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Tick quieted, his eyes practically shooting bullets at Luke. “I’ve been watching that cousin of yours.” He nodded past Luke, and he spun around.
“Who? One of the twins?”
Tick scoffed, and Luke turned back to him. “As if. They’re older than you.”
Luke knew it would be one of the teens. Probably Daniel, the sixteen-year-old, Uncle Tucker’s eldest grandchild. “He’s not a fighter,” Luke said.
“He’s got the right disposition,” Tick said. “Heard he got in a fistfight in school last week.”
Luke hadn’t heard that, but that wasn’t a surprise. “You need to leave.”
Tick didn’t so much as blink. Another car rolled up to the curb, this one a dark, shiny SUV. Luke had a very bad feeling about the situation, and he fell back a step. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“That’s the first thing that’s changed about you.”
“That’s right,” Luke shot back, his anger rising. He worked to tame it, to keep it way down deep in his stomach. “I have changed.”
“What’s going on here?”
Luke couldn’t look at two people at once, but he needed to, because he didn’t trust the man in front of him, and an icy hand gripped his throat when he turned his eyes to the man who’d just arrived.
Stephen Whitechapel, otherwise known as The White Devil, at least in the ring. He wore a mean, pinched look in his eyes and his biceps were as big around as Luke’s thighs.
“I don’t want any trouble here,” he said, lifting both hands up in surrender. His mother was in the yard behind him. His aunt. Hannah.
He backed up one step at a time, praying that the Lord would protect him and his loved ones. He thought of Slate, and how he and Dallas had gone to Austin with him so he wouldn’t have to go alone.
He thought of Nate, and the first time he’d met him. They’d been on the same team since. Luke needed his team right now, and he realized that in the ring, it was just him. It didn’t matter who sat in the corner on the other side of the ropes. It was only him.
He didn’t want to live like that anymore.
Stephen moved to a position a few feet in front of Tick, and Luke kept putting distance between them and him.
“Luke,” his dad said, and Luke spun and strode toward his dad. He went right behind him while the two men on the street started to laugh. The sound of a police siren met his ears, and Tick and Stephen both looked to their left.
They seemed to be moving as a unit, and they looked back at Luke as if he’d called the cops. He hadn’t; he’d been standing right in front of them the whole time.
“This is over,” Dad called, and Stephen headed for his SUV while Tick got behind the wheel of his car. They made plenty of noise by revving their engines and squealing away from the curb in plenty of time to be long gone by the time the cops arrived.
