Page 73 of Claimed By the Biker Brothers

“Diesel, no!” Jagger calls out, already ahead of me. “RUN!”

“Fuck that, I am not running from my own town,” I mutter and unload half a clip into the four bastards. I manage to take one of them down completely, blood spraying out the back of his head. I clip one of the cartel boys in the shoulder and force the other two still standing to hide behind the nearest car. “Move,” I yell, then fire a couple more rounds just to keep their heads down before I catch up to Jagger and Knox.

“Left,” Jagger says, taking the lead and a tight turn.

We follow, then jump onto an empty train car and reach the other side.

Commotion can be heard from the workers we saw earlier in the southern sector. They heard the gunshots, and now they’re coming over. I can see them in the distance, clearly confused but drawn by the noises.

“Hang a right over here,” Jagger says.

Again, Knox and I follow.

POP-POP!

One of our pursuers is about to catch up, jumping over the tracks to keep his sights on us. To my surprise, Knox takes out his gun and fires a few rounds at him. Two of these hit the second cartel guy in the stomach.

I hear the thudding of his body as we finally get back to our bikes.

“Move, move, move,” Jagger says, jumping onto his Harley.

Everything happens too fast and too slow at the same time. It’s a weird sensation, damn near impossible to immediately register. My body has gone into autopilot mode. Limbs moving, fingers working, eyes darting all over the place.

We ride out of the yard as the second Hughes goon closes in on us.

I swerve through a thick layer of red dust, raising it all in the air before I engage the gas and roll out with a deafening grumble of my big twin. He can’t hit us, not when he can’t see us. We only need a few fragments of a second.

My heart’s racing faster than my Harley.

But we make it back onto the road and go as fast as we can, putting the unexpected nightmare behind us. What’s ahead matters more.

“Well, this is a fucking shitshow,” Jagger says once we’re stopped at a gas station on the other side of town. “We left bodies behind… FUCK.”

I look around. There’s nobody here except the attendant, dozing behind the counter inside, flanked by candy bar and breath mint displays.

“Look on the bright side,” I mutter. Jagger and Knox give me a confused frown. “We didn’t bring our registered weapons,” I add with a wiggle of my eyebrows. “They can’t trace the bullets back to us.”

The silence that follows has me bracing for two possibilities.

One, either Jag or Knox will tear me a new asshole for the ill-timed dark humor, or two, they’ll see the sense in what I just said.

“And the surviving Hughes boy certainly won’t talk to the police,” Knox says, breaking his otherwise sometimes-annoyingly righteous pattern. “He’d have to tell them what he was doing there in the first place. He was left on his own, drugs and money laying around. The railroad workers must’ve called the cops straight away.”

“No time to stash the evidence,” Jagger says and sighs deeply.

“There’s also a downside to this,” Knox reminds us both. I already know where he’s going with this. I considered it from the moment I decided to kill Bad Hair before he killed us. “The surviving Hughes boy will tell Marlo all about this. She’ll know it was us.”

“And she’ll want to retaliate,” I say.

“Fuck,” Jagger snaps and kicks a pebble away with his boot. “She knows we’re close to Robyn. Marlo will try to get to her in order to get to us.”

Knox shakes his head slowly. “Hold on, brother. Robyn is safe. She’s at the clubhouse, and when she’s not at the clubhouse, she’s working at the salon or picking Kyra up from school. We’ve got people watching her. Marlo can’t get anywhere near Robyn, not without starting a whole fucking war with the club, and she knows it.”

“I’m not going to sleep on that,” Jagger replies. “Marlo is her grandaddy’s spitting image, character-wise. Just as ruthless, just as fucking evil and she’s rebuilding her grandaddy’s empire brick by brick. It’ll be war either way.”

“Jag, stop,” Knox says. “Don’t go down that rabbit hole just yet.”

“Calvin is still whispering in Marlo’s ear,” I suggest. “He’s obsessed with Robyn. He wouldn’t let Marlo hurt her or Kyra.”

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