Page 110 of Forged in the Fire
Like she was actually going to make it over that fence before I got to her.
“She thought she was here as a prisoner,” I continued. “Thought we were basically holding her against her will and holding her over her brother’s head. Thought she was marked for dead.”
“Thought?” Phoenix’s low, raspy voice curled into the room, his hands in fists on the table.
Madwas written across the knuckles of his right hand andManwas on the left.
Each pinky capped with a jester’s face.
My chest tightened, and I looked at him point blank. “I at least owed it to her to let her know that she’s safe here. Protected. We aren’t in the business of tormenting innocent women.”
“Not a whole lot about her that looks innocent to me.” Colby cracked it like any of this was a fucking joke.
I was not prepared for the way a wave of anger punched me in the face. Possessiveness clutching me by the throat.
My teeth ground, and I leaned back in my seat, searching for cool when I was five seconds from snapping.
“You say something like that about her again, you lose your tongue.” I attempted to keep the words easy. They still came out a blade.
Dude knew it wasn’t a euphemism, and he inhaled an unnerved breath as he roughed a hand through his long, dirty-blond hair.
Colby blazed through women faster than the last one had time to roll out of his bed, and it wasn’t uncommon to find a few of them there.
“Meant no disrespect.” It cracked as it left him.
“Don’t let it happen again.” I stared him down for a beat before my gaze drifted over my men.
“It applies to all of you. Already warned you she was off-limits, and that includes talking about her unless it’s directly related to the job. Do you understand?”
Yeah, we were an MC, but we were governed by our own playbook. Our rules were formed around our mission.
It blurred some lines since we had bunnies running rampant, and we allowed some of the typical MC behaviors. We had to look legit, and on a whole lot of levels, we were.
These guys were originally drawn to the club for a reason. It wasn’t like they were going to sit around being subject to the conventional laws of society.
Every single one of us were violent and brutal.
Destructive to the extreme.
We just took those propensities and morphed them into something different.
Bigger.
It was the little good we had to offer after lifetimes of corruption.
But I wasn’t feeling sogoodright then. Not when I wanted to reach halfway down the table and snap Colby’s neck. Not when I wanted to crawl inside that woman, sift around in all she was, discover that thing I could feel simmering under the surface.
A disconcerted rumble of assent went around since it was rare anyone evoked that type of reaction from me.
Trevan looked at me all the harder.
Prodding gaze burning a hole in my cheek all while some kind of smirk edged the corner of his mouth.
Like the fucker thought he knew something I didn’t.
I only grunted at him before I turned back to the table.
“Cash is continuing to gather intel. He thinks we should be ready to roll in the next two to three weeks. I need every single one of you ready for when that happens. This will be the largest job we have ever undertaken, and it is not going to come without risk.”
