Chapter Eight #2
Eli told himself it wasn’t possible. But he’d checked his locks more often and slept with a gun closer to hand.
If Tank was still alive…
Eli stepped back, exhaling through his nose. “Get her out of my sight.”
Trucker pulled a knife to cut the rope holding Peggy in the chair. She groaned in pain as he hauled her to her feet.
“She needs a hospital,” Trucker muttered, almost reluctantly.
“Then drop her in one and make it look like a mugging,” Eli said, heading back to his desk.
When the door shut behind them, Eli sat. Grabbing his phone, he entered a number. A voice on the other end answered. It was a network contact, mid-tier.
“We got a lead,” Eli said. “One of the warehouse guys working at INeeda here in Oak Grove. ‘Jason’ is all we got right now. Dylan Crizer’s been with him this whole time.”
A pause. “You want it quiet?”
“No,” Eli said, his voice ice. “I want it done. The bounty goes wide; every Cottonmouth, every affiliate. Dead or alive.”
“What about the girl?”
Eli’s hand clenched around his phone. “Bring her back alive and unharmed. She’s mine.”
He hung up. And for a long moment, he just sat there, the pressure in his temples squeezing like a vise.
Earle had already called twice, threats hidden in every word the man said.
Eli knew what happened to men who failed SS.
He’d seen it. Now he lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, pulling in a deep drag and staring at the wall.
The name scratched at the back of his mind like a ghost clawing at a coffin lid. But that was impossible. Tank was dead.
Wasn’t he?
* * *
Vendetta
Vendetta didn’t look up right away when he heard the knock.
He was sitting on the bed next to where Dylan slept, her breathing finally even.
After everything she’d been through with her uncle, almost being trafficked at the lake house, and then learning the truth about the man she’d slept with and trusted, she must have crashed the minute her head hit the pillow.
She looked so small now, vulnerable in a way he’d never seen when she was awake.
He watched her for a moment longer, wishing he could just stay there with her. And he swore to himself that if he failed at everything else, keeping her safe had to be the one thing he got right.
The knock came again, followed by Hero’s voice on the other side of the door. “We’ve got company,” Hero said. “Cottonmouths. They mentioned Tank.”
Vendetta froze. Who the fuck could that be? He took one last look at Dylan, brushing a hand lightly over her blanket-covered leg, and rose silently from the bed. Stepping out into the hall, he closed the door behind him with careful quiet.
“Who?” he asked.
Hero gave him a grim look. “Come see for yourself.”
“Did they ask for me? Or Tank?” Vendetta asked, thinking it sounded shady as hell.
Hero shook his head. “They sent a message through one of the low-level contacts we use out of Roanoke. Just said they needed to speak to anyone who had a problem with Eli Crizer.” He paused. “Razor screened them himself. Said you’d want to hear it. Outcast was there too.”
Vendetta’s brows lifted. “And Razor trusts them?”
Hero snorted. “Razor doesn’t trust anyone who shows up without warning and smells like Cottonmouth.” Then his gaze steadied. “But Razor said if they were lying, he’d know it.”
Vendetta exhaled through his nose and rolled his shoulders once. “Fine. Let’s see what they’ve got.”
Nervous energy ran through him like electrical current. He followed Hero down the hall, keeping calm. Whatever this visit was, it wasn’t random. And Razor wouldn’t have entertained it unless it was something worth hearing. He didn’t know the Hound president well, but that much he knew.
As they stepped into the Hounds’ common room, the first thing he saw were Razor and Outcast, standing off to the side. Then he spotted two other men waiting, both wearing Cottonmouth patches. Vendetta froze. He knew them.
Shade and Ripper. His brothers from the Abingdon chapter of Cottonmouth MC.
They’d come with him to Oak Grove when Eli called in support months ago, before everything turned to rot.
Shade looked the same as ever with his dirty blond hair just reaching his shoulders, his steady, green eyes sharp beneath a low brow.
Ripper’s blue-eyed gaze widened on Vendetta when he spotted him, then he ran a hand through his dark hair nervously.
He hadn’t seen them since the day Tank died.
All three of them had asked questions back then about what was really going on with the Oak Grove MC.
But no one gave them answers. He’d spoken with them after what he saw at the compound that last morning.
But he never told them he was hitting the road that night.
He hadn’t decided that until later, until after they’d called to arrange a “meeting.”
Ripper was the first to break the silence. “You’re alive?”
Meeting his gaze, Vendetta said, “That’s the rumor.”
“What the fuck happened?” Ripper was astonished, color flooding his face.
“Eli told us you couldn’t handle the direction we were going in and abandoned your patch.
I mean, we knew you had issues with the shit him and his bunch were doing.
So do we. It made sense you’d hit the road, go nomad over it.
But no one saw you at all after that and it never sat right with me. ”
Vendetta snorted. He’d allegedly abandoned his patch? It wasn’t even a creative cover story.
His brothers from Abingdon looked at him like he was a ghost. Shade slowly shook his head. They knew Ripper wasn’t letting this go.
“A lot of shit has gone down over the last couple of days,” Ripper went on.
“Eli’s tearing everything apart trying to find his niece because she pissed off someone in Sinister Skin.
He handed her off to one of theirs. Turns out he’s some higher-up.
He told us Dylan was cool with it. But she must not have been.
A boyfriend she had that Eli didn’t even know about busted her out, and that Sinister Skin guy had armed guards with him that night.
Not just anyone could have done that. Eli’s running scared and he’s turning on his own to keep control and cover shit up.
Things are bad in Oak Grove now, brother. ”
Vendetta listened, said nothing.
“We had a big fucking meeting this morning,” Ripper explained. “Someone brought you up. What if it was Tank, coming back to fuck with us? Eli was fuming, told us it couldn’t have been fucking Tank, because Tank was dead. He promised that anyone who turned against him would end up just like Tank.”
Eli had admitted it then. Fury rose in him like bile, and it was hard to force it back down.
“All hell broke loose then,” Ripper said.
“Because a lot of us have been real uneasy about the shit that’s been going down.
Then we hear that Tank had been fucking dead this whole time.
You could just look at him and know what he did.
Shade and me put it together. That him and his little circle had to have been the ones to kill you, then cover it up. ”
Shade, who’d been listening as he had, stepped toward Vendetta, his assessing gaze on his throat. Vendetta held still for him, let him take it all in. After a moment, Shade’s gaze met his. “What the fuck happened, brother? You didn’t have that scar around your neck the last time we spoke.”
Ripper was looking now too, so many emotions crossing his face it was impossible to miss. Rage. Regret. Something approaching to shame. He’d always been ruled by a hot temper and a big heart, always the first to swing, but never the first to walk away from a brother who needed him.
Shade, though, he was steady. Cool, the way he’d always been.
The one who held the line when the rest of them cracked.
But even now, Vendetta could see the shift in his expression, the anger he was holding onto.
They were both waiting, watching him. Looking at the man standing in front of them like he was a ghost come back to life.
Vendetta exhaled slowly, peeling back the edge of his hoodie, just enough to give them a better look at his scar. He wanted them to see where the rope burn had torn through his skin.
“That night,” he said in a low voice, “they told me we were meeting to talk. Just clear the air, and part ways like brothers.”
Ripper’s face twisted. “Bones?”
Vendetta nodded. “Called me personally and told me Eli didn’t want bad blood between chapters.” He paused, the words heavy in his chest. “The location was isolated, gave me a sick feeling in my gut. I decided to run, to leave that night. But they caught me before I could make it out of town.”
The silence that followed hit hard. They listened as he told them everything that had happened that night. Shade’s fists clenched at his sides.
Meeting Ripper’s gaze, Vendetta felt the weight of his story in every word he spoke. “To this day, I don’t know how I ended up on the ground. I buried Tank that night, what was left of him. I took a new name and came back to finish what I started.”
“I didn’t know what to believe,” Shade told him. “The last time we talked was right before you disappeared, over at my apartment. Remember?”
He did remember. The three of them talked for a couple of hours about the state of things in the Oak Grove Cottonmouth chapter with the criminal organization they were getting tangled up with.
His brothers had been just as upset about the trafficking and drugs as he was.
They just didn’t see things the same way.
Shade thought it would be best to try and fade into the background, head back to Abingdon after a time.
And Ripper was all about that idea. Maybe that’s what they were doing now.