53
I charged through the clubhouse of the One-Eyed Jacks just before seven in the morning. Alicia, Jump’s widow, gestured down the hall to the bedrooms, knowing what I was after.
I pushed the door open and stopped short.
Grace sat on the edge of the bed, patting a piece of white gauze over Tania’s chest. They both turned abruptly, their faces haggard.
“Tania,” staggered out of my mouth, a mix of relief and concern sloshed with anger.
Tania’s pale face was streaked with dirt, traces of mascara, remnants of fear and adrenaline. “I’m fine.” She tugged at the big black T-shirt she wore, adjusting it on herself, a hand at her chest.
“That’s all she keeps saying,” Grace said, her voice sharp. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”
“But I am, honey,” Tania said, eyeing her.
“Sure you are.” Grace pitched the gauze into a small plastic bag at her side and shot up from the bed, wiping at her eyes. “Take a look. See how fine she is. You’ll appreciate it.”
“Grace, don’t.” Tania’s face reddened.
“I’ll leave you two alone.” Grace brushed past me and left the room.
I approached the edge of the bed, my eyes darting to the red marks around Tania’s wrists to the cuts on her fingers. I yanked down the loose V of her T-shirt. My pulse slammed to a halt and hammered all at once.
An F sliced into the skin of her upper chest.
“Motherfuckers!”
“Finger—”
“That’s about me, clear as day!” I bit out through my clenched jaw.
The vicious red F on her smooth white skin was a cheap imitation of the cuts on my face. She didn’t deserve being held down and cut, she didn’t deserve any of this shit.
My throat closed, my blood churned. “He used you to send me a message, to—”
“Please, please don’t start some kind of war over this.”
“War’s already begun, baby.”
Reich fraternizing with the enemy, laying out a red carpet for the Smoking Guns in my territory? I wasn’t going to let that happen, no way, not ever, especially now with Lenore living here.
Tania pushed up in the bed. “They can’t find her, can they?”
She was thinking what I was thinking.
“One of them was with Reich,” Tania whispered. “And if you—”
“I’m going to take care of this.”
“Oh, yeah?” Butler’s voice came from behind me.
I spun around. “They took her from you, asshole. What was she doing with you anyhow?” The jerk had an old lady at the hospital, and the woman he really cared about had been taken out from under him.
“Finger, I was at Butler’s place because I wanted to be.” Tania raised her voice. “They took me when I left the building.”
“I don’t need you defending me, Tania.” Butler’s eyes flashed at her from the doorway where he stood.
“Both of you need to concentrate on getting things right between your clubs,” she said. “That’s how you can make this”—Tania pointed at her chest wound—“better.”
Butler and I stood there glaring at each other. He blamed me, I blamed him. But hell, we needed each other now to clear the deck. Blades, Guns, Reich. All. Of. Them.
Tania touched my arm, and my thick gaze met hers. “I need you to do me a favor.”
“Anything,” I said.
Butler let out a huff.
“I need to see my brother.”
“Of course.”
“What are you up to, Tania?” Butler asked, his voice sharp.
“In this huge mess, I see an opportunity arising for everyone, something I don’t think you see—a first step. I want to make it happen in an unequivocal way.”
Butler’s eyes narrowed. “Unequivocal?”
“That’s right. Do you need me to define that word for you?” she asked.
Her sass was on track. A good sign.
Butler’s lips pressed together. “No, I don’t.”
Her gaze darted back to me. “Finger?”
“I’ll make it happen,” I replied. “In a very unequivocal way.” I shot Butler a pointed look, which he flung right back at me.
“Is Catch far away?” Tania asked.
“No,” I said.
“Good. Get him up here fast. And you,” she said to Butler, “let him come here to see me. Please. And I need to see Nina.”
“Nina? What for?” asked Butler.
Tania was looking at the bigger picture to fix what could be fixed right here, right now. She was going to derail this circus train.
And if Butler would get his head out of his ass, he’d claim Tania for himself.
I lifted my chin at Tania. “You might not be my old lady, baby, but you sure are thinking like one, and I like it. A fuck of a lot.”
Butler shot me an icy blue glare. Ha.
“There’s something else I need to discuss with you. Alone. Sorry, Butler,” Tania murmured.
“You two do what you want. I’m out of here.” Butler pulled something small from his back pocket and threw it on the bed. A lipstick. “This is yours.” He stalked from the room leaving Tania looking as dejected as a girl who didn’t get asked to the prom.
“What did you want to tell me?” I asked, my voice lower, softer.
She picked up the lipstick, wrapping her fingers around it. “That Smoking Gun with Reich—”
“Yeah?”
“I recognized his club logo, just like her tattoo.” Her voice shook.
The small tattoo of a gun wielding skeleton “Rena” had on her lower abs. The one she’d trashed by slicing an F over it in that motel bathroom a million years ago.
My eyelids jammed closed. “Tania,” I cut off her trip down nightmare lane.
“Reich has set up the Smoking Guns with the Broken Blades,” she said in a rush. “From what they were saying, it’s been in the works for a while, but now, the Blades finally said yes to it.”
So it was official. Reich had backstabbed his own club by engineering an alliance between two of our territorial enemies. Specifically, my primary enemies. This was the new deal Notch had been on a high about.
My eyes darted to the F carved into Tania’s skin. “Who cut you, Tania? Who did it?”
“The Smoking Gun.”
“What was his name?”
“Scrib,” came the reply. The reply I didn’t want to hear.
My breath hooked in my chest.
“He told me he’s been watching your club since things got touchy with the Blades months ago,” she said in a rush.
Scrib had been the one watching us.
“He recognized me from when I came to Nebraska with Grace,” Tania said.
“Figured you and I were connected?”
She nodded. “Reich accused me of being Butler’s mistress, and then after I opened my big fat mouth and said that I knew you, he accused me of being your and Butler’s go between. He obviously doesn’t like it that you two are allies.”
Seething bile seeped through my veins polluting my blood.
Scrib was here on my soil, my territory, and Reich had brought him here, the two of them plotting. Together they had tortured an innocent woman for kicks to send me and Butler a message. To fuck with my head.
Fuck that.
Fuck both of them.
Fuck it all.
“I’d overheard them talking when Reich locked me in the bathroom at the cabin,” Tania continued. “Scrib told him how Pick, this Broken Blade guy, was impressed with his offer this time around. Scrib said he was counting on this all to work out. That the Smoking Guns has been looking to stretch this way for a long time now.”
I’ll bet they were.
If I didn’t do something about Reich now, if the Smoking Guns took over the Blades using them as a satellite for their own purposes and resources, it was only a matter of time before they pushed and shoved at my borders and chomped at my business, their ultimate goal and Reich’s.
If they had cut Tania for kicks, what would they do if they found Lenore and realized who she was?
Scrib had been there that last night of my captivity. He’d gone down on Rena, he’d cut me. He’d taken part in the revelry that night, and on many, many other nights. She’d told me about his repeated assaults on her in hallways, while she’d be doing laundry, when he’d take her home after babysitting his own kid. If he found her, I had no doubt he’d be leading the rampage for her blood.
Reich had set this shit in motion, that motherfucker. This was Reich doing what he did best. Setting fires and keeping them blazing, all the while looking out for number one and hitting me where he knew it stung the most.
“You know how he got that name, Tania?” My voice was low, controlled.
“No.”
“He scribbled on my face with his knife.”
“Oh God.”
“There was no God that day.”
She put a hand on my arm, and I refocused on her big, emotion-filled eyes.
“Finger, Scrib boasted to me about when they’d taken you prisoner. That later you’d stolen from them and he’d wanted to go after you, but because of the truce between your clubs he hadn’t. He said ‘Maybe it’s time that truce expired.’”
Screw that fucking truce.
Cold venom seeped through my chest. “Anything else I should know?”
“Yes, one more thing.” She let out a heavy breath. “Reich admitted to me he was the one who set the bomb in Nina’s car because Butler and Nina deserved it for fucking with him. That Butler took something of his, and he didn’t mean Nina. That the two of them thought they were smarter than him, but he was going to put an end to it once and for all.”
“Is he now?” I said under my breath.
Butler and Nina had taken something of Reich’s that he was desperate to get back. So desperate that he’d even tried to kill his Goldilocks to get his point across and get it back. That explained Nina and Butler together—she’d helped him get some kind of hard core evidence, and he’d gotten her out from under Reich. He was protecting her. Why the hell hadn’t he told me? And what the hell had they stolen from him?
Yeah, fuck it all.
I called Catch, and he arrived at the One-Eyed Jacks in under two hours, and was brought to the room where Tania was resting.
“You told me a while back that you’re in love with Nina,” she said to her brother.
“Yeah.”
“Still feel that way? Still want to be with her?”
He shifted his weight, his gaze darting at me then back to his sister. “Tania, what the hell?”
“I need to know,” she said. “Because I’m going to go talk to her today at the hospital. And I want to be sure of what you’re feeling.”
“What I’m feeling?”
“Do you love her?” Tania raised her voice. “Do you want her for your old lady?”
“Hell yes.”
“Good.”
“You gonna to set us up?”
Tania’s eyes met mine. Butler had told her that Nina’s baby wasn’t his, it was Catch’s. Just as I thought, Tania was derailing the circus train and resetting it on the correct track.
“If you want to be together, you should be,” said Tania. “Butler cuts her loose, you two get it together and show Reich and the world that you are the real deal, not fuck ups. She’ll be under your protection and Finger’s. Reich hates Butler, but you, you’re a Flame, that changes his psycho game plan somewhat.”
“You make it sound so easy, but it—”
“It is easy. You want something bad enough—” Her gaze shot to me. “—you make it happen.”
I had lived my life by that principle. But I’d let Serena slip through my fingers, like a tiny pebble or a sleek ribbon that I couldn’t quite grip in my maimed hands.
Make it happen.
Tania and Butler had something going on between them, but Tania was not about tossing the puzzle pieces in the air and seeing where they landed. No, she was making it happen by putting the puzzle pieces in their right place under a bright light.
Ten minutes later, a smile on her face, Tania got on the back of her brother’s bike and with me alongside, we rode out off the Jack’s property and headed to the hospital in Rapid. Tania went in to talk to Nina alone, while Catch hung with me in the hallway. He was jumpy, chewing on his lips. He was about to get what he wanted.
I planted a hand on his shoulder. “You ready for this?” In a few minutes Nina would tell him he was going to be a daddy again. His whole life was going to change.
He took in a breath. “The fuck of it is, I am.”
Tania opened the door to Nina’s room, beaming a smile at her brother. “Get in here.”
He gave me a last look, a glimmer in his coffee-colored eyes, and he pushed Nina’s door open wide.