By the mercy of fucking god, I kept it down. Kept still. And the man poking me with his foot moved on.
Now they knew I was alive, I let myself breathe shallow, rattly breaths that were deathly enough to leave me dizzy, and I listened hard, trying to place myself.
Last I remembered, I’d been in the chapel, but I wasn’t there now. This place smelled of doughnuts and coffee, and the floor I lay on was tiled, not wood.
The café. An enterprise I’d set up for the club’s old ladies to run and frequent, but rarely visited myself.
It made no sense that anyone had brought me here, except for the fact that it was the last place even Saint would think to look for me.
Saint. Concern flared in my heart. I’d last seen him in the yard. He’d been staring straight at me, but I’d turned away from him to—to what? Fuck, I couldn’t remember. My brain was thick and sludgy and too distracted by being trussed up on the café floor as it dawned on me that my hands were tied.
Years ago, Saint had taught me how to unpick knots with one thumb. It was after he’d walked in on me with a woman who’d bound my hands to the bedframe with her fishnet stocking. A dirty joke that had made me laugh all night long but disturbed Saint more than he could ever explain.
So he hadn’t. He’d turned boy scout on me instead, earnest and sweet, the teacher with the rough growl and savage smile. Had he imagined this moment? Any other brother, I’d know, but not Saint. As hard as I loved him, he was still a mystery to me.
I began to drift. Pain and blood loss were a wicked combination, and the jackhammer in my head was relentless enough for me to crave the blissful escape of sleep. Only fear for my brothers kept me conscious and listening.
My steady heartbeat reassured me I wasn’t dying any time soon. I pondered the source of the injury to my torso. Buried deep in my mind, I knew the answer, but I couldn’t reach it, and after a while, I stopped trying.
I couldn’t say how much time had passed when a voice I recognised broke through the fog, slurred and angry.
Cracker.My broken body tensed. Somehow I knew he hadn’t come to my aid.
“Why isn’t he dead yet?”
Bastard.
The eastern European voice answered him, bored and flat. “I told your man already. He is bleeding out. The fire will finish the job. Are you ready to set it? I want my money.”
“You get your money when that cunt doesn’t have a pulse.”
Nice. I didn’t even have it in me to be angry. I’d known for months that Cracker was against me enough to want me dead and I’d done nothing about it, too caught up in the club business that had led us to this point. If I died today, it was as much my fault as his.
“Also, I’m docking your payment for the fuck up with the chaplain. I wanted Malone dead, not Embry. He’d have been useful to me.”
Fuck. Embry. No.Grief was a blade that only grew sharper. My heart broke, and it was all I could do to stay prone on the ground, biding my time as my thumb worked to untie the knots at my wrists, my only comfort in the implication that Saint was alive.
The man Cracker had bought my death from moved fast, doing something to Cracker that made him gurgle and gasp. “You do not get to make that decision. The biker got in my way. I killed him. It is how it works and is why so many pay me to kill this one, no? He is in the way?”
“Who else paid you?”
“It does not matter. The job will be done.”
“What about the rest of them?”
“They are quiet for now, like we agreed. You have time to do what you need to do before you make your escape.”
“Malone is still breathing. He’ll know this was me and he won’t stop until I’m dead.”
“That is your problem. Perhaps you should’ve been more specific when you ordered the hit on your president.”
“I should’ve killed him myself.”
“You should. Now you have a bullet in a man who is not yet dead and I have run out of patience to assist you with that. I will take my payment now.”
“No,” Cracker spat. “You fucked up, and not just for me, for whoever else you took money from. He’s still alive—”
He cut off with a strangled splutter I’d heard from him before, the one that had oozed from him when his face turned purple beneath the force of my forearm against his throat.