Page 24 of God of War

Ares snatches the backpack from my grip and tosses it back into the car. “You have no power here, Delaney. So shut up and get your ass back in the car.”

His eyes flick down my front and his lips pull back in a sneer. “And take that thing off. You look like shit.”

I glance down. The front of the hoodie is speckled with vomit.

Gross.

As Ares makes his way back to the driver’s seat, I turn around and peel off the hoodie, struggling to do it without wiping bits of sick into my hair. My cheeks burn with humiliation as I settle back into my seat and pull the door closed.

One thing is for sure, my plan is a spectacular failure. I just hope there’s a way I can still salvage it.

10

Ares

“A trailer park? Seriously?”

“You expected a beachside villa?”

Delaney doesn’t say anything else. She rises up in her seat and frowns out the window. I get where she’s coming from — an abandoned trailer park that’s barely outside of the town’s borders doesn’t exactly scream ‘safe house’.

I steer around a collapsed trailer awning that’s fallen into the road and continue on to the end of the row.

“Where is everybody?” Delaney’s question is quiet — thinking out loud, rather than asking me directly.

“They all must’ve moved on,” I say, navigating around a couple cracked lawn chairs. “We had a few people living here — homeless, guys just out of prison with nowhere else to go.”

“The Wastelanders owned social housing?” Delaney asks in disbelief.

“No. We’re not a fucking charity. We controlled the territory. We just made sure nobody was out here cooking meth or whatever. There was a thing a few months ago, we had to give up the mountain pass to the Rolling Jackals.”

“Why?”

Because they held Reaper’s niece for ransom. Because unlike the Wastelanders, the Jackals don’t care about pulling innocent civilians into club business.

If the situation were different, if Delaney had walked into the Rolling Jackals HQ with a bag full of drugs, asking them for help, they wouldn’t have hesitated in putting a bullet between her eyes. That, or she’d be trussed up in the back of some van right now, drugs pumping through her veins, ready to be sold off like cattle.

My chest goes tight and my hands flex on the wheel, the leather squeaking.

“Doesn’t matter,” I answer. “Point is, this place belongs to them now. Not on paper, exactly, but it might as well.”

I pull up in front of the last trailer in the lot. “I guess nobody here felt safe anymore, so they left.”

“The devil you know…” Delaney murmurs. “So we’re going to hide out in a rival club’s territory. Sounds like a great plan.”

I let the car idle for a long moment, trying to pick out any dangers in the flood of the headlights. There’s no movement. No sign of life.

Delaney huffs quietly. “That was me being sarcastic, by the way.”

Turning off the car, I thrust open the door. “Get your shit,” I tell her, nodding to the backpack at her feet. “Let’s go.”

***

The Wastelander ‘safe house’ is the last trailer in the row. It’s still standing, though the windows are caked with dirt and the porch sags under my weight. I dig the spare key out of a hidden notch in the porch awning. The lock turns smoothly, almost like new, and I freeze uncertainly with my hand on the knob.

Unlike the rest of the trailers, this one is intact — at least from the outside. Either the folks who abandoned this place respected the Wastelanders enough to not trash it on the way out or… or the Jackals found this place after all and rigged some sort of trap.

The wooden porch creaks as Delaney steps up behind me. She waits a moment, then sighs. “Are we waiting for an invitation?”

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