water, its keen edge glinting through the suds.
Carter braced himself.
But he said, “Leah seems happy.”
Carter felt his brows go up. “She does?”
Marshall nodded – stiffly. He brought the knife out of the water to work at the sticky remains of fruit rind with a sponge. “She was real down when she first got home. She’s better, now.” He glanced over, hands still moving, his chin tucked a fraction, his gaze direct. “She likes you.”
Carter swallowed and refused to glance away first. “I like her.”
They held eye contact a long moment, before Marshall nodded again, the creases on his face shifting from stern, to something Carter wanted to label as satisfied. He turned back to the knife before handing it over to he rinsed. “You think I don’t like you, though.”
“I think I’m the biker dating your daughter, and that any father would be worried about that.”
One corner of Marshall’s mouth flicked up, nearly a smile. “You think I don’t like bikers.”
Carter couldn’t withhold a sigh. “I dunno. You tell me.”
Marshall braced both hands on the edge of the sink and twisted to face him fully. He looked very much like the Marine he was in that moment – but he didn’t look threatening. “I like the Lean Dogs.”
“You – do?”
“I’m a military man, not some stock broker. I know they do some things that lots of people don’t agree with. But, then, that’s true of lots of groups, and not just outlaw ones.”
Carter stared at him, disbelieving.
“I’ve always respected Ghost. He loves this city. He looks out for it. If someone needs help, he and his boys are there. The Dogs are brothers. That cut means something – it means loyalty.” He nodded toward the one Carter wore, and smiled a little more obviously. “Reminds me of my uniform days. You take care of your brothers, you die for your brothers, you protect the club and the people attached to it. The club makes the city better, not worse.”
Carter said, “You really believe all that?”
“I do. And I believe a Dog knows more about loyalty, and about caring for the woman he loves, than that shithead who took her to Chicago.”
Carter wanted to smile. He said, “Yes, sir.”
Marshall stared at him a moment, looking for something. Maybe he found it, Carter thought, because he nodded and turned back to the sink. Picked up the next knife and started washing it. “I’ve got no reason to dislike the guy, but what’s your read on this Shaman we’re paying rent to?”
Feeling like a sizable weight had been lifted from his shoulders, Carter set about trying to explain Ian in a way that made him sound like what he was – a useful ally who seemed to genuinely care about the Dogs.
Until his phone rang.
~*~
Ghost’s expression was downright spooky: a glittering, quiet, and composed sort of anger. The sort that preceded bodies hitting the floor.
“At eleven-fifteen this morning, an improvised explosive device detonated inside the New York chapter’s brand-new clubhouse. It was moving day.” He ground his jaw. “They’ll be picking through the wreckage for a while, so they don’t know exactly what was in the bomb, but the fire department is saying they think it was detonated remotely.
“Three members were killed, including Marco Gonzalez, their president.”
Hisses and low murmurs rippled around the table.
“Maverik is now acting president until they can get a proper vote, and he got beat up pretty bad. He called me from his hospital bed. Sounded like he’d just woken up.”
“Who did it?” Michael asked.
Ghost held up his phone, open to a blown-up photo, one that Carter could see even from halfway down the table. A span of concrete, a cinderblock wall, and spray-painted on it, a bright yellow inverted triangle.
Yield.
Ghost said, “The same people who left us this tag at the old mill when they abducted Allie Henderson.”
~*~
“This took some serious string-pulling,” Vince said late that afternoon, when the shadows lay long and blue across the concrete and steel of Dartmoor. It sounded like a token protest.
Ghost stood at his side, their backs to Maggie’s raised garden, both watching as a handler in a police windbreaker kept instructing the bomb-sniffing dog in his grasp to “seek” beneath the clubhouse pavilion. A second dog was searching the inside of the clubhouse, and they would move all down the property, checking offices and warehouses.
“No one’s ever launched that kind of assault on a clubhouse,” Ghost said. He could hear the strained detachment in his voice. He’d had to shove the