“Yeah,” Slater said, his word holding no conviction.
Jedd shuffled his feet, dropping his head into his hands to cover his face. It was a move so un-Jedd-like, it had Slater and me looking at each briefly before turning back to Jedd.
“Slate. Can you give me a minute alone with Ayda?” Jedd asked, dragging his hands down his face, resting his fingers on the edge of his mouth. His eyes were on Drew as he spoke. “Please.”
“Now?” Slater asked, surprised.
“Now.” Jedd nodded.
Glancing between the two of them with uncertainty, I met Slater’s gaze, accepting the wink of encouragement he shot me before turning and leaving the room after one last look down at Drew.
Jedd was watching me, and I saw the bob of his Adam’s apple under his beard as I slowly lowered myself to perch on the edge of the chair I now considered mine.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked, my voice trembling.
“There are some things I need to tell you. I need to tell Drew, too, but he ain’t waking up any time soon like I hoped he would, and the weight of all this is killing me.” Jedd closed his eyes, taking a moment for himself before he opened them again and directed his attention to me. “When everything was going down in that warehouse, I was wearing a wire for the ATF.”
I blinked at him. Unsure that I’d heard him right.
“What do you mean?”
“When I spent those nights in the cell at Sutton’s station, I made a deal with Winnie, the ATF chick, that, I hoped, would get The Hounds off the hook. They had a lot of shit on us Ayda. Nothing solid, but enough to ask a lot of questions. I had to do something, and Eric and I had…” He paused to sigh and run a hand over his forehead. “We’d talked about things. About how we weren’t willing to let Drew take the fall again. How we could stop the club from burning to ash and half of us spending a lifetime behind bars. We’d talked about strategies and different roads we could take if we needed to. Drew has a reason to be more than just the president now. He has you, and Eric and I wanted to protect that for him. When you and Drew drove off with Owen that day, I decided that it was my turn as VP to step up and become the buffer between the law and Drew. So, I volunteered my time, and I drip fed Winnie selective information to get her on side. I needed her to see we were the good guys, constantly thrown in shit situations. It started out with her being… well… she was a real bitch. Cutting me off every time I answered a question, applying the pressure when she thought she could press on a weakness. I hated her, Ayda. But something happened during my time inthat cell, and I slowly began to break her down. I talked about my brothers, the life, and how we always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I planted seeds about Walsh, Taylor, The Navs, the whole lot, and I let her add things up in her own head. The minute she saw the chance to take down someone as prolific as Mayor Walsh, she got promotion stars in her eyes and became a hell of a lot nicer. She agreed to back off the club if I…” He raised his brows, waiting for me to fill in the gap he’d left open.
“If you wore a wire,” I finished, pushing to my feet and wrapping my arms around myself.
I stepped to the blinds over the windows and stared out between them at the landscape. The sun was shining too brightly for what I was feeling inside. It was so dark and twisted right now. The one thing I loved about these men was their inherent need to protect Drew and the club. I knew it was always born from a good place. Brotherhood. Camaraderie. Loyalty. I couldn’t fault Jedd for that, and if it worked…
“Did she get what she needed?” I asked, holding back the inevitable question that was sitting on the tip of my tongue; one I knew Jedd was waiting for also.
“Eventually,” he muttered roughly. “When Slater told us we had to get to you guys after your SOS, I made the call. I told Winnie we were heading out to get her the proof she would need. Kenny hooked me up with the kit she’d given me—the fool believing me when I told him it was our own kit that I was using to try and entrap the Navs with. Kenny’s loyal and obeys rules. They all do. So when I told each and every one of them before we left that they were only to move when I moved, they listened. That’s why they watched him fight… because of me.” Jedd rubbed his lips together in thought, his brows creasing together. “I had to stand by and watch Drew take punch after punch, unable to go to him and fuck with The Navs because I knew who was listening in. Winnie promised she’d be theresooner. I kept waiting for them to charge through those doors and put an end to the fucking carnage, but one fight turned to two, two to three. I honestly didn’t think it would go as far as it went. And now Drew is like this, and we’re on the brink of losing someone else who held us all together.” His voice cracked on the last word—a big man reduced to sounding like a small, broken boy as his emotion and guilt took over. “And all of it’s because of me.”
“This isn’t your fault, Jedd. She had everything she needed when Trigger put Walsh in that ring with Drew,” I snapped harsher than I intended. It wasn’t aimed at him. At that moment, I almost wished it were that bitch standing in front of me. Days of anger and fear were coming together inside of me like a ball of rage I couldn’t control. “Why the fuck did she wait as long as she did?”
“I’ve not been calm enough to stand in front of her and ask that question yet.” His jaw ticked as he turned his attention back to Drew, his eyes glazing over. “Sutton told me the minute he got there that he was the one to press the button and force them to make the move inside the warehouse. Apparently, he’s doing everything he can to make sure Winnie gets her ass out of Babylon and leaves us alone for good, but… I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s for the best since we had her on our side. I don’t know if we can trust her or not. I don’t know anything other than I should have fought instead of waiting. I should have put myself in front of every man who challenged Drew, and I didn’t. I didn’t do for him what he would have done for any of us.”
“He wouldn’t have let you,” I said, releasing all the breath from my lungs. “He put himself in that position. He wasn’t going to let anyone else go down for him.” Another slow and painful truth started to rise with the statement. “He wouldn’t have put my survival on anyone else's shoulders.”
“I shouldn’t have given him a choice.”
“You honestly think Trigger would have given a shit about that? He was more than happy to give Drew what he wanted. There were no rules, but it was still his game to play. We were the mice—he was the cat. He wanted every one of us dead.”
Jedd covered his eyes with a rough hand. “I keep going over and over in my head when it all got so fucked up, and why it constantly happens to us. We can’t lose any more men, Ayda. Especially not him. The club may as well fold if he…fuck,”he hissed, unable to say it out loud.
“Drew’s not going anywhere,” I replied stubbornly. “He can’t. He has too much to live for.” I studied his face for a moment and glanced back at Drew, stepping toward the bed so I could run my hand down his arm. “He promised he was going to marry my stubborn ass, and Drew never breaks a promise.”