Page 80 of Traitor

If what this person was saying was true, then it had never been another biker gang. Monica had been murdered by her own club.

It had to be a mistake. Biker gangs had rules and codes, even the illegal ones. They didn’t just go around killing ol’ ladies. Unless, they became a threat to the gang. Shit, maybe it wasThe SopranosI was thinking of now.

Monica had overheard something, hadn’t she? She’d even insisted I not drag Torch into it. Why else would she have done that unless a fellow gang member was behind it all.

I stood up on shaky legs and propelled myself up the stairs and into the bedroom; pulling my big suitcase down from the top shelf of the closet before throwing it on the bed.

No, I couldn’t run. I needed answers. I needed to look in Mike’s eyes and have him tell me that this was all some sort of mistake.

The door slammed downstairs and I jumped.

“Lauren?” He called out as he moved from room to room.

I began trembling and tears pricked the back of my eyes. I had to keep it together. “Up here.”

He must’ve taken the stairs two at a time because he burst into the room within a matter of seconds. He held up a paper cup of coffee. “I got this for you. I don’t want to fight, but if fighting is what’s going to make this work between us, then I’ll stay up all night with you.”

His eyes dropped to the bed and the empty suitcase before looking up at me questioningly. “Are you leaving me? Because of the Jimmy thing?”

I shook my head. “No—yes. I don’t—did you get a text the night my mother died?”

The spark that had been in his eyes moments earlier faded almost instantly. “What are you talking about?”

My eyes began to burn. The urge to cry was overwhelmingly strong. I held it together and repeated, “The night my mother died, did you or did you not receive a text ordering you to keep her there?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed and then put the coffee down on the nightstand. “I—where is this coming from?”

I handed him my cell phone and his face took on a greenish hue. That was when I knew that it was true and, incidentally, the moment I realized that there were worse things than death. For the last sixteen months, I’d carried the belief that, had Mike known what was to come, he would’ve stayed on shift and kept my mother safe.

Hell, he’d told me as much.

He quietly stared at the phone screen, reading and rereading the words. As if doing so, would change what had happened. “Lauren, I can explain—”

“I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. You were following orders—kind of like the Katya thing, right?” The words were out of my mouth before I had time to consider them, but I knew that my intuition was right.

“The Katya thing was different…” he trailed off and glanced around the room helplessly.

The night he’d come home from Colorado, I looked into his eyes and saw the battle being waged within his mind. Yeah, he’d claimed that killing her would’ve kept his secrets safe, but I’d been certain that there was something else there.

He struggled to be the man he wanted to be and the man the club wanted him to be. Had it just been that, I might’ve been able to overlook it. Unfortunately, he’d chosen the club that night and I lost someone I was just getting to know again.

Unlike the morning after she died, there was no screaming. I wasn’t going to hit him. All the fight had left my body after receiving that text.

“You knew they were going to kill her all along—oh my god,” I clapped a hand over my mouth as it hit me. “That’s why your father came by that night. He wanted me to tell him what I knew and I fell for it!”

Mike’s eyes widened. “My father? He was here? When?”

I shook my head. “Does it even matter? It was when I still lived with Torch. He came over and wanted to talk about her case; said he thought there was a rat in his clubhouse—”

He waved both hands out in front of him. “Slow down—you’re saying my old man showed up at your place and wanted to talk about the case?”

I rolled my eyes and zipped up the suitcase, ignoring the fact that it was still empty. “Yes. And it all makes sense now. You’re both in on it together. Does Torch know what you both did? And then to blame it on another biker gang? It’s just sick. Were the biker in the parking lot and the ransacked apartment just ploys to get me to come running to you for help?”

I mashed the button down until the handle on the suitcase extended, before hauling it off the bed and toward the stairs.

Mike reached for my arm, stopping me in the hall. “I don’t know who sent you that text, but it sure as hell didn’t come from someone in the club. We don’t kill our own.”

“Your own? God, you even talk like one of them. Do you have a leather vest hidden around here too?” His grip tightened and I looked up at him warily. “Let me go, Mike. Please.”

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