Chapter Three
Irons in the Fire
Romeo
I flicked the truck’s lights twice at the guard at the gate, before rolling down my window to look at the man coming out of the small kiosk. “Jesus, Tomahawk, you look like the friggin’ Michelin Man,” I yelled above the howling wind. “What’d the hell you do to get guard duty on a night like this? I thought it was supposed to be Brake’s turn.”
Tomahawk, beefy even in a tank top and shorts, looked ridiculous in a parka, snowpants, scarf and knit cap, complete with a fuzzy ball on top. “This is bullshit, man. I’m getting fuckin’ frostbite out here.”
Automatically I looked at his gloved hands and saw only Shiloh’s pink fingers, all but useless as she tried to make them move. I’d never forget the moment I caught sight of them, so raw and obviously damaged, that for a second I’d actually stopped breathing. Then the irrational rage flooded in, eating away at my brain until all I wanted was to smash my fist into the face of the idiot who’d tackled her into the snow. One way or another, he’d suffer some kind of consequence for touching Shiloh. I’d make sure of it.
“This isn’t fucking fair, man. I got slammed by the boss for absolutely nothin’.”
That spectacular bit of whining brought my focus away from Shiloh and back to Tomahawk. “Nothing? I know how the boss runs things around here better than anyone, including handing out shit jobs like this one. You didn’t do nothing, Tom.”
“So maybe I grabbed the ass of that new bitch Zee brought in.”
Oh, shit.
“That’s no big deal, right? She wasn’t wearing his patch. She’s not claimed. Bitches that aren’t claimed aren’t supposed to come between brothers. That’s the rule. And if you bring an unclaimed bitch into the clubhouse, they’re candy, and that means they’re for sharing.”
Oh, shit times a million. “That’s not a blanket rule at this new chapter, Tom. We’re the Gravediggers. Not the Chicago Gravediggers, so that means we don’t act like fucking animals.”
“But,” Tomahawk went on, because ignoring my dash of reality didn’t fit with his narrative, “someone didn’t tell that bitch anything about that rule. She went wild on my ass just ‘cause I touched her. Then Zee went wild too, so I defended myself by pushing them both the fuck away from me before I wound up with a shiv in my gut.”
I went still. “You laid hands on a bitch? In the club? Where everyone could see you?”
“Look what she did to me.” Instead of answering, Tomahawk pulled his scarf away to display a brilliant set of red claw marks. “She drew first blood, man. First blood. All bets are off when first blood is drawn. You like rules? That’s a rule right there.”
“When it’s a combatant,” I gritted through my teeth, thoroughly pissed off. This loose-with-the-rules shit was how organizations self-destructed, and as Chief of Security I wasn’t about to put up with it. “No matter what they do, bitches are not combatants, so the First Blood rule doesn’t apply.”
“So you’re taking Tyr’s side on this bullshit?”
Jesus. “Where is Tyr? Clubhouse?”
“No, Ride Or Die. Listen, I didn’t do anything wrong—”
“Yeah, you did, and yeah, you earned a spot out here in a fucking blizzard. Now do your job and open the gate, and maybe read up on the bylaws while you’re out here before you get your ass tossed back to Hades. Or worse.” With that, I rolled up my window and waited for Tomahawk to move his lard ass into the kiosk and hit the button. As soon as the fence rolled open enough for me to get through, I gunned the engine only to feel the tires slip a bit.
Fuuuuck.
I scowled as I headed for the huge commercial metal building that housed Ride Or Die Choppers, where the most badass custom-made bikes on the planet were made. I needed to calm my shit down, but careless behavior like Tomahawk’s was a big deal in our world. Our chapter of the Gravediggers—a separate entity from the mother club in the area, the Chicago Gravediggers—was in its infancy. Tyr, our president and undisputed leader, had broken away from the Chicago Gravediggers headed by his uncle Hades, five years ago. Even though everyone in the life officially called us the “new chapter” of the Chicago Gravediggers, it hadn’t been an easy break-up, and we weren’t exactly the most welcome new kid on the block. Just about every force on earth wanted to crush us out of existence, from neighborhood activists that didn’t want us in their area, to LEOs that buzzed around the compound like bees around a honeypot, to the biggest threat of all, Hades and his crew. They constantly reminded us that we should set up shop somewhere else, preferably in fucking Siberia.
That was a helluva lot of pressure, so the one thing we couldn’t tolerate was insubordination within our ranks. If our president didn’t clamp down on every rulebreaker, it’d be a matter of the inmates running the asylum before you could blink.
Tomahawk knew this. Goddamn it, we all did. But apparently Tom just couldn’t keep his grubby mitts to himself.
There were several buildings within the chain link-fenced compound. Aside from Ride Or Die Choppers, we’d bought up the surrounding buildings that all shared a massive parking lot that included a straggly island of trees and overgrown brush in its center. Several decades back, the area had been a thriving shopping area just off of Route 66, and a precursor to the outlet malls that would pop up decades later. The Clubhouse had once been a bank built in the ‘70s, with thick cinderblock walls, excellent surveillance, and a basement of vaults that I seriously loved, because that was our version of a SCIF—a sensitive compartmented information facility. Basically no one could hear shit when we went behind those closed doors, and that was just the way I liked it.
There was also a low-slung, two-story motor court that had taken advantage of Route 66’s fame by being called Get Your Kicks Motor Court. However, by the turn of the new century, the neighborhood had gone to seed, and the locals referred to the dilapidated motel as Turn Your Tricks. That was how Tyr had come across the place years before he’d broken away from his uncle. Hades had been running a ragtag stable of hookers out of that motor court and Tyr had more or less been Hades’s pimp. It had been a position that was meant to show Tyr just how low he was on the totem pole, while Hades’s son Marvel got to make all the prime runs and have his pick of jobs. But Tyr pulled a fast one on them all by quietly buying up the properties, kicking Hades’s working girls out and turning the motor court into the Barracks, a no-nonsense source of temporary housing that could shelter up to two hundred brothers in times of either celebration or war. It had its own kitchens, a state-of-the-art computer room, a laundry room, and even a small gym.
In short, the perfect place to weather a long siege.
Across the large parking lot and next door to Ride Or Die Choppers was the covered garage, large enough to accommodate most of the vehicles belonging to the club’s hierarchy. Then there was the machine shop in the back, where the insanely talented gearheads and grease monkeys hung out so they could work their magic in relative peace. Last but not least was the squat cinderblock structure that appeared half-buried in the snow. That building was where Tyr lived with a complex dog run out back. Knowing how Tyr adored his two scary-looking, long-haired German shepherds more than most people, they were no doubt inside and sprawled all over Tyr’s bed or couches.
My destination was Ride Or Die Choppers, Tyr’s personal project. Unsurprisingly, the parking area in front of the huge metal structure was almost empty this time of night. I parked as close as I could to the front, then made a dash for the door, grimly pleased I could run into the warmth while that asshole Tomahawk had to be freezing his balls off. Maybe a dose of consequences would teach that dipshit to think before he acted. Fucker had the audacity to claim frostbite, when not five miles away a woman who actually did have frostbite didn’t so much as whimper about it.
Who knew strength like that could be so insanely sexy? I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Or her.
“Romeo.” Tyr Colgrave, the president of our chapter of the Gravediggers, stuck his head out of his office, the overhead fluorescent lights hitting his dark blonde head. “Saw you come up on the CCTV. I’ve got Ash back here. Let’s talk.”
Shit.
Did Ash actually run back home to Daddy to tattle on me? Seriously?
Fuck my life.
With nothing left to do but get it over with, I walked past the gleaming, clean lines of the showroom. Several of the custom-made bikes Ride Or Die Choppers was famous for sat on raised platforms, spotlighted like the works of art they were. Ride Or Die was the flagship of Tyr’s vision for where he wanted to take his fledgling club, so all anyone had to do to understand our club was look around. The showroom was professional, straddling the two realms of the biker and civilian worlds by putting the Gravedigger name on a commercially available product. If the Hell’s Angels could make that leap into the mainstream without losing their 1%er edge, then so could we.
But despite the sleek professional look of the showroom, only an idiot would believe it made Tyr—and those of us who’d left our old MC to start this new Gravediggers chapter—civilian-world soft. From the time he was born, Tyr was all about the Gravediggers and the biker life. He didn’t know anything else, didn’t care about anything else, didn’t pretend to be anything else.
That suited me right down to the ground.
“So.” I stopped just inside the doorway and glared at Ash. He was a big motherfucker, I’d give him that, built like a bear, with more than a little crazy going on in his dark eyes. If I’d seen him in the puffy parka and ski mask that was now discarded next to where he sprawled on a low-slung sofa, I’d probably freak out, too. “How’re you doin’, Ash? Want me to call your ol’ lady Mabel so she can hold your hand? Maybe make you some chicken soup?”
“Shut up, asshole. That bitch broke my nose.” Looking woebegone with a spectacular pair of black eyes, Ashtray had an ice pack bundled up in a bloody kitchen towel in one beefy hand. “That wasn’t part of the plan.”
Plan? “Holy shit, you mean that tiny little waitress didn’t follow the script? Why, that’s just rude of her. Maybe you should write your congressman to complain.”
“Fuck you,” Ash bellowed, then groaned and gingerly put the icepack in place over his nose. “Goddamn bitch got me good. You didn’t tell me she was an MMA fighter, asshole.”
“I didn’t tell you that because she’s not, dude. She’s just a waitress with sharp elbows. It’s not my fault you didn’t think to keep your face out of their way when you lost your mind and tackled her.”
“But it is your fault that you called Ashtray to help you out on something that was supposed to be a one-man job.” Tyr sat behind his cluttered desk, looking like he seriously didn’t have time for this. “You’ve been working the waitress angle for a month now, Romeo. You should’ve landed that fish by now.”
“Yeah, why’d you need me tonight?” Ashtray seconded, sounding so damn victimized I considered seeing how much more breakage his nose could take. “You’re the club’s official lady killer. Shit, your road name’s fuckin’ Romeo. But, hey, come to find out you’re not all that, are you? That sharp-elbowed bitch wants nothing to do with you, so obviously you’ve lost your touch. Maybe Tyr needs to send in a real man like me to take care of her.”
“You stay the hell away from her.” The words were out before I could stop them.
Tyr’s eyes narrowed. “You got a problem, Romeo? This bitch getting under your skin?”
“The only problem I have is this bull in a china shop threatening to bust up everything I’ve got going just when I’ve finally made some progress with the waitress.” In more ways than one, and I wasn’t about to let that progress vanish now.
“What progress?” Tyr demanded, scowling. “I’ve got two runs in the past month alone that got hijacked, leaving one brother breathing through a tube and two others so fucked up they’ll be riding the bench for the next few weeks. I’m on a time-clock here, which means you’re on a time-clock too. Just move in for the kill and get me what I need.”
“She’s gun-shy as hell, Tyr, like she thinks the world’s full of predators and she’s the only prey. That’s why I called Ashtray in tonight,” I added, glancing at the idiot sprawled on the couch. “Winning the trust of this particular mark wasn’t working the old-fashioned way. I had to get creative.”
“And what’d that get us?”
“It got me a broken nose,” Ash offered helpfully.
“She let me drive her home.” Jesus, that sounded lame, but when it came to cracking a hard case like Shiloh, that was practically on the level of copping a feel and not getting slapped for it. “I finally got that particular door open, so now we’ll see if I can work that stepping-stone to… the actual target.”
Predictably, Ash’s shaggy head snapped up. “What target?”
“She did mention he lived a life that was beyond her reach, whatever the hell that means,” I went on, ignoring Ash. “Doesn’t sound like they’re close, but I’m still convinced this angle’s going to bear some kind of fruit we can use.” And after that, I’d be free to do with Shiloh McKeen whatever the hell I imagined.
And I’d imagined so, so much as I’d watched her every move over this past month.
“We know the waitress’s relative didn’t come into the life the normal way.” Tyr was frowning, looking into the middle distance while rocking back in his chair. At the mere mention of Shiloh, it took all my concentration to focus on Tyr, and not on how Shiloh’s long, toffee-colored hair would look wrapped around my hands, pulling on it like reins while I plowed her from behind… “My uncle Hades wanted that boy in the club bad, and he pulled a lot of shit to get that guy to wear our former club’s patch. The kid’s never been happy, though, so if we can get close enough to offer him an off-ramp without Hades seeing it coming…” Tyr cut off abruptly before sending us a hard glare. “If you’re done pissing and moaning about a busted-up nose, Ashtray, get yourself home and into bed. And do yourself a favor—keep this whole waitress beatdown to yourself, yeah? Make up some shit about being in one of your legendary brawls if you have to, I don’t care. The one thing I don’t want you to do is admit some skinny waitress from nowhere fucked you up. You wouldn’t survive a day if anyone knew the truth, and I sure as hell don’t want it getting out that my guys’re so weak, some baby chick’s elbow did one of them in.”
“He deserves that broken nose,” I offered once Ashtray had grunted his agreement and shuffled out the door with his proverbial tail between his legs. I moved to swing the door shut to make sure we had total privacy. “I told him to scare the shit out of her but otherwise keep his hands to himself, but did he listen? Hell, no. He fucking full-on tackled that poor woman when she rabbited.”
“That’s because Ash doesn’t think things through. You do, or so I thought. Then tonight happened, and here we are.” With a short sigh Tyr pushed to his feet, and suddenly the room seemed to shrink. It wasn’t just the mere size of the president of the Gravediggers that did it; the badass, over-the-top menace that was Tyr Colgrave was enough to suck the air right out of the room. Lucky for me I was just as much of a badass, so I didn’t mind a bit when he came around the desk, crossed his arms and scowled at me. “You know who you are, right?”
This didn’t sound good. “I do.”
“You’re one quarter of the Original Four,” Tyr went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “You, me, Slash, and Ajax. So many others from Hades’s crew have joined us over the past five years, but the four of us were the first to go. The first to start this new chapter. We did it because we went through hell in Uncle H’s club, and we barely came out of it alive. We made our own way, because our vision of what the Gravediggers MC should be was nothing like the freakshow Hades had turned our mother club into.”
“I know, Tyr. Striking out on our own was the best decision we ever made.”
“It was the only decision, because good ol’ Uncle H was letting all of us die off in his senseless wars. He made it obvious from the start he didn’t give a damn about any of us.”
“I remember.”
“Do you remember that when we first hatched this plan with the waitress, I specifically told you we needed to keep it on the downlow?”
Here it comes. “I do.”
“Yet you brought Ashtray in on this mission.”
“Yeah, I did. It was necessary.” I kept my gaze level, because no matter how pissed off Tyr might be, I knew in my bones bringing Ash in had been the right call. Shiloh was open to me now. I had a chance with her. On several levels, that was the only thing that mattered. “I told him nothing, Tyr, other than the fact that this was club business that needed to get done. He doesn’t know the name Shiloh. He doesn’t know that her brother is Chef McKeen, or that we’re trying to go through her to get to Chef. And for what it’s worth, I doubt Ash even had Hades on his radar until you said his name just now.”
“Is that a dig?” For a moment a terrible rage lit in Tyr’s eyes. “Answer, asshole. Was that a dig at me and the way I’m running this op?”
“Jesus-fucking-Christ, Tyr, if I ever decide to take a dig at you, you won’t have to ask. You need to remember two things—one, I love tangling assholes with anyone who steps out of line, and I’m not doing that with you. And two, I’m on your goddamn side.”
“I’m the only one on my side, trying to keep this club from going belly-up. That’s about as far as my trust goes.” Then he looked away with an angry huff before turning to perch on the edge of the desk, signaling that the threat had passed. “Which fucking sucks, because you became my brother from that first time we raced and you somehow cheated and beat me—”
“I totally beat your ass fair and square, slowpoke.”
“The point is, Romeo, I should be able to trust my own damn brothers, especially one of the Original Four.”
I allowed myself to relax a fraction. “Yeah, you should.”
“And if that was a dig, I fucking deserved it. I’m just used to talking about club business in front of all my brothers without worry or fear that it might reach my uncle’s ears. I hate that I’ve got to keep so much of this shit locked down now, even from the people I’m supposed to trust the most.”
“The info you received… about how there’s a spy in our midst,” I said, scowling as the words left a bitter taste in my mouth. “Are you sure it’s solid? I mean, this club is tight, Tyr. I’d swear on a stack of bibles that every last one of our brothers would die before betraying this club. This family. Maybe your source misled you—”
“It was my brother Loki,” Tyr said grimly, and it was enough to send a chill through me. “Remember the raid we did on those idiots who took Loki’s woman a couple months back?”
Like I could forget busting up a warehouse full of small-time wiseguys. “Yeah.”
“While she was there, her captors made it clear they were working with Hades. They knew all about her, her family, how deep she and Loki were. Everything.”
“Fuck.” I clenched my teeth as I absorbed the enormity of that gut punch. “Jesus… fuck.”
“I see you’re getting the picture, my brother, but let me spell out to you exactly what’s going through my mind. No one knew Loki and Alice had hooked up, or that we had scooped up Alice’s foster brother for safekeeping. No one knew, except for our brothers in this club. Yet somehow Hades knew all about it, so he tried to thin out our numbers by pitting our chapter against those dime-store hoods who took Loki’s woman. But the war Hades wanted to ignite didn’t happen. Instead of crippling us, we walked away stronger than ever because taking out a mob boss gives you the kind of street cred that rings out across the whole damn region. We’ve got more prospects coming in than we can handle, showing up with ambitions of wearing our patch. Not the Chicago Gravediggers patch. Ours.”
“So that’s why you’ve been turning away so many of our recent prospects and hang-arounds.” I shook my head, because all this made a hell of a lot more sense than it did an hour ago. “With Hades trying to get through our defenses, I can see why you’ve been so selective with our new recruits.”
Tyr nodded, his mouth a flat line. “I’m positive my uncle’s been sending plants our way, which means we have to be careful in our vetting. That’s why I’ve been insisting on having the final say on who’s in, and who’s out.”
I nodded, taking my time digesting this new twist. “I should’ve been told about this.”
Tyr’s eyes narrowed on me.
“I might be your VP, Tyr, but I’m also this club’s Chief of Security. I need to know about this shit so I can deal with it.”
“I can’t afford to trust anybody, Romeo,” Tyr said, his expression grimmer than I’d ever seen it. “Loki’s woman getting kidnapped was just the tip of the iceberg. Our long hauls are getting ambushed, our product’s getting stolen, and our guys are being put in the hospital. We’ve got a goddamn dirty traitor in our ranks, and I won’t stop until I find that cocksucker so I can feed him headfirst into my woodchipper. But I am trusting you now,” he added, pushing off the desk to hold up a hand for me to grab in a hard clasp. “I’m trusting you to follow through on this mission. I need to get my hands on Chef McKeen, the one guy who we know has no loyalty to Hades or his crew, because he wants out.”
“You think that if we can get our hands on Shiloh’s brother, he’ll be able to help us identify the traitor in our midst?”
“That’s the hope.”
“They know Chef’s a problem,” I said after a moment. “Twice now I’ve spotted some of Hades’s crew buzzing around Shiloh. The first week you set me on her path, my crew watched as she was followed by one of Hades’s men to a grocery store in her neighborhood. And just ten days ago Ghoul walked right into the diner where she works and made her wait on him. She didn’t know who he was, so no drama came of it.”
Tyr’s eyes darkened. “Coincidence?”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“That makes two of us. I’ve got more irons in the fire to see if my uncle’s got any weaknesses in his organization, but number-one on my priority list is finding the traitor. That means you need to focus on one thing, and that’s seeing whether or not we can get to Chef McKeen through his sister. You read me?”
“Loud and clear,” I said, nodding.
Focusing on Shiloh and her amazing green eyes wasn’t any problem at all.