“We won’t touch him. We won’t have to,” he assured me, pulling me into his arms. “By now, he knows he’s not employed by the Wild Stallions, which means he belongs to the cartel. They wanted him, they can have him. What they’ll do with him remains to be seen. Doubt he’ll be of much use now. He’d be a fool not to sleep with one eye open. Gabriel Alvarez is a wild card.”
I rested my hands against his chest and confessed, “I feel like there’s so much I don’t understand.”
“All you need to know is I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Standing in his arms, in the middle of his living room, I knew he meant it. So long as he was close, I didn’t need to be afraid. But, much as I wanted it to be, his protection wasn’t all I needed.
“Jed?” I murmured, anxiously grabbing a fistful of his shirt.
“Lex?”
“I—I know what I said back there, about the job. About changing my mind. And I know there’s a lot I don’t know about the club, things Roy didn’t want to tell me without an NDA. But…but I need to understand. I need more context.
“Why does the cartel want to know what you’re doing? And why did you need this Scorpion guy out of your way? How is this all connected?”
He didn’t answer me right away. Instead, he studied me for a long moment. So long, I thought maybe he wouldn’t tell me anything. I gripped his shirt tighter, refusing to look away or back down. Finally, he freed a sigh and began to speak.
“When I started with the club, things were different. Anyone with rank had been a Stallion since the beginning. Scorpion was the man at the top. Man named Lasso was his VP. Bull was Sergeant-at-Arms. Almost everyone else you saw at that round table was just a brother, along for the ride.
“Code of the brotherhood and Stallion law were the same as they are now—but we were all younger and dumber. Except for Bull. He’s always been a hardass,” Jed added, a hint of a smirk causing his mustache to twitch. “Officially, we made our money at the garage. Unofficially, the Stallions have always been in the business of protection. Back then, we partnered with Alvarez and his crew. He had drugs he wanted to move across the border, we were the muscle backin’ him up.”
This news was heavy—heavy enough to make my heart sink.
Jed didn’t stop, though, leaving me no time to process as I tried to keep up.
“It was good money. Good enough that the number one rule of the club was no drugs. We didn’t mix business with pleasure. The Stallions know how to party, but we didn’t need addicts makin’ us unreliable. For a good long while, we didn’t have any trouble. Then Scorpion decided he wanted to expand. We opened the auto-parts store, but that wasn’t enough. Not for him. So, he started a stable.
“Thing about Scorpion—he was a leader, but he didn’t know dick about how to treat a woman. He let Johns do what they wanted with the prostitutes. Miserable as some of them were, it wasn’t a surprise when they brought in drugs. But that shit spread like a cancer. The disease went all the way to the top.”
We were standing perfectly still, but the more he said, the shorter my breaths became—like we were sprinting.
Still, he pressed on.
“Things went from bad to worse real quick after that. Scorpion had the club traffickin’ women, and there was more than a few of us who were not down with that fucked up shit. Couple of brothers left on their own. Some refused any work outside of the garage. Things got ugly. It was Bull who stepped up and got us out of that mess.
“Took him about a year to recruit enough of us willing to fight. His takeover was hostile. We had our own civil war. Three brothers died. It wasn’t what any of us wanted, but Scorpion refused to surrender. Only reason he’s not dead is because Bull refused to resort to murder. Best he could do was some trumped-up drug charge to get him behind bars and out of the way.
“That was five years ago. Since then, Bull has done his part to clean up the club. Most of the work we do is legit. No women. No drugs. No cartel. When we broke ties with Alvarez, it was messy—but only because he was mad we were leavin’. Seein’ as we weren’t tryin’ to compete, he had no reason to come at us. Until last summer.
“Scorpion reached out to Hoffman. Hoffman relayed a message to a weak link down in Cheyenne, and suddenly Alvarez got the idea the Stallions were lookin’ to get back into the drug business. You heard Bull earlier. Lost two brothers tryin’ to set the record straight. As far as we knew, a truce had been called. It seems that truce was one-sided bullshit.
“As for the rest—you were there, darlin’.”
I didn’t know what to say.
To label the Stallions’ backstory assortedwas putting it mildly, but I wasn’t so naïve that I could say I was shocked. A little disturbed, maybe, but not shocked.
Given my twin brother was a drug addict, the fact that the Wild Stallions used to be in the business of trafficking illegal substances across the border was a hard pill to swallow. The trafficking ofwomenwas even worse.
Yet, knowing that was in the past and not at all in the present was a truth as significant as the rest of what I learned.
Whoever thisScorpionguy was, he was bad news. Roy, on the other hand, was different. I’d spent enough time with him to know he was trustworthy. Not to mention, the man who held me in his arms wasn’t corrupt. Not even close.
I asked for context, and I got it; but it also opened the door for more questions. Except, I didn’t think I could handle anymore answers. Not at the moment.
“Know better than to think the truth could break you—but I’m gonna need you to say somethin’, Lex.”
“Thank you.” I flattened my palms against his chest, releasing his shirt as I willed myself to relax even as my thoughts swirled. “Thank you for telling me all of that. I, uh, I’m just not sure what to do with it yet.”
