“You should be used to it with the amount of time this thing has been broken,” Medic replies lightly, unoffended. He looks over at me. “You good with the others?”
I nod, stepping away from Sting, the last one in the row. “They’ll all live.” I glance at the bodies still being guarded by their friends and brothers. “Though I don’t know if that’s a good thing.” I don’t keep the dark tone out of my voice. The five men don’t even flinch. I look at Medic again. “Do you need help with them?”
Medic looks at his friends and swallows hard, grief clear on his face. “I’ll need your help once we get things figured out here. I have a spot we can keep them until we’re ready to involve the authorities.” The words are sad and soft.
“Fuck!” Bullet roars, the pain that rips from him is sharp and so angry that I can feel it even from here. He turns and slams his fist into the wall next to where King and the others are standing. They all jump, but none of them back out of Bullet’s way. “Three more. Three more fucking dead,” he snarls. I can feel his fury even from here. Raw and visceral. “One of them is barely a fucking adult. He was just a fucking kid.” He rounds on Angel and the others. “You’re going to fucking tell me every fucking thing you know,” he spits, stalking forward. “Or I’ll beat it out of you before I kill you.”
I step back into Hulk, wary of this exchange. I get it. Grief and anger will make people do stupid things, act in ways they don’t normally, and I definitely don’t want to be in the middle of it. Hulk wraps his arm around my waist and holds me tight to his front. His entire body is vibrating with tension, and I put a soothing hand on his arm, stroking against the skin comfortingly with my fingers.
I’ll give Angel and the rest of his crew props for not backing down at Bullet’s anger and getting in their faces, though I think he’s pretty stupid. The man looks ready to murder them. “We’ll tell you everything,” he promises. “Do you want us to talk now or when your other men get back?”
“We don’t have the time to wait for them, and we’ll fill them in when they get back,” Sniper states sharply. “Start talking.”
Angel glances at me briefly, but I hold his stare. I don’t give a flying fuck about any of their club business bullshit that was being spouted earlier. I’m here to support Hulk and help where I can.
Before Angel can speak, there’s a commotion, and we all turn our heads to see Rose rush inside, her eyes wild as she looks around until her eyes land on Bullet and then her sons. Thea rushes in behind her, looking frazzled and apologetic, but she moves straight to stand next to Sniper, a silent show of support. I half expect Bullet to blast Rose for being down here, but instead, he doesn’t say anything and just watches her as she walks over to look at the bodies lying on the tables that were brought in.
I expect her to cry, but I watch as her face hardens, her eyes full of vicious fury. “Who killed my boys?” she asks quietly, her tone making me shiver. There’s death there, just as deadly as her husband’s. It makes my respect, and a healthy dose of trepidation, grow.
I’m starting to see just how perfectly matched they are. Bullet gives her a quick run-down, which also informs me and Thea as to just what is going on. Knowing that Arson and the other men are gone eases some worry, but not when he explains that those who went with him are as well and will probably be coming back to try and kill us all.
Fuck, this entire situation is a mess.
When Bullet finishes, Rose looks over at Angel and the others. Her gaze is cold, assessing, and I swear I see them allshuffle awkwardly, unlike how they had been with Bullet. The power of this woman knows no bounds. Finally, she states, “I trust my man, and if he trusts you, then I’ll trust you. But hear me now, if I find out that you had anything to do with my boys’ deaths, or anything else that’s going to happen before this is over, I’ll kill you myself. And I’ll make sure that it’s far slower and much more painful than anything the rest of them do to you.”
Angel and the others all nod. “The only thing we want to do is deal with Arson and the others, get rid of them, Vlad, and the bullshit that’s going on. Then, we want to go home and fix our fucking club. I have allies ready to help us, and I’d ask them to come here, but I doubt they’d get here in time.”
“I’ve already called in help,” Bullet states. “They’ll be here shortly if things go to plan.”
“Who did you call in?” Angel questions. Bullet says nothing, narrowing his eyes. Angel sighs. “Right, nothing until we tell you what we know. Alright, here’s what we have. Like I said before, Arson and Silver have been making a lot of moves in the last few months to try and solidify our routes and our operations. They’ve been making deals without club consensus and keeping us five out of the loop.” I note that no one looks surprised by that information. Still, I can’t imagine this club doing that. They work so well together. “We started getting suspicious, and we’ve been keeping tabs,” Angel continues tiredly. “Silver’s the one who’s been trying to get most of the deals worked out and bringing them to Arson once he’s got it mostly ironed out.”
“Just Silver? No one else?” Bullet asks, gaze intense. I can practically see the wheels in his head spinning.
Angel nods. “As far as we can tell. He and Crook have gone once or twice to places that no one could figure out, so the two of them may be the ones working on getting it all sorted, but I think it’s mostly Silver.”
“Silver’s Arson’s right-hand man when it comes to anything club-related,” Trix adds grimly. “The two of them are always riding together, doing shit together. Hell, I think there was talk at one point that Arson wanted Silver to take one of his daughters as an Old Lady because that would make him family. Silver resisted that, saying he doesn’t want to be tied down, but there were rumors that Silver and Arson’s daughter were screwing around for awhile about a month ago. Haven’t seen the girl around much since, so we haven’t been able to find out if it’s true or not.”
“When did they start working with Vlad?” Sniper demands.
“We don’t know the exact time frame, but it was just before you called us in that we five were really getting cut out of meetings and discussions the others were having. Hell, they had Church one night without telling any of us, and the only reason we found out was that we got back from a run earlier than expected.” Angel scoffs darkly. “That was when we knew shit was going down and really started to pay attention more. When we walked in on that meeting, they were finishing up talking about something to do with Russians, and that they had a perfect setup for the club to take over running for them. They weren’t happy with other MCs in the area, and one in particular was causing problems. They shut the entire discussion down quickly after that, and they put away all the papers and maps on the tables as quickly as possible.”
“They had routes all across the lower states mapped out and into Mexico,” Diesel adds. “Different colors and shit too.”
“Different suppliers,” Torque guesses darkly. “You said that they were making deals with the Cartels, Russians, and possibly Italians?”
“That’s what we were able to gather, but the Russians are the big suppliers on their list. The Cartels and Italians mean getting things across the borders, but the Russians, they had the setupalready figured out here, and the products would come from other areas that wouldn’t affect anything with the operations here,” Dozer rumbles out.
“They have everything coming in from West Coast ports,” Thea states. When everyone looks at her, she arches a brow. “Remember that operation I was part of before that resulted in all those arrests? We tracked them to the West Coast and made sure to document all the shipments we intercepted meticulously. The East Coast is mostly controlled by the Italians and other Eastern European crime groups, but the Russians, Japanese, and Chinese all smuggle their things in from the west purely due to proximity and getting things into the country faster.”
I blink at that rush of information. Wow, I really have been living under a rock. I had no idea about any of that.
“All that’s true, but the Russians have networks all across the country from the West Coast set up that the others probably don’t,” King adds grimly. “And where we are, we’re the perfect intersection between the eastern states and the border. Dagger knew that, and that’s why he approached them with the locations that Bull set up. Not only did he make it so that he would fuck us over for what happened with Bull, but it gave them the ability to pay him good money and set up an operation that’s been running under our noses for years and we never had any clue. This is an intricate operation, and one that they’ve perfected since.”
“And they wanted MCs to help them with the final legs of getting it where it needs to go,” Bullet finishes. “Being that Dagger sold those locations out, they knew they couldn’t come to us, so they went around us. They went to the Wild Devils, and they took them up on it, but being so close to us, they had to be careful how they ran their operations so we didn’t get suspicious. It could be that Vlad isn’t happy with how careful or slow they’rebeing, so he saw another opportunity to find another way to get his shit out to the other states faster with another club.”
“A bonus being that they’re a known ally of ours,” Hulk states bitterly. I squeeze his arm comfortingly.
“You think that Vlad reached out to them and not the other way around?” Sniper asks him.
