Chapter 21
Vienna
Now
The woods were quieter at night than most people realised.
During the day, the place looked ordinary enough—a stretch of overgrown land skirting the edge of Rider territory, broken up by bramble patches, winding trails, and enough trees to make it easy for a man to disappear if he knew where he was going.
But at night, every sound seemed to carry further.
The crunch of leaves beneath our boots. The low clink of metal as Hacksaw set his toolkit down beside a tree.
The distant rumble of bikes somewhere far off, too muffled to make out clearly, but there all the same, like the land itself never truly slept.
I adjusted the strap of the bag over my shoulder and looked down the line of trees, measuring distances automatically, noting gaps in the undergrowth and the places where a man on foot might move without being seen.
It was all instinct at this point. Years of living this life had trained my body to spot danger before my mind had even caught up.
But tonight, more than usual, every route, every shadow, every hidden track felt loaded with meaning.
Hacksaw crouched at the base of a thick oak tree and began unpacking one of the trail cameras, his movements efficient and methodical, as though he’d done this a hundred times before.
Maybe he had.
He was one of those men who always seemed to know how things worked, how systems fit together, how to build structures where other people only saw chaos.
It was why he made such a good secretary and why I trusted him more than most, even when there had been a time—not all that long ago really—where I hadn’t been sure whether he wanted to punch me in the throat every time I walked into a room.
“This one should catch the main trail,” he said, glancing up at me briefly before returning his attention to the tree. “If the Riders are moving product through here, they’ll either cut across this route or swing wider to the left, where the brush is thinner. Either way, we’ll see something.”
I grunted in agreement and set the second bag down, unzipping it to check the rest of the equipment. We had three trail cams, two smaller motion sensors, and a directional audio recorder that Hacksaw had somehow got his hands on through channels I wasn’t especially interested in questioning.
The less I knew about where he sourced half our gear, the better. I understood enough to know the thing would be useful if set near the right route, and that was all that mattered.
The chapter of my life where I cared about rules and nice, clean methods had been and gone.
“You’re quiet,” Hacksaw observed after a moment, tightening the strap around the tree trunk. “That usually means one of two things. Either you’re thinking too much, or you’re planning something stupid.”
“I’m hungover and in a forest with you,” I replied, crouching beside the bag and checking the batteries. “Call it personal growth.”
He snorted. “That’d be a first.”
The corner of my mouth twitched despite myself, and for a moment the tension in my shoulders eased.
That was the thing with blokes like Hacksaw.
You could go months without discussing anything real, survive enough shit together to write your own gospel, and still somehow know where you stood by the tone of one stupid, throwaway remark. Or at least, most of the time.
I handed him a second battery pack, and he took it without looking up.
“Dante want coverage on all main approaches?” I asked, partly because it mattered, partly because work was easier than letting my head drift where it had been trying to drift all day.
“Main approaches, side routes, anywhere the little bastards might try to get clever,” he replied.
“If that shipment is really coming in at the end of the month, we need to know where it’s entering, where it’s being split, and what roads they’re planning on using to move it.
There’s too much money in it for them to be sloppy. ”
“They’re always sloppy.”
“Aye,” he said, standing and dusting off his hands before reaching for the next camera. “But lately they’re sloppy with confidence. That’s the dangerous kind.”
He wasn’t wrong.
There was a difference between men making mistakes and men deciding the consequences no longer applied to them.
Nico’s lot had started carrying themselves like they owned more than their side of the line, and every week the boundary between posturing and open provocation felt thinner.
The rally had been one thing. The girls disappearing had been another.
The chatter about product movements, missing women, and routes being tested all painted the same picture.
The Riders weren’t just shifting more drugs.
They were expanding their reach and counting on the rest of us to be too distracted, too cautious, or too fucking tired to stop them.
Dante had no intention of proving them right.
Neither did I.
Officially, that was why I was here.
Unofficially… well.
My gaze flicked through the trees toward the dark stretch of land where the Riders’ territory began in earnest, and my jaw tightened before I could stop it.
Somewhere beyond the woods and roads and patches of broken fencing sat that house, that room, that locked balcony door, and no matter how hard I tried to keep my head on the job, the image kept sliding back in.
Her standing there in the half-light, pale and tense, tears in her eyes and fear written all over her face so plainly that I still didn’t know how I had ever convinced myself I was looking at rejection.
I had pounded my fist against that glass like a fucking idiot.
And she had still been more worried about me than herself.
“Don’t put the second one too high,” I said, hearing my own voice come out rougher than intended. “If they come through on foot, we need faces. Not just movement.”
Hacksaw glanced over his shoulder at me, one eyebrow raised. “Funny,” he said. “Dante said exactly the same thing when he went over the placements.”
“Then clearly it’s a brilliant idea.”
“Or you’re both getting twitchy in your old age.”
“I’m thirty-seven, you cheeky bastard.”
“You act fifty when you’re nursing a hangover.”
“Get the camera up.”
He smirked faintly and turned back to the tree, but I caught the look all the same. Not suspicion. Not quite. Just observation.
Hacksaw, like Dante, had always been one of those annoying fuckers who noticed more than he let on. The difference was that Dante tended to wear his concern in silence and scowls, while Hacksaw preferred to bury his beneath sarcasm.
For a while, that had suited me just fine.
Especially after the Rachel mess.
What a fucking shit show that had been. And it was something that had been lingering between me and Hacksaw ever since that night. Ever since those damned pub cameras had caught way more than they were supposed to.
One stupid, weak kiss between me and Rachel. It hadn’t meant anything. She didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t want her to be mine, either.
It was something we had both tried to avoid facing, until Hacksaw had done exactly what a Devils brother was supposed to do, and forced us to drag the truth into the light.
At the time, I’d been too wrapped up in everything that followed—the fallout, the war, the fight with Dante, the bullet that tore through me and the punctured lung that damn near took me out—to spend much time picking apart whether Hacksaw and I were good.
Life had simply moved on in the ugly, relentless way it always did.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” he said suddenly.
“Sure.”
“Did you go through with the tattoo?”
“What tattoo?”
“Hair buddies must not grab ass,” Hacksaw said dryly, as though he had plucked the thought straight from my head.
A burst of laughter came from deep inside me. “Damn straight I did. Dante watched the entire thing. And he chose an absolute butcher of a tattoo artist. He almost tore my ass to shreds. Do you want to see it?”
“The fuck I do!” Hacksaw snapped as I jumped to my feet and began pulling my trousers down.
That had been my punishment for kissing Rachel. To have a tattoo on my ass, “hair buddies must not grab ass.”
All things considered, I’d got off lightly.
“Your loss,” I replied. “My ass is a spectacular thing to behold.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Does Chris have a better ass than me?”
“I—What?”
“I’ve always wondered if he had a nice ass. And since you’ve seen it…”
“What on earth is wrong with you?” he snapped at me.
“So many things, brother. But don’t be shy. I’ve no problem saying you have a spectacular ass. But out of the two brothers, I think Trent has the nicer ass over Chris.”
“This conversation is done now.”
“I should think not.”
“I should think so!” And then he turned away from me, busying himself with the fiddly wires.
“You still pissed at me?” I asked after a while, because the question had been there too long now.
He paused then, only for a second, but it was enough for me to know he understood exactly what I meant.
“For kissing Rachel?” he asked without turning around. “Or for nearly dying before I’d decided whether to knock your teeth out for it?”
“You pick.”
Hacksaw straightened slowly and turned to face me, the second camera hanging from one hand. His expression was unreadable in the dark for a moment, and then he let out a breath through his nose, somewhere between a sigh and the ghost of a laugh.
“You were a fucking idiot,” he said at last. “And if you ever put me in the position of watching club footage and seeing your tongue down Rachel’s throat again, I’ll bury you myself and save everyone the trouble.”
“Fair.”
“But no,” he added, the word clipped and simple, like he had no intention of dressing it up.
“I’m not pissed at you. I was, maybe. For about five minutes.
Then you got shot, punctured your lung, and scared the shit out of all of us.
After losing Shark… it all seemed a bit pointless. No point holding a grudge after that.”