Page 55 of Out for Blood

“Drugs?”

“No,” Bear yelled over at me from the door. “They’d need more room. It has to be another warehouse.”

I nodded, running up to him with Hawk and heading out, just as I saw Kendrick and Kirby run out the other exit. Savage andViper were flipping for who got the honours as I pushed the boys out of the warehouse and toward our bikes.

“What’s up?” Bear asked me as we got on our bikes and put our helmets on. Savage ran toward his bike, obviously the loser of the coin flip. We waited for Viper to come running before we took off.

“Looks like we got a rat.”

His lip curled up in anger. If there was anyone who couldn’t stand betrayal, it was Bear. My chest was hurting at the deceit, but they were hidden in plain sight. It made sense how Neal could gather so much intel on us, and to take our businesses from us.

Viper came bolting out of the warehouse, straight to his bike. He threw his helmet on, and we took off just as the sound of the warehouse exploding into the night could be heard behind us.

Pulling into the compound, I was fired up from what we’d done and what we still had to do.

“Get him,” I called over to Chains who nodded and ran off with Razor. I moved forward with Hawk and Bear at my side. They didn’t say a word, so they must have known how serious I was.

We moved off to the shed, where we did our dirty work. I didn’t want to worry the girls. Our prospects had been told to go inside and look after them, keeping them from coming outside. I could hear the music pumping inside, meaning they had already given them the news that we were back and unharmed. I didn’t want Sheridan to come and see what I was about to do to someone I had trusted implicitly.

“What the hell is this?” I heard the old man grumble as Bear pushed him into the garage, closing the steel roller door behind him. We all stood around him, all of us aware of his deceit, and what he had been planning to do.

No wonder he hadn’t stuck with us when we partied, or why he never came into the clubhouse.

“You know.”

I nodded. “Yeah, pretty fucking stupid to pretend to be one of us all this time.”

“This was never anything to do with you, Cooper. I made that deal long before you boys came home. You see, with Donald gone, we weren’t making money. I had to do something. Neal promised to let us stay here, to keep running our drugs, but a few weeks after you returned, he reneged. I hadn’t read the contract properly.”

“You should have come to me,” I said, my voice eerily level and distant.

“You are too much like Donald,” he said. “You would have thought I’d been a rat.”

“You are,” Bear said, his anger evident. He’d thought of Eagle as a father figure, especially when his own disowned him once he patched in. The comparison to my father was one that I hated, especially with what I knew about him and what he did to Sheridan. I hated him.

He knew it too.

“I’m nothing like the old man, Findlay. He would have let you live.”

Realisation dawned on him as he looked me in the eye, but he never faltered.

“What made you think you could sign over our land, our clubhouse, everything we owned? “

“Donald left everything to me,” he said. “He didn’t know if you were to come back, you never returned his calls in the lead up to his death. He changed his will.”

“No, he didn’t,” I heard someone say from behind us. I turned around to see Shona standing there, her arms crossed over her chest. She’d come through the old entrance door to the shed, so we hadn’t heard her approaching.

“Whore,” Findlay spat at her. Savage kicked out at the old man’s knees, and knocked him to the ground.

“Don’t you speak about her like that,” he bit out, angrily. I was just as angry he would turn on her. She’d been through enough.

“What do you mean, Shona?”

“You don’t know about certain things, Ace. The last few months, especially when you were on runs, I…I did everything to keep my place here.”

Her eyes were watering, tears flowing down her cheeks. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.

“You always had a place here,” Hawk said. “No matter what Dog did to us, you are a part of our family.”

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