Kenzie?”
“So far, no slipups,” she grumbled her reply at Axe. “Trust me, I’m trying.”
“What was her BS excuse for the bruises?” Wheels inquired, before he took a deep sip of water from his bottle.
“That she needed a way back home and figured it would get Keys to help her.” She shrugged. “It stinks. To me, it reeks. But I know for a fact she and Keys don’t get on, so I doubt he’d have helped her to be fair. He’d have thought, like most of you would, that she’d made her bed and had to lie in it.” When her words got a bunch of nods as a reply, she rolled her eyes and sighed. “Yeah, yeah. Well, though that fits, nothing else does.”
“The baby’s Hex’s, yeah?”
“Apparently.”
I reached up and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “It’s too soon to know if the heat’s gone off the Knight’s, isn’t it?” I mumbled.
“Yeah, way too soon.” Lucie pulled a face. “Unfortunately. But Dad’s got feelers out with the cops on his payroll and—” She blinked when everyone gaped at her. “What? What is it?”
“You called Martin ‘dad.’” Axe’s eyes were round. “That has to be the first time I’ve ever heard you call him that.”
She scowled. “I didn’t.”
“You did, babe,” Flame retorted, but his lips were twisted in a smile. “You’ll make his day if you call him that to his face.”
Lucie grunted. “Don’t be a baby.” When Flame just snorted, and the snort was punctuated by the flicker of his lighter, Lucie grumbled, “Anyway, before I was rudely interrupted, he says he’ll get back to us ASAP if there’s any news on just who their rat might be.”
“Good. Well, I guess we’ve all got shit we need to be doing. Axe, I think we need to call church tomorrow. The brothers have been patient, but it’s time to let them in on the clusterfuck.”
“They’ve only been patient because they’ve been up to their eyeballs in work,” I retorted drily. “It’s not like we’ve had time for church with most of us all over southeast Texas hiding our wares.”
Wolfe shrugged. “True, but you know I like to keep them in the loop.”
And that was exactly why he was a fucking awesome Prez. I’d been there for the latter years of Bomber Steeler’s presidency, and it hadn’t sucked too hard, but we’d been at war with the Knights and that had blown. Lots of brothers were lost to a rebellion nobody really understood… until Lucie had returned and, with it, she’d brought answers.
As church disbanded, I went upstairs with Dagger. He was the one I was closest to, mostly because we’d worked together once upon a time.
Before Lucie had brought home the ghost gun operation, we’d had a kill-for-hire service that had netted us a lot of dough. Flame had one team, Dagger the other.
“Ama doing okay?” he asked when we made it upstairs.
“Yeah. I think she’s enjoying the tattoo parlor. I’m not sure if she’s made out for the inking, but we’ll see.”
Dagger tipped his head to the side. “What do you mean? Why don’t you think she’s cut out for inking?”
“She doesn’t like the sight of blood.”
His mouth worked and he gaped at me. “How the fuck did I not know that?”
I shrugged. “She hid it from you.”
“Little fucker,” he mumbled under his breath.
My lips twitched. “Hardly. I mean, she probably hid it because she thought people would make fun of her.”
“You’re not making me feel better,” he snarled, running a hand through his hair. His cheeks pulled taut as he gnawed on the inside of one for a second, and as he leaned back against the wainscoting, he murmured, “Get her to persevere, yeah?”
“Of course. She’s no way near ready to pick up a machine, so there’s no problem on that score.”
His eyes narrowed. “Why isn’t she ready?”
“Calm down, papa bear,” I mocked. “She can’t use one until she can put it together. Them’s the rules,” I carried on teasing.
“Fuck, she never was good with anything mechanical.”
“It’s hardly fucking rocket science,” I retorted. “But she keeps fumbling it, and until she can break it down so she can use the autoclave to get things sterilized, and then put it back together again, she can’t try it out.”
“You’re not going soft on her, are you?”
I stuck my tongue in my cheek, because in so many ways, I was soft around Amaryllis. To the point where it was probably bad for my street cred. But in this? Yeah, I was being