Page 56 of The Devil's Scars

“So get to it,” Wolf ordered him, including Kansas in the command. “Now. Take anythin’ and everythin’ you need. Rebel, keep ‘em fed and watered, whatever they want. Everyone else, guard duty needs to be set up around all our buildings. Scars, you set up the rotations, make sure we’re covered 24/7. Shifts organized perfectly, no holes or fuck-ups.”

“Yeah, Prez. Gotcha. Consider it done.”

Here Wolf paused, shot a look of steel around the room. “All of you… watch Zee. Arrow, Saint, Vikin’, you clap eyes on her when she’s at work, everyone else, watch her when she’s wanderin’ around the grounds, goin’ for lunch at Satan’s and all that. Ice and Cain, you’re the protective detail. Silver, you got security cams on your place, so we’re good there.”

“Yeah, and they’re active,” Silver said. “I haven’t been watching the footage, because why would I, but I can take a look, if you want.”

“I want,” Wolf said flatly. “Let’s make totally sure that this fucker hasn’t been stalkin’ Zee, maybe even just for fun.”

“OK, I’ll go through it all tonight,” Silver said. “Let Scars know if anything looks off.”

“Fuckin’-A. And everyone? Eyes in the back of your heads, you feel me? You all know what to do. Christ knows we’ve done it enough times before.” Wolf glared around the room, clearly enraged that they were backhere, again… back to living like criminals waiting for a raid on the clubhouse that peppered them with bullets, or for a rival MC to start taking out their members over coffee in a public diner. “Full fuckin’ alert here, at home, at Curves, when you go grocery shoppin’, everywhere. You never relax, not for a second. We don’t know what any of this means yet, and until we do, we’re workin’ on the theory that it means bad trouble and danger. The fuckin’ coward hid in the shadows to deliver what he had to say to us, so that’s where we need to start understandin’ we are. In the shadows.”

Everyone nodded again, because really, what else was there to say? A finger in a box wasn’t a birthday greeting, or a ‘hey, love ya, you MC scamps!’ message. It was bad news, is what it was, and to a man, they knew how to act now, how to observe others in their environment, how to move around a world of shadows.

They knew how to live like men in the cross-hairs… because that’s where they’d lived for a long, long time. It was the life that Wolf had dragged them out of, despite the clawing hands that didn’t want them to leave.

And yet, here they were. Back in the cross-hairs life.

Again.

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