Page 18 of Pain

They’d think I was crazy just for suspecting such a thing.

And I was already sitting right smack dab in the middle of enemy territory. I wanted to believe I could trust these people to take care of me. The last thing I needed was for them to think I was not only an enemy, but also losing my mind.

Because when it came right down to it, the only one I truly trusted was Knight himself. And I wasn’t positive he could protect me against the rest of his crew if they decided I wasn’t worth keeping around.

CHAPTER 9

KNIGHT

Tinker bent over my bike, scowling at it like it had somehow done something to piss him off. As it turned out, of course, it was me that had done something to the bike.

Of course.

“What the hell have you been doing with this thing?” he growled. “It looks like you rode it through a war!”

I didn’t. Not even close. It was still one of my original bikes, and he damn well knew it. He also knew that I took care of it like it was one of my fucking kids.

Not that it mattered. I was never good enough to the machines for Tinker’s liking.

He’d been my best friend since we were eight, and had come along with me into the club right at the start, saying he loved motorcycles almost as much as he loved women, and that they were a whole lot more dependable. As far as he could see, a club centered entirely around them was heaven on earth.

He’d spent the last eight years proving it, a wrench always in his hand and his face almost always smeared with grease.

But he also kept the club running—literally—and I couldn’t have asked for a better mechanic in the club. When it came to him accusing me of abusing my bike, though...

“Well let’s see,” I said, pretending to be thinking about what I might have been doing. “I rode into a town that Devil and his crew control, crouched as low as I could get the entire time to try to keep from being seen. There, I had a meeting with a businessman who, it turns out, wants to pay us to move him and protect him once he’s moved. Then I saw a girl being thrown out of a moving vehicle and stopped to rescue her. None of which did any damage to my bike. Or were you referring to something else?”

He wasn’t, and we both knew it. But he’d wanted the story, and now I’d given it to him. Partially to prove that I hadn’t been abusing the bike. Partially because I owed it to the club to tell them what was going on.

I’d come to that conclusion halfway through a sleepless night spent doing more thinking than anything else. I should have told them the moment I got home, but I hadn’t been sure how to do it. I still wasn’t sure how to do it. I didn’t want all the fucking drama they were going to bring down on my head over bringing Saraya home. Didn’t want to have to explain to them that this had been the right thing to do, and that at the end of the day, it was my choice, not theirs.

Didn’t want to hear the grumbling I knew would go on.

Was I a chicken for telling my best friend first, just to see how it would go over? Maybe. And I didn’t give a single damn.

My club, my rules. And that included how and when I told them about bringing a new girl into the club. A new girl who just might ruin everything.

Tinker stood from where he’d been crouching on the other side of my bike and eyed me closely, waiting to see if I was going to give him any more than I already had. When I didn’t, he shrugged. “Heard a rumor it wasn’t just any old girl you rescued.”

Right. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. Wasn’t that how the saying went?

“It’s not just any old girl. It’s Saraya Post. And I don’t have to tell you what that means.”

I didn’t. Tinker and his brother, Brock, had been with me from the start, which meant they’d known me when I broke away from my dad’s old crew and started my own. They’d seen the fire in my eyes and the fury in my heart when we sat down and decided what the Banshees were going to be all about, and they’d watched as Devil had fought me at every turn, and then set me up and sent me to jail.

They’d held the Banshees against him when he tried to take them over, once I was safely behind bars. They’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Gem and a few of the others and told him exactly where he could stick it.

And they’d been around to see the war that followed. They knew Devil was gunning for me and that I’d as soon shoot him as look at him. They’d also seen Saraya on the back of his bike at every sighting. They knew how important she was to his club and how much she meant to him.

Or... how much she’d meant to him at one point.

They were my best allies, which made them the right people to hear what I’d done, and before I’d even thought it through, I was pulling Brock away from the lists of weapons he’d been going over and into our conversation, then hunkering down with them and telling them everything. The town where I’d had the meeting, and how I’d been intent on getting out of there before anything went wrong. The truck in front of me. Saraya flying out of it, handcuffed and with a blindfold still over her forehead. The way she’d hit the sidewalk... and then come up ready to run, despite what I thought might have been a broken ankle.

The pleading in her voice when she begged me to bring her with me.

“That girl don’t plead for no one is what I’ve heard,” Brock said, his deep baritone soft to keep anyone else from overhearing us.

“You’re right about that,” I muttered. “I hear she’s as stubborn as Devil himself, and twice as smart.”