Saber thought for a moment, his eyes dark and menacing. “You both leave now.”
I walked over to the girl and hauled her up by her elbow, then turning my back on my rivals, walked out of the clubhouse and into the midday sun.
INDY
I don’t know what I expected when Cade returned. But him walking in with a busted-up girl from a rival club wasn’t it.
I was in the clubhouse when the door opened and Cade swaggered in with the girl, Joker and Vader behind him.
“What’s going on?” I asked as he walked toward me. I looked past him at the girl. Her face looked like she’d gone a few rounds with a brick wall.
“She needs medical attention,” Cade said without looking at me. He made his way around the bar and dug a hand into the built-in ice bucket in the counter. I could read Cade like a book. He was angry at everyone and everything, and he wasn’t going to bother hiding it.
I folded my arms and didn’t move. “I can see that.”
“Good. Then how about you see to fixing her.”
I remained rooted to the spot. One eyebrow went up. “I’m going to need a little more information than that,” I said bluntly.
Only now did Cade look at me. His usually sparkling eyes were dark and cold. “She’s got a busted lip. A black eye—Jesus Christ, Indy, I’m not the one with a medical degree.”
He pulled his hand from the ice bucket and wrapped it in a wet towel. But before they disappeared under the fabric, I noticed some very bruised knuckles. He’d been in a fight. Not with the mysterious girl— Cade would never touch a woman in anger—no, if I were to guess, I would say he got those swollen knuckles giving someone a taste of their own medicine.
Fine. I unfolded my arms. Because he had obviously helped save this girl from whatever had happened to her, I was prepared to let it go. For now.
I looked over at her. She was shivering. Not because she was cold, but because she was broken. And quite possibly drunk. Mascara ran in big black streaks down her cheeks and she wouldn’t look at me. She simply wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the ground.
I offered a gentle hand to her shoulder. “Come on, honey. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She looked at me with nervous eyes. Then they shifted to Cade, asking him for permission. But he was busy flipping the top off a beer, his mouth fixed, his jaw clenching.
“Come on,” I said to her. “I’ll get you fixed up.”
Cade met my eyes and I matched his coolness with the coldest Arctic front a warm-blooded woman could pull off. The beer bottle paused at his lips as we passed by, and my eyes didn’t leave his until we disappeared from the room.
“Are you really a doctor?” the girl asked as I got to work on her face with antiseptic cream and a Q-tip.
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“What?” I asked. “I don’t look like a doctor?”
She shrugged. “It’s just, well… this is kind of the last place I’d expect to find a woman like you.”
Sometimes I still felt the same way.
“That man…Cade. Are you his old lady?”
“No,” I replied. But when I thought about it, that wasn’t quite true. I was his old lady. We just hadn’t said much about us to anyone. Because before we knew it, the reality of an MC life had pointed a gun at us and fired. Isaac was dead. Whether I was Cade’s old lady or not seemed irrelevant. Unimportant. But now that I thought about it… yeah, I was Cade’s old lady.
“You know, The Knights didn’t have anything to do with that guy’s death,” the girl said, completely out of the blue.
“Oh, yeah? How do you know that?”
She hesitated and then leaned closer to me as if she was about to reveal a big secret. “They don’t know it, but I overheard Saber and Hogg talking about it the other day. Hogg asked Saber if they were involved and Saber said no. Apparently, they have a big heroin shipment coming in from a new supplier and now wasn’t the time to be starting any kind of melee with a rival club. He said they needed to keep their crosshairs on their new supplier and didn’t need the distraction.”
Once she started, she just couldn’t stop. She was like a dam of secrets, all of them spilling out of her mouth. Listening to her go on, I thought about the MC saying: a scorned old lady can take down a club. And by the sounds of it, the loose cannon in front of me was heading in that direction. She knew things, she said. And she was going to make Clutch pay for hitting her.
“Saber and the club are deep in the local heroin trade. He knew about that dead guy’s involvement with a heroin deal, but with the big shipment coming in, he wasn’t going to make a move on it. Hogg asked him if he knew who killed him. Was it the Southern Sons or Satan’s Tribe, and again, Saber told him no. The Knights are heavily allied to the Tribe and he’d confirmed it with their president.”