Drew opened the box to reveal a mountain of opened letters stacked on top of one another. Some on white paper, some on blue, each one clearly having been read a hundred times already. A yellow post-it note was stuck to the lid. Drew pulled it out and scowled at the words that were scribbled on there. “Upset equals set up,” he read aloud. “Bugs equals rat. What is this?” Drew scowled, handing it to me.
I studied the short list. It was like reading convoluted directions. Words meant certain things, and patterns indicated others. “This is how he got messages to them. He was giving them his secrets as insurance.”
“Because the letters are read before they leave Huntsville. He had to talk in code,” Drew breathed out as things slottedinto place for him. “He knew Taylor would read his shit.”
“There have to be hundreds of letters here.” I looked into the box at the stack and back up at the one Drew had picked up. Inside the box, there was a legal pad with a pen that the family had obviously used to decipher whatever secrets Clint had given them. “Jesus, Drew. How deep does this shit go?”
“I don’t know. All we know is that what Helen Taylor told us about Jon, The Navs, and the Mayor was only thetipof the iceberg.” He stared at me, his face ashen. “And I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that I’m in the center of all this, Ayda. They were coming for me. Harry, Clint, and everyone else were collateral damage. I know I don’t know that for sure, but there’s too much shit surrounding the club and me. Everyone seems to know about itbutme.”
I hated the thought of another sizable target being on his back; on our backs, but Drew wasn’t alone in this anymore. The problem was we didn’t know why these ghosts were coming after him. What reason was there to make him the center of this insanity? What did he have that all these people wanted? It couldn’t have been money. Most of his cash was tied up in the club. He had power, but that wasn’t something you could take from him. It was natural.
I leaned over and picked up a random letter from the stack in the box, unfolding it carefully. The paper was thin and cheap—the note scrawled untidily in pencil. Some passages sounded like rambles, the handwriting untidy, anddifferent to the rest of the letter in small, unobvious ways.
Holding the page out to Drew, I flattened it gently between us as I slipped the post-it from his fingers. I studied the thing for almost ten minutes before I managed to get something out of it, and even then, it only made half senseuntil I mixed it with some of the real facts in the letter.
“This can’t be right,” I said quietly. “Clint is saying they used the prison laundry to wash cash?”
Drew stared down at the letter. “It’s Huntsville, Ayda. You could tell me they were boiling babies in there, and I wouldn’t be surprised.”
I bent over to grab another letter and scanned it, handing it to Drew before diving in for another. The ones I plucked out had some new information in along with some of the particulars Helen had fed to us. The fact that Clint seemed to have a more detailed account meant that either Helen was holding back or Clint heard more while inside than he was ever meant to.
“Drew, this is insane.”
He was too lost in scanning letter after letter, searching for something neither one of us knew we were searching for. That intuition of his had taken over, and I knew he wasn’t going to stop until he found whatever it was he was looking for.
“Jon Taylor,” he said, placing down a letter. “Mayor of Babylon. Mayor of Dawson, Mayor of Purdon, Mayor of Silver City, Mayor of Navarro Mills. No surprise there, but fuck.” He placed down a letter after he spoke each name, his movements getting quicker as he scanned line after line of Clint’s ramblings. “Name after name of people Clint had seen in Huntsville, cozying up to Taylor and his men. I get there’s corruption in power, but what I don’t get is what I have to do with—”
All at once his face froze and his words caught in his throat.
Everything else fell away from him, except the one letter he was now clinging to with both hands, his fingers shakingaround the edges and his face turning ghostly white as his eyes darted from left to right over and over again.
I leaned in closer, reading over his arm, scanning, scanning… my eyes flicking between the words and the cipher. Then I caught the first line of it, my eyes reading over and over and over again. The coffee and donut I’d eaten while searching the letters turned to acid in my stomach.
I don’t think I breathed for a full minute. Even out in the open, I couldn’t find enough oxygen to take a breath.
Drew turned to look at me, disbelief taking over, his lips parting and his eyes searching mine wildly, silently begging me to tell him he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing.
But it was there, and there was nothing I could say to make it untrue.
“Drew—”
“The Hounds,” he croaked. “My club. We have a fuckingrat.”
Chapter Thirty
DREW
“I’m on my way back to Babylon,” I told Eric on the phone, my voice as cold as my blood. “Be there.”
“You got it. Everything okay?”
“I’ll be back as quick as I can.”
I ended the call abruptly, using Ayda as my anchor. As long as I looked at her, I could stay in control—remain grounded. Couldn’t I? Fuck, I hoped so.
My club had a rat. That’s what Clint’s letter had implied. Harry had known. He’d known there was an infestation among the Hounds, and I had a feeling that’s why my father had returned when he had.
Ayda told Elise, Paul, and the others that the letters had been useful, but we had to leave. I was too far gone to be polite, so I remained silent, my jaw ticking and my eyes burning with a need to get inside my own club, weed out the traitor, draw their last breath from their body, and hang them in the yard for everyone to see.