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“How bad is it?” Denny asked, looking over at Warren, who was peeling off his suit jacket.
“I’ll live long enough to make that motherfucker pay for this.”
No one said another word the whole way home.
Not even as Denny backtracked to free my arm from the bar.
No one even followed me inside to make sure I didn’t make a run for it.
Everyone was too worried about their king being shot.
As I gathered up my son, ice cream dried all over his shirt, but still red-eyed and splotchy-cheeked, I wondered if this was my chance.
For just a second.
Before the cavalry arrived.
Half a dozen cars pulling into the driveway.
“Not yet, buddy,” I told Judah, pressing a kiss to his curls. “But someday,” I promised.
Someday.
CHAPTER THREE
Aurelio
There was a tension in my spine as I pulled into the lot of the docks the night of the deal.
I couldn’t pinpoint a reason why, and eventually chalked it up to unease at this unusual situation. Knowing the guys and I would be carting around a shitton of illegal guns until we could put them in the plastic containers I had waiting for them, then tuck them safely into a storage unit.
Then we would meet with the bikers, make a deal, and let them handle it.
My mind was on a million of those things when I heard a female voice—so unexpected in this place at all, let alone at night, and on an evening with a meeting like this going on—call out toward me.
My head whipped over to find a black SUV sitting there, engine off, the back window rolled halfway down.
I saw her first.
Because, fuck, how could I not?
I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of not knowing exactly what you were looking for until you saw it—the right car when it was time for an upgrade, the perfect gift for someone hard to shop for, the kind of food you didn’t even know you were craving—but this was that times a fucking million.
If there was a physical manifestation of a woman I could see on my arm, at my side, for the rest of my life, this was the one.
Judging by how much of her I could see through the window, she was tall, which I’d always known was a preference of mine. She was maybe a little too much on the thin side, but that was nothing some of my cooking couldn’t fix.
She had wavy warm brown hair cut on a long bob—a ‘lob’ Elsie had called it once when she’d come home sporting one she’d immediately regretted because she felt it made her face too round. But on this mystery woman, it perfectly suited her face with its slightly sharp, square jaw, highlighting her full mouth, her delicate nose, and these gorgeous amber eyes.
Not a stitch of makeup.
Still the most beautiful goddamn thing I’d ever seen.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that her arm was jacked up at a weird angle. And that a fucking handcuff was around her delicate wrist.
Warren, because it had to be Warren fucking Graves, had handcuffed this woman in his car.
Why?
