“Well, that was an experience,” Sutton said dryly, blowing all the air out of his cheeks and hooking his thumbs into his belt loops.

I was standing next to him—the two of us looking out at as the wave of Hounds poured out from the meeting room into the bar area. The moment the gavel had landed on the wooden table, the boys had pushed up from their chairs and screwed their war heads on. Not that we were at war. That didn’t mean we couldn’t be prepared just in case.

We’d gotten away with the murdering of the Emps in the warehouse that night. We had the chief of police backing our story after spending most of his life hating us, making our version of the events unquestionable in the eyes of Babylon and the other MCs. We’d killed so many people, buried them in dark ditches, covering them in midnight dirt and stamping on their nameless graves with the soles of our vengeful boots. We’d gotten away with deceit, death, destruction…

Now our good fortune was finally running out.

Our imitation of The Navs to silence our Emperor enemies had always felt like an itch at the back of my mind that would, one day, come back to haunt me.

There were some ghosts I didn’t relish the thought of fighting. The Navs were one of them.

But I’d be ready. I was always going to be ready now.

I’d never be caught off guard again.

Crossing my arms over my chest, I eyed my family of outlaw misfits. “We’re not as scary as the public has you believe,” I told Sutton quietly.

“No.” He paused. “You’re worse.”

“Worse?” I turned to him and raised a brow.

“Tucker, when you sit at the head of that table, you take on a different look.”

“What do you mean?”

“In recent months, I think I’ve let myself get too complacent with you. I started to think you were soft. Softer. Not as hard as I’d once known. Maybe that’s because of the way I see you act around Ayda and Tate. The way you’ve taken on a kid, and you’ve acted like a father. The way you’ve taken in my girls and vowed to protect them. The way you bend more, willing to do whatever they want you to do to keep everyone happy and, more importantly, safe.” Sutton exhaled slowly again, shaking his head. “But in that room, you were the Drew Tucker I’ve always known. The fighter. The man willing to kill or be killed in order to keep his club safe.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing…”

“Isn’t it?”

I looked back out over my men. The reaper and the hounds were staring back at me from every corner of the room. The smell of well-worn leather, grease, smoke, and whiskey filled the air. It wasn’t conventional by any means, but it was my fucking family. The sight of them all in front of me, safe, protected for now, was what kept my heart sated and my mind somewhat peaceful. The thought of losing any one of those men or them getting scratched by a rival MC took me back to that dark place—the place that saw me sitting in an isolated prison cell for just under five years. The place that saw me taking gang beatings just for something to do when the silence rang in my ears, or the memories of Pete’s brutal death became too strong. The place where I used to enjoy the taste of my own blood after a cellmate had smashed his fist across my jaw, just because that taste reminded me I was still made up of human parts.

“You know,” I spoke quietly. “I don’t expect the outside world to understand the love I have for these men and their families, Howard. It’s not conventional, and I guess that’s one of the things I love most about it. My parents are gone. I have no siblings. I have no blood ties. So let me tell you that without these men…” I nodded to my club. “I’d never have had a reason to live. They are my reason. They are my heart. They own my damaged soul. Just like your daughters own yours.” I tilted my head his way once more. “And not so many nights ago, you told me to bring the man who hurt your baby girl to you so you could make him pay.”

Sutton’s eyes narrowed, and he swallowed loudly as he stared at me.

“I love my men the way you love your girls. There’s no difference except one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t deny who I am the way you do.”

Sutton’s scowl deepened instantly, his back going rigid as he raised his chin and stayed silent.

“And whether you admit it or not, Chief…” I leaned in closer. “I’m the guy you want on your team when you need to make someone pay. The Drew Tucker you’ve always known, the fighter, the man willing to kill or be killed in order to keep those he respects safe… he’s the guy who’s going to help you face your fears, destroy your demons, and crush the fingers of the kid who dared to even breathe in Sloane’s direction. So if I were you, I wouldn’t be so quick to discount that guy. Believe me… you’re gonna want him on your side when the shit hits the fan.”

Sutton’s eyes searched mine wildly. “How the fuck has this become my life?” he asked in a whisper, forcing the slow smirk to creep on my face.

“You got lucky.” I slapped a hand on his shoulder and gave him a shake before I laughed and turned back to the others, just in time to see Ayda waltzing across the room, her eyes wide as she asked me a million questions with one look. “This is the one you should really be scared of, Sutton,” I muttered under my breath.

“Already am, Tucker. Hence the reason I ended up teaching her how to shoot.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s debatable.”

“Don’t start with this crap again,” he grumbled.

Ayda fluttered to a stop mere feet from me, her eyes moving between Sutton and I, before deciding that the coast was clear and closing the distance between us so her arm slid around me easily. “Everything go okay?”

“As tempting as it would be for me to lie to you and say yes, I’m not that stupid anymore.” I side-eyed Sutton who was shaking his head before he took off in the direction of the bar. “Fancy taking a walk with me, Hanagan?”

“Lead the way.” Keeping her arm around my waist, she stepped to the side, waiting for me to lead.

I grabbed her hand so I could pull her through the crowds of men and women who had gathered together. As we got closer to the door of The Hut, Jedd stepped in front of me on my right, Slater doing the same on my left.

“Sorry, Drew, but we’re under orders to let no man or woman out of this building,” Slater practically growled as he slapped a hand on my shoulder.

“Under any circumstances,” Jedd said in an equally low, hoarse voice. “By order of the pres.”

I glanced between the two of them. “Get out of my way, dicks.”

“No can do,” Slater said firmly.

“We don’t break protocol,” Jedd added.

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “Your president is giving you a new order. Remove your hands from his leather, or he will break your fingers quicker than either one of you can blink.” I smiled flatly and batted my eyes at the two of them.

They loved to play with me, especially around Ayda.

Slater glanced at Jedd and raised a brow. “What say you, VP?”

“I’m not sure, Sarge. You think we can trust him not to get himself killed outside of this room?”

“No.” Slater smirked.

“Me either.”

I pushed past both of them, mumbling about them being idiotic fuckers as they moved aside. “Concentrate on the real threats. I’m going to clue in my old lady.”

Making our way outside, I stood on the porch for a second, surveying my yard and the area beyond the locked gates. Everything was quiet as Ayda pulled up beside me. Whenever I was on the verge of change, I found myself soaking up every second of silence. I never knew how long things were going to stay that way.

With a gentle squeeze of her fingers, she sucked in a breath and looked up at me with questions in those blue eyes. After a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure we were alone, her stare settled back on me. Dozens of those questions passed before she settled on the one that needed the attention most desperately.

“How bad is this, Drew?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“That makes sense. One Nav doesn’t really tell us much I suppose. How can we find out if there are more? How do we go about our daily shit without constantly looking over our shoulders? Where did you see him? Can you tell me anything?”

“Actually…” I took the first step down on the stairs and looked back at her. “It’s you I need to tell me a few things. When I saw the Nav, I was at Babylon High, Ayda.”

“The high school?” Ayda fell into a contemplative silence. She looked back over her shoulder where I imagined she was calculating where Tate and Sloane were with the twins and worrying over them. “Why? Why was he there? What could possibly be at the school other than… than the kids?”

I tugged on her hand and raised my chin, nodding behind me. “Let’s take that walk.” She eyed me with uncertainty, but like the amazing, trusting person she was, she followed me as I guided her down the steps and walked hand in hand with her across the yard in the opposite direction of the gates. We had some land out the back, enough for us to loop around the grassy areas a few times and soak in the cool air. “I couldn’t settle this morning. Call it a sixth sense, paranoia, or whatever you want, but I had this itch under my skin. Something felt off. One thing I’ve always learned to do over the years is pay attention to that itch and listen to my gut when it’s growling at me that something is wrong. I took a ride out and the next thing I knew, I was sitting outside Babylon High. This whole thing with Sloane had me needing to make sure her and Tate were safe. I looped around the back where no one could see me and snuck into the football field. One minute it was empty and all was good. But then…” I sighed and cleared my throat. “Then I saw Jacob Hove. He was out there alone… or so I thought. Someone in the bleachers caught his attention, and when I looked up, it was a Nav. I recognized the cut straight away. I couldn’t see who or tell whether I knew the guy. He was wearing a dark baseball cap, and he was hidden away. But Jacob knew him. He knew him, and he wasn’t scared. In fact… If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was a fucking friend of his.”

Ayda stopped walking, her chest rising and falling almost as though she was heading toward hyperventilating. After a blink of her eyes, she caught herself and frowned. Another mental reprimand creating chaos behind her eyes. “I should have known that bastard had some ulterior motive. Son of a bitch.” She pulled her hand from mine and kicked the earth, marching away before she spun and looked at me again. “If this is my fault…”

I shook my head. “This could be a number of things. There’s a chance, however small it may be, that this is all nothing more than coincidence.”

Covering her face with her hands, Ayda dragged them down until her fingers were pushed against her eyeballs. “It’s too much to be a coincidence. The first thing he did was try and provoke you. If I had to guess, I’d even say he knew you and I were together when he started following me that afternoon. He’s a manipulative bastard.” She dropped her hands and tipped her head down so she could look at the grass in thought. “I can almost bet you my next pay check that his next move will be to shake things up, to cause a rift in the club. But why? Why would he be working with the Navs?”

“Just because he knows one, it doesn’t mean he’s working with them. It does, however, mean we’ve underestimated him. Or I have…” I scowled, staring down at the ground myself for a moment before I pushed my hands into my jeans pockets and looked at her. “The unfortunate truth is that neither me or any of my guys know anything about this Hove guy. Sutton gave us a bit of family history back there, but his version of Jacob didn’t match up with yours. Grade A student. Perfect family background. Good in the community. No public arrests. Nothing that can give us a hint as to how the fuck someone like him knows someone from a group as threatening and widespread as The Navarro Rifles. Sutton knows Jacob is up to something now, sure, but his history is so white, so clean, so sparkling, there’s not even a hint of dust on his official records.” I inhaled slowly, releasing the air in my chest as I spoke. “Is there anything you can give me? Any info? Any… dirt?” I closed my eyes. “I don’t care if it’s something you think I’d rather not know. I don’t care if it involves you in any way. I just need… something. Anything. Anything that can give me a reason to nail this kid to the wall and get away with it without getting myself and the entire fucking MC killed in the process, ‘cause if Jacob is involved with the Navs and we don’t react, the whole of Babylon is about to change.”

“Sutton’s right,” Ayda said thoughtfully. “Because that’s what Jacob wanted everyone to see, but he wasn’t a fucking saint, Drew, he was just smart. Any time he came close to being caught, he’d call his big brother to come and bail him out before it got out of hand. I bailed him out once or twice myself by giving him an alibi. Stupid, but I was a teenager who thought she was in love.” Lifting her chin, Ayda met my eyes, and the burning ice made the blue sharp enough to cut. “He’s up to something. I can promise you that. I should have known it would have something to do with the club. I was too easy a target. I could fucking kill him for this.”

My frown deepened. “Back up. What alibis did you give him?”

“There was a couple of mornings he would catch up to me at school, and in that way of his, he would throw his arm around my shoulder and whisper I was with you last night. It was never really a question, more an order, but I didn’t think much about it. Never anything more than that. I wasn’t that blind. I was that stupid, though.”

I sighed and tried to concentrate. “High school would probably have been too soon for him to be any kind of prospect for the Navs, although him asking you to cover for him without question is the kinda thing I used to do…” I cleared my throat roughly and flared my nostrils. “And I guess we’ve already had Tate doing some sketchy shit for us as an MC and he’s only just out of fucking diapers,” I whispered, mainly to myself, but I knew she heard it. “Jacob being part of The Navs isn’t something I can rule out, but it doesn’t make sense to me.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to think. I tried to solve the puzzle. I tried to see through the fog. What wasn’t I getting?

“It’s a leap I can’t make, either. You’ve been the only MC in this town. No one but the Emps dared to come in, and that was just to fuck with you. So how would they have managed to get to Jacob, and why him? There was a kid…” she made a hand gesture as though trying to make her brain catch up with her train of thought. “His name was… I don’t know his name, but the guys called him Bubba. He lived in the trailer park up off 3130? Anyway, he was the kind of kid you could see them reaching out to. He was fearless, angry at the world and dealt pot to most of the kids in school. It’s why I keep thinking why Jacob and how? It doesn’t make sense.”

Bubba. With a name like that, and with the kid dealing in pot, I’d definitely remember him if I’d heard his name so much as whispered before. I tried to concentrate, and not focus on the fact that someone, even a snot-nosed kid, had been dealing any kind of drug in my town without me knowing.

“We’ve always had a good relationship with The Navs. We’ve had their respect, and at times, their backing, too. The Emps were always the biggest thorns in our side, never The Navs. We stayed out of their way, they had no reason to pass through Babylon without either letting us know or stopping by to say hi. The history between the two clubs has always been calm. Which is why it’s even more worrying that one of them is in town without letting us know, and he just so happens to be on friendly terms with my girlfriends ex-fucking-boyfriend whose nose I smashed onto the counter of Rusty’s not so long ago.”

I put my hands on my hips, looked up at the sky and let my shoulders drop.

“This feels bad, Ayda,” I told her with way more honesty than I’d even told my own men.

“Really bad,” she agreed, closing the distance between us, and resting her hands against my ribs, her forehead falling to my chest. “How do we figure this all out before it starts raining fire?”

“For now, we carry on as normal, but we lay low. You go to work, but there’s gonna be Deeks and Kenny watching over you every damn shift, and that’s non-negotiable.”

“I’m not arguing that point. Can you spare them both, though?”

“The real question is could I go on if I didn’t spare them and something happened to you?” I raised a brow and flexed my jaw.

Smiling sadly, she nodded her understanding and drew in another breath. “Do what you have to.”

“Always do,” I mouthed back, grateful for her understanding. “Sloane and Tate will go to school as normal…”

“I wish there was a way to get Jacob fired. I’d feel much better if the one tie to the Navs was out of the school.”

“And I understand that… more than you know, but for now, an enemy in plain sight, working nine ‘til five every day is a much safer enemy to us than one hiding in the shadows, eyeing us like he’s the wolf and we’re the sheep.”

“Jacob may be in the light,” she said with a snort of derision. “But it’s the Nav that’s hiding in his shadow that I’m worried about the most. I just can’t get that haunted feeling to go away…” She trailed off, her eyes going distant, and her mind ticking almost loud enough for me to hear it.

“So let’s bring him out to play.”

“Tell me how. You know I’m on board. All in. Remember.”

My smirk tickled my lips as I stared at her through hooded eyes. “Believe me, that’s something I’m never gonna forget.