the compound. These guys think they’re ready for battle with the government? They just made enemies with bigger and badder outlaws than they’ll ever be. You fuck with the Serpents, you better be ready for a deadly bite. We’re going to war.”
“Babe...” Liv approached and gently placed her hands on his chest. Not willing to let her try to sway his resolve or tell him how to run his club, he braced himself for an argument that could turn explosive and hurt some womanly feelings.
But he should’ve known better than to make assumptions about this particular woman by this point, because what came out of her mouth next wasn’t an argument at all.
“How dirty are you willing to get?” she asked.
: 21 :
| LIVIA |
“You know what you’re doing, right?” Torch mumbled through my ear piece.
After spending a couple days watching the previous month’s FTX security footage to make sure I did, I sure as hell hoped so. I had yet to test the limits of Silas’ forgiving nature, but had a feeling stealing from his business partners crossed more than one ethical line, even for a man like him. But we weren’t really stealing, we were just… borrowing. He’d get over it.
“I wouldn’t risk losing you or my best client,” I replied.
“Hey, what about the rest of us?” Grimm huffed.
“It kinda depends on the day, honestly,” I shot back. “Don’t worry, you haven’t done anything to piss me off since this morning. Can everybody else hear me?”
One after the other, I got confirmation from Zed, Mace, Squid, and Biff; along with Torch and Grimm, they were in an unlit box van parked next to the pickup truck I was sitting in. Biff was driving, the rest were going in.
“Okay, we have five minutes until security does a shift change at midnight,” I told them. “They sit around and bullshit for about fifteen before the patrol guy goes out. I have the surveillance video set to loop for exactly that long, so it’s all the time you boys have. Hopefully they won’t deviate from that for the first time tonight, but if they do, I’ll fire off a few rounds and set a fire out here as a distraction—”
“And you immediately fucking drive away,” Torch reminded me.
“Yes, daddy,” I smirked, “I’ll let the big, manly men do everything.”
“I don’t like your tone, sweetheart,” he warned. “And I have about… three and a half minutes to climb in there.”
I smiled to myself at the thought of him trying to fix my tone in three minutes. Not likely, he’d need at least six to fuck me into submission. “Yeah, well, I don’t like sitting on the sidelines. Relax, baby, in an hour we’ll be back at the clubhouse with some new weapons and you can fire yours in me all night.
“Jesus,” Biff groaned. “You two know we can all hear both sides of this conversation, right?”
“I don’t mind,” Zed chimed in with a chuckle. “Does this make it an open invitation?” A loud thud signaled something flying at his head, presumably from Torch’s direction. “Ow! I was just kidding, man. Fuck.”
“Okay, guys,” I laughed. “You ready? I’m switching the outside cameras, the gate code is 7354.”
“Ready,” Biff responded.
I switched the video feeds, placed my laptop back on the passenger seat, and said, “Go.”
The van pulled away from the side of the entrance road and drove a quarter of a mile to the front gate. Biff leaned out and punched in the code. The doors swung open and we both went through, but I branched off to the right about two hundred yards in and parked behind a tree. After making myself comfortable and grabbing my laptop to keep an eye on the live cameras only I could now see, I watched as the guys pulled up to another chain-link fence surrounding the building itself and backed up to it.
All wearing ski masks, black clothes, and backpacks, Torch, Zed, Grimm, and Squid jumped out and cut an opening before squeezing through. I switched the interior cameras to show my looped footage in the control room and pulled up FTX’s key code software. Every door in and around the building had an override combo which changed every five minutes and was only accessible to the CEO and Head of Security, in case they had a breach and the building automatically went on lockdown.
“The code is 2987,” I told the guys as they reached the specific door we were after. “And just as a friendly