AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her expression was concerned but still gentle. “Okay. Good. Then what?”
He shook his head again. No, he was not going to tell her that he’d been thinking he needed to devour her to have enough of her. Nope.
Her hands cupped his cheeks, over his beard. “Seth. Please talk to me.”
He’d told her not to call him by that name. He wanted her to remember always that he was Dex, named for a TV serial killer because they had so much in common. He was damaged, dangerous, and she needed not to forget it.
But just now, that name was exactly right. He hadn’t always been Dex. He was more than Dex. Maybe that was the key to the puzzle of loving a good woman like Kelsey—to be Seth for her.
Maybe that was its own kind of crazy, an invitation to add multiple personalities to his list of dysfunctions, but it felt safe. It felt calm.
“Iamokay. Just … overwhelmed, I guess. And I like when you call me Seth.”
Now she smiled. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I don’t want to be Dex with you.”
Her legs came up to circle his hips, and her arms snaked around his neck. “Then love me, Seth.”
“I do.”
He slipped his hand beneath her, took hold of her perfect ass, and set out to show her how much.
~oOo~
“The women are safe,” Apollo said, answering Eight’s question. “They all have the same story. Paid a coyote, got put in a truck, sat in the truck for a few days, door rolled up a couple times for more women to get in, rolled up a few times for some to be taken off, they were taken off and shoved into a van, finally arrived at the house you found ‘em in. Came in two different groups that arrived around the same time. One group crossed near Laredo, another near El Paso. They don’t know jack shit else. Not the coyotes’ names, not even what they looked like. They all wore bandanas, shades, and hats.”
“Is that normal?” JJ asked. “For coyotes to go incognito?”
Apollo gave him a look. “I got no fucking idea. You think I’m down at the border a lot, making new friends?”
“You are in charge of intel, though,” Zach said, having his brother’s back, as usual.
“Not a lot of intel to be had about coyotes. It’s not like they’ve got a union.”
“Coop? Do you know?” JJ asked. He was, apparently, determined to piss off as many fellow patches as possible.
Cooper turned a scowl on the kid. “I’m gonna get one of those signs for the chapel—you know, the ones they hang up at factories that say ‘This shop has gone blank days without an accident’—only mine’s gonna say ‘This club has gone blank days without making Coop the spokesperson for the entire Latino culture.’ The count probably won’t ever get to double digits. I’m not even Mexican, asshole.”
“But your dad was illegal, right?” JJ asked, continuing to measure his foot for residence in his mouth, while Cooper measured his own foot for residence up Jay’s skinny ass.
“My father wasundocumented. Not every undocumented immigrant crosses the Rio Grande. He arrived in the States on a fucking airplane. He overstayed a student visa. About ten years before I was fucking born. So no, I can’t tell you how coyotes fucking dress. Jesus!”
“So what you’re saying, Apollo,” Maverick said, forcing the point back to the center before Cooper could decide JJ’s stupidity warranted a more physical correction, “Is you don’t know shit more than we did yesterday.”
“Not yet,” Apollo answered, seemingly unaffected by Maverick’s brusque tone or Cooper’s aggravation. “The coyote thing, that’s just not a field we play on, and it’s not like they advertise on Craigslist. It’ll take me time to find my in—if I need an in. Right now, we’re trying to use what we know of Grenell from his prospecting days to triangulate his contacts, see if we can connect some dots and find who’s on the other end of a fucking slavery operation.”
“That’s the thing we need to sit with,” Simon added with quiet solemnity. “A few days ago, we were dunking on some wannabe shitheads with a stupid-ass name. They’re still wannabe shitheads, but they’re hooked up in human trafficking, and whether they’re courier or customer, there have got to be some very bad motherfuckers on at least one side of that deal. And if they’re couriers? Maybe two very bad motherfuckers, with us sandwiched between them.”
“We all know what a very bad Mexican motherfucker looks like,” Jazz said, his voice just as low and heavy as Simon’s had been. “Any move we make on them could pull us into real dark water.”
The chapel went suddenly and completely silent as the import of what could happen finally settled over the table. Every man seated around it, even those too young to have been part of the Perro Blanco days, seemed to sag at once.
A very bad Mexican motherfucker looked like Julio Santaveria.
Being indentured to, and then warring with, Santaveria and his Perro Blanco cartel had very nearly destroyed the Bulls—and not only the Bulls but their allies as well. A not-insignificant portion of the one-percenter clubs of the entire US had been tied up in that mess. Not to mention a very powerful Russian bratva, the Frankenstein to Santaveria’s monster. No one had come out whole.
Santaveria was dead now, and the Perros destroyed. One major club and a few small clubs had folded in the aftermath, but not the Bulls. Or the Horde. They’d beat the bad guys and lived to tell the tale.
