Page 36 of That Girl is Trouble

“I know, brother. We’ll find her.” I nod at Kat. “I need to get her out of here. Fill in Bane and Tex and then call Decker. Cops got surveillance on us, and Deck might have eyes on who came in and out of here today.” I swallow the lump in my throat as Kat trembles against me. “Can’t have been too far behind them. Jess… he wouldn’t have survived long. We’ve still got time.”

Time before they hurt her. Time before they kill her.

Reno… Triss.

Reno is one of us. Fucker disappeared over a week ago, and I wrote him off as dead. Another thing to add to the shitstorm of trouble that’s been plaguing us for months. Someone’s been fucking with us, making a go for our territory, and after that threat was laid out on Triss, I put enough pieces together to assume it’s all connected.

Part of me thought that maybe Reno was just being Reno. The man does have a bad habit of disappearing. He’s got a weakness for cards, and if he’s on a bad streak, and he frequently is, we might not hear from him for days, or at least until he can crawl back into the black.

But to fuck us over like this? To take Triss and kill Jesse? I will unleash all kinds of hell on the fucker.

“Inner circle only,” I say to Graves, gripping his shoulder to make sure he’s listening. “If Reno betrayed us, we don’t know who we can trust. But we’ll get her back.”

He nods as he pulls Triss’s blood-covered jacket to his chest, the fear in his face morphing to anger, to rage. The Graves I know fighting his way back to the surface. “When I fuckin’ find them—”

“You’ll kill them,” Kat says. Her head is still flush with my chest. She’s calm now. The hysterics that came with the initial shock of seeing Jess like that, of watching him die, are long gone. She looks up at me, her cheek pressed to my jacket. Her eyes are angry, but there’s a pleading look on her face. “Promise. Get my sister back and then kill them. For her. And”—she lets out another sob—“and for Jess.”

I stare down at Jesse, at Triss’s coat Graves is still clutching to his chest, at Kat’s face, the tears staining her skin, the streaks of blood from Jesse’s hand. This is the easiest promise I’ve ever had to make.

“We’ll get them, Kitty. And we’ll kill them all.”

11

Two years ago

December

Taillights disappear down the old dirt road. An echo of a scream slices through the night, and then everything goes dead quiet. I huff out the breath I’ve been holding, the white cloud hanging on the icy air like smoke.

The truck stops abruptly, the brake lights illuminating the road a deep red. A door opens. Followed by a shout, a laugh, the clink of a chain, the thump of a body being loaded into the box.

Lincoln Decker stands beside me, murmuring into his phone, his police uniform abandoned for street clothes. An unregistered 9 mm sits in his waistband in place of his police-issued Glock. He’s clean shaven, as always, his hair neatly styled and perfectly placed, despite the carnage surrounding us. Even the pristine Officer Decker is blood covered tonight.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, his attention shifting to the truck as it comes to a stop in front of us. “Yeah, that’s right. Nine.”

Nine dead bodies.

Reno’s death was the slowest. Graves wanted it to be brutal, asked me to make him hurt like the traitor made Triss hurt. The girl was bloody, bruised, and half-naked when we found her. I haven’t given myself much time to think about what they could have done to her before we got here.

All these months, my gut’s been screaming at me, warning me that someone’s coming for us. Never would have guessed it would be one of my own. I never thought a man I trusted, a man I considered family, would turn on me.

Reno was in a fuck ton of debt. A shitty hand in a high-stakes poker game left him owing too much to the wrong kind of people. Corporate types who buy loyalty rather than earn it. Who can smell the kind of desperation on a man that makes him willing to put a price on his soul. They saw an opportunity to use him against us, and rather than pay his debts with his life, he chose to pay with ours. With Jesse’s. Fucking degenerate.

I made sure Reno died exactly how he deserved—without mercy. The Sinner ink cut from his skin, Bane’s blade slicing into all his soft spots. And when I was done with my questions, when I was sure Bane had ripped every answer out of him, we stripped him down, chained him to my truck, and dragged him up and down the old farm road until the screaming stopped.

And it only just stopped.

Bane hops out of the driver’s side door, a grin on his face like I’ve just given him an early Christmas present. “Must’ve hit a rock. Neck snapped, I think,” he says, jerking his head back towards the road. “Made a mess out there. Lot of blood.”

I rub my hand over the scruff of my chin and squint at the long laneway leading up to the barn. In the night, the streaks across the dirt-covered road look black, as does the blood soaking into my hands. “It’ll get handled. Supposed to snow tonight.” I nod at Decker, who lets out a deep sigh and pockets his phone. “We good?” I ask him.

“Yeah,” he grunts. “This is a big ask, Donovan. Furnace will be running all night at the morgue getting rid of this shit. Won’t be cheap.” He glances behind him, regarding the old dilapidated barn where those fucks were holding Triss. “We should torch it. I assume none of you idiots were mindful of fingerprints.” He throws a glare at Preacher, who’s just pushed out of the passenger side door of the truck with a smoke hanging from his mouth. “Or DNA. You pocket that, Preach. I won’t be hanging around here all night picking up your butts.”

“You’ll pick up what I tell you to pick up,” I snap.

“Don’t talk to me like I work for you,” he retorts. “I’m not one of your brothers.”

Bane lets out a soft chuckle and twirls his knife in his hand. “Keep talking with that tone, Decker, and I’ll chain you to the back of the truck like I did our best buddy Reno here and spread out your insides all over the road.” There’s a maniacal glint in his eye as he turns to me, as if waiting for my nod to do exactly that. The dude’s an absolute sociopath. Even I get a little squeamish around him and that damn blade he carries.

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