“So what is it, exactly, that you’re telling us here, Nash?”

 

Honestly, he had no idea. But he had to come up with something. Sitting in front of the usual assholes who held all the strings for the Steel Phoenixes, he was basically there with his dick in his hand after months of investigating—and all because Eliza had pleaded with him not to turn her dad in. If he had it his way, Nash would have thrown Darryl to the wolves in a heartbeat. Not only was the guy sketchy as fuck, but Nash didn’t appreciate the way he manhandled his daughter. If he did that kind of shit in public, what exactly was going on in the Truman house in private?

 

Still, Eliza had presented her case for her dad’s innocence, and against his better judgement, Nash decided to believe her. Maybe his leads were wrong. Maybe he was following the wrong trail of breadcrumbs. Maybe he was falling for her and suddenly her opinion held more weight than all his physical evidence. Whatever the case may be, he’d come before his Phoenix brothers tonight to admit he had probably followed a false lead all this time, and that the dean wasn’t the man they were hunting after all.

 

“Was my explanation unclear in any way?” he asked, stretching his legs, then crossing one leg over his knee. It was like facing a tribunal of some kind, all the king shits of the MC sitting behind one long table, Nash on a chair in front of them. Unlike a tribunal, however, these assholes didn’t have stacks of paper in front of them—just alcohol and a mountain of ashy, finished cigarettes. As he watched good ol’ Micky take a long drag, he was itching to fish the pack out of his pocket and light up himself. But this wasn’t a social visit. He wasn’t here to drink and smoke like the rest of them—Nash was here to present his findings, or lack thereof, to the men who were finally putting their collective foot down.

 

“No, there was nothing wrong with the way you explained yourself,” Hammond, an old Brit with a penchant for dipping into his own coke supply, growled in that cigarette-tainted voice of his. “It’s what you had to say that’s left us… confused.”

 

“Look, I don’t know what you want me to say,” Nash said with a sigh, offering up a little half-shrug to add to his projected nonchalance. His insides were churning, however. “I’ve been following a lot of leads. A lot. The freelance guys are good on their word because they got reputations to uphold, but I just think that the dean is too easy a target. It’s been hard to get here, but now it’s like a cakewalk.”

 

“Maybe with good reason,” Micky remarked. Nash’s eyes darted to him quickly. The old man was always in Nash’s corner, no matter the trouble he was in, but he could tell by the tone of Mick’s voice that he wasn’t totally confident in Nash right now. “Maybe you just finally got ‘im, Nash. Bring him in and let us do the rest.”

 

“But I don’t want to spook the real perp by going after someone with as much power and reputation as Dean Darryl Truman,” Nash argued. That much was true, anyway. If Eliza was right and her dad would never do anything like this, the real asshole behind the deaths of his Phoenix brothers might run. “You just gotta give me more time.”

 

“Nobody has a problem with giving you time,” Toby Barnes insisted. Head of accounting, bald-headed Toby refused all vices but women. “It’s that you probably have the guy and you aren’t acting on it. That’s where we have a problem.”

 

While he didn’t think the bigshots at the Steel Phoenix Motorcycle Club would take his news lightly, he hadn’t expected some kind of inquisition about it. Shaking his head, Nash scratched at the stubble on his cheek. Eliza liked it. She said she liked the way it felt on her thighs when she was tied down and he was teasing the absolute fuck out of her with his tongue. He hadn’t said anything at the time, but he loved the way she twitched and quivered under the roughness of the hairs. Nash swallowed thickly, somewhat annoyed at how easily his thoughts drifted to Eliza—and over nothing, really.

 

“Look,” he said again, his brain working overtime at how to rationally explain his somewhat irrational thinking. Darryl could very well be the asshole behind all of this, the grand mastermind who wants more than just controlling a university, but Eliza had planted a seed of doubt in Nash’s mind that was starting to blossom. “I don’t know what to say. Darryl Truman seemed like my guy, and now I’m having doubts. I want to be sure. I want to make sure I don’t spook the real perp and have a bunch of our guys end up dead as a consequence.”

 

“And why would that happen?”

 

“Use your fucking head, Toby,” Nash snapped. “It’d be a message. That’s what all the killings have been about… Sending the Steel Phoenixes a message, that we’re not at the top of the totem pole anymore, you know?”

 

To describe the silence that fell over the group of men as uncomfortable would have been an understatement. Shaking his head, Nash busied himself with a nonexistent bit of fluff on his pants, not looking up until Micky asked the question he’d been dreading.

 

“Aren’t you fucking the dean’s kid?”

 

Heat rose to Nash’s cheeks, his hands threatening to curl into fists. Even though he’d told Eliza what kind of world he actually lived in, he didn’t want her to be a part of it. He didn’t want to hear her name come out of any of their dirty mouths.

 

“Yeah,” Hammond mused, nodding as a lecherous smile spread across his lips, “what was her name again? Belle?”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” Nash said dismissively. “It’s not important.”

 

“Clearly it is,” Micky remarked, and when Nash met his eyes, he saw the familiar hint of betrayal lurking. “If it wasn’t important, if she wasn’t important, you’d give her name up without a second thought.”

 

“Come on, Mick—”

 

“I think you’re getting swayed, Nash,” Toby said loudly enough to speak over him. “Swayed by pussy.”

 

Nash scoffed noisily. “Are you fucking serious?”

 

“Look,” Toby continued, his little speech earning him nods from the rest of the men around the table, “if you think it’s the dean, you better fucking act on it and get his ass in here. You’re dangerously close to losing your place in the club, Nash. Consider that the next time you try to cover for some uptight bitch.”

 

If he wasn’t a man with a better sense of self-control, Nash would have launched himself across the space between him and Toby and throttled the prick. Instead, the only hint of anger to show was a twitch of his eye, and he was sure it was lost on the darkness of their little interrogation room.

 

With a half-hearted wave toward the door from Micky, Nash was dismissed, and he pushed out of his chair was such force that its legs scraped across the floor. Jaw clenched, he stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him, in search of the nearest wall for him to take his frustrations out on—followed swiftly by a very, very strong drink.