Royally Broken by Elle Boon Page 0,24
He liked knowing the men were thorough. It also helped knowing they wouldn’t have found anything on him he didn’t want them to. They didn’t have an address where the girl Dallas James was being held but coordinates. Satellites were an amazing thing if you were good with computer imaging, and again, Koyn being a man who’d worked for the NSA was right there with the brains and the technology, making it to where Keys didn’t have to work to find it. He put the information into the folder, sliding it into the backpack with his laptop.
Driving away from the huge home, he couldn’t help but admire the grey and black two-story place. It was almost a modern looking mini mansion, the details making it homey with the tree-lined driveway. If one didn’t know that through the woods, there was a place that they used for torture they called the slaughterhouse. Not that they used it indiscriminately or anything. You only ended up back there and at the end of a hacksaw, or whatever they chose, if you were on the wrong side of the brotherhood. Otherwise, you’d think the home was just a rich man and his family’s place.
He checked his phone, seeing he’d missed a text from King. “Fucking hell. When did he become a goddamn mother hen?”
Since he was riding, Keys decided he would wait to call him when he stopped outside of the town. He’d already booked a room at a B&B that hadn’t been there when he’d grown up. The owners hadn’t recognized his name. Well, not that he’d used his given name, but the one he legally changed his to. Keys Royal was his name now. Silas DeMarcus was dead like he’d told his brothers back in California. The Navy might send him a check, which he donated every month to a different charity since he didn’t need the money. He and the MC were really good at liberating funds from those who didn’t need it, once they took them out. Men like Traeger’s ole lady’s family who had been rich thanks to their ill-gotten gains, then in a blink, they were gone, leaving a lot of cash behind. Keys made sure nobody could trace the transfer of funds back to any of them while building up a portfolio that would sustain each member and their descendants for years to come. He knew how to play the stock market, where to invest, and had turned their profit margin from six figures to seven in a year. Although some thought he was crazy to not take advantage of what being retired with full benefits gave him, and there were a lot of freedoms he was afforded, but Keys wanted to give back. Which is what he did, choosing to do what the hell he wanted.
The last sign for Lionsville showed he had twenty more miles, so he decided to pull over and give King a call. Pulling off to the shoulder, he turned his bike off, thinking about the last time he’d been on that same stretch of highway only he’d been running away from the town and heading toward his future. A future that didn’t include seeing anyone from there if he had any say in the matter.
“Life sure knows how to throw curves at a man. Hell, fuck curves. This time, it’s more like fucking bullets. I got damn good at dodging them when I was overseas. Hope I don’t need to do the same again.” The scattering of birds overhead reminded him of the old nursery rhyme ‘One for sorry, Two for mirth, Three for a funeral, Four for birth, Five for heaven, Six for hell, Seven for the devil, his own self.’ He never understood why children’s shit tended to be pretty damn morbid when you actually thought about them.
Before he could punch the number for King, his phone rang. The image of his prez showed on the screen. “Son-of-a-bitch. You got ESP or what, King?” he asked after swiping his finger across the screen.
“What the hell are you talking about? I’ve been calling you for the last six hours at the top of every hour. Do you not check your messages asshole?” King didn’t sound happy.
He looked at his call log, sure as shit, he had several missed calls from King. “Damn, when I left Koyn’s place it didn’t show any missed calls. They probably got some kind of blocker up there.”
It wouldn’t surprise him to find out the paranoid