Page 86 of The Kings of Kearny

“How?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you. You need plausible deniability in this. All of you do.”

Her frown deepened. “Liam wouldn’t get his chance for retaliation?”

I shook my head. “No one could ever think he was part of it. Or Jakob. Or anyone in either club.”

“He won’t thank you for stealing his revenge away from him,” she said.

“At least he’ll be alive to be pissed at me.”

She studied me for a moment, reading me like she had earlier. Finally she nodded. “What do you need from me?”

“I need you to stall their planning for as long as you can and help me get out of here when the time comes,” I told her.

She nodded. “I can do that. What else?”

“Will anyone overhear me if I make a phone call out here?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Then can you go back inside and give me a few minutes alone?”

In answer, she rose from her seat to leave. She paused when she reached me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do, but you should know, Jakob won’t want anything to do with me afterward.”

She surprised me by grinning.

I frowned up at her.

“You must really like him to go this far.” She squeezed my shoulder and left.

I waited until she disappeared inside before picking up my phone and scrolling through my contact list until I landed on the name Nicholas Nguyen-Forrester, a Vietnamese American Air Force intelligence troop I’d flown with in Syria. With resources in short demand, our role could change from attack plane to reconnaissance in a heartbeat, and he and a few other intel spooks had hopped a couple of flights with us, strapping an antenna array to our rig so they could collect comms data from Russian ground vehicles in the area.

He was a six-foot-tall dreamboat with wide shoulders, an incredible smile, and a body that just wouldn’t quit. Our flirtation had started the second we caught sight of each other, chemistry sparking between us in a way that couldn’t be ignored. We spent a couple of sleepless nights together back on the ground, and the sex was just as good as I hoped it would be. That was all it was though, and we’d lost contact after he and his crew switched to another plane.

We’d become Facebook friends a few years back, and now he was married with a daughter still in diapers and another baby on the way. We kept up with each other in the way that casual acquaintances typically did, liking each other’s posts only once in a blue moon or typing out LOL if one of us posted an exceptionally funny meme. He’d liked my status when I moved to Kearny and surprised me by reaching out via Messenger. The fact that Jakob didn’t know about him meant that he hadn’t actually stalked me after all. Because if he’d known about Nick, I never would have been allowed into Charley’s.

Nick answered on the second ring, his voice sleep muddled. “Krista?” he said. “Everything okay?”

I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at the time. It was almost ten. “Sorry for the late call,” I said. “But what if I told you I had a way for you to screw over a motorcycle club, and all you’d have to do is go to coffee with me?”

“Give me the time and the place, and I’ll be there,” he said.

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