Page 61 of Grave Games

A faint tremor began to creep into her tone, but even an idiot could have spotted that the tremor came from a place of rage, not fear.

“Okay, baby. Listen, I’ve got something for you to carry at all times, yeah?” I reached into my jacket’s inner pocket and handed it to her. “This is an SRK military-issue knife, with a six-inch black-matte blade. It’s got a nice sticky rubber grip and easy-snap sheath. I’m hoping you’ll never need it, but I still want you to practice drawing it as fast as you can. Understand?”

I heard her take a calming breath, and her fingers were steady as she took the blade from me. “I understand. Thank you.”

“Also, as of now, no more going anywhere by yourself, yeah? Not even here within the compound. Not until this shit blows over.”

“I sent Arthur out alone, Romeo. I put him in danger. It’s my fault.”

“No, Shy.” I brought her hand up to my mouth so I could press my lips to her knuckles. When she leaned toward me like a flower reaching for the sun, a velvet fist caught my heart and squeezed hard enough to make it hurt in the craziest, sweetest way. “You did nothing wrong. In fact, I’m proud as hell at the way you’re handling yourself. The fault lies with the people who did this, not you.”

“What happened after that?” Tyr said, the muscles flexing with tension in his crossed arms. “Did you see where the truck went or who was driving it?”

“I recognized Radar in the passenger seat, and one of Hades’s lieutenants, that skinny bald guy with the bad teeth—Ghoul, I think?—was in the back of the truck,” Mabel offered, her lip curling in distaste. “There were four of our guys at the gate. Three of them went tearing off after the truck. The other one—I think he’s a prospect, he looked so young—locked the gate behind them and then tended to Arthur. Shiloh cussed that boy up and down for locking us in so we couldn’t get to Arthur. That’s all I know.”

“The one left behind is our newest prospect, Ethan,” I offered, glancing at Tyr. “And he did a damn fine job in locking the place down.” Which I would explain to Shiloh once we had a minute to breathe. “The other three are Gunner, Indy and Mal. We need to know if they’ve returned.”

“They have.” Tomahawk approached our table, looking like he’d just chewed on some glass. “They came in through the front gate about two minutes ago. I put them in your office, Tyr, so they’re ready for you whenever you are. You should know that Indy recognized Ghoul in the back of the truck, so it’s confirmed. This was no random attack. It was Hades.”

For a full five seconds the whole room went silent as the enormity of this shit bomb went off. It was official. As of now we were at war, and the first casualty was the kid I’d placed as my woman’s personal bodyguard.

Goddamn it.

“Do you know how Arthur is?” Shiloh straightened in her seat and looked to Tomahawk, her expression filled with equal amounts dread and hope. “I saw the EMTs working on him before I was dragged away. Do you know if he’s… you know… alive?”

Tomahawk shook his shaggy head. “I just know they loaded the kid up in the ambulance and peeled out of here, sirens blazing. That makes me think he was still breathing when they left.”

“That makes sense.” She nodded, her voice faint. “They wouldn’t be in a hurry if he was dead. Right?” She looked to me with so much hope in her eyes it hit me like a dagger.

“Hoping for the best while bracing for the worst is the only way to handle situations like these,” I said carefully, not telling her that I’d gotten a good look at what our prospect had been through. In addition to an obvious beating of a lifetime, there had been at least three stab wounds to Arthur’s torso, not to mention the header he’d been made to take out of a moving vehicle. “All we can do is make sure Arthur gets the best possible treatment, because Gravediggers take care of their own, yeah? And Arthur is definitely one of ours.”

“He wants to be a Gravedigger so bad, Romeo. Just this morning he told me that there was both power and pride in wearing the jacket, and he doesn’t even have his patch yet.”

“He sure as hell earned it today.” Tyr’s voice was gruff, and he sounded more emotional than I’d ever heard him before he turned to Tomahawk. “I’m going to head over to the hospital to be with Arthur and let him know he’s not alone, so I need a couple things from you and Romeo. First, I want video of when and how they got Arthur out of this compound, so Romeo, I need you to trace his every move from the moment your Shy girl sent him off with that receipt.”

I nodded. “As soon as I have it, you’ll have it.”

“Tom, I need you to get Gunner and the others over to the hospital so I can talk with them.”

Tomahawk nodded. “Understood.”

“And Tom, make sure everyone who’s traveling is loaded for bear, yeah? Every brother is packing, as of now. Even here within the compound itself, as well as at church and the barbecue tonight.”

Being armed at church was usually forbidden, but war changed everything.

“You can’t possibly have a party now,” Ana-Sofia said, literally doing a pearl-clutch. But it was done so daintily she made it look both natural and adorable as she turned wide black eyes to her man. “Zee, baby, someone was nearly killed right on your doorstep as a clear message that war is coming. You can’t have a party now. It’s… it’s just not done.”

“Sure, Fancy, it wouldn’t be done at Lincoln Park Country Club.” Zee pressed his mouth to her shiny black hair, no doubt to blunt the harsh reality of his words. “But here in this world—”

“The crazy-macho biker world.”

“Yeah, the crazy-macho biker world,” he agreed with a grin, and suddenly I understood what had drawn Zee to such a Richie-rich woman from the wealthy elite side of the tracks. There was a world of spice hidden beneath that finishing-school façade, and Zee had always had a taste for spicy. “Here in my world—your world now—we always move forward. We don’t show weakness, because we’re not weak. We don’t show fear, because we’re not afraid. Arthur would be the first to tell you that you never show your enemy even the perception of weakness or fear, which is exactly what canceling tonight’s events would do.”

“So in other words, the show must go on?” Shiloh said, not in a condemning way, but in a tone that told me she was doing her best to understand the rules of her new world.

“Exactly,” Zee said, nodding at her. “But for us it’s more than just a show. It’s a declaration of strength—a statement that they’re incapable of knocking us off our stride, much less off our feet.”

“I get it.” Ana-Sofia took a calming breath. “It won’t stop them from trying to knock you off your feet, though.”

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