MasukMarcus
By the one-hour mark, Jarek was offended. Maybe a slight bit worried with a dash of frustration. But definitely offended.
Which, admittedly, was one of my favorite versions of him.
Because somewhere around the forty-minute mark, he’d stopped treating this like a kinky little mountain game and had started acting like baby doll had personally insulted his ancestors.
Every empty trail and abandoned hiding spot seemed t
MarcusThe anonymous message sat on my phone for less than five minutes before Nixx told me the number was useless.That did not mean the message was.MAYBE THE WRONG KING IS WEARING THE CROWN.Jarek read it twice from the edge of the bed while Sable leaned against his shoulder, then handed the phone back to me without touching anything else on the screen. None of us needed to discuss whether I should answer. We had spent the afternoon creating a crack in the club specifically so Mateo would believe there was somewhere to push. Ignoring the first hand that reached through it would defeat the entire fucking point.What took longer was deciding how interested I was supposed to look.“Not eager,” Sable said. “If you answer in thirty seconds, you look like you’ve been waiting for somebody to offer you his patch.”“I have standards.”Jarek gave me a dry look. “Do you?”“Occasionally.”The humor lasted just long enough to take the edge off. Then Nixx came upstairs and rigged my phone to pre
SableThe hardest part about staging a fight between my husbands was getting Marcus to stop enjoying it.We had agreed on the bones of the performance before lunch. Nixx and Benny knew enough to monitor whatever happened afterward. Brian and Max knew because neither of them deserved to get dragged into a fake leadership collapse without warning. Everyone else would hear exactly what Mateo needed them to hear: Jarek wanted to move on a Serrano-linked storage property that afternoon, Marcus thought the intelligence was too thin, and for once the disagreement would not disappear behind a closed door.The property itself was real. Nixx had connected it to one of the shell companies in Mateo’s ledger, but activity there was inconsistent and nothing proved Mateo, the warning Jackal, or anybody important would be on-site. Under normal circumstances, we would have watched it longer.That made the argument believable.By three, the main room was full enough to give us an audience without makin
MarcusThe prisoner had barely finished smiling when I looked at Jarek.“There it is.”Jarek’s eyes shifted to me.“That’s the rumor,” I said. “Not just that you came home damaged. That I already proved I can run the club without you.”For one beat he stared at me.Then he snorted.Not an angry sound. Not wounded pride. An actual fucking snort.The prisoner’s smile faltered.Jarek leaned back in his chair, careful of his ribs, and looked me over like he was seriously considering the question for the first time. “Think you’d make a better President?”“Fuck no. Too much paperwork.”Sable covered her mouth with one hand while Jarek nodded toward the prisoner. “Hear that? Apparently my marriage is safe.”“I said I don’t want your job, not that your marriage is safe.”That broke Sable. She laughed hard enough that she had to turn away, and even Jarek’s mouth twitched. The man tied to the chair stopped looking pleased with himself.Good. He had expected something else. Maybe anger. Maybe Ja
MarcusBy the time the fourth rumor reached us, Jarek had started looking at every doorway like it had personally offended him.The false Dagger cuts at the Vipers warehouse had not fooled Brian, and the stolen-cargo paperwork had not fooled Max. That should have helped. Instead, I could practically watch Jarek’s nerves tighten every time another message came in from a club that did not know us well enough to separate fact from whatever Mateo wanted circulating that hour.Sable was downstairs with Nixx when Jarek finally said, “Until we know how far this spreads, she stays inside the compound.”I looked up from the burner report I had been reading. He stood near the bedroom window with his arms folded, staring toward the gate. The bruising along his ribs had faded enough that he no longer moved like every breath hurt, but recovery had not done much for the part of him that wanted to control every variable he could see. Yesterday he had let Sable ride south with Brian because she was t
SableBrian called before breakfast, and the first thing out of his mouth was, “Before you hear this from somebody else, no, I do not believe your club did it.”That got my attention faster than the coffee Marcus had just set in front of me. Jarek was already awake at the kitchen table with a legal pad beside his plate, pretending the fact that he had made it downstairs without anybody helping him meant he was fully recovered. Marcus stopped halfway to his own chair when I put Brian on speaker and asked what happened.“One of our storage properties got hit overnight,” Brian said. He sounded tired rather than angry, which told me he had already worked through whatever his first reaction had been. “South side warehouse. Mostly bike parts, some old records, tools. Nobody was there. Security caught three men going in through the rear around two twenty.”Jarek’s pen stopped moving. “And?”“They were wearing Black Daggers cuts.”The room went still, and I looked at Jarek first because I kne
JarekThe call came at four seventeen the next afternoon.I knew the time because I had been staring at the clock when Marcus’s phone rang.Not because Sable was downstairs.Progress.Marcus answered on the second ring, listened for less than five seconds, then stood so fast the chair scraped across the floor. When I asked what happened, he looked straight at me.“Middletown Motor Works.”Everything in me changed.The Daggers owned the shop through a legitimate company handling motorcycle repair, parts, and fleet work. The front doors were closed for inventory, leaving Bryce, Smitty, and two trusted mechanics inside. The back office held years of old vendor invoices and local camera archives. At that morning’s operations briefing, we had assigned Stone and Nixx to pull those records tomorrow because two names from Mateo’s ledger appeared in old files. Enough brothers had heard that plan to make the timing a problem.Marcus put the phone on speaker, and Bryce’s voice came through over







