Page 106 of Love Thy Brother
River spoke again before he could. “Don’t fuck with me. Whoever tried to hurt Rubi needs a boot on their neck, and it’s gonna be mine.”
19
RIVER
No one argued with me. Not Cam. Not Saint. Not even Rubi. He invited everyone to stay for dinner and pushed past me into the kitchen.
Cam gave me a look.
I gave him my middle finger. “Shut the fuck up.”
“Didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, well, don’t.”
Saint made a sound that could’ve been a laugh, but it was hard to tell. He evaporated into the kitchen too, and I faced my big brother alone.
I poked him for intel. “What do you know about the crew supplying Jonsey?”
Cam rose and moved to the window, cracking it open to smoke a cigarette. “Including him, there’s three dealers on the ground. He’s laying low, but the others are out and about every night.”
“Who’s supplying them?”
“A crew at a stash house in Truro. It’s near the train station, where the kids are bringing the re-ups in from the city. Mateo and Folk are on it as we speak. They found the car you ID’d outside, and the next re-up, they’ll follow the couriers back where they came from so we’ll know for sure who we’re dealing with.”
“Then what?”
“Then we hit them where it hurts. And we keep hitting them until it’s over.”
“You’re going to kill them?”
“Hope not.”
So did I. “This mess is my fault.”
“Partly.” Cam huffed smoke through his nose. “But it’s Rubi’s too. He knows better than to throw his weight around a town where we have no clout anymore.
“None at all?”
Cam shrugged. “We left a vacuum when we stopped moving product. It was only a matter of time before it blew up in our faces like it always does.”
“You can’t keep drugs out of Porth Luck any more than you can anywhere else.”
“I know that. It’s the process that’s the problem. If Rubi’s gonna stay surgically attached to you, it’s gonna get out that he’s one of us. Then it leaks that a crew came for him and we did nothing about it. That we’re weak, and what happens next?”
Blood. Lots of it. I crouched by the coffee table and rescued Rubi’s pipe. He’d left it loaded. I took full advantage and lit up while Cam watched me, gaze a thousand arrows carving holes in my armour. “You’re saying you need to go hard on this?”
Cam finished his cigarette and faced me again with a grim nod. “I’m saying we have to. It’s a massive step backwards, but if we don’t show face over this every chancing cunt out there is gonna have a pop. Then the big boys start coming too. For the strip clubs. The yard. The haulage firm. Then what? They kill us all?”
“Don’t say that.”
“I have to say it. Because it’s true. It’s a sad fact, Riv, but some of us were born too deep into this shit to ever fucking escape.”
“So it really never ends.” I took another hit from the pipe, then set it aside. “All this time, I thought you just didn’t want a nine to five.”
“I do want a nine to five. I want a ten o’clock bedtime too, where I can go to sleep without worrying I’ve put fifty brothers out of work. Husbands and fathers who’ll hang themselves before they’ll see their kids go without. But that ain’t happening, so I need to make the best of it until the club dies with me.”
I shivered, rubbing my bare arms. “That’s your plan? Till death do us part with the MC?”
