Page 7 of Saint's Sinner

“Tried to once, but this mean ‘ol bastard with a scarred-up face lit after us and we skedaddled ‘til they was gone.”

“You went back though, didn’t you?” Mark asked from somewhere to Saint’s left.

Ben whistled low, his bloodshot eyes brightening a bit. “First time in years I’ve slept on a bed that soft. Had four good nights of sleep before they showed up again. Next time we went back there was a note on the door saying how they was gonna torch us if they caught us. Ain’t been near the place since.”

“We passed the word along so folks would know to steer clear,” Daniel added. “Didn’t tell ‘em about the beds either, so they wouldn’t be tempted to try and get in.”

“Them guys on the bikes have patches like these ones?” Saint asked, pointing to the Joker on the back of his kutte.

“Scarred guy had a patch but it wasn’t that one, his had this old three headed dog on it spittin’ fire and standin’ on a mountain of skulls and bones,” Ben said before he took a swig from the bottle Daniel passed him.

“And the other?” Saint asked.

Daniel shook his head. “He had a vest but no patches. Machine he was ridin’ looked like it was made up of all mismatched parts and too big for ‘em to boot. Was a pretty one, whichever he was, but didn’t no one make ‘em go in there. He just went on in on ‘is own.”

“Yeah, and what did that pretty one look like?” Mark asked.

“Blond, I think. Least at the ends. Rest was covered up by one of them dew rags. Didn’t get a close enough look to see much else, but he went walkin’ in beside the big one with the scars. Looked enough alike that they coulda been kin.”

“More like behind him,” Ben interrupted. “He was kickin’ rocks, remember, and that mean one gave him a look. Pretty one flipped him off but he did as he was told. That big one didn’t have to say nuthin’, either.”

“The look was enough to get the pretty one duckin’ his head like a scolded puppy,” Daniel said.

“What else was in there besides the bed?” Saint asked.

“Desks and a buncha stands. They got lights mounted up in the corners of the room too. Power and everything works in there. Bright as hell. About blinded me when I turned ‘em on.”

“Big? You mean like spotlights?”

“Thems the lights.”

Saint glanced over his shoulder and locked eyes with his brother. “Holden say anything about there being two buildings?”

“Not a word, but that doesn’t mean I won’t wake him back up and check.”

Saint turned back towards Daniel and Ben and gestured to the LMX studio they’d searched hours before. “Ever seen those guys go in there?”

“One guy we seen go in both. Don’t know who he is though,” Daniel said. “He’s always got dark shades on.”

“Always in the van too,” Ben said. “Ain’t never seen him come around in anything else. If the van don’t come though, no one heads out to the old candle place, but at this building here people been comin’ and goin’ all the time.”

“Alright, thanks. You think of anything else, you call this number,” Saint said as he scrawled his digits on the back of two of the cards from the tattoo shop. “And here’s something for you guys. Good lookin’ out. You hear about anything else, or see the man in that picture, you reach out. There’ll be a lot more green in your future.”

He handed each a card and a couple twenties and watched as they ambled away, passing the bottle between them.

“Two buildings,” Mark said when he got off the phone with Holden. “Candle shop is supposed to be storage though.”

“Fuck, why didn’t he share that the first time!” Saint snapped. “We’ve wasted enough time out here. We need to regroup and come up with a better plan ‘cause this is a dead end.”

Snarling, he stalked back to his bike, fired her up and roared back to the clubhouse to regroup and have a drink or three before the others returned, though he should have expected Night to be fast on his heels. He hadn’t made it halfway to the door before he heard Night parking, only instead of the man’s bootheels crunching over the gravel behind him, he heard a blaring ringtone and Night’s snarledwhatwhen he finally answered it.

It pissed Saint off that Night took the call. Hell, it was pissing Saint off whenever anyone did anything that wasn’t directly connected to finding Sinn. Instead of snapping at the man, he slammed the door behind him when he entered the club, then kicked it for good measure when it didn’t stay shut. That didn’t work either, and he could see why when he took a closer look at the bolt and realized he’d left it in the lock position when he’d pulled out his keys.

Son of a bitch, couldn’t anything work around here the way it was supposed to?

The last thing he expected was to see Teddy behind the bar with his clipboard like it was just another inventory day. He took several steps back when Saint reached over the bar for the bottle of Tequila he kept stashed there, only to discover it missing.

“Mark’s orders,” Teddy said with enough of a smirk that it snapped the final thread of Saint’s control. He lunged for the man only to have Teddy nimbly leap out of range, turn, and bolt out the back door, but not before the clipboard clattered to thefloor, along with Teddy’s phone and one of the bottles, which promptly exploded everywhere.

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