Page 77 of Easy Steal

“Close the fucking roller doors, no customers today,” I said to the boys on Thursday morning.

They nodded.

Zeke ran to shut the doors, and Danny helped me and Toni unload the duffle bags of weapons and ammo from the trunk of our cars.

Today was preparation day.

Tomorrow night, would be the end of the Redliners.

There was no music, no jokes, no messing around today.

Even the boys were calm and collected.

Maybe it was Toni’s presence, maybe it was the knowledge of what was to come. Even for us, this was risky. But we knew that it needed to be dealt with, it couldn’t be ignored anymore.

The Redliners were causing too much damage to The Family - the business and the people within it. Ren and Val had moved halfway across the world in order to stay alive. All of us wanted them to come home, and I was sure they wanted to return as well.

If we could pull this off, they could come home.

Life could get back to normal.

Well, as normal as our lives could be.

Antoni’s face was flushed red as he hauled the bags over his shoulders and we stacked everything into the office. I heard the sound of the roller door raise slightly, and all of our heads snapped around in unison.

Livie stopped in her tracks as all of our eyes landed on her.

“What?” she snapped.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, striding towards her.

“Helping,” she said, pushing past me.

“No. You don’t have to, you’ve done enough.”

She ignored me, heading to the office and putting her backpack down. Antoni pulled her in for a hug and they stood in the corner chatting for a while. I leant against one of the cars with my arms crossed, watching them.

He led her towards the bench, and was showing her all of the weapons.

She ran her hands over some of them, nodding along to whatever Antoni was saying.

Things were still weird between us, and it stung.

Livie was becoming someone I considered a friend, and I didn’t consider many people my friends.

That’s before I went and made things complicated.

“Right,” Antoni’s voice boomed through the workshop, and we gathered around to listen in.

“We have the destination, we have the date and the time. But we still don’t have any other information. We don’t know what we’re targeting, or who’s going to be there. The plan is to get their stock. We know that they have something big in that warehouse, we know that they’re relying on it. We need to destroy it, and take down as many of them as we can. Their numbers have grown quickly, to regain our power we need to reduce those numbers - drastically.”

“I’ll be able to see the numbers heading towards the destination, but that won’t give us much time to do anything with that information. You need to focus on taking down the bikes. If everything goes right, I’ll be in full control of the cars,” Livie added.

“Wait, you’re coming?” I frowned.

“Of course I am,” she said plainly.

“Are you sure that’s necessary?”

---