I waved my hands at him and swapped positions with Levi. “All right, all right. Don’t get your knickers in a knot. Men your age are at much higher risk of a heart attack, and I already have enough bodies to deal with tonight. Don’t need to add yours to it.”
“Just bury me now,” Whip said to Levi. “Seriously, like, bury me alive. Dirt in my mouth and nose and suffocate me. It would be less painful than this conversation.”
“And they say I’m the dramatic one.” I swapped spots with Levi. Only because I really didn’t feel like digging more graves without his help.
“Where to?” Levi checked the mirrors and pulled out onto the street.
Whip sighed. “There’s too many of them for us to start from scratch. The group has a dump point in the woods for situations like this. We can leave them there for now and go back and move them when we can.”
Levi’s lips pressed together into a thin line. “Does somebody want to explain how we ended up with a pile of dead bodies in the back of an ice cream van?” He glanced over his shoulder at me.
“Hey! Why do you automatically think it was me who went off the rails?”
He turned back to the road, but I still saw the raised eyebrow in the rearview mirror. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Did I mislabel you as a serial killer?”
I grinned, ignoring his sarcasm. “No. I wear that label with pride. But this wasn’t my fault.”
“Never is, huh, X?”
Actual irritation prickled inside me, and just the edge of my good mood slipped. I didn’t say anything.
Whip filled him in for me. “I was dropping him home after we went to get some food. They jumped him in the alley outside his apartment building. If I hadn’t looked back—”
“If you hadn’t looked back, I would have killed five people tonight instead of three,” I growled. “I left two of them for you because I was feeling generous.”
It wasn’t quite the truth, and Whip and Levi both knew it.
I was good with a knife. And I had zero remorse for taking a life. Especially when that life belonged to people hunting me down.
But any five-to-one fight wasn’t an even match.
And men from the list, ex-crims and violent felons, were generally no strangers to brawls and weapons either.
I’d been lucky Whip had been there to back me up.
But I didn’t have to admit that when they were both being fuck nuggets.
“We’re fairly certain at least two are from the list,” Whip said to Levi. “The rest were probably roped in to help. They all look like gangbangers.”
Levi clenched the steering wheel harder. “That’s two attacks on X in less than twenty-four hours.”
Whip’s jaw clenched. “I’ve been watching the security footage on my place too. A couple of guys came to my house with guns last night while I was at the clubhouse. They walked right up to the fucking porch and knocked on the door like I was going to ask them in for tea.”
“And they were going to respond with bullets instead of offering to bring a sponge cake.” I shook my head. “No manners on thugs these days, is there? You know, back in my day—”
“You’re barely thirty, X. Shut up.” Whip pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Sorry we aren’t all in our eighties, Grandpa,” I muttered back.
Levi turned the van off the main road, onto a dirt track Whip and I were both familiar with, though it had been months since I’d been down here.
“So they’re escalating.” Levi eased off the accelerator a little to account for the uneven road. “That’s just great. We need to warn the others.”
Whip nodded and pulled out his phone, then tossed it onto the dashboard. “Signal is shit out here. We’ll get it back when we get a bit higher up.”
The van jolted over a bump, and one of the bodies shifted, slapping me on the leg with a rapidly cooling dead hand.
I fought back the urge to gag.
