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“I need Ash to focus,” I insist. “And you and I both know if I sent Ash to watch her, he’d just end up fucking her and that wouldn’t accomplish shit.”
“How do you know he hasn’t already fucked her?”
I shrug. “I don’t. If that’s what they’re doing, it doesn’t matter.” I don’t mention that River and I have already had a run in like that because it’ll just piss Priest off even more. “I trust her to want to kill Ivan enough to not let anything distract her. I don’t trust Ash to be as focused.”
Priest makes a face like he hates that. “Never thought I’d see the day that you said you trust some random woman over one of us.”
“You know what I mean. You’d do the same thing in my position.”
“No, I would have killed her when she refused to talk the first time. She’s a liability, Gage.”
“That’s the whole point of keeping her here,” I remind him. “Becauseshe’s a liability. At least this way, we’re minimizing the damage.”
“Yeah, the damage out there,” he insists, pointing as if to encompass the world outside this house. The muscles in his neck are tense, standing out in corded lines. “Not the damage she can do while she’s here. She’s already distracting Ash and Knox. She’s trying to work her way through us.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know,” he growls. “To make us… unstable. Tear us apart. Something.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think that’s it. I think she’s just toying with us because she wants to think she has the upper hand here. Because we’re forcing her to stay. Killing Ivan is her main goal. Everything else is just incidental.”
Priest doesn’t like that explanation, I can tell. He pushes off from the wall and takes a step closer to me, but it’s not threatening. More like he just needs to be moving.
“And what about after she kills him?” he asks. “What happens then?”
“Then Ivan’s dead,” I reply. “And thank fuck for it.”
He scowls at me. “You know what the fuck I mean.”
“I know. You’re worried someone will connect Ivan’s death with us, even if it’s her who carries it out.”
He nods, his light blue eyes glinting. “We’ve had issues with him in the past, and people know it. It could get pinned on us because of that.”
He’s right, and it’s something I’ve considered a little bit since River’s been here. Ivan St. James is a powerful person with as many allies in Detroit as he has enemies. Fucking with someone as big as him in the underground of the city will upset the balance of the whole thing. Being seen as the ones who killed him could get us a new kind of respect, but more than likely will just paint a big-ass target on our backs.
“Well,” I say after a long moment of silence, speaking as I think. “We won’t be the ones who killed him. So we’ll make sure people know who did.”
Priest’s eyebrows lift at that. “Pin it on her?”
“It’s not pinning it on her if she’s the one who did it. She was going to go after him with or without our intervention. We’ll just make sure credit goes where it’s due. It’ll keep our names out of it and keep us from having to deal with the fallout.”
“Yeah. That’s a good plan.” He nods, relaxing for the first time since we came down here to talk in private. “They’ll eat her alive. All the bottom feeders and the idiots who were hanging on to Ivan will come after her.”
“It would have happened anyway,” I say.
There’s a part of me that… doesn’t like this. We have no way of knowing if River had some plan to make sure Ivan’s death was discreet and no one would find out it was her. Getting mixed up with us strips her of that, but that’s not our problem, so I shove the mixed feelings aside.
Above all, I’ve got to protect my family. These men are my brotherhood, and I’ll do anything to protect them. Even if that means sacrificing someone else to make sure none of us go down for this.
Besides, River already made her bed. Whatever she might have had planned, she’s been aiming to kill Ivan from the start. And she said before that she’s not afraid of death, so it’s not like she doesn’t see what could be coming in her future if she goes through with this.
Still, part of me feels like a monster anyway.
