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Lifting his gaze from her jean-clad legs poking beneath the car, he looked across the garage and caught sight of Nikolai Steele. Alias Nicolas Steele. The six-foot-six Russian lifted his gaze from the motor he was working on, his ice-blue eyes stone hard, staring back at Noah before nodding slightly.
Noah’s jaw bunched. He had work to do tonight before he could treat himself to another taste of Sabella. But when he was finished, his wife had best watch out.
As the day progressed, the garage eventually locked up, and Noah got ready for his weekly little night on the town, he couldn’t get Sabella out of his mind.
The way she had stared him and Rory down. She hadn’t screamed or yelled. She hadn’t cried. She simply stated hard cold facts and her intentions. If Rory made decisions that affected her livelihood again, then he could have all of it. And as she had said, she had been the one who had walked into the garage and saved it.
The last person Noah had expected to be able to run the place was Sabella, with her too pretty hair, which she had obviously had colored. How had he never known she colored her hair? It was still bemusing to watch her, those darker blond tresses longer now, running around flipping that braid over her shoulder.
She didn’t do the manicures and the pedicures anymore. And he had to admit, he might miss that a little bit, but only because he’d always enjoyed knowing his “girly” wife had everything she needed to be girly.
Finding out she wasn’t so girly, and that she had held back parts of herself, both infuriated him and made him determined to learn exactly what he hadn’t known about her.
As he sat in the smoky, dimly lit bar later that night and talked to men he didn’t want to talk to as he played the friendly curious mechanic, he couldn’t get over the look on her face earlier that day.
Pure, livid determination. She hadn’t shown her anger, but there wasn’t a doubt left in his or Rory’s minds that she wasn’t serious. To-the-bone serious. She would sell out her share of the garage and she would leave.
Backbone. She had backbone.
Why had she never shown that part of herself to him? Why had she hidden herself?
Probably for the same reasons he had concealed the darker parts of himself, he thought with an inner grimace. It seemed he and Sabella both had held back during those first, tempestuous years together. They’d only had two years together. Not long enough. Not nearly long enough for them to really get to know each other.
“You know, the Black Collars, they don’t like strangers in town asking questions either,” the retired ranch hand from one of the outlying ranches commented as he and Noah shared a beer at the end of the bar.
Jesse Bairnes was well known to Noah. A friend of Grandpop’s that Noah remembered.
“They don’t like a lot of people,” Noah stated.
“Specially those different from them,” Jesse said, his voice pitched low. “I have a friend, pure Irish. His son has lived in hell.” Jesse shook his head at that.
In hell? Grant Malone?
“How so?” Noah asked him.
Jesse shook his head, his lined expression somber. “Lost his whole damned family,” he said, sighing. “Ever’ one of ’em. The militia only leaves him alone ’cause he keeps his head down, doesn’t try to do anything more than run his ranch, and killin’ him wouldn’t be enough for them. But they got nothing else to hurt him with now.” The old man shrugged. “Shame, it was.”
Noah stared down at his beer. Jesse couldn’t be talking about the Malones.
“How do they get the power to do this?” he murmured. “I’ve not heard much about them and I’ve made my rounds of Texas plenty of times.” Hell, he’d lived here, worked here, loved here. How hadn’t he known?
“Quiet is always better.” Jesse shrugged. “They’re paranoid ’bout secrecy. The only ones that talk are the young dumb ones. They weed those out as they try to climb in the ranks. No one that cain’t keep their traps shut makes it to those hunts I hear they do.” Jesse turned back to him, his faded dark eyes somber. “They been huntin’ for years and no one cared till they killed some FBI agents. Now ain’t that a shame?”
Noah nodded. “That’s a hell of a shame.”
He finished his beer, completed his conversation with Jesse, and headed from the bar. The late-evening visits to the local watering hole were giving him a new insight into the changes that had been developing in his hometown. Or perhaps, more accurately, the underground intricacies that were finally showing themselves after decades.
He was nearly certain now that the Black Collar Militia’s ranks were still small enough, here at least, that pinpointing one of them wasn’t going to be easy. That or they were hiding themselves better than he could have imagined.
Though, after his search of Mike Conrad’s office, he knew at least one of the members. Black masks for the members, black collars for the victims. How the hell had he managed to keep his eyes closed to what was going on in his own hometown? This wasn’t a new organization. It was something that had been building, growing, for decades.
An even better question, he told himself, was, how had he managed to miss what kind of a man Mike was through the years of their friendship? He had trusted the other man. Laughed with him, drank with him, and he hadn’t suspected. If someone had told him Mike was involved with a militia, he would have laughed at the thought.
The militia wasn’t something new. Hell, there were plenty of militias with varying agendas all over the west, but few that were walking in the footsteps of this one.
Late-night hunts for illegals. Kidnapping legal aliens and taking them into the canyons of the national park to torture and murder them.
Their agenda was an atrocity to humanity.
