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“It’s Rowe,” she said, and the name was a knife to the gut. But I wasn’t sure if it was because of the issues with us, or the news of him getting hurt. Or both. Because, despite myself, I still cared.
“What happened?” I asked, voice choked.
“He was shot. That sounds superficial. But, ah, he fell off a roof, Bills. He hurt his back.”
“How bad?” I asked, heart feeling like it was getting squeezed in my chest.
“Bad, it seems. Not paralyzed, but not good either,” she said. “Sorry to be the one to tell you,” she added, wincing.
“Why?”
“Because, you know, of how you feel about Rowe.”
“I don’t feel any way about Rowe,” I insisted, shrugging.
“Oh, come on, Bills. This is me.”
“You’ve been away for a while. I don’t feel any which way about Rowe anymore.”
I just wished to hell that could be even halfway true.
CHAPTER TWO
Rowe
It was supposed to be a pretty easy job.
Hell, it wasn’t even a big enough drop to warrant Fallon sending any of the OG members.
Which meant it was me, Slash, Crow, Seth, and Vance. Because it was only a couple dozen guns we were dropping off to what seemed like a low-level, up-and-coming organization. Not even big enough for any of us to have heard about them, even.
And, therefore, no alarm bells had gone off, prompting the higher-ups to send more of us, or any of the older, more established brothers.
“Vibe is off,” Crow declared as we got out of the SUV and off our bikes at the drop location.
I didn’t believe in vibes, so I shrugged that off as Vance and Slash unloaded the duffle bags of guns.
It was, admittedly, a little more desolate than I’d been expecting. Most of our drops were either in major cities or to sprawling estates with security guards at the gates to buzz us in.
This was something like a half-abandoned town with boarded-up houses with knee-high weeds and old, peeling eviction stickers taped to the front doors.
I personally thought letting the previous tenants continue to stay and maintain the properties would be better than letting them go to shit, but that was beside the point, I guess.
It wouldn’t be unheard of for some of the local kids from a downtrodden area with shitty schools because of low taxes, who had next to no chance of getting out of the vicious circle that was ancestral poverty to decide that they would make the money with street corner arithmetic.
Vance shot me raised brows, shooting his gaze in Crow’s direction, silently agreeing with me and his vibe comment.
“Here,” he said, handing me one of the bags to allow one of his hands to be free.
“It’s too quiet,” Crow went on, reaching up to run a hand through his inky black hair as he sucked in his cheek, making his piercing there disappear for a moment. “Place like this, no noise? No kids. No dogs. No one even driving around? Something is off here.”
The longer we stood there, the more I started to agree with him. Not because of vibes, but because no one was approaching us. We weren’t early or late, we were exactly on time.
And after five minutes turned to ten, I could practically feel all of us start to tense up.
Slash, a future president himself, and therefore somewhat ranking over the rest of us, was the first to break the silence.
“They get three more—“ he started just as a black SUV started to pull down the street.
Down the street.
The dead-end street.
Blocking us in.
I genuinely didn’t believe in vibes, but the moment before that car slowed to a stop and the window moved down, I knew. I knew shit had just gone south.
“Shit,” Crow hissed even as Slash, Seth, and Vance were reaching for their weapons.
Too late, though.
The gun was already pointing out the window.
Street sweeper. The standard drive-by weapon.
I was getting good at knowing that kind of shit, for better or for worse.
And our handguns didn’t stand a chance. It didn’t mean we didn’t try to use them, of course.
From our ducked positions behind the bullet-resistant SUV that had been worth its weight in gold if you asked any of us, we took turns popping up and squeezing off a few rounds.
“The fuck is this about?” Vance hissed, shaking his head as he fell back against the side panel of the SUV, adrenaline making his breathing fast and shallow.
Of all of us, Vance was the one who’d seen the most action. Not with the club, per se. But with the fireball he’d wifed up and her mission to take out as many traffickers as humanly possible.
“Chris is going to have a field day about this,” Seth agreed, wincing when another hail of bullets hit the SUV. “She couldn’t find dick about these assholes.”
“Maybe because these assholes gave fake information,” Slash suggested, took a deep breath, then popped up. “Oh motherfucker,” he said, squatting back down. “Incoming,” he told us.
