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He lifted his chin, giving me a grin that left me feeling evenmoremurderous than I already did. “Why so hostile, Tati?”
Because I was sick of his damn face, that’s why.
“Does your guest want to come inside?” my mama asked from somewhere behind us. “I was just playing about him not being welcome, let that young man come in and get a plate.”
“He’s fine,” I countered with a little more snap then I intended with my mama, so I turned to her and apologized.
She gave me a look —an annoying, knowing look—that I couldn’t say anything about. “Brandon, baby your mom wants you to come look at these blocks I put down in my garden so you’ll know which ones to go get her.”
“Goddamnit,” Brandon muttered, but then immediately put on the right attitude for my mother. “I’m coming, Ms. Carmen,” he told her. “Nyx, kick it with Tati for a second, let me handle this.”
“Yes, go be a good son before you lose her,” I teased him, earning a middle finger as he strolled off.
“It’s good that he takes care of his mom the way he does,” Onyx said pulling my attention to him.
Grudgingly.
“Yeah.” I nodded, stepping outside to keep him out of my mother’s house. I didn’t need her making conversation – and plans for my fucking future – with him. “Any man that wouldn’t, I’d have to question his character.”
He looked away from me, scratching his chin. “I can see why you’d say that, but don’t you think that’s the type of thing that should be taken on a case-by-case basis? Everybody’s mother doesn’t deserve that.”
Something about that statement made me narrow my eyes—not because it bothered me or even that I disagreed. It just made me wonder.
I met his gaze, trying to figure it out, but the intensity of his eyes was too potent, as usual. I had to look away.
“That’s not what you’re here for, right?” I asked, shifting the subject back to more pressing matters. “You have an update for us?”
He nodded. “Teo put all the data on the private server too, but we got some good shit. I put him on some shit I was familiar with from… prior employment. So we were able to do some digging with a few extra tools y’all didn’t have access to.”
“Like what?”
“I might have to kill you if I told you that,” he said, wagging his eyebrows. “Seriously though—no need to worry about it. The point is, we got all the location information, bank accounts, all that. And after spending a couple hours digging through text messages we scraped from the cell provider, we’ve got some…supposed… names.”
I drew my head back.”Supposednames? What does that mean?”
“It means…” He shook his head, pushing out a deep breath. “There might be more to this than we thought.”
“In what way?”
He sighed. “So LVPD claims they have intel confirmingMarauderinvolvement, right? But we didn’t see anything about itfromany of them. No planning, no codes, none of that. But afterward, there’s chaos, while they’re trying to figure out what happened. They’re denying any involvement.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course they are.”
“To their own people?” he said, which…
Okay.
That was a little weird.
If it was a sanctioned attack, certainly there would have been some type of communication about it. Even if the actual strike was planned in person, they would have conveyed to the other members to stay out of the area, to lay low,something.
“I’m not sure if what wethinkhappened is whatactuallyhappened,” Onyx continued. “It seems like theMaraudershave had a lot of confusion going on since it went down, which is the exact opposite of what you’d think. Taking out the leaders of a club like thePredators? That’s big shit. Legacy-making shit. But instead it’s chaos. They’re trying to figure out who could have possibly been wearing their colors.”
I blew out a sigh. “So… stop talking around the point and just say it plain. What do you think is going on?”
“I think this shit was a setup.” He shrugged. “I don’t think it was theMarauders.”
“Okay… talk me through it.”
