Page 51

POWERS

Sitting at the table with Havoc, G, Kruger, Midas, and Ambros, I stare at the old ladies at the table across the room, watching in case they say anything that upsets Lil.

“Earth to Powers.” A hand in front of my face snaps me out of my daze.

“Sorry, what?”

“She’s not going to disappear,” Midas says.

I look at him. “She has before.”

He nods, conceding my point. “Things are different now.”

“Not from where I’m sitting. The same threat that forced her to run is still nipping at her heels. You think she won’t trade her life for someone else’s? She’s done it time and time again. It’s instinctual at this point.”

“It’s different because she knows running won’t keep us safe,” Havoc states.

I sigh and run my hands through my hair, tired of feeling on edge. I don’t see that changing any time soon. “But staying won’t keep us safe either. That’s the kicker. Every move he makes, she’s going to be the one who feels every hit and shoulder all the blame. I don’t know how to keep it from happening. It’s like trying to hold back the tide when it’s set to return. There’ll be a showdown. It’s inevitable, especially if he knows she’s back. After everything that went down, he won’t let us keep her or let her walk away unscathed.”

“She’s right about us needing to call in reinforcements,” G says.

Havoc nods. “I’ve put a call in to Kings of Carnage, Chaos Demons, and Sons of Purgatory.”

“Sons of Purgatory? There’s a name I haven’t heard for a while,” Kruger comments.

“I don’t think I’d heard of them at all until Havoc arranged safe passage for us to ride through one of their cities,” I admit.

Havoc leans back and takes a sip of his beer. “One of their chapters has ties to the Chaos Demons through a couple of old ladies, but I’ve met Smoke a few times. I like the guy, but distance meant I had little to do with them. However, that’s likely to change now they’ve relocated. Smoke’s chapter is only a few hours away, closer than Hannibal’s club, by all accounts. And that’s what we’re going to need—people who can get here quickly.”

“Hannibal will send some guys if we need them,” Midas says.

“I know, and I’ll accept them too. But he can’t leave himself open to an attack either. Remember, James has tried to infiltrate their club before, and there is nothing to stop him from trying again. I assume he’ll focus his attention here because Lil is here, but you know as well as I do how unpredictable this motherfucker is.”

“How the fuck he keeps evading the cops is beyond me. He doesn’t have the skill set Lil does to stay off the grid, and his photo has been splashed across every news outlet in the country,” Kruger complains.

“He doesn’t need Lil’s skill set when he has rich friends in high places and deep pockets willing to pay off law enforcement. They don’t give a fuck about Lil or the other women, they⁠—”

“What women?”

The table goes quiet as I lift my head and find Lil watching me with a confused expression. Does she really not know about the others?

“You haven’t seen the news?”

“Off the grid means no TV. What girls?”

I look around the table, wondering how the fuck I’m supposed to tell her.

G jumps in before I can say anything. “When I was digging into James, I found a lot of buried complaints made in numerous hospitals, across more than one continent.”

She relaxes a little. “Okay, that I did know. There were rumors around the hospital that after his wife disappeared, he had a bit of a reputation for dating his coworkers but not wanting anything serious, and they always got attached and disgruntled when he didn’t want more. A doctor as a husband is the endgame for a lot of people, so I kinda understood what I was hearing. But I was also willfully ignorant. I buried my head in the sand. What happened before me didn’t matter anyway, and who am I to say how he should cope with his grief? That was my mindset anyway, though the hospital was pretty dismissive of it all, too. I guess I thought if there was anything to worry about, I’d know. Nurses and doctors are a bunch of gossips.”

When nobody says anything else, she looks between us all and curses. “There was more to it, wasn’t there?”

G nods. “There were a lot of sexual harassment claims brushed under the carpet from a variety of hospitals, a lot of them from war-torn places with a desperate need for doctors. He was somewhat of a hero. I didn’t realize at the time I was digging—mostly because I didn’t know there were two Lils—but looking back now, it seems the time he was with you is the only time no complaints were filed.”

She blinks in resignation. “So if I stayed…fuck.”

“This is not on you. And honestly, Lil, you can’t blame yourself for everything that motherfucker did,” Havoc says. “It’s ridiculous. That’s like surviving a serial killer, then blaming yourself when he takes someone new.”