Devil May Care: Boxed Set (41 page)

“Now, you want to tell me what Axel wants? Or should I just send a message saying no now?”

I tensed, but didn’t let my nervousness show on my face. Or, at least, I tried not to. I was in a precarious position with this man, because he had a love-hate relationship with the Renegades. Mostly because he used to be one of them. “Axel doesn’t know I’m here.”

He seemed genuinely surprised by my answer, a single silver brow lifting curiously. “Alright. I’ll bite. What
are
you doing here, then?”

“I’m looking for a man named Dagger,” I told him thinly.

“Well, you managed to get that part right at least. You found him. Now what do you plan on doing with him?”

I cleared my throat. “Five months ago, Axel bought some illegal weapons from a supplier out of the area. It wasn’t unusual, but it went sour. Axel got caught. He went to prison. He’s still there and he’s not too happy about it.”

Dagger looked unimpressed with my story and merely sat back farther into his chair, as though I’d lost some of that initial interest I’d had to barter with. “I thought you said you weren’t here for Axel.”

“I’m not.”

“Sure sounds like it.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. I knew I had to be careful about all of this, but I didn’t have a lot of patience these days and the drive down here probably didn’t help. Taking a steadying breath, I cleared my throat and continued. “Axel’s in prison, but I’m the one in trouble. The boys think I’ve got something to do with it and I’m not in the mood for their shit. The only way to get through to Axel is to find out who
really
set him up.”

Dagger contemplated my response, examining me closely. For a long time he was silent and I worried that I’d wasted this trip for nothing. I was beginning to think that he wasn’t going to be any help at all, and with my already shortened temper, I decided I was tired of wasting my time.
Especially with Olivia at the hotel, hot and bothered and waiting for me.
I shoved the thought aside, but still couldn’t stop myself from jerking abruptly to my feet.

“If you’re just going to sit there and waste my time, I’m out. I’ve got better things to do with myself than wait for you to quit posturing.”

I turned to leave then, and halfway to the door I heard him call out for me.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help.”

Counting several beats in my head, just so he didn’t think I was quickly giving in to whatever he said, I finally left the door and walked back to the living room where he was sitting. I stood for a bit, just so that I could look into his strangely pale eyes and let him know that I meant business. This was my life we were talking so casually about, but more than that, I’d dragged someone else unwittingly into this and now both of our lives were on the line. Maybe that didn’t mean anything to him, but I took that responsibility seriously. If it were just me I would have said
screw you
to this Dagger guy and been on my merry way. I didn’t need him to give me intel—not really, not when I could surely and without conscience beat it out of one of Jacob’s stupid, meat headed boys—and I wasn’t interested in playing cheap shot posturing games over it.

But things were different with Olivia being involved. It meant I had to play things a little bit safer, and that was the only reason I was still here, listening.

Finally, I took my seat again. “What do you know?”

Dagger straightened slightly only to lean forward, placing both of his elbows on his knees. He looked at me with sharp eyes and the corner of his mouth kicked up in a grin. “You know I used to be a Renegade, right?”

I folded my arms across my chest and nodded. Yes, I had known that, though there wasn’t a lot else I knew about him. He’d been a Renegade long before my time, but I’d heard that he’d been part of the same crew as Axel. Probably not when Axel was leader, given Axel’s relative youth and this man’s age, but they’d ridden together. Then something weird happened. Dagger left the club and Axel worked his way to the top. I didn’t know if the two things were related, and right now, I didn’t think I really cared, but there was that lingering, niggling curiosity. What
had
made Dagger leave?

“I used to be the guy they called in to do the jobs no one else wanted to do. The jobs everyone was too
scared
to do.”

Sounds familiar,
I thought mildly. In fact, it sounded exactly like me. I stayed away from the drugs and the guns when I could, but if there was a shady job that people were afraid of, they’d call me. The drugs I wasn’t interested in because I didn’t like what they did and I sure as hell didn’t want them on my person when the cops showed up. That was mostly because I didn’t want to end up a cop killer if I could manage it, and that was a lot harder when you ran drugs. The arms stuff I did sometimes, but only when the people we dealt with were…dangerous. The kind of deals you maybe didn’t walk away from.

I wasn’t afraid of dying, I just didn’t want to spend my life in prison. Axel knew as much, so he chose my tasks accordingly.

Part of me wondered if this guy, Dagger, had been the same way. Or was he a different breed of crazy altogether?

“So what happened?” I finally asked when Dagger seemed to pause, lost in thought or memories or whatever.

He blinked a couple of times in surprise, like he’d forgotten that I was still sitting there in the room. “I got out,” he said simply, and while it sounded too boring, too uneventful, I had the feeling that those three words were laced with so much more.

“Got out,” I repeated. “Why?”

“Because sometimes there are things bigger than the club and the money and whatever else you’ve got going on.” He gave me an appraising look, his eyes slipping from my face to my hand which was settled on my bicep. It was my left hand and after a moment, I realized that he was staring at the ring on my finger. It was so new that I forgot it was there sometimes, like
I shouldn’t be wearing this, it’s just not me
, but then my mind would flash to Olivia and suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

I cleared my throat. “Things? Like what?”

“Don’t you know?” He was still staring at that ring and suddenly my mind flashed back to the picture sitting on the tabletop. It was the only one that looked personal to him. It had shown me a glimpse of a beautiful young woman, someone smiling and flirty and laughing—someone he seemed to completely adore. But it was only
one
picture as far as I could tell and there was no sign of the woman now.

Had she been his reason?

“Look, I don’t really care who you were or are or what your reasons were,” I told him gruffly, feeling an odd sense that we were dancing around a somewhat dangerous topic. Did I want to know why he left? And did I want to know where that woman was today? Probably not, because I had the feeling that if I learned anything about that my world might shift pretty dramatically. And I wasn’t ready for any of that. “I came here because word is you’ve got intel about what goes on with the Renegades. You’re supposed to have the inside scoop that no one else has and I want that information.”

Dagger slid back into his chair again, once more examining me closely. After a moment, he shrugged his shoulders. “I know some things. Funny thing about being done and retired, people still seem to think you need to
know
things.”

“So what
do
you know?”

He dragged a hand across his face, catching tiny silvery stubble along his jaw and stretching the tan, leathery skin there. “About what went down with Axel? Not a whole hell of a lot,” he admitted hesitantly. It seemed to me that there was something he didn’t want to tell me—but
did
want to tell me, too. He motioned towards my hand. “How long you been hitched?” he asked abruptly, switching topics so quickly that I wasn’t even sure how he’d made the leap.

I glanced down at the silver band. Plain, boring, but representative. “Not long,” I answered uncertainly. “Look, this doesn’t have anything to do with—”

“You so sure about that?”

I paused. “Yes. She’s not…she’s straight, alright? As far as I can tell, the biggest mistake she’s ever made was her ex-boyfriend, and no one would even know that except that he doesn’t take no for an answer.”

“And you think that makes a difference now? With these guys?”

I wanted to tell him, “Yes, of course it makes a fucking difference,” but I couldn’t. He was right by insinuating that this had to do with Olivia. My being in her life—even before I’d realized it had grown serious—meant that I dragged her through the mud with me. At the time, I wouldn’t have cared much and probably Jacob’s boys wouldn’t have cared either. But somehow I’d grown attached to her and as a result Jacob had targeted her.

I’d dragged her into this whole mess before either of us knew what had happened.

“If she’s in it, she’s in it,” I finally told him, gritting my teeth. “I didn’t mean to pull her down, but the only way to get her out now is to clear my name.”

“And then what?”

“What?”

He sighed and ran his hand across his face again, a nervous habit it would seem. “And then what? You clear your name, the immediate danger is over. But how long before something else goes wrong? How long before your boys cross someone else’s boys and they’re the
wrong boys
? How long before you get tagged for something else that may or may not be your fault?”

Frowning, I thought about what he was telling me.
How long.
Not very, if I was being honest with myself. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“I’m
telling
you that that ring on your finger is going to get her into trouble every goddamn time whether it’s your fault or her fault or anyone else’s. It won’t matter because she belongs to
you
.”

Dagger’s voice was low and serious and there was clear enough warning that I sat up a little straighter, a chill slipping down along my spine.
She belongs to you.
I enjoyed the way that sounded, fiercely so, but I also had to admit that there was an undercurrent of worry that went along with that.

“Are you saying you’re not going to help me unless…?”

He nodded once, stiffly. “I need to know the next time you get into this mess, it’ll
just
be you.”

I understood then exactly what he wanted—and I knew just how little I wanted to do it. Suddenly, I was positive that whatever happened to Dagger and his leaving the Renegades was directly related to the woman in the picture. Whether I wanted to think about it or not, his story paralleled my own—which made it all the more poignant that I hadn’t seen the girl around here anywhere.

Dagger was asking me—no,
telling
me—to give up Olivia for her own good, and I didn’t want to do it. But sitting here weighing whether or not he was right, as though I didn’t already know, I slowly came to the only conclusion available: I left Olivia or I walked away empty handed. He wasn’t going to talk if I didn’t agree that from now on I’d be doing this solo.

Finally, though there was a strange tenseness eating me up, I forced myself to nod. “Okay. I give my word. Will you tell me now?”

He hesitated still, which told me that what he knew didn’t sit well with him, but eventually he finally came clean about it. “Axel always had a tendency to meddle with people he wasn’t equipped to handle. That’s what happens when you think you’re the baddest monster around.” He shook his head, looking both nervous and irritated, strange as that was. “Axel was always like that. Thought that playing with drugs and guns and circumnavigating cops meant he was the biggest fish in town. And maybe he was, but when you start looking at
other
towns, you start noticing that there are big fish there, too. Much, much bigger fish.”

“What are you getting at?” I asked, feeling impatient.