Page 24 of Rune
I told myself I wasn’t going to look up what a “one-percent” biker meant. The last thing in the world I needed was something else to be freaked out about.
What can I say, though? My whole life the past year or so had been about research. It was hard to just shut that off.
So there I was with my coffee at the crack of dawn, carefully propping my phone against my thigh in case my sister came down, and typing into the search bar.
“Great,” I grumbled to myself as the results came up.
Apparently, ninety-nine percent of bikers were just guys who liked to ride bikes and sometimes hang out with other bikers.
One percent of them were actual criminals: drug dealers, enforcers, pimps.
I mean, I guess it wasn’t exactly shocking. Normal, upstanding citizens didn’t do things like Rune had done.
They also didn’t try to shoot people, a little voice reminded me—no matter how much they have it coming.
After a little more digging, I found that Navesink Bank had two biker clubs: the Vultures and the Henchmen. Rune, it seemed, belonged to the latter.
I was almost late for work as I tried desperately to figure out what kind of line of work they were into.
Apparently, not everything could be found online. These guys were either super careful or greased the right palms, because there were no arrest records for the members of the club that I could find that might point me in the right direction.
For reasons I chose not to analyze, my stomach lurched at the idea of Rune being a pimp. I mean, not that I had anything against sex work. I just knew that pimps were historically predatory and violent with their girls.
It was absurd to care what the man I almost shot did for a living. So I pushed those thoughts away as I slipped into the booties my client insisted I wear, then moved into his already meticulously clean home. The kind of clean where it was clearhespent hours a week maintaining it, only to pay me to clean it some more.
Once everything was dusted and the walls were wiped down, I grabbed my scrub brush and went to town on the baseboards. It was my most hated house cleaning task, which was probably why I was putting way more elbow grease into the already clean baseboards than necessary.
“You’re gonna scrub the paint off.”
The squeal that escaped me was a sound I didn’t even know I was capable of making as my heart lurched and my head whipped over my shoulder.
Sure enough, there he was. Leaning casually against the counter, arms crossed, watching me clean.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed, pushing up to my feet.
How long had he been watching me without me knowing?
“Followed you.”
“No, really?” I said with an eye roll. “This is my client’s house.”
“I figured.”
“He’s going to see you on the cameras and fire me.”
“There are no cameras.”
Damn him. He was right. This client once went on a twenty-minute rant about doorbell cameras and surveillance technology when I asked about a security system at his house. When I arrived the first time, I noticed every device that had a camera had tape covering it.
The funny thing? The owner worked in tech.
“Of course a one-percenter biker would have noticed that.”
“Looked that one up, did you?”
He’d changed from the day before. I guess I found that comforting. He hadn’t just been… lurking around my house and life all night. He’d gone home, likely showered, and changed into black jeans and a crisp white tee. The kind of white tee that was out of my budget because it was thick and had some sort of magic infused so that it didn’t wrinkle when you sat. He’d even tossed on a gold chain. And for some reason, my mind led me to believe that meant that he wasn’t going to kill me. I mean, who wore white and put on jewelry to create a crime scene?
“I figured you must have been in the dark to waltz in there like you did.”
