Page 70 of Soulless Saint

One side was a photo of the canyons. The other had a couple lines of numbers scrawled in smudged black ink.

10-01-22

1100

It was a date and a time. And below was a symbol I assumed stood for Sons of O’Sullivan. The mark two jagged S’s, one perched above the other with a slashed O between them.

S

Ø

S

“They want to meet,” Ma reiterated for everyone else as Hardin reached across Dad to steal the notecard from my grasp. He looked at it for all of two seconds before tossing it back on the table with a popped eyebrow.

I knew what he was wondering.

I sat back in my seat. “There’s a date and a time, but no location.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Ma asked, pointing to the postcard photo. “That shot was taken from the valley floor of the canyons way out past the equestrian center on the canyon road. Look at the peaks. Four of them, each one larger than the one before it.”

I recognized the spot now, remembering Ma taking us on a ride that way. She’d pointed to the ridges and said, look, it’s us. There’s you, Hardin, she’d pointed to the third largest after the ones she considered to be the mama and papa peaks. And there’s you, baby, she told me, pointing to the smallest of the four. The one with all the crags in its tawny face, the sun lighting up the purple and yellow bruises on her face.

But that was before…

There was no way the Sons could know about that ride. It was only a coincidence, but still, the memory made the muscle around my mouth twitch with disgust.

“That’s the location,” she added, and the room fell silent, all eyes glancing between Ma and Dad.

The skin between Dad’s eyes knotted as he stared wordlessly down at the postcard.

“What?” I snorted. “You’re not seriously considering this, are you? It’s probably a trap.”

No one said anything in agreement, but no one spoke to the contrary either because they all knew damn well I was right. “And even if it isn’t, we didn’t set this meet. This is a location of their choice. A time of their choice. A date of their choice. That’s not how we operate. Meets happen when we fucking say they—”

“Enough, Kaleb,” Dad sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Of fucking course we aren’t going to go wandering out into the desert on their terms.”

My ears heated, and I crossed my arms over my chest, adjusting my position in my seat, feeling sufficiently put back in my place. “Well, good. Just making sure.”

I wiped an imaginary leak from my nose and sniffed, waiting for the attention to shift. There was a reason when Dad suggested I could take over for him someday, I’d turned down the offer, telling him Hardin would make a far better leader, despite his silence. He was the oldest, it made more sense.

I wasn’t fit for leadership. Too slow to catch on. Too thick in the head; the idiot son who went and got himself lost in the canyons at ten years old for eleven days and almost died.

Everyone knew it.

I could see the judgment. The shame of it hot on my face.

Just Kaleb pointing out the obvious again.

“That said,” Dad fucking mercifully continued. “We need to be ready for them to make a move. If we don’t show up, there’s no telling how they’ll react and we still don’t know their goal here. We don’t know their numbers, but intel leads me to believe they are at least in the same ballpark as us, putting on semi-even ground.”

“But we got home field advantage,” Zade argued. “We have the mayor. The senator. All the smaller fish pay tribute to the Shark of SoCal.” I watched my Dad’s face tick with unease before his mask was back in place.

So, he hadn’t told them about the Mayor or the Senator, but I knew damn well they were aware of the small gangs in the area being more than a little uncooperative lately. Everyone was on edge for tribune collection day, which was barely two weeks away now, on the last day of September.

“There’s something you all need to know,” Dad started, and I braced myself, tapping my fingers on the table. “Neither Senator Murphy or Mayor Costa are taking my calls. I tried to go to their offices yesterday but neither was there. Their assistants were slinging some bullshit about them being sick and working remotely. But they weren’t at home, either.”

Whispers rose from the group of high ranking Saints and I didn’t need to hear exactly what they were saying to know that the general consensus was that this was bad. Like, set your tits on fire bad.

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