Chapter 14
By the time Reeze came downstairs, the morning had gone on long enough for the smell of coffee to hang heavily throughout the clubhouse.
A few of the others were already gathered in the meeting room with mugs in front of them, surrounded by that particular kind of tired silence that usually followed a late night.
Billy was leaning back in his chair with one foot propped against the edge of the table, Jesse was leafing through a sheet of paper he probably hadn’t read a single line of, and Mark was standing by the coffee machine, filling his mug for what had to be the third time.
Rollo was the first to notice Reeze.
He didn’t say anything at once, merely followed him with his eyes as Reeze crossed the room and dropped into his usual chair.
Someone pushed a mug of coffee towards him and he took it without really registering who it was.
He had slept, technically speaking, but there hadn’t been much rest involved.
Every time Charlie moved beside him, he had woken and checked that she was still there, and on the few occasions when he had managed to fall properly asleep, Dennis’s fucking message had remained somewhere at the back of his mind.
“You look like shit,” Rollo observed.
There was nothing mocking in his tone, but the comment still made several of the others look up.
“Good morning,” Reeze replied shortly before taking a mouthful of coffee.
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“It was the one you got.”
Rollo continued studying him across the table. They had known each other far too long for Reeze to fool him with a few short answers and a coffee mug, and after another few seconds Billy began to look interested as well.
“What happened?”
The question was asked calmly, but Reeze recognised the tone.
Rollo wasn’t asking because he was being polite or because Reeze happened to look like shit.
The president wanted to know what was going on, and if it was something that could affect one of his officers or the club, he expected an answer.
Reeze let his gaze travel over the men around the table before setting down his mug.
“Dennis happened.”
That was enough to make Rollo straighten slightly.
Billy’s foot came down from the edge of the table and Jesse stopped pretending to read whatever was in front of him.
None of them needed to ask who Dennis was.
Reeze had mentioned the name enough over the past few days for them to know exactly who he meant.
So he told them.
Not everything. He said nothing about finding Charlie curled up in bed with the covers wrapped around her, or about the way her hands had shaken when she handed him the phone.
That belonged to her, not to the men sitting around this table.
But he told them the rest. Dennis was her ex.
There was a restraining order he didn’t give a shit about, and the bastard was also a police officer.
Reeze told them about Josh, the partner who had stood outside Charlie’s building photographing her, Reeze and his cut, and finally he pulled out his phone and showed them the message Dennis had sent during the night.
By the time the phone had made its way around the table and finally returned to him, the coffee had gone cold in several mugs. Billy’s usual grin had disappeared completely, while Jesse sat with his arms folded across his chest, staring down at the tabletop.
“Fucking pigs,” Mark eventually muttered.
No one disagreed.
Rollo remained silent for another moment before looking back at Reeze.
“Has she kept everything? Messages, calls, reports, what he’s done before?”
“Yeah. There’s evidence.”
“Good.”
Rollo nodded slowly to himself and ran a hand over his beard while he thought. Reeze knew better than to interrupt. He had watched the president do exactly the same thing hundreds of times over the years whenever something needed to be weighed from several angles before the club made a decision.
Eventually, Rollo rested his forearms on the table.
“And now for the important question.”
Reeze already knew what was coming, and apparently it showed because Rollo raised an eyebrow.
“Good,” he said dryly. “Then I don’t have to spell it out for you.”
A faint snort came from Billy, but Rollo ignored him and kept his eyes on Reeze.
“How close are you to doing something really fucking stupid?”
This time Billy didn’t make a joke. No one else said anything either, because every man around the table understood that Rollo wasn’t trying to be funny.
Reeze held his gaze. They had known each other for far too long for either of them to have to guess what the other was thinking, so there wasn’t much point in lying.
If Dennis had been standing in front of him right now, Reeze didn’t know whether he would have been satisfied with talking.
After spending half the night holding Charlie while she shook in his arms, he wasn’t even sure he would have tried.
He leaned back in the chair and rubbed a hand over his jaw.
“Closer than I should be.”
Rollo nodded. There was no judgement in his expression and no surprise either, only the calm acknowledgement of something he had probably already known.
“About what I thought.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“I know. If you had, we wouldn’t be sitting here discussing it.”
Billy pursed his lips but, for once, managed to keep whatever comment had occurred to him to himself. Rollo picked up his coffee, discovered that it had gone cold and put it down again with a grimace.
“Good. At least we know where we start.”
He let his gaze move around the table before returning it to Reeze.
“We don’t do anything stupid and we don’t do anything fast. Most importantly, we don’t do anything that gives that bastard exactly what he wants. He’s a cop, which means he already has the advantage if one of us loses his fucking head.”
Reeze’s jaw tightened.
He didn’t like it, but Rollo was right and he knew it.
“That doesn’t mean we sit around with our thumbs up our arses either,” Rollo continued. “We do this clean and we do it smart. We find out what he’s doing, who he’s talking to and how much he actually knows. Until we know more, Charlie doesn’t go anywhere without people around her.”
“She’s staying here,” Reeze said.
“She is,” Rollo agreed. “For now, at least.”
Billy leaned forward and rested his forearms against the table. “And if the cop or his partner turns up here?”
Rollo looked at him. “Then you do nothing.”
“Me?”
“Especially you.”
“What the fuck have I done?”
“Do you want the list alphabetically or chronologically?”
A low ripple of laughter travelled around the table, and even Reeze felt the corner of his mouth twitch. Billy managed to look offended for all of two seconds before pointing at Rollo.
“I’d just like it noted that this is fucking discrimination.”
“Noted. And if either of them comes here, you tell Reeze or me. Nobody hits them, nobody threatens them and nobody gives them a single fucking thing they can use against the club afterwards.”
“Boring,” Billy muttered.
“You’ll survive.” Rollo turned back to Reeze.
“Charlie doesn’t go anywhere alone either. Not here, not to work, not if she needs to go anywhere else. We already know Josh is watching her and, until we know why, we assume he’ll keep doing it.”
“I was thinking the same.”
“Good. Then we don’t need to argue about that.”
Reeze picked up his mug again, took one taste of the now stone-cold coffee and immediately put it back down.
Ever since he had read the message on Charlie’s phone, he had wanted to deal with the problem himself.
Find Dennis, put him against a wall and make it very fucking clear what would happen if he ever went near her again.
A simple solution to a problem that probably wasn’t simple at all.
Now it wasn’t his decision to make alone.
Strangely enough, that didn’t bother him nearly as much as it should have.
Rollo pulled the gavel closer across the table.
“Then that’s what we do. We map out Dennis and the partner. We save everything they send and document every time either of them shows up. Nobody improvises and nobody plays fucking hero.”
His gaze stopped pointedly on Reeze. “I’m not looking at you at all.”
“No, of course not.”
“Good.” Rollo raised the gavel but stopped before bringing it down. “One more thing. If this bastard thinks he can use his badge to intimidate a woman under our protection, he’s seriously fucking miscalculated.”
Silence settled around the table for a moment before the gavel came down against the wood.
“Then it’s decided.”
Reeze remained where he was while the others began to move and conversations slowly started up again around him.
Billy reached for the coffee pot, Jesse gathered the papers in front of him and Mark muttered something about somebody needing to learn how to make coffee that didn’t taste like fucking motor oil.
Reeze barely heard any of it. His thoughts had already gone upstairs to Charlie.
Dennis was still a problem. Nothing they had said around the table changed that, and Reeze still wanted to break every fucking bone in the bastard’s body. But something had changed.
Dennis had gone after Charlie when she was alone, and he had expected her to stay that way.
She wasn’t alone any more.