Page 39 of Forty

Harper sighs. “Yeah. I’ve searched everywhere. Des doesn’t have his passwords written down.”

“Did you look under his keyboard?” Heavy asks.

“Did you look here?” Harper flips him off.

“Some of the guys I worked with at Fort Meade, before I applied for the Rangers? They’d have what we need within an hour.” I know exactly who I’d call. All I need is the go ahead.

“No outsiders.” Heavy folds his hands over his wide stomach and pins Harper with a stare. “You’ve been trying to guess? Try birthdays, pet names, whatever he calls his dick?”

“As often as I can without triggering a lockout. I say it’s time to do it my way.” Harper cracks her neck.

Harper wants to haul Des in and beat a confession out of him. There’s a simplicity to the plan that I appreciate, but there’s no guarantee Knocker would believe a confession made under duress.

“Des Wade isn’t some piece of trash we can gank off the street,” Heavy argues. “He’d be missed. You should come home. We haven’t seriously considered going after Watts.”

“Senator Anderson Watts?” Harper scoffs. “That’s a shit plan, and you know it. I’m in this. I’m not coming home until it’s time to bury pieces of Des Wade’s body under a baby oak tree up on Half-Stack Mountain.”

“You’re wasting time, sister.”

“Oh, brother, ’Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if you do not lose heart.’” Harper blinks and flashes him a small, wry smile.

Heavy snorts. My jaw drops a little.

“What? You thought Heavy’s the only one who picked up a little King James listening to Mom piss and moan about Dad all those years?” She smiles wider and runs her tongue along her bright red lips, her eyes icy and calculating. “I’m going to stay. Des has been hinting around about the future. Maybe he’s gonna put a ring on it.”

“Sometimes I think you’re enjoying this too much.” Heavy gauges her with his own cold eyes. “Don’t get too accustomed to the lifestyle. It might be a month or a year, but that man is marked.”

Her shark’s smile drops in an instant. “Make no mistake, brother. When the time comes, I’m going to cave his skull in with a baseball bat and slip-slide around in his mashed brains.”

Neither Heavy nor I speak for a long moment. No doubt, we’re both picturing it. Harper’s a manipulative, duplicitous witch, but she never makes idle threats.

Harper’s the first to break the silence, homicidal madness gone, all fake smiles and sunshine again. “In the meantime, how about I work off my extra energy by running Nevaeh Ellis out of town? I was thinking with all this arson, it’d be easy enough to pin something on her. She’s definitely the type who would fire bomb a man’s bike.”

My muscles bunch so quickly, bolts of pain spear down my fucked-up arm.

“No need,” I say. “I’ve made the situation clear to her.”

“What’s she doing back here anyway? I’d say she lost her job, but there’s no way that woman hasn’t lost more than a few jobs before now.”

“It’s immaterial. She knows where she stands.” Heat coils in my gut as I remember her spread across my lap, her ass dancing under my palm, pussy juice smeared on her thighs.

I’ve never done anything like that before. Maybe a few swats in the heat of the moment, but nothing like what Dizzy and Fay-Lee do. It’s just—she was smiling. Ear to ear. Flirting with that ginger asshole like she didn’t have a care in the world.

And she didn’t care that she was courting real danger. Heavy, Nickel, Creech. They hate her. They blame her for me reenlisting, for breaking up the original crew. They’ve despised her so long, it’s habit. We don’t hurt women, but what would they do to encourage her to disappear?

She’s not my old lady. No one would physically touch her, but she’s not protected when I’m not around. And some of my brothers are devious, vicious motherfuckers. She talks shit, but she’s not hard on the inside like Harper or Annie.

And there she was, dancing and laughing it up. Instigating. Giving the club her back. Daring them to run her off.

I’ve never needed to wipe a smile off a person’s face in a worse way.

Now, Heavy’s staring at me, deadly serious, his dark eyes unreadable. “Don’t underestimate her. She’s not some harmless hot mess. She’s dangerous. To you. To this club. We let her in once. She used that access to try to tear us apart. She had a temper tantrum ‘cause she wasn’t gonna be the center of attention for a hot minute.”

“She’s a brat.” There’s no denying it.

Heavy nods. “There’s the kind of spoiled that’s mildly irritating. And then there’s the kind of spoiled that poisons shit. I’ve kept tabs on her.”

My chest tightens. I never asked him to do that.

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