Chapter Twenty #2
She shook her head. “Not at all, from what he claimed.”
“Seems like an oversight,” I said. “No way to accurately gauge someone if you don’t meet them.”
Her green eyes gleamed in the soft light. “Right you are. No way to tell, say, if someone is a dangerous sociopath, one turn away from derailing the entire goddamn train.”
“So Redding went rogue, and Liam’s been trying to reel him in ever since?”
She pointed her beer at me. “Bingo.” She took a sip of her drink and then shook her head, her bright red curls brushing her shoulders.
“The problem with power is that you become used to it, used to the way that people respond to you. In the MC world, Liam is a known commodity. The men and women he interacts with on a daily basis know him, know his reputation, respect his authority, and for the most part, they do what he says. He’s accustomed to that, so when he deals with people outside our world, he’s a bit… Arrogant isn’t the right word.”
I nearly snorted. It sounded like a good enough word to me.
“Blind is more like it,” she amended. “His expectations are skewed by his experience. He expects them to follow orders, do what he wants. He’s becoming ill-equipped to deal with the unexpected.
He didn’t foresee Redding acting out or breaking rank, and even now, he’s treating him like he would a wayward biker, sending in Mike to straighten it out instead of cutting ties or fixing the fucking mess he’s dragged us into.
” Her accent grew thicker as she talked, anger seeping into her words, and fucking came out sounding more like fecking.
Liam owed a lot of apologies to a lot of people over this. Hopefully, they came as easily to him as they did to his son.
I looked away from Jennifer, out into the night beyond, the wheels in my mind spinning. “And now that we all know about Redding, time has run out for Liam to take care of this quietly.”
“Aye,” Jennifer answered. “At least Daniel had the good sense to keep this shit to himself. His silence is the only thing giving me hope that this situation is fixable.”
I turned to her, frowning. “How so?”
“If he’d told the club what Liam did, they would have turned on my husband. Daniel knows how ugly that would get, so he’s giving Liam one last chance to make it right before he mounts a full-scale insurrection.”
“He made a comment about the club being more loyal to him than Liam,” I said.
She nodded. “That’s what happens when you start your own club. Liam’s made a cock-up of the whole situation. King members aren’t stupid. They see his microaggressions against their leader, and they don’t like it. If Daniel gives them marching orders, they’ll go to battle for him.”
“Did Liam agree to back off? Let Daniel patch in that club in Georgia?”
“Yes,” she said. “But only because I threatened to divorce him if he didn’t.”
“What about the ceasefire between him and Daniel?”
Her expression flattened. “He’ll sign it if he wants to stay married.”
I raked a hand through my hair, nails digging in, anger getting the better of me. “What a goddamn mess.”
“What a goddamn mess indeed. I could have married a nice Irish boy,” she mused, “like me mam wanted. But no, I just haaad to have the tall, handsome American.”
That got a laugh out of me.
Her eyes crinkled at the corners, belying her amusement. “Not too late for you, you know.”
I grinned. “I know that.”
“And yet you want to stick around?”
My smile fell, and I nodded.
“Then welcome to our world,” she said. “You sure you can handle it?”
“I can handle it,” I said. But would Jakob still want me in it after what I was about to do? I glanced toward the house, motioning toward it with my beer. “What do you think those two are planning?”
She followed the gesture, staring back toward their home, worry creasing her face. “Something violent. Something meant to send a message. Redding breaking rank makes Liam look weak, and he’ll want to make an example out of him.”
“To who?” I asked. “The only people who know about this are us, Mike, Daniel, and whoever Daniel told.”
Her answering smile was rueful. “That’s more than enough people.”
I shook my head. “What if there was another way to fix things?”
Her eyes sharpened. “What do you mean?”
“What if there was a way to fuck over Redding and the Jokers without dragging the rest of us into it?”
“How?” she asked.
“I can’t tell you. You need plausible deniability in this. All of you do.”
Her frown deepened. “Liam wouldn’t get his chance for retaliation?”
I shook my head. “No one could ever think he was part of it. Or Jakob. Or anyone in either club.”
“He won’t thank you for stealing his revenge away from him,” she said.
“At least he’ll be alive to be pissed at me.”
She studied me for a moment, reading me like she had earlier. Finally she nodded. “What do you need from me?”
“I need you to stall their planning for as long as you can and help me get out of here when the time comes,” I told her.
She nodded. “I can do that. What else?”
“Will anyone overhear me if I make a phone call out here?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Then can you go back inside and give me a few minutes alone?”
In answer, she rose from her seat to leave. She paused when she reached me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I do, but you should know, Jakob won’t want anything to do with me afterward.”
She surprised me by grinning.
I frowned up at her.
“You must really like him to go this far.” She squeezed my shoulder and left.
I waited until she disappeared inside before picking up my phone and scrolling through my contact list until I landed on the name Nicholas Nguyen-Forrester, a Vietnamese American Air Force intelligence soldier I’d flown with in Syria.
With resources in short demand, our role could change from attack plane to reconnaissance in a heartbeat, and he and a few other intel spooks had hopped a couple of flights with us, strapping an antenna array to our rig so they could collect comms data from Russian ground vehicles in the area.
He was a six-foot-tall dreamboat with wide shoulders, an incredible smile, and a body that just wouldn’t quit.
Our flirtation had started the second we caught sight of each other, chemistry sparking between us in a way that couldn’t be ignored.
We spent a couple of sleepless nights together back on the ground, and the sex was just as good as I hoped it would be.
That was all it was, though, and we’d lost contact after he and his crew switched to another plane.
We’d become Facebook friends a few years back, and now he was married with a daughter still in diapers and another baby on the way.
We kept up with each other in the way that casual acquaintances typically did, liking each other’s posts only once in a blue moon or typing out LOL if one of us posted an exceptionally funny meme.
He’d liked my status when I moved to Kearny and surprised me by reaching out via Messenger.
The fact that Jakob didn’t know about him meant that he hadn’t actually stalked me after all.
Because if he’d known about Nick, I never would have been allowed into Charley’s.
Nick answered on the second ring, his voice sleep muddled. “Krista?” he said. “Everything okay?”
I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the time. It was almost ten. “Sorry for the late call,” I said. “But what if I told you I had a way for you to screw over a motorcycle club, and all you’d have to do is go to coffee with me?”
“Give me the time and the place, and I’ll be there,” he said.