“Trinity!”
She spun, fists still clenched. Oleg had followed, and now he strode quickly after her. Two doors away, almost made it.
An argument had been brewing between them—she’d kept secrets, he’d thought he knew her—but she couldn’t have that conversation right now.
“You knew it was important, your relationship with Jax—”
“He’s my brother.”
“You knew it would complicate things for us.”
“I didn’t know how much, but, yeah, I knew. Do you blame me for keeping my mouth shut when I was falling in love with you?” She ran her hands through her hair. “Honestly?”
Oleg reached out to touch her cheek, lifted her chin. “And if you have to choose?”
Trinity’s breath quickened. She cocked her head, trying to mask her alarm. “Are you going to make me?”
“If you had to,” Oleg said, “who would you choose?”
Trinity gave a small laugh and shook her head. Her life back home had sometimes been troubled, sometimes lonely, and sometimes dangerous, but to her it had always been a beautiful life. School, working in the bakery and later in Keegan’s Pub, seeing her friends, and fighting with her mother. There were churches and cobblestones, and on a nice day there were musicians busking all through the city. Beautiful.
There was beauty here as well. The badlands and the mountains. At night, even the lights of Las Vegas had a brittle beauty. Trinity had believed that she and Oleg could make a beautiful life, but she felt apart from it now, as if the only loveliness she could see was through the barred windows of some prison cell.
“A man who loved me would never ask me that question,” she said.
Oleg nearly growled. She saw him fighting within himself, the grim Russian demeanor in conflict with his feelings for her.
“A woman who loved me would be able to answer it,” he replied.
“You bastard…”
He reached for her, but she shook his arm off. “All I’m asking is… if it came to that…”
Trinity pointed a finger at his face, bared her teeth. “He’s my brother, which makes him the only thing my father ever gave me. He’s family.”
A brutal silence descended upon them.
They heard the shush of clothing and a heavy footfall, and they turned to see Jax coming around the corner at the end of the hall. He stopped, meeting Oleg’s gaze in an open challenge, and Trinity wondered how much he had heard.
“You got a minute?” he asked.
Oleg scratched at his stubbled chin. “She’s got all the time in the world.”
He turned to walk away, but Jax called him back. “I was talking to you.”
Chin high, Oleg regarded him coolly. “Go on.”
“Me being here complicates things for you,” Jax said. “I recognize that. Kirill and I have an understanding. At the end of this thing, we may not all be friends, but we’re not gonna be trying to kill each other. I get the impression you and I need an understanding of our own.”
Oleg wetted his lips. “Putlova recruited Kirill. Kirill brought me into the Bratva, freed me from an ugly life. I had great respect for Viktor Putlova.”
Trinity watched her brother’s face. His features betrayed nothing, were as smooth a mask as Oleg’s.
“I respected Putlova, too,” Jax said. “But it’s hard to keep respecting a guy when you’ve got a knife in your back. Or at your throat. Trinity loves you, so I’m gonna promise you something. All my cards are on the table. My only agenda is to make sure my sister is safe. I know you want that, too, Oleg, but I have to ask… are all of your cards on the table?”
Oleg hesitated, glanced at Trinity, and a veil of aggression seemed to fall away from his face. “Yes,” he said, “all the cards.”
For a second, Trinity thought they might shake, but Jax did not extend his hand, and Oleg only nodded and turned away, striding along the corridor until he reached the turn in the hall. She heard the sound of the metal release bar on the exit door, then listened as it thumped shut.
“That went well,” Jax said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm.
“I think it did, actually,” she said. “He may not want to respect you, but I think he’s startin’ to. Harder to hate a man if you know him.”
Jax laughed softly. “Yeah, that’s not really been my experience.”
“Regardless, we’re allied now, all of us. Once Lagoshin’s out of the way, all of this fear will end.”
For half a second, Jax stared at her as if she’d grown an extra head. His doubts aside, she believed that this alliance would be propitious. Awkwardness lingered between them, but it was quickly being replaced by a deep kinship. Jax had made it clear that he had her back, no matter what, and though she’d spent her life learning to deal with men who disappointed her, she had begun to believe in this man. Her brother.
Trinity told herself she would never have to choose between her new life and her old one. She could almost believe it.
15
Thor felt a hand shaking him. He felt the crick in his neck and the ache in his spine and tried to twist himself into a more comfortable position. The hand shook him again, like God had reached down into his dreams and rousted him. He pulled away, determined to cling to sleep, but as he moved he slid off the sofa cushions that he’d laid out on the floor of the poolroom in a makeshift bed, and just that two-inch drop to the ground was enough to make his eyes pop open.
“Up and at ’em, thunder god,” Baghead said, worried sincerity in his eyes. His breath could have peeled a century’s worth of paint off a barn.
“Bag…,” Thor managed to say, too tired for any imaginative profanities. He pulled away from that hideous breath. Glancing around, he found the hair band he’d taken off the night before and used it to pull his red mop into a topknot, keeping it out of his face.
In the midst of this, Bag kept putting his hand out. Thor blinked and realized his friend was trying to give him something.
“Phone’s for you,” Bag said.
Thor squinted, rubbed his eyes, and glanced at the door. Was it morning yet? Had the sun come up? Sure as hell didn’t feel like it could be morning.
He took the phone. “It better be fucking good o’clock,” he said. “Who the hell is this?”
“It’s Izzo,” a raspy voice said. Someone else who didn’t like being awake at this hour. “Trust me, I’m not happy to be talking to you, either. Something I figured you and your MC would want to know.”
Thor felt a tightening in his chest. He glanced up, saw Baghead watching him intently with those mad little rat eyes of his. “Get me coffee, Bag.”
Thor watched Bag retreat from the room. He had to go around Antonio, who’d been sleeping on the floor but who now raised his head to gaze blearily around the room. Jax had sent Thor back to the Tombstone the night before with a request that Rollie keep them ready to move, which meant every member of SAMNOV in the area had bedded down in the rooms at the back of the bar. Baghead had been sleeping in the other crash room with Mikey the Prospect, who was a nineteen-year-old ex-football star, and a short brute with a shaved head and blond eyebrows that they all called Clean.
“You call just to breathe heavy?” Thor asked.
“I thought you were still talking to your buddy,” Izzo said. “Guy sounds half-crazy, by the way.”
“Maybe both. You’re stalling, man. Tell it.”
Thor could hear Izzo sigh over the phone, almost as if the cop was afraid to speak the words that would come next. The sound was chilling.
“Little more than half an hour ago, we got a call from a guy out doing his morning bike ride. Found two bodies on the side of a remote road in North Vegas, runs through an old family ranch that was foreclosed on a couple of years back.”