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I hadn’t had the courage to do it when I first packed my bags in McMurphy’s apartment, but I thought maybe I had the courage now. I had to have the courage, because I had no choice. It was where we were going.
The saying was wrong, then.
You really can go home again.
Twelve
Cavan
I’d heard plenty about the Lake of Fire MC during my ten years with the Black Dog. They were based in Nevada, bumped up against the Black Dog territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and southern California. The two clubs had clear lines drawn, and they stayed out of each other’s business and left each other alone. The Lake of Fire was into some of the same businesses as the Black Dog—drugs, guns—but they had different suppliers and supply routes. The two clubs were rivals, but as long as no one crossed into each other’s territory, they didn’t go to war.
I wondered if that would change.
I had the daughter of the Lake’s founder and first president in my passenger seat. I should be freaked out about that, but I found that I wasn’t. I still planned to save her life. I’d have still saved it if I’d known who she was when she was in my chair.
Dani, in the end, was Dani. It didn’t fucking matter.
We took I-95 until it slipped over the border into California, and I kept driving north as night fell, trying to get as much distance between us and McMurphy as possible. Dani offered to take a shift driving, but I turned her down. We stopped only briefly to eat and fuel up, and another hour down the road we stopped for the night.
In a town called Rio Verde, we found a strip of steak houses, bars, and hotels, for the tourists spilling east from Joshua Tree National Park and south from Vegas and the Mojave. I found a motel called the Rancher, which at least looked clean and decent, and got us a room.
One room this time. I didn’t bother with two. Dani, who checked in with me this time, said nothing. I had no idea what the hell my plans were. I just knew we weren’t going to sleep in separate rooms tonight. She wasn’t leaving my sight.
I paid in cash, and as we walked to our room I mentally counted the money I had left. It wasn’t much. In fact, I couldn’t get us to another town, another hotel, or fill another tank of gas with what I had. If I was going to get us both out of this, I was going to have to face my status as a billionaire. I was going to have to find Max Reilly, even though I hadn’t seen him in ten years and he maybe didn’t want to talk to me. Max, I could face. I wasn’t ready for Devon yet.
While Dani took a shower, I pulled out my old laptop, logged in to the motel’s wifi, and Googled Max Reilly Los Angeles. What I saw knocked the wind out of me.
I’d missed everything in ten years. Fucking everything.
There wasn’t much about him, but there was enough. He was a veteran—he’d done four years in Afghanistan. He came home with PTSD and part of a leg missing. And he’d started a charity called Real Heroes, that connected vets who needed it with free psychological help. There was an article in a small San Francisco magazine about it, with a picture of Max and his fiancée—his fiancée—standing in front of an office building, surrounded by their small staff of four.
Max looked different than he had ten years ago. When I left he’d been a young man, clean-cut and good-looking. He was the steadiest of the three of us, the calmest, the most responsible, despite being raised by an alcoholic father and an overworked mother who eventually left. It was Max that Devon and I went to when we were in trouble, when we needed to figure out how to get out of a problem. And it was Max who always had the answers. He was less dark then Devon and me, the guy we relied on for at least a little optimism and light.
But after what he’d been through, he’d changed. He had dark hair and a beard, worn thick but trim, and a big body, muscled and hard. He was wearing jeans and a black sweater, and his broad shoulders were clearly visible, as were his big arms. His dark eyes held calm, serious depths to them, and though his face was relaxed, he didn’t smile for the camera. I got the impression that post-war Max Reilly was a man who didn’t smile much.
Standing next to him was a blonde knockout, a woman who could probably be on a magazine cover. She wore a classy gray sheath dress and very little makeup, but none of that could suppress her natural beauty. She was leaning close to Max, her shoulder touching his, her arm through his, her hand on his wrist. That hand, the way it curled around him naturally and possessively, supporting him with a touch, told me everything I needed to know about Max and his future wife. Unlike him, Gwen—that was her name, according to the caption—was smiling widely, her happiness obvious.
So Max had been through hell, and—it looked like—come out the other side. The article said he’d started the charity with his own money, and I immediately knew what that meant. Devon had given Max some of his money, probably—if I knew Max at all—under protest. And because Max was a good guy, even after what he’d lived through, he’d used the money to help other guys instead of keeping it.
All of this hit me as I stared at the faces in the picture. And fuck, I missed them—Max, Devon, both of them. They’d been my brothers, though only Devon was blood. We’d been so fucking close. And then the shit had gone down, and we’d blown apart like a bomb had hit us. Especially me.
I wondered if Max hated me now. It was time to find out.
It wasn’t hard to get his number with a little online digging—he obviously hadn’t taken many precautions to hide it, because until now he’d been no one instead of a rich man running a charity. I picked up my burner phone and dialed.
“Hello?” came a gruff voice, thick with sleep. I was so screwed up, I had no idea what time it was.
“Max?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
There was a second when I knew he knew. He
fucking knew.
“Cavan?”
