Page 43 of The Hangman's Rope

“Hua,” I said and went to the bar. “Gimme a beer,” I told Spooky who reached into cooler in front of him for one, before deftly twisting off the top and holding it out to me all in one seamless motion. I took it and saluted him with it before taking a drink of the cold, crisp suds. He gave me a silent nod of appreciation and went on about his bartending duties while I slid up onto a corner stool.

“Syn’s already in the chapel if you wanted to connect,” Corvus raised his blond eyebrows at me and I shook my head.

“Naw, let him cool off,” I said and Corvus gave that raucous laugh of his nodding.

“Madisyn’s certainly got his panties in a wad,” he agreed.

“She’s not always wrong,” I said with a smirk.

“Especially not in this case, I hear…”

There it was.

Corvus wasn’t a fucking dumbass. His brown eyes went from sparkling with mirth to glittering with a cold calculation as he searched my face looking for some hidden answer or sign of deception on my part.

He wouldn’t find any. I was just as loyal to this club and the brothers within it as I ever was, and that loyalty wasn’t wavering in the slightest. I just knew for a fact, was trusting my gut, that we could have our cake and eat it, too this time. That the club would be fine and that Lorelai would be fine and that she wouldn’t give us any trouble.

I knew it with a deep and definitive ache in my bones, but there wasn’t any explaining the why of it to Corvus or anyone else. It was purely based on trust. Them trusting me as much as me trusting Lorelai, which I did. She was a genuine soul, couldn’t keep a thing off her face or out of her eyes, and was a sweet girl… if things were different, if I had met her under any other circumstance, I would have pegged her as the sweet submissive sort from a mile away – but this wasn’t a different era, or time. This was now, and I fully admitted our meeting wasn’t under the best circumstances. Not just for Reaper, but for the club as a whole.

She’d seen and heard a lot that she wasn’t meant to, and we couldn’t play fast and loose with that.

The stakes were high, and in this case, we were in the gambler’s seat; and we knew that in the end the housealwayswon… but what we didn’t know was who we were dealing to.

Wasn’t Lorelai; I knew that for sure. She was a pawn in all things – collateral damage, and boy was she damaged.

Her spirit wasn’t broken, but her heart and her mind weren’t exactly firm. She was scared, she was lonely, she was also clearly imprinting on me… but that was the rub. I couldn’t say I wasn’t imprinting on her, too.

It was a pretty fucked-up meet cute. I would say there was nothing cute about it – because there certainly wasn’t… but that was the world we lived in.

There was nothing cute about it. Nothing safe. Nothing sane. It was as real, dangerous, and high stakes as any world any citizen could dream of.

We lived where the real-life action took place that they could only live vicariously through movies, books, and television… but not us. We were the real deal, except the consequences were looming if we ever got caught and thus the club’s unspoken motto came into play:don’t get caught.I think we all needed to sit down and brainstorm exactly how we went about keeping our asses out of the light cast by law enforcement and the legal system we lived our lives firmly on the wrong side of.

I thought about all that as Corvus stared a hole through my soul with the expectation that I would speak.

I didn’t know what he expected to come out of my mouth, and I was sorry to disappoint him but…

“She’s a good girl,” I said. “Fuck knows why, but she trusts me. I’ve been building a rapport the last couple of days. It’s something we can leverage.”

He stared me down, doing the math in his head and finally blinked several times and shook it, “I still see way too many waysthis could go bad and not enough ways in which we come out on top.”

“With how dire the situation is, I would worry less about coming out on top and more about just breaking even,” I said quietly.

He searched my face and looked grave before nodding carefully.

“Sounds to me like you trust her.”

I shrugged.

“Gotta give a little, to get a little,” I said.

He choked on a laugh and sighed harshly, shaking his head.

“Mads and the girls really fucked this up,” he said.

“Getting to know her. I can’t say I’m upset about it,” I said cautiously.

Corvus scoffed, “Careful you ain’t flyin’ too close to the sun on this one, bro. You know how that worked out in the end.”

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