Page 45 of Atlas

“What the fuck?” Willa would laugh at me for being a chauvinist right now, but fuck me.

That’s no man.

The woman is as tall as Lynette, probably around six feet, and clad for the runway in a tight black dress cut low between her ample breasts and riding up high over a set of long, creamy legs. She’s got at least six inches of heels under her, but she makes walking on wet gravel look like an artform as she catwalks confidently down the middle of the road.

She crosses her arms, tosses back her sleek, black, shoulder-length hair, and slowly peruses the parked vehicles from left to right.

“I want my money!” she yells, her voice thunderous.

The hair on my arms all stand up in an instant.

“Christ,” Wizard hisses, shuddering.

Tyrant, to his credit, rolls out of Raiden’s truck like it’s an ordinary day. He approaches cautiously, his leather jacket bulging where he’s got his gun tucked. He says something to the woman that we can’t hear. It goes on for a few minutes, and then he gestures to us.

One by one, we exit the vehicles, each of us holding a suitcase in hand.

Silently, we creep towards the middle of the road. We set them down in the gravel and edge back, not taking our eyes off Tyrant. He’s wearing a vest under his jacket, but that won’t save a guy from a headshot.

I watch as Wizard, Grave, and Raiden train their guns on the figure.

“I put trackers in the money,” Wizard drops casually. “Wherever she goes, unless she finds them, we’ll know where she is.”

“She’ll find them. She’s got to launder that somewhere.”

“How the hell did she come across almost half a million dollars?”

“Crime family, criminal connections, she could be a Donna in her own right. Or maybe just a really good businesswoman doing some dirty work. It’s the modern age. Women are just as capable of being villains.”

“I don’t know. She’s so… hot,” Grave says.

Laughing right now would be inappropriate.

It’s not funny to watch her tote all those suitcases, two at a time, and set them in the trunk of her car. It’s impressive. She doesn’t falter in the wet gravel once.

“How has she not snapped an ankle yet? Those shoes look like murder. I wouldn’t mind them wrapped around my waist, though.” Grave is still looking at the woman appreciatively.

“If she doesn’t find the trackers, you could always look her up. There’s been stranger matches made in the club. If she’s come into that money through nefarious means, she might need a savior.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, brother.”

Done with the suitcases, the woman gets into the driver’s seat and starts the car. She backs up slowly, keeping her eyes on us the same way we watched her. She reverses all the way down the road, until she’s down a hill and out of sight, and only then does she do a three point turn and race away. We catch the blur of black speeding into the distance before Tyrant gives us the signal to roll out.

Wizard doesn’t mutter anything except curses about the mud and stones that Grave’s truck is throwing all over us. Even after we turn off onto the paved road, the gravel pelts us.

“I’ve seen a lot of weird shit,” Wizard states as we pull back into Hart’s city limits. “But that was right up there.”

I just nod, because that pretty much covers it.

I’m sure that this one will be something the club talks about foryearsto come.

Chapter 14

Willa

It’s good to be home.

Agatha just about wept with joy when we drove her back to her farm and installed a whole bunch more cameras. She promised to call us if she saw even the smallest thing out of order or if she so much as had a feeling that something wasn’t right.

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