I reached over to her side of the bed and found the sheets were cold. She hadn’t reached for me in the night like she usually did, and I didn’t remember her having any nightmares, either. I lifted my hands and looked at my palms. Shit. They were tore up and oozing from the shovel I’d used the day before. I should have worn a pair of gloves or something.
“Hey, Cam,” Trix’s nan, Amy, called out when I came out of my room a while later. As much as I wanted to lie in bed and sleep the entire day away, I had shit to do. Cars still needed to be fixed and I needed to go see my baby sister at some point.
“Hey, Amy. How’s Poet doin’?” I asked as I grabbed a cup of coffee from the end of the bar. “And where is everyone?”
“He’s being an ornery old goat, but getting better,” she said with a tired smile. “Pretty much everyone headed home today—”
“What?” I snapped, glancing around the room. “You serious?”
“Patrick sent word. Not sure what’s going on, but he told Dragon that it was okay for everyone to split, as long as they stayed vigilant.”
“That’s what they fuckin’ said before,” I mumbled angrily.
“You’ll have to take it up with him.”
“So, why are you still here?” I asked as she pulled her robe tighter around her body.
“Feel better in here with Patrick still laid up,” Amy said with a sheepish smile. “I know everything is probably fine, but I’m not ready to go back to regular life yet.”
“Yeah, I hear you. Trix and I aren’t leavin’ yet, either.” I leaned against the bar top and sipped my coffee, grimacing when my palm brushed against the hot mug.
“What did you do to your hands?” she asked sharply, moving toward me. “Holy hell, Cameron. You idiot!”
I looked at her in surprise as she pulled my hand out in front of me.
“Come on, I’ll clean these up.”
“They’re fine,” I replied, shaking my head. “You seen Trix today?”
Her mouth firmed for a minute before she looked up from my hand.
“She went over to Brenna and Dragon’s.”
“’Course she did,” I grumbled, shaking my head.
She ignored my words, but went silent for a moment before saying, “Come on, kid. I’ll get these hands patched up.”
As soon as my hands were disinfected and wrapped, I made my way to the garage. I had a couple of cars I could work on while the place was mostly empty, so I cranked up some music and started. Just because we were in the middle of shit didn’t mean the work stopped—we needed the legal income.
Running illegal shit may pay the bills, but it didn’t give us clean money to report to the IRS, and fuck if I was going down for tax evasion.
A couple hours later, I heard slow footsteps come into the garage, stopping next to where I was crammed underneath a car.
“What’s up—” I asked, rolling myself out. “Will?”
“Hey,” Will said, his mouth pulling up in a half-grin.
“When’d they let you out?” I asked happily, getting to my feet. “How you doin’?”
“All right,” he replied, closing his eyes as his voice cracked.
“Fuck, man. I’m so sorry about Micky.”
“Yeah,” he whispered huskily, nodding his head and looking over my shoulder. “Yeah.”
“How’s your mom?”
“She’s hangin’ in.” Will’s body began to sway and I took a nervous step toward him.
“Let’s sit down,” I said calmly, waiting for him to get himself together before I led our way into the clubhouse. I knew he wouldn’t want me to help him, but it was fucking slow going as he shuffled toward a chair and sat.
“Shoulda spoke up sooner,” Will stuttered as we settled in. “Shoulda said somethin’ about those boys when I first started buyin’ off them.”
“You couldn’t have known, brother,” I replied calmly, watching him closely.
The day before Gram’s party, we’d all been called in to the clubhouse for a meeting. Turned out that Will knew the people that had been fucking with us. He hadn’t put the two together at first—it had taken him a while to figure it out.
The guys he’d been buying his steroids off of for the past six months had decided to branch out. That’s what they told him. Apparently, they’d thought he had some sort of allegiance to them because they were supplying his ’roids. They’d asked him to help them—be their muscle. It just went to show how completely fucking naïve the boys were.
There was no way Will would ever turn his back on the club. Even if he’d wanted to leave the only family he’d ever known, the brothers would never let him.
When we’d realized that the little shit–the slashed tires, the bike accident and the shady informants–were the work of some college students, we’d been relieved.
Christ.
We’d been fucking ecstatic. We could deal with a group of snot-nosed punks with too much time on their hands and not enough money. They were a fucking joke. All the stupid shit they’d done had made sense—it wasn’t the work of men like us trying to fuck with our heads, it was immature posturing by a bunch of boys.