His throat was so tight that it was hard to breathe. There was absolutely no way that the Sons would have come this far north without someone at least sending him a goddamn text, and that wasn’t one bike he was hearing. That was a dozen or more, and the engines roared like Harleys. It was the Racketeers. Obviously.

 

Thank god he’d left his bike in LA. That was something. The distinctive mods would have given him away in a heartbeat, even if it weren’t covered in the Sons of Chaos colors. But the bike he’d borrowed wasn’t all that much less distinctive, not if someone actually went and looked at it. Vanessa knew Take’s work well enough to identify it, if she actually looked. And there was no real reason that she would. He’d parked around back, in the dark, for a reason. But the parking lot had been pretty full when they came in, and if there were a lot of bikes, they might go around to the side, just like he had. After all, the Racketeers were looking to set up a drug trade in Castello and the towns around it. When he’d been in charge of seeking out things like that, Soloman’s would have seemed like a fantastic place to have a club bar, where he could meet people, offer protection to the owner, and make sure that deals that needed to happen in public but away from prying eyes could go down without a hitch.

 

Vanessa knew his methods. She’d been a big part of his learning them. She would think the same way he had. Jesus Christ, how could he have been so stupid? And he had Jessie with him. If his cover was blown, and she was with him — they could both be dead. He would have gotten both the Hendricks siblings killed, no matter what she said to try and ease his conscience. What was he going to do?

 

One of the reasons he’d done well when he was deployed was that he never froze. He didn’t always make the best choice in the old fight or flight internal debate, but he absolutely never gave in to the urge to freeze. He had once, when he’d seen that bike boring down on Danny and hadn’t been able to figure out what to do fast enough to save his best friend’s life. This was the second. Did he grab Jessie’s hand and run? He didn’t know the layout of the back of Soloman’s. They were near a door, but would it lead to a business hallway? The bathrooms? The kitchens? He hadn’t seen the waitresses going in or out. Would there be an exit, or would they just trap themselves? For that matter, did this bar belong to the territory of anyone at all? His research had been cursory this far north. Castello was certainly unclaimed, but what about these small towns that were barely names on a map? Were they considered territory for anyone at all?

 

They could go out the front door. He could hook his arm around her neck and tell her to act like she was drunk and laughing, and they were heading out to fuck up against the wall and the stars, but she was staring at him with growing alarm every second he didn’t make a decision, and she hadn’t been any kind of actress when they were young. Time had passed, but he hadn’t talked about it. Why would he have needed to? There had been no reason. Christ, what was he going to do?

 

If they went out the front door, they’d bump into the Racketeers, there was no way around it. And if they did, there was a good chance Vanessa would be with them. She never missed a chance to dance and drink, and she was damned good at both. And if she was here, and she made even the slightest comment to Jessie about what he was supposedly doing here in town, the whole operation would be ruined. It was a hare-brained idea as it was, and introducing complications would kill it dead, no question about that.

 

It didn’t matter, in the end, if his cover got blown. Well, it did, it would make getting them out of here safely harder, but the ultimate goal had to be protecting Jessie. She was innocent in all of this. If his stained soul got dragged down to hell, that was sad, but not the end of the world. But if he had to give his life to keep her safe, he could do that. He could do that much for Danny, and his memory.

 

He started to stand, ready to take her hand and shuffle them both out the door in the most unobtrusive way he could manage, but he’d been frozen for too long. Even as he stood, the doors to the bar slammed open, and a crew of men in Racketeers’ colors poured into the bar.

 

A few of them he could pick out from the research he’d done on the club. Rodriguez, Sully, Harsh. None of the brass, from what he could see, just patched members. His heart settled down just a little bit. None of the patches would know who he was. And Jack Pedroza, Pedey, wasn’t among the guys who’d come in. Thank god for that much. He and Danny had hung around with Eddie when they were kids, and his cousin had been a bastard even then, always in trouble with someone, always harassing them for money or get them to steal liquor or cigarettes or prescriptions from their parents. Pedey probably wouldn’t recognize the man from the boy he’d known, but he wouldn’t put it past the bastard. And if Eddie Pedroza’s cousin really was the punk in Racketeer colors who had run down Danny Hendricks all those years ago, Tex wouldn’t put it past him to kill both him and Jessie, if he figured out that they were trying to take him down.

 

But no Pedey, and no Vanessa. Okay. Okay, maybe this wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

 

Except that the Racketeers came rushing into the bar like the villains in every shitty Roadhouse-type movie he’d ever seen. Sully pushed a guy out of a chair so he could reach down and throw back the man’s amber whiskey. Harsh grabbed a woman away from her dance partner and smothered her mouth with his. She punched him in the sac, and he shoved her away into the woman she’d been dancing with, then carried on to the bar. Someone else was barreling onto the dance floor, and someone else was pushing the DJ out of the way.

 

He stood all the way up, and glanced down at Jessie, who was watching all of this with angry eyes and a firm chin. He took her hand and pulled her up, tossed a twenty down onto the table, and then headed for the door near them. Right now, he didn’t give a shit where it went; they were out of here. He could see the bartender, slipping around the corner and picking up the phone. From another set of doors, a couple of big guys were moving out onto the floor of the bar to intercept the interlopers. Another day, he would have joined them, settling down the men and explaining how people acted in public when they wanted to be considered people, and not animals. But today — it made him more than a little sick, but he had something more important to do right now. “Come on,” he said to Jessie.

 

She all but dragged behind him, looking back at everything that was happening with worried eyes. He understood, but she was tiny and delicate, and he couldn’t stand the thought of her breaking. He pushed her through the door ahead of him. And just before he followed her, the door opened one more time, and Vanessa came in on Pedey’s arm. Their eyes locked across the room, and he froze one more time.

 

Her lips curled in an angry little smirk, and she was already tugging on Pedey’s arm and pointing as he hustled out behind Jessie. They needed to move.

 

He found himself in a dark hallway, with illuminated signs for the bathrooms down the hall. He moved quickly in that direct, his grip on Jessie’s hand firm. “What’s happening in there, Tex?” she snapped, but at least she’d stopped pulling on him like an anchor. “Is this some kind of PTSD veteran thing? What the hell is happening?”

 

“Stop talking,” he snapped, and anger registered in her eyes. He forced himself not to notice it; he forced himself to focus on the assignment he’d been given, getting her out of here in one piece.

 

He was on the same wall as he’d parked the bike, and he was sure he’d seen the outline of a delivery door when they’d been outside, but whether he could find the storeroom that led to it? About twenty feet past the bathrooms was another door. He judged it to be about the same distance as the delivery door might have been. He needed to move, anyway; if Pedey was like him — and Pedey was often like him — he’d be working his way across the floor, looking to check out what Vanessa was talking about. Maybe to meet their new hard goods man. Find out why the guy was beating feet as soon as he saw the club colors, instead of staying to make some friends. After all, it was custom for all patches to vote on new pledges. He’d need to be known by more than just the club leadership in order to become a full patch. Being invisible would not get him his stated goals.

 

Didn’t matter. The primary mission was to protect Jessie. The rest of it didn’t matter.

 

The door was locked, but the knob felt flimsy under his hand. In movies, guys always slammed into the center of the door, but that was ridiculous; to break open a door, he’d learned a long time ago to put the force of his body right next to the lock. A shoulder slam would snap a chain, but for a doorknob? He drew back, lifted his foot, and kicked hard, ball first, right next to the doorknob. The door popped open with a snarl of wood, the lock tearing free from the jamb.

 

“What are you doing?” Jessie asked again, but at least this time she asked it in a horrified whisper. Both her hands were clasped around his one now, and he could feel cold sweat in her palms. There was a distant part of his brain that told him he was overreacting, this was not a combat situation, he could stand down, but the part of his brain that had helped him survive in the desert boxed that little voice off, because he was surviving, goddamnit, and he’d be guilty or rationalize later.

 

“Getting us out of here,” he managed to choke out, because if she would just be quiet, they’d be safer.

 

He tugged her through the doorway, then pushed the door shut behind them. They were in a dim storeroom, but there was a door down at the far end letting in a little bit of moonlight. This one was shut with a deadbolt, so he could easily flip the lock and let them out. He felt a sliver of guilt at leaving it unlocked, and hoped that the owner wouldn’t lose many goods because of this stunt he was pulling, but the mission was the most important thing.

 

“Tex,” she hissed again.

 

“Quiet,” he hissed back. “Bike. Now.”

 

“Tex, look,” she said, yanking his hands so that he turned his attention to the front of the building.

 

Pedey wasn’t so much like him as he’d hoped. The man — probably led by Vanessa — had come out of the bar and turned around into the dark side area. They hadn’t seen him or Jessie yet, but it was just a matter of time. He placed his free hand over Jessie’s lips to signal her to be silent, then carefully began taking one step at a time towards his bike, praying her heeled boots wouldn’t make the gravel shift.

 

They managed to stay completely silent and lost in the shadows right until he turned the key in the bike’s ignition. He heard Vanessa’s shrill shout at the same time he kicked the bike into gear, Jessie clinging to his back like a burr. The bike’s tires slewed through the gravel, and he felt Jessie shift behind him. For one horrible moment, he was convinced someone had grabbed her, and that in the next second, he would feel a cold brush of wind against his back as she was torn away from him, shattered on the ground, and he would have failed his mission. But no, she was just adjusting, clinging to him more tightly, shifting with him as he fought to control the bike long enough to get up to speed.

 

None of the Racketeers were behind him as he hit the highway, turning the bike’s throttle as fast as he dared to go on the rapid turns. There was only one place he could even begin to think that he was the slightest bit safe. He could hear Jessie shouting behind him, but the wind stole her words, and the panic attack took full control of him; his heart throbbing in his throat, he drove, his demons hot on his tail.