Page 92 of The Riders’ Reign

From out of the stunned silence, noise takes over again as everyone starts talking at once. The cops quickly round up Clay and his motley gang and push them into the backs of their police cars.

Nerves on edge, I do a check to make sure all my men are okay. There’s Ace, sad, but safe. Jack, whose jaw is set so tight it looks like it might shatter. Ghost, talking with one of the cops.

Finally, there’s Rook, and he’s standing by the cops rounding up the guys who came after him, looking absolutely stricken.

He’s going to blame himself for this.

Why did this have to happen? Just when it looked like the club could breathe a sigh of relief, and Rook was celebrating, this blows up in our faces.

Will we ever catch a break?

41

ACE

It’s so surreal to see Phoenix getting read his rights and being cuffed. It’s like I’m watching a movie. A cop got shot today on our compound. We’re so fucked. It’s going to take every single bit of negotiating skills Jack has in order to bridge the wound this will create in our relationship with the local department.

I rush to Camile to make sure she’s okay after all this shit. I’m surprised she’s not totally lost her mind with everything that keeps happening around here.

Taking her hand, I squeeze reassuringly.

“He didn’t do it.” She leans in close to me, keeping her voice low.

“What?”

“Phoenix. He didn’t do it, Ace. I saw exactly what happened because the bikes weren’t between me and them, and it was Shelley. She shot the cop.”

Holy shit. I stare over at Phoenix and glance at Jack, but he’s busy talking with Dawson.

“Why would he take the blame?” she asks. “He’s going to go away for years for something he didn’t do.”

I can’t say for sure, but if I know anything of Phoenix, it’s that he’s a chivalrous bastard, and he’s as tough as they come. I expect he made a split-second calculation and figured out he was better equipped to survive whatever comes next than Shelley is.

The paramedics arrive and immediately rush to the wounded men. They pull Shelley off Bear as she screams and kicks, not wanting to be separated from him. Someone tells her that she needs to allow the paramedics to do their job, or Bear might die, and that seems to calm her down, though she cries like her heart is breaking.

Ghost finally finishes talking to the cop and brings Megan over to us. Shelley is going to ride in the back of the ambulance with Bear, which kind of leaves Megan on her own again until her husband gets here.

Megan covers her face with her hands as she sobs, her shoulders heaving. “I just freaked out without thinking. I thought the men who grabbed me had only pretended to be cops. I hadn’t known they were actually a part of the sheriff’s department. Oh, my God, now Bear has been shot because of me.”

“The cop who got shot was responsible for grabbing you on behalf of Hector?” Ghost asks.

She sniffles and nods. “There was another one, too, but I don’t see him here. I thought they’d just used it as a disguise.”

Ghost frowns. “The deputy needs to know the back story to this, that the cop who’s been shot is corrupt and that he hurt Megan.”

I look over at him. “How are we going to explain that without needing to tell him the rest of the story?”

“We’ll just have to say that they abducted her off the side of the road, but that she managed to escape.” He looks to Megan. “Do you think you can make that believable?”

She blinks up, her eyelashes wet with tears and clinging together in spikes. “I’ll try my best. What if they ask why I didn’t report it?”

I think of something. “Say they were in uniform, so you pretty much knew it was corrupt cops and that meant you couldn’t trust any of the department. How were you supposed to know who was in on the corruption?”

She blows out a breath. “Makes sense.”

“It could help Phoenix’s case if it’s proved the cop was corrupt,” Ghost tells her.

“Poor Phoenix,” Camile says, her voice thick with tears. “Why did he do that?”