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“She’s okay! She said she will meet you all back at home. I promise.” Her words don’t mean shit.
She takes a large step back when she notices I’m drawing closer, her head shaking. “I promise you, War! Please! She’s fine. She will meet you back at the house.”
“And where’s the boy?” Priest asks from behind.
“He got away. Sorry. I couldn’t stop him.”
Agitation has my fingers craving her throat, but I throw open the passenger door and find Halen’s phone on the seat.
I tap at the screen and her screensaver lights up.
Try and find me with your GPS now. Asshole. Be home later. – EWBOMH
My breath is heavy when it leaves my lungs, as if I’d held it for too long.Even with blood on my hands.She put the acronym there because she knew I’d ask questions.
I kick the door closed, passing her phone to Priest.
“You!” I point to Katsia. “If there’s even so much as a fucking strand of hair missing on that girl’s head, I’ll fuck you up.”
The realization of how important Halen is to me weighs her mouth down in a frown. “I know. And don’t worry. She’ll be okay.”
We hadn’t even made it back onto the jet when Priest answers his phone.
“Fuck… now what?” Vaden rests his foot on the table opposite us. We need to find out who the fuck it was that tried to take Perdita, and who that little fuck was that was in Katsia’s office.
They’re both dumb as fuck if they think we don’t know that something is happening between her and Halen. We don’t ask questions. We find answers.
“Who?” Priest’s body turns stiff. The width of his shoulders spread as the muscles in his jaw turn taut. For the first time since he took the gavel, I see it. I see his father in him. It’s a simple change of gears, not the whole man.
His eyes hold mine before shifting to Vaden’s. When they come back to me, I know it’s not the Gentlemen. “How can I help you?”
Lowering his phone and taping the speaker button, he places it on the table between us. “We can all hear you.”
My brows knot as lead fills my gut when his voice comes through the phone.
“I’ll make this quick. The people who shot up your island were part of the Factory.” My body turns to ice. Archer Thorn isn’t a man you want a phone call with. We had never spoken with him before. In fact, we didn’t know shit about him until his father came up out of nowhere when we were young. His father and Bishop knew of each other. Our families pointedly made an effort to stay the fuck away from one another. Not that Archer was an enemy, because he wasn’t. He was just… Thornhill’s monster, and no one—and I meanno one—wants to die on that hill.
“Why are you telling us this?” Vaden asks, his eyes bouncing around the two of us, with the two girls watching carefully from the back. They’d been surprisingly complacent throughout the whole Halen leaving debacle.
“I won’t be the one blamed. They ran up in there with ski masks, dressed in black and wearing a black rose. They knew what the fuck they were doing trying to pin that shit on me.”
My knee bounces. “The Factory? Never heard of them.”
He falls silent. Seconds pass until Priest jumps back in. “Who are they?”
Finally, Archer snickers, and the motherfucker, I swear. If half of the stories are true about him and his crew, then I’m not sure we want his help. I mean, yeah, we could take them out, but we’d both lose. Their savagery matches ours. We’ve always known we could fuck up the Gentlemen. They’d be tough, and they’re the biggest threat as far as enemies go, but that’s only because Thornhill isn’t an enemy.
We’ll need to keep it that way.
“It seems you need to pull your resources in line. Look…” He closes a door in the background. “The Factory is where the Bakers run out from.” The air drops to an icy level. “They’re notthe crew you assumed they were, and that’s where you’ve made your first mistake. I’ll send you coordinates. Go in, take out who you can, and get out. You do not want to be there for longer than two minutes. You hear?”
“I owe you.” Priest’s jaw tenses as if it physically pained him to say the words, but I know that’s not all that he’s pissed about. It’s that we didn’t know whoever the fuck these people are.
“Actually, yeah, you do, but not for this.”
I lean forward, ready to ask him what the fuck he means, when the phone goes dead. “Well, fuck. How’s that gavel feeling now?”
“This is how it’s going to be from now on, right?” River surveys us all, clipping a bottle of water when Amber strolls past with the cart. “I guess we won’t have to throw parties when we’re bored anymore.”
