Torched: Afterburn (Iron Serpents Motorcycle Club Book 2) Page 18

  “A hundred grand,” Cora explained. “I feel like the right thing to do is to return the profit cut and interest since it was one of my men who screwed everything up for you.”

  “And what does that have to do with my woman?” Torch fumed.

  Cora curled his lip. “If she wants to go around acting tough, she needs to be willing to step up. If your old lady kills Mena, you get the money. But only if she does it. Let’s see what she’s got.”

  Torch took another step forward, going nose-to-nose with him. “You’re not putting that shit on my wife, keep the fucking money.”

  “Oh, come on,” Cora smirked.

  Having reached full bullshit capacity, Torch grabbed the fucker by his designer shirt and shoved him backwards, immediately turning the situation tense as both his and Cora’s guys moved in to stop a fight before it started. “I told you no,” he hissed.

  A shot rang out.

  They all stopped and turned around to see Liv pointing her own gun at the trunk, the barrel still smoking. Toto ran inside with his weapon drawn, but nobody moved. They just stood there with their jaws hanging open, watching in stunned silence as she put her piece away and grabbed the briefcase full of cash Gino had set down on the roof of the car. She snapped it shut and walked over to them.

  “I’ll be taking this,” she told Cora. “Don’t test me again.”

  After giving a speechless Torch a kiss on the cheek, she sashayed her ass out the side door. They all rushed over to the trunk and saw that she’d put a bullet in Mena’s head. Right between the eyes.

  “Fuck,” Cora murmured. “That bitch scares me. Good luck, man.”

  : 20 :

  | TORCH |

  For the second time that day, Torch and the boys found themselves waiting for Liv to work her computer magic, this time on a mission to figure out what the fuck this militia group was all about. He’d never even heard of the Patriot Defense, but when did guys like that start taking on guys like them? From what little he knew of the type, they were mostly just men on the paranoid side, who liked to play with guns and thought they could go up against the American military if it came down to it.

  He sat down next to Liv at the bar and slid her a beer, the rest of the guys who were at the clubhouse were just milling around now. With Mena confirming that Scully knew he’d lost his shot at getting them to play ball, the chances of him trying to pull off any other harebrained stunts were low and protection orders had been lifted. The club would get payback on the militia and take out Scully—maybe even find those damn coins—but it would be through a well-planned and premeditated move, not some half-assed, guns blazing type of shit.

  “You wanna talk about what happened in the garage?” he asked.

  She didn’t look away from her computer. “Like how I should probably get rid of the gun I used in case Mena’s body shows up floating in a river and they run ballistics?”

  He reached across her lap and swiveled the stool around so she couldn’t avoid eye contact. “Sweetheart, you played the part to perfection, but I know you’re not a cold-blooded killer. The only other asshole you killed was a rapist and trafficker who tried to kill you. It’s gotta be eating you up just a little.”

  She looked up at him and rubbed his leg. “Babe, he set you guys up to be ambushed and robbed. I don’t care if he didn’t have all the details, Mena got the ball rolling. He got in bed with a man who took out his second-in-command with no regard for code or honor, he knew exactly who he was dealing with and what Scully was capable of. In a way, that makes him just as culpable for the hit-and-run too. He was dead anyway, if I hadn’t done it, Cora would’ve. Now the club’s down one problem and up a hundred grand, I don’t see why it should eat me up.”

  He couldn’t help but smile. This woman. Zed had been right about every last thing he’d said, Liv got the life like none of the others. And she was all his. What a beautiful fucking thing. “Alright, fair enough.”

  Liv turned back to her laptop and twirled it around so he could see what she was up to. She pointed at two side by side satellite images on the screen. “Anyway, back to our militia neighbors… Look at this shit. These are pictures of their twenty acre compound in the middle of nowhere. The one on the left was taken a year ago, the one on the right is recent. The shooting range was already there, but these ten other buildings are new additions. And that’s just the stuff above ground, I bet they have bunkers too. It’s surrounded by two, eight-foot fences spaced six feet apart, but the gap is actually used as a dog run for Rottweilers. It’s kind of brilliant actually, much more effective than electricity or barbed wire. They’d hear the dogs losing their shit long before you even got close enough to cut through. And with a gap that big between the fences, trying to jump over would just get you mauled unless you used a pole vault.”

  He pointed at a cluster of small structures surrounding a rectangular one. “What are those?”

  “Cabins. Only a couple of their guys live on-site right now, but it looks like they’re planning on bringing in the rest with their families and going off the grid at some point. They have solar panels, a few power generators, propane tanks, fruit trees, rows of raised garden beds, and even an animal enclosure. Surprisingly, I don’t see any security cameras, but I guess a closed-circuit system would take too much power to run twenty-four hours a day and the solar-powered kind use wireless signals, opening them up to remote spying.”

  “Where the hell did they get the money to build all this in the first place? The fencing alone had to have cost a fortune.”

  “Well, that’s partly why the Feds are watching them. Aside from stockpiling weapons, they’ve had to get more aggressive and turn to crime over the last year. These guys started out like your typical bunch of second amendment warriors about ten years ago, buying a piece of land and getting together for target practice in their spare time. No big deal. But then they decided to go full-on commune and started actively recruiting. Some of the money comes from members’ pockets, but the rest is from stealing shit and selling it across state lines. Also, prescription drugs.”

  He smirked. “Selling those coins would probably bring in enough to finish up the whole compound—”

  “Or the guns they wanted to buy from you,” she pointed out. “Wouldn’t that have been a bitch?”

  Jesus, no shit. The militia would’ve basically gotten free guns by using money belonging to Buddha—and by extension, the club—in the first place. Talk about looking like chumps, that wouldn’t have been good for the club’s image at all when it got out. “Assholes,” he murmured. “Anything on the members? How many are there?”

  She switched over to another screen, pulling up official-looking government documents. “By all accounts, they’re not as big as you’d think, maybe thirty guys so far. I’m running a search for known members tagged in law enforcement records.”

  “Okay, let me know.” He hopped off his stool and leaned down to kiss her neck.

  “Babe, don’t get me distracted,” she warned. “You know how easily I get sucked in.”

  He chuckled and took a nibble on her earlobe. “You can suck me in whenever you like. My cock’s so fucking hard right now from hearing you talk business. You can take a ten minute break.”

  She bent her head to the side and moaned. “Goddamn it…. No, knock it off and let me finish.”

  “You know I’m acting president right now, don’t you?”

  “Is that supposed to impress me?”

  “No, it’s supposed to make you think twice about disobeying an order in my clubhouse.”

  She snapped the laptop shut, turned around, and unzipped his jeans. “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t hear the ‘order’ part of our conversation. My mistake, Mr. Acting President.” Her fingers made their way inside and stroked his desperate shaft over the fabric of his boxers.

  He grabbed her wrist and yanked it out. “Not out here.”

  “Why? I thought you were trying to assert your authority. Don’t you want your brothe
rs to see me on my knees sucking you off?”

  With a growl, he picked her ass up off the stool and slung her over his shoulder. “Fuck no, they don’t need to know what they’re missing. This shit’s all mine. Come on, let’s put your talents to the test and see if you can suck and search at the same time.”

  “I feel like I should point out—”

  “Shut up.” He smacked her ass, knowing exactly what she was about to point out, then turned so she could snatch her laptop off the bar. “I’ll be doing the shooting this time… my load down your throat, that is.”

  “Charming,” she groaned.

  : : : :

  His eyes flew open in a panic and it took him a few seconds to realize the bloodfest he’d witnessed was nothing but a dream. Relieved to find himself in bed at the clubhouse instead of on top of a pile of dead bodies, he looked around for Liv. Naturally, she was curled up in the chair across from him, frowning at something on her laptop. Christ, she just couldn’t rest when there was work to be done, could she?

  Apparently none of that had mattered to him, he was sprawled out naked under the comforter. The last thing he remembered was coming long and hard with her lips wrapped around his dick.

  Had he passed out the minute she’d sucked him dry? Shit. “Babe,” he croaked. “How long was I out?”

  “Just an hour. I figured you needed some sleep.”

  “But you didn’t get yours.”

  Her concerned expression dissolved into a mischievous one. “I took care of it myself. I’m handy that way.”

  “What the fuck? Are you serious?” She better not have taken it into her own hands, that would be a surefire way to make him feel like a fucking failure of a man.

  “No,” she laughed. “That takes too damn long.”

  “Okay, good, that’s my job. Did you find something? Why were you looking so serious a second ago?”

  Just like that, the frown returned. “I don’t think you wanna know.”

  He was pretty sure he did. Propping himself up on his elbows, he asked again, “Liv, what did you find?”

  “When’s the last time you talked to your father?” she asked.

  What the fuck did that shitbag have to do with anything? “Twenty-some years ago when I left home. I saw him at my sister’s funeral, but he didn’t see me. Why?”

  She sighed and rubbed her cheek. “His name’s George Branson Larter, right?”

  “Yeah. Why the fuck are you looking him up?”

  When she didn’t answer, he jumped out of bed and pulled the laptop out of her hands. She was looking at court documents from an aggravated assault case against someone named Christopher Mason, with George Larter listed as the defendant’s attorney. He glanced back at her, not quite sure why the find was significant. “Yeah, he’s a lawyer, that’s why I made a run for it as a kid. I knew reporting him for using me as a punching bag wouldn’t do anything, one of his buddies would just get him off and he’d do something worse.”

  “He’s not just a lawyer, he’s the militia’s lawyer,” she explained. “Chris Mason is one of the founders. Over the past two years, your dad’s handled every criminal case their members have caught, everything from larceny to illegal weapons charges, even a murder. He’s pretty good too, only one guilty verdict and that was just for stealing a truck.”

  “Shit.” Feeling like he’d gotten the wind knocked out of him, Torch took a deep breath and sat down on the edge of the bed. He knew he should’ve finished off his old man years ago. “I haven’t thought about that son of a bitch in years. You’re telling me he was part of this?”

  Liv got up from the chair and sat down next to him. Reaching over to tap the mouse pad, she pulled up what looked like undercover surveillance pictures. “I don’t know if he was part of setting it up, but it’s probably safe to assume he knows about the whole thing. These are pictures from a week-long ATF stakeout of the compound about four months ago, they got a tip about a transport but it didn’t pan out. That’s your dad with Mason, Scully, and two other members. They have footage of him going in and out almost every day. I’d say there’s more than an attorney-client relationship going on.”

  Gritting his teeth, he handed her back the computer, walked over to a wall, and slammed his fist through it. It was one fucking thing to go after him or the club—that was a serious enough offense to warrant broken bones and blood loss—but to knowingly let Scully go after their women? His woman? If Liv hadn’t run back to leave her helmet, she would’ve been right in the path of that fucking car too.

  No.

  No fucking way would that stand.

  Call it honor among thieves, call it a code, there were lines you didn’t cross unless you wanted to fucking die. Scully, Mena, Russell, his old man, they were all just cogs in the militia wheel. He didn’t give a rat’s ass who came up with the ideas, who gave the orders, or who carried any of it out, they were all complicit and they were all going to pay one way or another.

  Seething with barely-controlled rage and ready to rip every last one of them apart with his bare hands, he turned back to her. “I want everything you have on 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 reminder, please don’t kill anybody if you get caught. These are technically my clients.”

  “Knock ‘em out if we have to, got it,” Mace replied.

  I pulled up interior video. “You shouldn’t run into anybody, the hallway’s clear. Go sixty feet to the right, there’s an unmarked gray door. 7286 will get you in, the drones are stored in there.”

  I kept my eyes on the screen, skimming all the feeds for any sudden movement. Luckily, the security team was following routine and chitchatting in the control room.