Page 68 of Wolf.e

I stop too because I’m instantly on high alert with her. “What?”

She pulls her phone out and presses one button on it, then starts walking again. “Don’t look at him, just keep walking. Whatever I say, go along with it.”

“Who? What are you talking about?” I ask, even though I already know because my gaze follows hers.

I watch the rider who’s been parked in front of my work for the last week turn around and crush his cigarette butt under the heel of his boot. I can see it, even from a hundred feet away… The grim reaper on the back of a red Harley. The red banner above is glaringly obvious, and I already know enough to understand that this is bad news.

Disciples of Sin. My keeper isn’t a friend of the club, he’s the enemy.

I put my phone back in my pocket. The AirTag I stuck under Brinley’s car tells me she’s still at work. I’ve run thirty-two miles in the last five days, tore my fists up on the bag and blew through almost a thousand rounds of ammo. Yet none of it is working.

I can’t get my fucking head right and I’ve resorted to tracking her every move. I told myself on Monday it was because I had to make sure she wasn’t gonna talk, but it became clear she has no intentions of going to the cops. Most of the time, from what I can tell, she seems skittish, like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The other shoe being me.

I’ve fallen into this primal need that I have to see her again. I watch her in the night, in the hours when her sleep is the deepest. During the day, I use my truck to follow her on the way into the office, to make sure she gets in safe, then return again to follow her home at night. I can’t shake her. I can’t get the way her body molded to mine out of my head. I tell myself it’ll pass but then one day blends into the next and still…

“Boss,” Jake calls as I stare out the window. “Chapel.”

I nod.

“Steele Street Clinic was ransacked in the middle of the night,” Jake says as we all assemble. “Their entire methadone supply was wiped out.”

“How did that happen? We have eyes on them,” I say. We have multiple cameras in every location.

Jake shakes his head. “I dunno, man, it’s like they knew the blind spots.”

I look around the table at all my men. None of this makes sense. The faces I see here I’ve known most of my life. They’re my brothers. To not trust them seems impossible.

“That’s not all, there are more rumors everywhere. DOS members are talking. Word on the street is they’re planning something,” Jake adds.

“Glen Eden rally, maybe?” Kai asks.

“Not sure they’d wait that long,” Flipp says as he lights a smoke. “That’s not till next month and there’ll be a ton of crews there, why involve them in our bullshit?”

I shrug. “It’s what I would do. Easier to blend in with the masses.”

The rally they’re talking about, Glen Eden, is annual and massive. The biggest in the south, it attracts thousands, from every major player in the one percenters, all the way down to the smaller recreational clubs. It’s a place for us to make connections with other crews and to bullshit and let loose a little. It’s only forty-five minutes south of here in the hamlet of Benson, Georgia. The town is completely taken over, even the main roads. The acreage on the outskirts is owned by one of our sister clubs, Titans MC, and there are cabins and places for people to camp. It’s an all-out party. New people, new women. One I normally look forward to, but this year the only woman I want is one who belongs nowhere near my world.

“Send a crew to Atlanta, help the clinic get cleaned up. The cops’ll be all over it. Contact the PD there and find out what they know,” I tell Robby.

He nods.

“Take a prospect and Flipp.”

The Atlanta PD is a friend of the club, they walk a fine line between looking the other way and accepting our help. If there’s anything they think will help us stop this from happening again, they’ll tell us.

“On it.” Robby nods.

“All right, next we need to talk about—”

The sound of glass shattering stops Jake from finishing his sentence as the main window in the chapel shatters. I catalogue every single thing around me all at once. It’s not a gun that causes the window to shatter, something was thrown through it. I scan the room to make sure it isn’t an explosive. I don’t move as I start to count. If another hit is coming, statistically it will happen in the next twenty seconds.

My gaze lands on a brick with something tied to it on the other side of the room. Paper? The window on the east wall quickly follows, exploding inward as we all cover our heads. None of us have our phones in here, so we sit and wait for gunfire or another attack for the last ten seconds before I’m on the move, crawling out of the room with Jake and Ax behind me. I reach the main hall where the people hanging around the clubhouse are all on the floor. Broken glass is everywhere out here too—two windows are shattered and women are cursing, one is cut up and bleeding.

I nod to Flipp to see to her, and make my way to the door, pulling my gun as I approach but the assailants are long gone. Tires spewing rocks and leaving a cloud of dust that makes it impossible to see who it really was. I already know it was DOS but a visual of the vehicle would’ve been nice.

Nodding at the cameras, I look at Kai across the room and yell over the noise, “Check ‘em.” Then I head outside with Ax close behind me.

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