Page 54 of The Vows We Keep
She places her hands on my biceps. “You think you’ll find that here?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s too early to tell. But I gave Los Reyes enough time to prove I’m not going to find it with them.”
16
NIRO
Through the window, I see King in his office, the room we use for church, with Saint and Halo standing in front of him. The door rattles as I knock, and King waves me in.
“We saw them,” Saint says. “They’re reconstructing their operations at the docks.”
“Fuckers,” King mutters. “The Righteous Brotherhood. Racist bastards and women traffickers. Suppose we should have guessed they would try to rebuild their trade route through the docks.”
“You want us to take them out?” Halo asks. “We can plan for that.”
Kings takes a draw on his cigarette and blows the smoke out slowly. “I’m sick of dealing with this shit. Whip in the Allentown chapter has a contact in the FBI. Get Haven, our guy in the docks, to find video footage for us. I’ll speak to Whip about passing the intel along.”
“Wanna go tonight?” Halo asks Saint.
“Fuck yes.” It’s personal for Saint. Briar, his old lady, managed to escape the Brotherhood’s trafficking ring. They were going to sell her to some wealthy bastard to be his slave or some shit.
I punch Halo’s shoulder as he walks by, and his gruff laughter reverberates through the room.
I nod in Saint’s direction. He doesn’t respond. The guy has every right to be pissed at me. I helped kidnap his sister Rae, for Prez. I wonder if Catalina has a line of what she’d accept from me. And I wonder what’ll happen when I cross it, because I always do.
The idea she might leave me hits a little harder than I expect it to.
“I need permission to be absent for a while,” I say to King.
I stand before him stone-cold sober. I’ve slept on what I’m about to do. Thought long and hard about the implications. I saw the look on Cat’s face as I loaded her bags into the back of the truck. She was quiet on the drive to the clubhouse, and I left her in the kitchen talking to Gwen.
Clutch’s old lady seemed taken aback by the idea Cat was mine ... well, with me. As I left the room, I heard her ask Cat if she was there by choice.
King lights a cigarette and tips his chin toward my chair, three seats down on the right side of the table.
A steady stream of smoke leaves his lips before he speaks. “Is this to do with the Los Reyes chick?”
I crack my neck to the left and run my tongue over my teeth to avoid answering with the first thing that comes to mind. That King can go fuck himself referring to Catalina that way. Instead, I frame a response that says the same thing without being quite so confrontational.
“Catalina is not a member of Los Reyes motorcycle club. Her father was, and he is missing or deceased. She has no other formal ties to the club.”
King leans forward and rests his elbows on the table. “You and I both know it’s not as simple as that. If you weren’t so cunt-struck, you’d see it.”
“What the ... ?” I lose the cool I’ve been trying to keep. “I’m trying to not be an asshole and do this right, but fuck you, King.”
He stays calm and pulls a bit of loose tobacco from his tongue and flicks it away. “That’s a bit like saying Iris is no longer affiliated with this club if Spark dies.”
When he puts it like that, I do understand his point, and I feel like I know he has the upper hand; but I’m arguing at a disadvantage. I never know how to handle conversations like this. If I concede, will he make another, then another, until I’m buried under all these points and can’t make my own?
“It’s not exactly the same thing. Catalina is not her father.”
King shrugs. “Fine. It’s like me not being affiliated to the club just because my dad died.”
I grind my teeth. This is not going how I planned it.
“Listen,” King says. “There’s a lot that’s wild about what’s happening here. I don’t see all the ins and outs of it yet. At face value, it could be exactly as you think it is. That Catalina is looking for her father, expected us to be hostile to her, and was proactive in subduing you to get answers when she thought you were me. I don’t like that she did that to you, but I get why she did. It’s smart.”
“It’s exactly that,” I say. “She just wants to find her father, and I want to help her. I have a great memory when it comes to faces, you know that. I want to see if Vex can help her in any way. We’ve done this kind of thing a thousand times before. Finding people who don’t want to be found. Getting to the bottom of secrets and lies.”
