me how to run my girls and threatening me not only with you,” she jerked her chin at Knight, then at Rhash and finally moved her eyes to Hound, “but also Chaos, when Chaos doesn’t have shit to do with it anymore? You wanted Chaos clean,” she said to Hound. “It’s clean. Now run along, little doggie.”
Hound didn’t make a move or a sound.
He just kept staring at her.
She was young. Okay looking. She made the little she had better with expensive clothes and makeup and a good dye job for her hair. He could tell she worked at that body. It was lean to the point it was feral. She probably kickboxed or some shit.
She could kickbox herself unconscious.
He still could snap her neck before she could blink.
“We’ve wasted our time,” Knight murmured, getting up from his chair, doing it getting her attention.
“I told you I’d lay off my girls, I’m laying off my girls,” she snapped.
“Not from news I got last night, which prompted me reaching out to make this meet,” Knight replied.
Her eyes skidded to one of her goons before they went back to Knight.
The eye skid meant that was news to her.
This little girl didn’t have a grip on her boys.
This whole act was show.
But she better get a grip or get the man pulling her strings to sort their shit, because when Knight said she didn’t want to know what he’d do if she didn’t get things in hand, he wasn’t talking shit.
“Perhaps the message hasn’t yet filtered through the ranks,” she mumbled. “I’ll make that happen right away.”
“Your boys don’t take freebies either, Camilla,” Knight added. “Not at all, but definitely not rough ones.”
Hound watched her mouth get tight as she listened to Knight give it all to her, but Hound didn’t know her so he couldn’t read that. Either she was pissed her boys weren’t listening to her or she was pissed Knight was telling her how to do her business.
Chew ran Chaos’s girls when they had them.
Chew took freebies whenever the fuck he wanted.
And Chew could get rough.
“You with me on that too?” Knight prompted.
“That message as well will be repeated,” she said tightly.
“Where’s Valenzuela?” Knight asked suddenly.
Hound watched her closely and she didn’t miss a beat when she answered, “He’s expanding operations elsewhere.”
“He comin’ back anytime soon?” Knight went on.
Again with the unamused lip curl. “I’m thinking he’d frown on me sharing his travel plans widely, Sebring. He’d especially frown on me sharing it with Chaos’s dog in the room.”
“He’s been gone a long time,” Knight remarked.
“He’s exploring some exciting opportunities,” she returned. “That takes a lot of time.”
Hound kept watching her, and for the life of him he couldn’t catch anything. Not a flinch. Not a tick. Nothing.
Knight kept at her. “He know you ordered the retreat from Chaos?”
“Of course he does, since he’s the one who ordered it,” she replied.
No flinch.
No tick.
Nothing.
All Hound could see coming from her was that she was landing truth on them when he knew it was nothing but lies.
“Years of pushin’, he gave up easy,” Knight noted.
She shrugged. “I’ve never understood why Benito does half the shit he does. Though I don’t question it. He’s not a fan of that.”
“He’s also not a fan of giving women positions of authority in his business,” Knight pointed out.
There was more hard than normal behind her, “I proved myself.”
Knight gave it a beat. Rhash stood at his man’s back while he did. Hound stood four feet away and kept his attention locked on her.
“Do we have more to discuss or can we all get on with our days?” she asked in a prompt for them to get the fuck out, the words sugar sweet and all fake.
Since Hound kept watching her, he only felt Knight and Rhash turn their eyes to him.
“Not discuss,” Hound said, and she looked to him.
“It speaks,” she said on one of her catty smiles.
He ignored that. She was young. She had no idea with men like him, bites like that had lost their power to sting a long time ago.
“Just say,” he went on.
“So say it,” she spat when he didn’t continue, and Hound thought it was interesting she thought she could play with Knight but she had zero patience with him.
“You tell Chew, he’s got a beef with his former brothers, he shows his fuckin’ face and communicates his shit. He doesn’t hide like a pussy behind a little girl who’s playin’ a dangerous game that might get her neck snapped.”
That’s when he saw it.
Surprise and panic cut through her features before she erased it.
Hound wasn’t the only one who caught it.
“He wants to come outta the shadows,” Knight put in immediately, “you can set that up with me. I’ll find a neutral place. He’ll have parlay.”
She pulled herself together to retort, “I’d be happy to pass on this message if I knew what the hell you were talking about.”
But Hound caught it. A little lift of her chin.
She’d been cool and in control. She thought she had a secret.
They knew her secret.
So now she was rattled.
“You need to get smart, girl,” Hound advised low. “It seems like shits and giggles until someone’s throat gets slit.”
“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Mr. Ironside?” she hissed.
“Yeah,” he told her. “I would.”
He said that, and then he walked right out.
He took the stairs, fifteen floors. He did it because it gave him time, not with Knight and Rhashan, to make his call.
Tack answered on the first ring with, “Message delivered?”
“It’s Chew,” Hound told his brother, jogging down the stairs.
“How’d she handle it?”
“Shook her shit.”
“Knight offer parlay?” Tack asked.
“Yup,” Hound answered.
“You get anything else?”
“She knows I took out Black’s killer.”
“Fuck,” Tack clipped. “Chew was out of Chaos by then. Only men who knew were in the room, and not a one of them would say dick.”
“A room Chew knew existed,” Hound pointed out.
“Surveillance?” Tack asked.
“He was a little weasel, obviously still is a little weasel. Coulda been watching. Coulda set up cameras.”
“Could have cameras still there,” Tack noted.
“Best get boys out there, Tack,” Hound advised. “Send Dutch with whatever brother goes. He needs to learn how to find shit like that.”
It was too bad Jagger was at school. He needed to learn that too.
“On it,” Tack said then went on, “At least we know one thing.”
Hound gave him that one thing. “The old ladies are safe.”
“Yeah,” Tack agreed. “That’s a line Valenzuela would cross, but Chew would not.”
“Yeah.”
“Right. Still gonna keep the women covered. Now I got calls to make,” Tack told him. “Later, brother.”
“Later.”
He disconnected, shoved his phone in his back pocket and jogged down the rest of the steps.
Knight and Rhash were waiting for him outside the building.
“That go the way you wanted?” Rhash asked when he stopped with them.
“Absolutely,” Hound answered.
“I didn’t get a good feel about that last part,” Knight shared, watching him closely.
“It’s in hand,” Hound lied.
“I hope like fuck it is, man, ’cause th
is shit was annoying. Now it’s twisted and nasty and the time comes Chaos is forced to take a turn they don’t wanna take, a path that’s dark might hit pitch when your whole Club falls down a deep hole you can’t dig your way out of,” Knight declared.
Hound hoped like fuck that didn’t happen too.
“Who woulda thought we’d miss dealin’ with the psychopath that was Valenzuela,” Hound muttered, looking from them to scan the street, wondering if Chew was there keeping an eye on his girl.
“You might consider bringing Lee in on this,” Rhashan suggested and Hound turned his attention back to the big black man. “Ferret this fucker out.”
Lee, as in Lee Nightingale, a top-notch private detective with a team of the same, all of them covering skillsets that were extreme, all of them scary-good at what they did.
And all of them were allies.
“Nightingale and his boys got skills, but we now know this is Chew. So this is Chaos. It started with Chaos. It’ll stop there,” he replied.
Knight nodded understanding, but Rhash gave him a look, because he didn’t.
Hound got Rhashan’s reaction.
The faster this shit could end the better and Nightingale could assist in taking it Mach one.
But Chew had once worn the Chaos patch. He’d get the degree of respect he had left, which he’d earned when he’d earned that patch.
When he wasted that, the gloves would come off.
“We all got shit to do,” Hound said to them both. Then he spoke right to Knight, “Gratitude for arrangin’ that meet.”
“Good luck, Hound,” Knight replied.
Hound lifted his chin to Knight and then to Rhash.
After that he walked away thinking they didn’t need luck.
They needed what they always needed in the never-ending quest of dealing with this shit with the hope of finding an end to it.
Heart.
And balls.
Keely
I struggled in the back door with six bags of groceries dangling from my fingers, thinking that when Hound and I moved, we were so totally going to buy a house where the garage led right into the kitchen.
I hadn’t thought about taking that trek outside, along the back of the house and up the back stoop, not for years. It was just what I did, laden with grocery bags or not.
Now that my future included something different, I couldn’t wait to rush out to meet it.
What I could do was wait about ten more days (or ten more years) for that night.
We were having dinner with the boys to share with them that Hound and I were going to come out to the Club (or Hound was, he wasn’t allowing me anywhere near the Compound when he shared that information with his brothers, no matter the fits I’d pitched, and I’d pitched some fits in the two days since we’d made the decision).
It wasn’t that I couldn’t wait to have dinner with all my boys. I was looking forward to that.
It wasn’t even the fact that if that news went over okay with Dutch and Jag, we were also going to share that, once we were out with the brothers we’d be putting the house on the market and looking for something a little smaller.
I didn’t get the sense either of my sons were attached to the house. They were attached to me, not the house.
But if I was wrong and one or both of them was, we’d find a way to keep it for them. Rent it out or even let them move in and share it until the time came when the decision had to be made about which one would get it.
So, all that would be all right.
However, that night, Hound also wanted to tell them we were eventually going to get hitched.
I wanted him to officially ask me to marry him before we shared that news with my boys.
At least he’d agreed to that.
Obviously, we were not going to share we were planning on giving them a baby sister.
Not yet.
So that night I figured would go okay.
It was once that was done, the next step was telling Chaos.
That was what I could wait ten years for.
I dumped the bags on the kitchen table and started rooting for the stuff that went in the fridge and freezer, trying not to think about the fact that dinner tonight with the boys was step one of a two-step process with the second step not being a fun one.
In fact, I was back to wanting to postpone this step so the next step wouldn’t come and was even thinking I could convince myself that Hound and I could live the rest of our lives in hiding from his Chaos brothers if it meant he wouldn’t have to stand the gauntlet.
I knew he could not only handle it, in some badass part of his mind, he felt he needed to withstand it in order to finish the act of earning the honor of calling me his old lady.
It was me who couldn’t deal with it, and the closer it came, the harder it was to try to put myself in the place that I could, for Hound, for our future, even for Chaos.
I just didn’t know, if it came down to the gauntlet, if I could forgive them.
It was on this thought, and while I was shoving pistachio ice cream in the freezer (Dutch’s favorite, and also, I’d found, Hound’s) when a knock came at the front door.
I looked that way then moved that way.
It was the Saturday that heralded one last day of my spring break before having to go back to work. Hound was coming home to help me make dinner for the boys, but I didn’t expect him back for at least an hour.
We’d make dinner.
Then have dinner and tell the boys.
And the next step . . .
Well, at least we’d agreed on where we were vacationing when school was out. I’d even made the booking at a fantastic, pricey resort in Baja. I was excited about it. When I showed Hound the resort’s website and told him we had a booking, Hound had grunted through a smile, which I took as him being excited about it too.
Something else to look forward to.
It was just that before we got there, we’d have to deal with something I did not look forward to.
I sighed and moved through the house to the front door. When I hit the foyer, I saw through the oval of frosted glass that was in my door what looked like two figures, one taller than the other, one a woman, one a man . . . wearing a Chaos cut.
Shit.
Well, thank God Hound wasn’t due home for a while.
I peeked through the side of the window, which was a sliver of non-frosted glass.
Millie and High.
Okay.
What?
Why?
Shit.
One thing I knew with my door, if I could see them, they could see me.
In other words, I had no choice but to open it.
Which was what I did.
I looked from Millie to High and back to Millie.
Millie looked a little hesitant . . . no, actually wary. High looked like High. Tall, dark, good-looking, and right then clearly acting as a guard dog for his woman.
They hadn’t ended things well years before, and Millie had become persona non grata for all of Chaos, including me (even though Black had always said, unless we heard it straight from Millie’s mouth, we shouldn’t judge because we couldn’t know for sure what had happened, and again it seemed Black was right).
Obviously, even though Millie and I had exchanged a smile at Jean’s funeral, both of them thought I still held that ill will.
“Bev told me you two were back together,” I said as greeting.
“Yeah, uh . . . yeah,” Millie stammered, pulled it together and said quietly, “Hey, Keely.”
“Hey, Keely?” I asked.
Millie now looked a little confused and a lot more wary.
High looked like he was preparing to get extremely pissed.
“I mean, that’s it?” I asked. “‘Hey, Keely?’”
“I, well—” she started.
“Oh for God’s sake, get over here and give me a fucking hug,” I snapped on a smile.
The wary slid away, a relieved look hit her face and I
didn’t wait for her hug.
I reached toward her, grabbed her and yanked her into my arms.
“God, I’ve missed you,” I whispered in her ear.
Her arms around me got tighter. “Me too.”
We pulled away but not too far, only enough so we were holding on to each other’s forearms.
“You look awesome,” I told her, and she did.
She used to be right there with me and Bev in our biker bitch clothes (Millie used to wear High’s T-shirts belted at the waist as her form of micro-mini dress, it was shit hot).
Now she was all proper in a beautifully cut tight skirt, high-heeled boots and a slim fitting sweater.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” she replied.
“I’ve given the spandex a rest,” I told her, and she laughed.
“I hear that,” she said.
That was when I laughed.
“Woman, you gonna make us stand on your front stoop for the next hour of gettin’ reacquainted?” High asked grouchily.
Since Hound wouldn’t be home for a while, in that time I could duck away from them and text to let him know it wasn’t safe to come home and he and the boys should hang tight until they heard from me.
So I shot a grin at High, let Millie go, stepped to the side and swept my arm in front of me, indicating they should come in.
“Beinvenido a mi casa,” I declared.
Millie smiled at me and walked in. High shook his head and followed her.
Even though Millie took a few steps into the living room, High stopped in the foyer and turned to me.
I thought he wanted me to take his cut or something (which would be weird, he’d been to my house, he knew he could dump it anywhere if he wanted to take it off) and I started to offer that.
He didn’t, and I knew this when he said, “My woman gets a hug and you’re dissin’ me on that shit?”
“You’re not a hugging type of guy,” I told him because he wasn’t.
Way back, he used to be a sweet and affectionate type of guy. But since Millie broke it off with him, he was a surly type of guy. As mentioned, he came to the house, helped out, he wasn’t a stranger. He’d loved Black too. And me. And my boys.
But he wasn’t cuddly.
“I’m turning over a new leaf,” he told me.
I looked beyond him to Millie, who was looking at her man’s back with a happy smile flirting at her mouth, and I knew why this leaf was turning.
Wild Like the Wind Page 35