Chapter 36 #3
The anger didn’t disappear. But it changed. Chris could see it clearly. A few seconds earlier, Reeze had looked at him as someone he wanted to kill. Now he looked at him as something that might still be useful. Chris wasn’t sure which was worse.
Rollo picked up the chair Chris had knocked over and sat astride it. “You’ve got a problem.”
Chris said nothing. “Actually, several. First, you stormed my clubhouse. Second, you tried to kidnap a woman from under my roof. Third, you were stupid enough to do both for people who have already left you to fucking hang.”
Billy grinned. Chris didn’t.
“Dennis isn’t going to save you,” Rollo continued. “Right now, he’s probably already working out how to dump all this shit on you.”
Chris slowly sat back down. Because somewhere inside, he knew Rollo was right.
“This is what happens next. You tell me everything you know.” Chris looked up. “To the cops.”
Now he blinked. Billy started smiling. Reeze still said nothing.
“All the names,” Rollo continued. “Every meeting. Every conversation. Dennis, Josh and every fucking colleague who helped them. Everything.”
“Why the fuck would I do that?”
Rollo raised an eyebrow. “Because the alternative is standing over there.”
Chris followed his gaze towards Reeze. The anger was still waiting.
“I can’t go back to my club after that.”
“Your club?” Rollo tilted his head. “The club that sent you in here and then left you to die?”
Chris said nothing.
“The club that’ll dump all of this on you the second someone starts asking questions?”
Still nothing. Rollo leaned back slightly. “This isn’t about fucking around with Sunkholes any more. It’s about surviving.”
Chris swallowed and looked between the men in front of him. “Let’s say I do it.”
“Good start.”
“Let’s say I tell you everything. What do I get?”
Rollo looked almost surprised. “You live.”
The words came so easily that Chris could only stare at him. Rollo nodded towards Reeze.
“Because if Sunkholes keeps interfering in Wallhalla business after this, I’m not stopping him a second time.”
Billy laughed quietly. Chris didn’t. He looked at Reeze and finally understood what Rollo was actually offering him.
It wasn’t a negotiation. It was a lifeline. And he wasn’t going to get another one.
When the voice on the other end of the phone identified itself as Internal Affairs, Chris was still sitting with his hands on his thighs, looking like a man who hadn’t quite understood how completely his life had managed to derail in only a few hours.
Rollo had made the first call and hadn’t said much, only enough to get the right person on the line.
Then he held out the phone. “Now you start again from the beginning.”
Chris looked at the phone, then at Reeze and finally at Rollo. For a brief moment, he looked as though he might throw it through the wall. Instead, he took a breath. And started talking. Reluctantly at first, but soon more coherently.
Dennis. Josh. Names of colleagues who looked the other way, those who helped and the people who benefited from doing so.
Meetings, phone numbers, places and the things Dennis had collected to keep other people under control.
The longer the conversation continued, the less Chris looked like Sunkholes’ vice president and the more he looked like a man who had finally realised how completely he had been used.
When he finished, he sat with the phone in his hand for several seconds before handing it back.
Nobody spoke. There was no need. Everyone in the room knew something had just changed.
Rollo put the phone away. “You go back to your club.”
Chris stared at him. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re letting me go?”
Billy started laughing. “Trust me. This isn’t the win you think it is.”
Chris still looked suspicious, but slowly got to his feet. “If Sunkholes comes after you again—”
“You don’t.” Reeze had barely spoken during the entire conversation, which made his voice all the clearer when it came.
Chris met his gaze.
“Because next time, nobody stops me.” That was enough. Chris nodded once and left the boiler room. Nobody followed him and nobody tried to stop him. When the door slammed behind him, Reeze stood there for several seconds staring at it.
Then he turned and left. Billy said something after him, but Reeze didn’t hear what.
His thoughts were already somewhere else.
By the time Reeze returned to the clubhouse, the worst of the chaos had subsided.
Glass still littered the floor along the walls and several tables would need replacing, but people had already started doing what they always did when something went wrong.
Taking care of their own. Cleaning up. Moving on. Charlie sat on a bar stool with a mug of coffee in her hands while Mia bandaged one of the Assholes guys, who was loudly protesting the entire treatment. She looked up when Reeze came in.
That was all it took. He walked straight towards her without saying a word, and Charlie barely had time to put down her mug before his arms closed around her.
Hard. Not enough to hurt, but with a force that told her exactly how much he had been holding back since the door had come crashing in earlier.
Only now, with her sitting there in front of him alive and unharmed, did his body seem willing to acknowledge how close Chris and the others had actually come to taking her.
Charlie said nothing. She simply wrapped her arms around him.
After a few seconds, she felt his face press into her hair and his hand tighten against her back.
“I’m here,” she murmured.
“I know.”
But he didn’t let her go. Charlie didn’t try to make him.
Around them, Wallhalla continued moving.
Someone was sweeping up glass, and from the other side of the room Billy could already be heard starting an argument with someone.
Mia swore at the man in front of her that she would pin him to the chair if he didn’t stop moving while she taped his ribs. The world wasn’t safe.
Dennis was still out there, and what they had just learned had made the problem bigger rather than smaller. He didn’t merely have a couple of police officers behind him, but an entire system built from information, favours and people he could pressure whenever it suited him.
But Chris had talked.
For the first time, they had something they could use not only to defend themselves against Dennis, but to start dismantling whatever had made him almost untouchable in the first place.
Charlie pulled back just enough to look at Reeze.
“Did you get anything?”
He looked at her for a moment. “More than I wanted to know.” It wasn’t much of an answer, but she knew him well enough by now to understand that the rest would come once he had time to sort through it.
“And Chris?”
“He’s alive.”
“You sound almost disappointed about that.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I am.”
Charlie ran her hand over his cheek. “But you let him go.”
“Rollo did.”
“And you listened.”
“It happens.”
“Sometimes?”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
She smiled, and for the first time since the attack something in his face eased.
Not much. But enough. Reeze pulled her close again and Charlie rested her head against his chest while the clubhouse continued putting itself back together around them.
Dennis was still out there. The threat hadn’t disappeared.
But now he was no longer the only one who knew what was happening while everyone else stumbled around in the dark.
For the first time, they had found an opening in the system he had built around himself.
And Reeze wasn’t walking into the next part of the fight alone. Charlie was there. Rollo and Billy were there. Wallhalla was there. For now, that was enough.