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Maddox raises his chin, then holds his hand out to Trent, who takes it and they do some bro handshake. Zak gives him the same treatment, then he calls out a bye to me as he heads off in the opposite direction to the other lads.
I stare after him as he disappears round the side of the building.
“Hey, you alright?” Zak asks, taking the bat from my hand.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I tell him, plastering on a smile that I don’t feel. His eyes narrow on me, and I pray he doesn’t call me out. He watches me for a few seconds longer, then opens the car, dumping the bat in the back.
“You don’t fool me, nor Maddox. Aside from the obvious, what’s bothering you?”
The conversation with James has put me on edge. Even though I know Star is safe, it’s got my mind working double time.
“Just something James said, like how he gave Theo a choice. What did he mean by that? When we get back to the house, I need to speak to Mitch. I need to check some things with him. But first, let’s go and piss off Bonner.” I give Zak a wink, then walk to Maddox, who is holding my helmet out for me.
Taking it, I’m just about to get on the bike, when my phone rings. There’s a moment of hesitation as I think about who called me last, but I shove it down and pull my phone free. I instantly relax when I see the name on the screen. And it’s as if he heard me mentioning his name.
“Mitch, everything okay?”
“Roxy, where are you?” His tone lets me know this is not a catch-up call but something more serious.
“Err…you don’t really want me to answer that, so how about I just tell you I’m on my way back to the house.”
“You’re right, I don’t want to know. But get back to the house asap, we need to talk.” And with that he hangs up.
I frown as I look to Maddox. “Mitch wants us back at the house,” I tell him, shoving the helmet on and climbing behind him.
Zak, and Ripley, who has Bowser in the car, drop in behind as we pull away.
It takes less than thirty minutes for us to make it back home—I’m really starting to like calling it that—but Zak, Ripley and Bowser take almost an hour thanks to traffic.
By the time they walk through the door, minus Ripley, who Bowser says needed to go, Maddox and I are sat with Mitch in the lounge scanning more of the documents from Theo’s envelope.
As I suspected, Bowser’s brother and his mate, plus the other two friends and the two cops from that night are all on Theo’s list of…clients, I guess you’d call them. I’d call them something they haven’t even invented words for yet.
When I search the corresponding photos, they are among the ones labelled deceased too. Theo has managed to amass a huge amount of evidence, and I’m still confused as to how he’s managed it but also why he’s never used any of it.
What I do know is that there are several men from my human trafficking case that are also named here, and I plan to use that to my advantage. Well, not me personally, but Smithy or Mitch can under my guidance. My biggest problem is that if James is this involved then I don’t know how we do that without his knowledge. The man knows people and probably has depraved little minions everywhere like that bitch—
“Hughes,” I blurt out at no one in particular and stopping the conversation going on around me dead.
“Roxy?” Mitch questions.
“That bitch is in James’ pocket, or his bed”—the thought of that sends an unpleasant shiver alone my spine—“and we need information, right? So, what the hell are we sitting around here for, let’s go ask her,” I say, getting to my feet and looking from Mitch to the guys. “What,” I ask when they all just sit staring at me.
Mitch scowls. “Roxy, there’s something we need to talk about first.” He gestures for me to sit, which I do. “I put a tail on Noah, and up until earlier today he’s been either at the station or at home. But this morning my tail followed him to a property in Lambeth where he met with Laskin.”
I listen to the guys cursing Noah out and threatening death upon sight, but something doesn’t sit right with me about the whole thing.
“Maddox, you said that Laskin knew about Eva, right?” I ask, interrupting his tirade.
“Yeah, and he knew we got her out of London but nothing more, unless he was bluffing. He could have been bluffing about the whole fucking thing and just wanted answers.”
“No, that’s not it. The shooting at Rogue was the Acers, at least that’s what they wanted you to think. They wanted you to go after Laskin because…” And then the penny drops as a memory of Maddox telling me about his conversation with Laskin flashes through my mind and a comment he made, ‘sometimes our enemies aren’t our enemies at all’. “He wanted to start a war between you and Laskin and then looked for leverage to force Laskin to do what he wanted.”
“Okay, but why?” Maddox asks.
I don’t get a chance to reply because Zak catches on and answers instead.
“Because what better way to eliminate your enemies and destroy your competition all at once than to turn them on each other while you stand back and watch. It’s sort of what we had discussed when we first realised Rogers wasn’t going to let it go and was trying to frame us for Theo’s murder.”
