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It was sunrise by the time I climbed back out, going into my room to grab some new scrubs for the day.
Because I wasn't naive enough to think they'd just let me go.
They would be watching.
And if they were watching, I had to act like everything was fine. Normal. Status quo.
In my head, I could hear the voices of my loved ones. Telling me that I could trust them, that they could handle this for me, that I didn't have to carry this alone.
But anytime I looked at my phone like a lifeline to a dozen or so people who were more experienced in situations like this than me, all I could see was Niro strung up in a basement somewhere while someone cut off fingers, toes, pulled out teeth, peeled off skin.
While I sat there helpless.
No.
I couldn't risk that.
So I was just going to keep my damn mouth shut.
Like they'd told me to do.
Chapter Eleven
Niro
"Did you see this shit?" Fallon asked, coming out from his room, still pulling on his shirt. Most of us had decided to turn in sometime around two. When I'd headed off to bed, Fallon had still been raging.
"What shit?" Finn asked with a mouth half-full with Lucky Charms, sans the marshmallows because he had some weird aversion to them.
"The shooting last night," Fallon clarified, rolling his eyes.
"Some of us have been up for hours," Finn said, shrugging. "Yeah, we've seen that shit."
"What do we know about it?" Fallon asked, fully in boss-mode even though it wasn't technically his place yet, and the fact that he'd barely gotten any sleep.
I knew what he was asking for. Not the news report shit. The personal details that might impact us.
Description of perps.
Possible connections to crime families.
If any of the other organizations had gotten in contact, shared their concerns with us yet.
"It was out front of that pizza place owned by the Grassis," Seth supplied, dropping the name of the local mafia family.
"So it was mafia shit?"
"No," Seth said, shaking his head. "From what I'm seeing, it started over at the convenience store. Bodies aren't Italian."
"It seems like cartel shit," I supplied.
"Cartel? Since the fuck when do we have the cartel in town?" Fallon asked, pausing in his mission to go grab his usual cup of coffee. He pretended to drink that shit black, but he put more sugar in it than a grade schooler with a sweet tooth would.
That was a good question though. We'd kept an eye on criminal activity in the area, always wanting to know where possible new threats were coming from. Our town was ever-changing. Especially now that the second generation of each organization was rising to power, making new friends. And new enemies.
We thought we had a pretty good intel game.
Clearly, the ball had been dropped when we'd missed the Vultures moving in.
That was bad enough.
But the cartel deciding to stake a claim in this town? That could be a fucking nightmare. It could mean out and out war depending on what kind of shit they stirred up and what type of empire they planned to run. It could be ugly and long-lived, too, if they were connected to one of the bigger cartels somewhere in South America.
Let's face it, they probably were.
If we were going historically for our area of the world—the mafia handled imports and extortion, the bikers did enforcement and weapons, and the cartel did heroin or cocaine.
If that was the case, they likely wouldn't fuck with us, but you never knew how a new criminal empire might impact the local dynamics, if the streets would become unsafe, if their personal wars would end up getting us all involved.
"Who were they shooting then, though?" Fallon wondered, coming back out of the kitchen, leaning on the door jamb. "There's no way two separate cartels moved in without someone seeing it. Us or Hailstorm at least. Not to mention the mafia, the loan sharks. There's no fucking way."
That was a fair point.
"I recognized one of the bodies they identified," Finn said, nodding toward the TV. "It was one of the idiots trying to revive Third Street," he explained.
Third Street was a gang the club had done away with a while back because they'd been the ones to kidnap Reign at Danny's—from the Vultures—command.
"Makes sense," Fallon decided. "They used to deal heroin around here. If the cartel wants to move in to do it, they'll take out anyone involved in it. Messy as fuck, doing it in the street like that."
"I'm more worried about the woman right now, though," Seth said.
"What woman?" I asked, only having gotten the CliffsNotes version from Finn when I rolled out of bed a little bit before.
"They took a woman," Seth said, shaking his head. "She and some other guy were out front of the pizza place. The witnesses say he was shot, and she was dragged away, screaming."
