Page 76 of It's Going to Be a Chrome Christmas
Jeff looked down, shamed. “I know. I just… The boy looked so lost. You didn’t see him back then, Trixie. He was… He was a shell. It’s a poor excuse and you have every right to fire me for doing so, but I just wanted to offer him something, anything, to help him. If keeping him apprised of you helped, then that’s what I did.”
Trixie should fire him. While he hadn’t sold the information, he’d still given out sensitive employee information without their consent. Problem was, she’d just lost Cayden. She didn’t think she could handle losing Jeff too.
“This doesn’t leave this room,” she said finally. “And you never give him any information again.”
Jeff nodded. “Understood.” He hesitated before asking, “Will you tell me now what happened with Cayden?”
She shook her head. “What’s to tell? Lee showed up on my doorstep, shot. I kicked Cayden out, so he wasn’t mixed up in whatever it was Lee was into. I didn’t know he was a cop at the time. Cayden argued, we fought, Cayden left. I haven’t seen him since. Apparently, though, he decided to take liberties with his security codes and relieve us of our Spyder.”
Jeff bit his lip before saying, “He didn’t use his security codes.”
“What do you mean?” She hadn’t had a chance to take him out of the system yet. Why wouldn’t he use his codes?
“L and S just got through with their assessment. Cayden bypassed their system entirely. He never touched his employee access.”
Well…shit.
Cayden had been sixteen when he’d first met Carver, then the Vice President of the Black Pythons. He’d just boosted a sweet sleeper and had driven it to a shop across the city. Carver had been impressed that Cayden had found the tracker as well as avoided the cops to make it to that specific shop. When Carver had asked Cayden why that shop, Cayden’s answer had been simple, “They’ll give me a bigger cut.”
Carver had handed Cayden his prospect cut that day.
For his nineteenth birthday, Carver had gifted Cayden with the schematics to a new “un-boostable” car that had yet to hit the market. It had earned the club nearly half a mil in their coffers, and ten percent of that went into Cayden’s account.
Cayden wouldn’t go as far as to call Carver a friend. They’d had a mutually beneficial relationship to serve the MC. Cayden did his job, and Carver provided the resources and protection for that job. In exchange, they both got paid well for that job.
It took Cayden a long time to realize that he wasn’t loyal to the Black Pythons. They’d been his ‘people’ since Carver had found him, but they weren’t hisfamily. They would never be his family. Some MCs were ride or die, loyal to the core. But not the Black Pythons. Even brother chapters didn’t care about eachother enough to come to their aide. It was cutthroat, and at the end of the day, the cut was worth less than the leather it was created from.
Carver was a tall, muscular, bald man. For a criminal, he tended to wear more white articles of clothing than black, and Cayden was likely one of the few people who knew why.“Why would I want to hide the blood splatter?”Carver had once asked him. The statement had been rhetorical, but it hadn’t made it any less true.
“Boost!” The man’s voice boomed around the room when Lee and Cayden entered the clubhouse. Carver was in the center of the room with his fist raised above his shoulder. His other hand held the shirt of a bloody, partially-conscious man who was slumped on the floor.
The club brothers guarding the door had let Cayden and Lee pass without argument or checking them for weapons. Carver must have warned them Cayden was coming, which meant news of Romero’s getting hit had reached him as Cayden had predicted.
Carver was shirtless, donned in only a pair of white training pants and his cut. His entire body gleamed with sweat and crimson pebbles.
Cayden stopped a few feet from his former Prez. The man hadn’t changed in three years. From his style of clothing to the ruthless look in his eyes. He continued to pound on the man’s face like unexpected visitors hadn’t just walked in on him pulverizing someone. Cayden didn’t see a cut on the bloody man, but that didn’t mean much. It could have been ripped from him before Carver started beating on him.
Lee halted right behind Cayden. Trixie’s brother hadn’t said a word since they’d been inside the Spyder. Cayden imagined silence was the former soldier’s default mode. Though he appeared relaxed, Cayden sensed the man was anything but. Healso didn’t move like he’d done self-surgery to remove a bullet from his shoulder only two nights ago.
Cayden had been around the proverbialtough guyall his life. No one on the streets lived long with a reputation of being a wimp. Only the strong survived. But there were the strong like Carver, who took it by force, and then there were the strong like Lee, who earned it through his own flesh, sweat, and blood. Lee didn’t say anything he didn’t mean and didn’t threaten anything he couldn’t deliver. Cayden had only known the man a little over a day and he felt confident enough in that assessment.
Every single one of the club brothers present were armed. If they were smart, which Cayden could attest to that they weren’t, they would be more scared of Lee, who was unarmed, despite the guns they carried on their persons. Guns did not equal strength. Most of the time, guns equaled stupidity because people believed they gave them strength. Cayden had seen more than one brother harm themselves more than they did their opponent because they thought themselves a badass with a gun in their hands. It was one of the reasons Cayden didn’t touch them. There were too many fools in the world who felt guns made them powerful and Cayden had resigned himself a long time ago to never be a fool.
“Carver. I like the new digs.”
The Prez’s smile was wolfish, but there was something guarded in his gaze. “I’m afraid you have me at a bit of a loss today, Boost.” He dropped the bloody man unceremoniously to the floor. “As happy as I am to see you, Bucky assured me that you were out. I let you go out of the kindness of my heart, and now you’re back?” He walked over to Cayden, his eyes never leaving his. “It makes me suspicious, Boost. It makes me wonderwhy.”
“To be honest, I’m wondering the same thing.”
Carver raised an eyebrow. “Are you?”
“I wasout,” Cayden emphasized. “I wasn’t even running anything at Romero’s, but since Bucky’s little visit, I’ve been under scrutiny for every little fucking thing that went wrong there. A damn paperclip goes missing, blame the convict!”
Carver’s expression showed his distaste for Cayden’s attempt at going straight. “Sounds dreadful. Really, you should have taken your complaints up with management.”
“I did, when I stole her precious car.”
Carver let out a sardonic snort. “Well, I suppose that’s one way to make your feelings known. Are you back then?”
