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“Wyatt?”
“One of the MC brothers,” Piper explained. “The Vice President. The two of them chased after me, but I managed to give them the slip.”
“So your cover is intact?”
“Should be.”
“Well, if this isn’t a mess, it’ll do until the mess gets here,” Harris muttered. After a moment, he let out a slow breath and continued in a calmer tone. “Are you injured? The local PD said there were a lot of spent shell casings at the scene.”
“Took one in the vest, but I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m kind of surprised,” Piper said, once again looking down at the lump of metal stuck into her vest. “It wasn’t that bad. It’s sore and looks like it’s going to bruise a bit, but it seems okay. I thought it would hurt more.”
“They probably only hit you with a light target round. If you’d have been hit by a heavy combat load, we’d be having a very different conversation. Plus, if you’re all amped up on adrenaline, you might not feel it much for hours.”
At least now he sounded more concerned than pissed off. That was a step in the right direction.
“Look, I know this looks like a cowboy move,” Piper said. “But it wasn’t. I wanted to question them about the bank robbery and if and how the MC were involved. I couldn’t do that and maintain my cover if I waited for the local PD to show up and arrest the suspects.”
“It was a risky move,” Harris said. “Dangerous.”
“I didn’t see another way to find out what we needed.”
“And did you? Find out what we needed?”
“No. Everything popped off before I could properly question the suspects.”
“At least your cover is still intact. We can still move forward with the case. Find something on this MC that we can use. But you and I are going to have to have a conversation very soon about charging into situations impulsively.”
“Right,” Piper said, her shoulders relaxing now that she was pretty sure that Harris was fully simmered down. “Right.”
“Get some sleep. And don’t do anything else stupid,” he said, and hung up.
Get some sleep. Like that was going to be possible.
Piper poked her fingers under her bulletproof vest, in the spot where the bullet had hit her. She was right; a bruise was forming there, which she still barely felt.
Adrenaline, Harris had said. The same adrenaline which guaranteed that there was a snowball’s chance in Hell that she was going to get to sleep any time soon.
You and I are going to have a conversation very soon about charging into situations impulsively,Harris had said.
A conversation. Yes. That was what she needed. Someone to talk to, someone with whom she could bleed off this energy like a pressure safety valve.
Not Carly. There was no way she could talk about this with Carly. Her sister would go completely insane with worry. The stress of her sister’s bullshit felony charge was bad enough; to add on worrying about Piper’s safety would be unconscionable.
Carly was a good kid, all heart, but still, just a kid in a lot of ways. Twenty one and wide eyed with wonder. Piper had been the same at that age, but she’d never had to deal with a slap in the face like a felony charge that looked and smelled like a set up. She’d had time to mature a bit before she’d seen some of the harsher edges of reality.
It wasn’t fair to talk through this with Carly, who would never and could never understand. She needed to talk to someone who could relate, who had been on the razor’s edge and had felt what she was feeling.
The razor’s edge. Was she subconsciously trying to tell herself something?
Pony. Combat veteran, outlaw biker… he would understand. She could never tell him what had happened, of course, but even just a conversation with him felt to her like it was a step in the right direction. Get her head right. Stop this feeling like there were gears inside of her that were spinning out of control.
Plus, she could try to get an idea of whether or not her cover was really intact. Not to mention, try to get an idea of why he and Wyatt and Devil were out there at the gas station near the cabin.
Now she was really talking herself into it, she knew, but found herself tapping out Pony’s name on her phone all the same. She wrestled with letting the call go through for all of the three seconds until Pony answered.
