“This man wanted every one of you dead. Every single last one of you. Men, women, girls, boys, innocents, guilty criminals, he didn’t care. If you were associated with The Hounds, you’re damned in his eyes. It was like he wasobsessed. I never quite understood it. He sold his hatred of you to me by saying you were ruining his town, but then I looked into it. I got Chester Cortez and The Emps to look into it, to rile you up and rustle your feathers a bit. I got Sinclair to set up the whole teenage copycat club to lure you in. I got each and every man working for me to go out there and make yousnap!” Trigger spun on his heels, the twist of his body smooth and controlled as he eyes shot to mine. “But I never got them to catch youstartingthe trouble. I never got them to catch you being fools for the sake of being fools. You were fools because your hands were tied. You were forced to be those men. Which only made me dig deeper. And do you know what I found?”
I remained silent, apart from my ragged breaths.
Trigger bent down over Walsh, his lips resting by the mayor’s ear as he looked up at me and spoke. “I found a bitter man, jealous of your MC, who was making men like me deal with his enemies because he was too scared to handle them himself.” He looked down at Walsh. “Isn’t that right, Mayor?”
The mayor simply shook, a big man full of shit staring back at me with wide eyes and fear hanging over his shoulders like a cheap, shitty suit.
“He just doesn’t fucking like you, Drew,” Trigger told me. “He’s asked me to kill you and your family so many times. He’d ask me to kill you now if he thought I would.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because I don’t do shit for anyone unless I want to. Unless it benefits me. I work for no one. Do you understand that? Everything I ever do is becauseIwant to do it. Because I’m in control. I rule this town. I rule all the towns. Texas is mine.”
“And you want me to kill him now?” I asked carefully.
“I want to see how you fight for survival against those closer to you than we are.”
Shifting my feet, I stood with my legs wider apart, my fistsflexing down by my thighs. “Get up,” I told Walsh, not caring for Trigger’s need for his ego stroking, only caring to extinguish one more threat. “Get up!” I said louder, losing patience.
“I… I can’t fight you,” Walsh stuttered. “I can’t…”
“Either get up, or I’ll drag you the fuck up.”
“He sounds serious, Mayor,” Trigger teased, and for a moment, I thought he was on my side—if he had been the kind of man to take sides at all, but then I saw him dip his hand into the inside of his cut and ever so slowly, ever so carefully, pull out a knife, slipping it into the hand of Walsh as he looked up at me. “Consider this an advantage from me to you, Mayor. I think you’ll need it.”
Walsh stared at the weapon, turning it over in his hand before he looked up at me carefully.
“If you think you need it, use it,” I told him.
“Suicide Tucker,” Travis said through a sleazy, bright smile.
I ran a hand under my nose and sniffed, blinking away the trickle of blood that was swimming in my eye. “Cut my father down,” I told him, pointing Eric’s way before I pointed at Walsh and bounced on my toes. “Cut him down, and I’ll fight this fucker: knife or no knife.”
“No!” Walsh snapped, turning back to Travis, the panic in his eyes. “No. You promised me that Eric would die. You told me he would hang.”
Travis seemed to study Walsh, his expression unmoving as he took him in.
“You told me your word was your bond,” Walsh rasped.
Travis’s smirk broke free, and he leaned closer to Walsh. “I lied.”
The wordsI liedfell easily from the mouth of the man who once claimed that lies were punishable by death.
With a click of his fingers, Travis had given the instruction to bring Eric down. The chains rattled around him, and his red,raw, bleeding body swayed as two Navs began to lower and release him. Eric’s knees weren’t about to hold him up, though, and I opened my mouth to shout for someone to catch him when I saw Ayda moving quickly from the corner of my good eye, her agile body slipping past the men in leather until she was by Eric’s side in a flash. Her arms flew around his stomach a second before the chains released him, and his body fell against her. She took the brunt of it, stumbling back only a few steps before she lowered both of them to the platform as carefully as she could.
“You son of a bitch,” Walsh hissed.
“You said you wanted to end Tucker’s life, Mayor,” Travis whispered. “You begged me to let you be the one to sink a knife into his chest if my memory serves me correctly. You just never made it clear which Tucker you were referring to.”
“You know I meant Eric,” Walsh ground out. “You’ve set me up. You lying, crooked bastard.”
“Careful. I can always take that knife away from you and let young Tucker kill you with his bare hands. There’s hunger in those bust up eyes of his, and he looks ready to hunt.”
Walsh turned back at me. His weak, shot-up arm limp as he pushed himself off the ground and began to stand on shaky feet. He looked all around him, at every man and woman within in his sight, the fear of what was about to happen taking over.
There were no tricks he could pull here.
No deals to negotiate.