Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3) (27 page)

"Let me understand this, Janie darling," Antony said, not ready to dismiss me. "You blame Marco for Wolf's arrest. You have had him beat. And now you come to us to involve us in your situation. What is your game plan here?"

"Honestly?" I said, feeling my shoulders shrug and my voice take on a hint of desperation. "I don't know. At this point, I'm scrambling to do anything I can. That news story last night about the rape kits? That was me. I uncovered them and dropped them on Collings' desk with a warning. I outsourced to kick Marcus' ass. I looked into his family. I'm doing whatever idea pops into my head. I have no real plan. At this point, I'm just creating chaos. And I... I have no fucking idea if anything I am doing is even making any kind of difference and I'm just so..." I trailed off on a hopeless little hand gesture, shaking my head.

"Matteo, I think it is time to offer this lady a drink," Antony supplied. "Luca and I have an appointment with a man in the hospital," Antony winked at me, touching my shoulder as he passed.

"What's your poison? Usually it's only right to give a beautiful woman a nice glass of wine, but it sounds like you're having a stiff two fingers of whiskey kind of day."

I snorted, shaking my head. "Or a whole bottle. Sure, whiskey is fine," I said, following him toward the bar.

Matteo ordered us each a drink and took a seat next to me, turning on the stool to face me. "I understand what you're trying to do here, Janie. But you are going to lose it if you don't slow down."

"What other choice is there? Let him sit in jail endlessly while I twiddle my thumbs?"

"You've done more in twenty-four hours than anyone, even Wolf, could expect from you. Have you even slept?"

I got an hour, if that counted. "I don't sleep. So I might as well work on this. Reign is on the lawyer angle, but I am still counting on this blowing over before it goes that far."

"You realize the repercussions of leaking those rape kits, right? IA will be all over NBPD. No one will get away with anything."

"Honestly, Matteo," I said, putting down my empty glass and standing. He did as well, of course. The freak. "I don't give a fuck what happens to anyone else if I can get Wolf out of this. Thanks for the drink."

"You love him," his voice called after me, making me stop dead.

Love.

I loved him?

Even as I tried to deny it to myself, I knew there was no way to push it away once it was unearthed. Somehow, someway, sometime along the way, he had done something to my cold, shriveled little heart. That was why I was working so hard, keeping myself too occupied to think about why I needed to sleep in something that smelled like him, why it made my blood boil to be around the club whores, why I was willing to threaten an honest cop to get him to do something he had avoided all his career- erase evidence.

All of that so I didn't realize what the seizing feeling in my chest, the way breathing was hard when I thought of him, the way I felt very close to tears most of the day, was.

I loved him.

Crap.

I turned back, lifting my chin. "Yeah. And some day, Matteo, you'll love someone like I love him and you'll understand why I have to do what I have to do."

With that, I walked out of Famiglia and went back to my car.

--

I walked into The Henchmen compound half an hour later, slamming the door closed, and seeing the common area was cleared of all the bikers from the night before. All that was left was Reign, Summer, Cash, Repo, and... Lo.

All eyes turned to me and, for reasons I don't understand in the least, I blurted it out.

"I love Wolf."

"No shit, babe," Reign said, rolling his eyes.

"Of course you do, honey," Summer said, squeezing Reign's knee like she was relaying some silent message.

"He's a little old for you, kid," Cash winked, letting his arm fall from Lo's shoulders as she moved to stand.

"Another one bites the dust," Repo mumbled under his breath, shaking his head.

"Janie..." Lo said, looking like she wanted to hug me or something equally as girly. Where was my badass leader when I needed her? Had loved turned her sappy too?

"I need to hit or shoot something," I declared before she could say anything else.

Lo looked at Cash and Cash looked to Reign, who shrugged.

"Yes!" Summer said, jumping up. "Just us, none of the guys."

"Summer..."

"I won't shoot up the damn compound again, Reign," she said in a voice that had the effect of an eye-roll.

"Look, I don't think..." Reign tried in a voice that suggested he was going to shut our idea down, making all three of us close ranks, Lo with her hands on her hips, me with my arms crossed over my chest, and Summer with a brow-raise any method actor would be envious of.

"Oh shit..." Repo said, smiling as he sat back in his chair.

"Bro, I think we both know you can try to fight this, but it's going to have the same result."

"Three women who love weapons a little too much in my backyard with guns," Reign nodded.

"Someone let me into the gun safe," Summer said, giving her man a smile that promised the kind of gratitude that came with nudity at a later time.

Fifteen minutes later, we were out in the yard, facing the targets the men kept up at all times, the men themselves making no secret about them watching us from the safety of the picnic tables about twenty yards behind us.

"I didn't know the AK would kick like that!" Summer insisted to us, referencing the time she accidentally shot the side of the compound.

"He should have warned you," Lo agreed, loading her gun without looking. She could build, load, and shoot guns in her sleep.

"I'm actually a good shot," Summer insisted.

"Let's see it then," Lo urged.

"First we need to talk about Janie's little admission," Summer said, giving me a look that suggested she would never let it go if we didn't.

"Stupid fucking Matteo Grassi threw that at me when I was leaving."

"He's one good looking guy," Lo added and I felt myself smiling. It was nice to talk to a woman again.

"Yeah, well, he's an asshole for pointing that out."

"Not to be the devil's advocate here, but... shouldn't you have known that without him pointing it out?" Summer asked.

"I was a little busy!" I insisted, being the first to turn to the targets and squeezing off a few rounds.

"Wow... you got better at that," Lo nodded.

"Wolf taught me a trick," I admitted and even I could hear the dreaminess in my voice. Summer was right, I should have realized it before Matteo pointed it out.

"So you guys have been shooting together," Lo said in a way that was begging for more information.

"Yeah and covered up evidence together, bought washing machines together..."

"And..." Summer pressed, her eyes dancing.

"That too," I agreed, looking away from them.

"Oh, Janie..." Lo's voice dipped.

"It's not a big deal," I insisted, taking aim at another target.

"I think we all know that it is a really big deal," Lo countered. She paused when I didn't respond. "Well... how was it?"

I snorted, shaking my head. "I don't really have anything to compare it to, Lo."

"So what? Doesn't mean you don't know."

"Was he... good to you?" Summer asked hesitantly.

"Oh my god, could this get any cheesier?" I asked, shaking my head.

"Well... was he?" Lo pressed, starting to sound almost worried.

"It was good. He was good. Everything was good. Moving on."

"Babe," Lo said, sounding serious. "You're going to get him back. None of us will let this go much further. You've done a lot. And if it doesn't lose steam before it makes it to trial, I promise the judge and a few select members of the jury will be living well on Henchmen and Hailstorm money. Or we can tattoo an escape map on Repo's back and he can get himself locked up and bust them out ala Prison Break style," she added with a smile.

I felt a laugh well up and burst out, swiping away the dark cloud I had felt hanging over me for two days. I acted on instinct and threw my arms around her. She stumbled back a foot and her hands paused, surprised, before going around me.

"Hugging with loaded guns isn't the best idea, ladies!" Repo called and I could hear the frustration there.

"Neither is yelling at people with loaded guns, jackass!" I shot back.

That night, I didn't sleep.

I wandered down the hall and into the common room, finding a shirtless Repo sitting on the couch across from the giant TV, two beers on the table in front of him, one on either side of a giant bowl of popcorn.

"Figured you'd come eventually," he said, his eyes looking heavy. He was on his last leg of sleeplessness. He would crash eventually in the next twelve hours. I wondered if he was staying awake for my sake.

"What are we watching?"

"Car show."

"Well that's one way to make me sleep."

And, with the first lights of morning, I finally did.

TWENTY-TWO

Detective Collings

Things were seriously screwed.

Five years. All he needed was five more years of things going the status quo, no matter how messed up that status quo was. He wanted to handle the cases he could, overlook the cases he couldn't, and ignore the situations where the bad guys took out the worse guys because, well, alls well that ends with a shithead in the pen or the ground.

He'd underestimated the new blood.

When he'd said that flippant comment about a wolf in the morgue, he never thought the guy would put two and two together. As far as anyone knew, Wolf had no motive to take out Lex Keith. In general, their two organizations largely ignored each other. If Collings hadn't been on three other cases over the years, since Wolf was a young man, that had the same characteristics that Wolf did have a loose connection with, he never would have placed it himself.

Then all of a sudden, he found out Marco was running the boot prints.

And from there, it spiraled out of control, leading to an arrest and the most frustrating interrogation in his career.

The evidence was shit. Normally, it would never stand.

But Marco pitched a fit and the captain just waved a hand.

Then Collings got a desk full of files from a clerk who said there was an order for them, an order he never placed. With it came the email.

He'd actually smiled when he finished reading it for the second time. It didn't have to be signed for him to know who it was from. Janie. Hailstorm's favorite child. Lo's little prodigy.

See... if Collings had learned one thing from the dissolution of his marriage twelve years before, it was that women will only take so much shit from their lives.

Apparently Janie hit her max level of shit-taking and she was going to take down every mother fucker who had ever piled it on in the first place.

That included him.

Not because he had ever done anything to her, but because he had simply... not done anything at all. So he bunkered down and he got all of the rape kits sent out to the lab well before the first news story ever hit. The station had watched it in silence, the tension a palpable thing humming off of every crooked cop in the building.

"Tell me there is something we can do to head this off," the captain yelled out, watching his men duck their heads. They were all fucked and they knew it. And, by extension, so was the captain.

"Those rape kits are at the lab," Collings supplied, making all eyes, including his new blood's, fall on him.

"Come again?"

Collings shrugged. "I, ah, found them laying around. Figured there must have been some kind of mistake so I re-opened the cases, properly labeled everything, and sent them off to the lab."

The captain exhaled a loud breath. "You just saved your own ass at least Collings," he said with a shrug. "Time will tell if the rest of us will be so lucky."

Up until that moment, he hadn't considered it an olive branch that Janie had sent him. She gave him the only thing she had that could have saved him his job when IA finally came in to investigate. That was why she asked him to bury the boot print evidence (which, in his humble opinion, was not much evidence at all to begin with. How it was going to actually go to trial was completely beyond him). She gave him his job security, the guarantee of his pension, by making it seem like he was the only detective on the force who was doing his job.

But in exchange for that, she was asking him to do the exact opposite of his job.

Collings sighed, powering down his computer and going home for the night. He needed to sleep on it.

He woke up to the news of Marco getting his ass handed to him in a back alley.

He deleted the boot print and hoped for the best.

Nothing happened for a full day, making Collings do nothing but sit and sweat.