She was dead fucking right. How the hell could I promise her that when I couldn’t get a grip on my temper? But fuck, I didn’t want to lose her. I needed her light to help me through my dark. I’d figure this shit out so she never needed to be exposed to it again. “I’ve only got my honesty to give you. I will make this right. You will never be scared of me again.”
“I wasn’t scared of you,” she whispered. “I was scared for you. And for the guy you were fighting. I’ve never felt afraid of you, but I really thought you could have killed that guy tonight. That’s what I was scared of.”
“So what are you telling me here, Roe? Are you walking away from this before we even get it started?” I’d fight her tooth and nail, but first I needed to know where we stood.
“I’m saying what I said when you first got here—I don’t want to talk about it tonight. I want you to give me the space to think it over.”
Out of everything that had gone on, I realised that if I didn’t give her that space, the rest wouldn’t matter. She needed to know up-front that I’d not force myself on her when she needed time out.
I nodded and dropped my arms. “You’ve got tonight. After that, you let me back in here,”—I placed my hand against her chest—“so we can talk this out.”
On the way home, I grasped how important this thing with Monroe was to me. I’d never looked for another woman after Tenille. Had never wanted the complication again. Had never wanted to put a woman’s life at risk like Tenille’s had been just by being married to me. But leaving Monroe’s house that night, without knowing where we stood, caused my chest to constrict in ways it never had. This wasn’t love—not yet—but it meant something to me. Something I wanted to fight for.
I spent the next day taking care of club business. King and I had managed to move past our issues. I’d been making an effort not to lose my temper with any club members, and he’d been distracted by shit going on with Jen. He’d also been walking around in a mood due to Bronze finding no dirt on Ryland yet. He also hadn’t found anything useful on the guy whose head had been delivered as a warning.
King sent me out early to clean up a mess one of our clients had gotten themselves in. The cleaning side of our business had ticked along quietly over the years, but King had ramped it up over the last month due to our drug income dropping. The club was bleeding cash, so he took on almost any cleaning job sent our way these days. He’d been more picky until recently, which concerned me. Who the fuck knew whether these new clients could keep their mouths closed about what we did for them? The last fucking thing we needed was one of them singing to the cops.
I arrived back at the club around four that afternoon to find King in his office having a heated discussion with Bronze. Something about an attack King planned that Bronze was against.
“You do that and you’ll have the feds crawling over you like you never imagined they could,” Bronze warned.
The vein in King’s neck pulsed. He was worked up more than usual. “I’m sick of sitting here doing fucking nothing, Bronze. Ryland’s had my hands tied for far too long, and Marx has evaded me because of it. I need to get out there and slit throats and cut some fucking balls off. Anything to make people talk and tell me where the hell Marx is and who’s behind it all.”
“Jesus, King, stop fucking talking,” Bronze muttered. “I don’t want to fucking know this shit.” He was exhausted. The dark circles under his eyes and the way his shoulders slumped told that story.
I stepped in. “Whose throats are we slitting?”
Bronze held up his hands. “I’m leaving. Don’t call me when the feds throw you in jail.” He didn’t wait for King’s response, just simply walked away from the conversation. King didn’t try to stop him either, which told me he was serious about his plans.
“Bronze ruled out one of the three Italians we’ve been looking at. That leaves two. I’m done with quietly investigating them. I want you to take one team of members to one of them, while I take another team to the other one. If we have to slit their men’s throats in order to make them talk, so fucking
be it. This happens tomorrow. By the end of the day we’ll know which one it is.”
“And Marx?”
“He’ll be out of business once we know who’s controlling him.”
I rubbed the back of my neck as the tension crept in. “Fuck, King, I’m not sure that Bronze isn’t right about this.”
King scowled. “Last week you would have been all over this plan. What’s changed?”
“Last week I let my mood dictate my actions. This week I’m trying like fuck not to do that.” I’d failed so far, but a man could only try. And this shit King suggested could fuck the club right up if we weren’t careful. “We go out there and cause a blood bath like you’re suggesting, that’s a lot of potential enemies we’re creating. Those crazy fucking Italians have some loyal supporters.”
“You think we can’t handle ourselves, brother?” King had a god complex some days. On others, he managed to lock it down. Today was not one of those days.
“Have we been handling ourselves, King? You tell me. From my perspective, it feels like we’ve lost some of our edge because of Ryland. He’s too close to us for you to even consider this attack. Bronze isn’t shitting you when he says the feds will be all over us if we do this.”
“So we just sit with our hands tied, holding our balls, and allow one man to decide what we can and can’t fucking do? Fuck that. We’re in the middle of a fucking war here, Hyde. We don’t run from war. We stand and we fucking fight to the bitter end.”
I pushed my anger away. I needed to get my point across without my temper getting in the way. “We stand this time? It might be the bitter end.”
King stood with his hands clenched by his side, with an expression on his face I knew to mean he’d already made up his mind. “Tomorrow, Hyde. We get this done.”
Chapter 27
Monroe
I relaxed into my comfy chair in my office, both hands wrapped around a hot mug of coffee, and let the stress of the day leave my body. It was just after five on Wednesday night, and Fox had two more clients to finish up with. One, he was almost done with, the other waited patiently for him. He had one of the best reputations in Sydney, so people were always happy to wait for him. I was certain that if he ever left me, my business would go downhill fast.