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“Shit. How did we not know this?” I asked.
“There’s nothing to know unless there’s something to know,” Slate said vaguely.
“I hate when you talk in fucking riddles,” Rocky groaned.
Slate rolled his eyes. “If there’s no push to put it to a vote, there’s no reason for us to know anything.”
Which meant by the time we found out anything, it could be too late. “Keep a close eye on it, Slate. If there’s any movement either way, I want to know. And look into whatever else he’s trying to buy up. If that fucker wants to play it this way, we can too.”
“On it,” Slate murmured, and turned back to his laptop.
“Not to pile on the shit,” Rocky began with a worried expression on his face. “But I have shit to pile on.”
“I’m listening,” I said with a sigh, and raked a hand through my hair as my gaze swung to my VP.
“I went to Sheriff Cross first thing this morning to see if his people found anything at Ellie’s place.”
The worry that clogged my chest for the past week only intensified. “What did they find?”
“Nothing. That’s the fucking problem. They dusted the whole damn place for fingerprints, hairs, and fibers, and you know what they found? Not a goddamn thing.” Rocky shook his head, brows dipped in fury. “Even Cross thinks it’s too clean to be anything but a pro.”
“Shit.” I bit out the word, and it was filled with so much anger and concern. “A pro. You wouldn’t send a pro unless you thought she knew something. This wasn’t about the graffiti, they were looking for something. Right?”
My club brothers all voiced their agreement.
And I bet I knew what it was. We’d been through the boxes of her sister’s stuff and hadn’t found anything incriminating, but we must be missing something, it had to be there. “We took all of Stacy’s stuff out of her garage. It’s safe here, the boxes of paperwork and some journals. I reckon that’s what they were looking for, and when they couldn’t find it, they decided to send a message.”
Rocky nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. This isn’t just some rival MC.”
“If it was,” Hawk added, “they wouldn’t be sneaky about it. They’d want us to know it was them.”
“Exactly,” Rocky said.”
“So we’re in agreement that this has something to do with Carter.” It wasn’t a question. This wasn’t how we operated on the other side of the law, this cowardly bullshit. The Steel Demons, along with our allies and enemies alike, were in your face. We didn’t hide behind the law or contracts to get our points across. No, we fought like men. This underhanded way of attack smelled like the sort of bullshit that shady corporate organizations excelled at. “It’s all happening too coincidentally. Sneaky shit happening all around us. Trying to scare Ellie, trying to warn us off with threats of bringing the law sniffing into our business by depositing dead, underage girls near our clubs… It ain’t a fluke.”
“It all leads us back to fucking Carter and whatever it was that Stacy found,” Hawk growled.
“Grab three of the prospects and go through every fucking sheet of paper in those boxes Ellie brought with her. We need to know everything, and then we can make a plan.”
“On it,” Slate said, and pushed away from the desk, presumably to go in search of a few prospects.
I let out a sigh, the burden that had felt as if it was lifted only an hour before, was now back and heavier than ever. Somehow this was all tangled up together, Stacy and those dead girls. The shit part was I was now sure Stacy had met the same fate as them, but her body hadn’t turned up.
“What are you thinking?” Rocky’s deep voice sounded behind me, and I stared up at him with knitted brows.
“I’m thinking there’s a reason Stacy’s body hasn’t turned up yet.” And I didn’t want to think about how devastated Ellie would be when her worst fears were confirmed.
“You think she’s connected to Carter personally somehow?”
“Yes. No. I don’t fucking know, brother. I think maybe she found something she wasn’t supposed to, and if she just stays gone, she’s just a flake who disappeared from her life and only her family will worry.”
“But if she’s dead, police will dig into her life and everything she might have been digging into herself.”
I nodded, grateful to my brother for understanding everything. “Exactly.”
“I’ll help the prospects go through the documents inside those boxes,” Rocky offered, and left me alone with my thoughts, which centered on Ellie and how she would take the news when I was forced to tell her.
And Leo, who would never know her beyond stories shared by Ellie.
