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“Believe me, after my interaction with her, she’s imprinted on my brain.”
“The stuff she told you about your mom, Kill?” Jonah asked carefully.
“Yeah. She was the first person to give me hope that she’s not completely gone after all these years. Believe me, that kind of thing sticks with you.”
Asher staggered over to Caleb, who turned the screen toward him. Ash slapped his hand down on the coffee table then peered at it. Just seconds it took before he was nodding at me and confirming, “Olivia is the visitor.”
“All right,” Aaron said, rubbing his hands together again, something I’d come to notice was his getting-down-to-business thing. “This is good. We now have two targets to approach and apply pressure to, in order to pull intel on Lance that will lead to Aurora’s location.”
“No,” Ash said.
As we stared at him, he looked out at me. “You were right about going the route of Drew. I know once I told you I knew his location, it became too real and you wanted to find another way that wouldn’t risk him, and hurt Aurora by extension, but it’s the optimal approach. Olivia and Ronan will be impenetrable. They won’t give up any intel.”
“There are ways to force that,” Aaron said.
Asher tensed.
That was the former Infidels enforcer in Aaron coming to the surface. “Shit, sorry, son. I didn’t mean to—”
“Let’s keep on track,” Ash grunted. He squeezed his eyes shut, then sucked in a centering breath, and managed to speak again in a steady tone, as he said, “We need to force Lance’s hand. But not in that way. It’s already been demonstrated three years back that he won’t break. Neither will they, he’s basically trained them in his image. So we go after the one point of vulnerability he has, outside of Aurora. We expose his brother, which will force Lance to make a move, because he’ll know that blowing Drew’s cover won’t stop there—the threat of drawing the Head Infidels directly to him will be in play.”
The corner of Aaron’s mouth turned up. “There’s that devious puppet master revered far and wide.” He winked. “Nice of you to come back out and play, Ash.”
There was a brief smirk from Ash, before he went on, telling us, “Drew is going by the manufactured last name of Coulson. He owns a motorcycle repair shop in a small town a few hundred miles from here called Laysle. He frequents the local diner every evening for dinner after he closes up.”
“Aurora told you all that?” I asked, a knot in my gut.
His gaze snapped to mine and he studied me for a moment. “Relax, it was your secret with her. She did put her trust with that in only you, Killian. I obtained the intel through other means.”
Relief sung through me. “You told her you knew everything about her. You weren’t kidding then.”
“Asher never kids about intel,” Jonah said.
“Why did you never bring it up, when you knew she was keeping it from us?” I asked Ash.
“Like I told her, trust takes time.”
He’d actually waited for her to be ready. He hadn’t forced it, hadn’t even tried to manipulate the situation to extract it from her. I smiled. He really did care for her. So much.
“All right,” Aaron started, stepping forward. “I’m sure this isn’t gonna be well received, but just to play devil’s advocate here, we need to consider the possibility that Aurora might not want to be pulled away from her old man. Her mission from the get-go was to bring him back to her. That’s been accomplished now.”
“In a really fucked-up way, though,” Jonah said. “Nah, there’s no way she’d be okay with this.”
“Well, she obviously wasn’t. Let’s not kid ourselves—the reason Lance showed up to help you out at that slaughterhouse has to be her influence,” Caleb said.
“You think she’s softening him?” Aaron asked, incredulous. “Him?”
Caleb nodded. “He wanted Ash wiped off the board, then he’s suddenly showing up to put him back on? Damn straight she’s influencing him.”
That sounded like our girl. “She does have that impact on people,” I said. “Right, Ash?” I added pointedly.
He winced.
“What?” I asked.
“She may not have wanted me to hurt, but that might be the extent of it. At least where I’m concerned.”
“The last time we were with her, she confessed her love for all of us,” I countered.
