Wild Like the Wind (Chaos #5)(118)

“Yeah.”

“Right. Still gonna keep the women covered. Now I got calls to make,” Tack told him. “Later, brother.”

“Later.”

He disconnected, shoved his phone in his back pocket and jogged down the rest of the steps.

Knight and Rhash were waiting for him outside the building.

“That go the way you wanted?” Rhash asked when he stopped with them.

“Absolutely,” Hound answered.

“I didn’t get a good feel about that last part,” Knight shared, watching him closely.

“It’s in hand,” Hound lied.

“I hope like fuck it is, man, ’cause this shit was annoying. Now it’s twisted and nasty and the time comes Chaos is forced to take a turn they don’t wanna take, a path that’s dark might hit pitch when your whole Club falls down a deep hole you can’t dig your way out of,” Knight declared.

Hound hoped like fuck that didn’t happen too.

“Who woulda thought we’d miss dealin’ with the psychopath that was Valenzuela,” Hound muttered, looking from them to scan the street, wondering if Chew was there keeping an eye on his girl.

“You might consider bringing Lee in on this,” Rhashan suggested and Hound turned his attention back to the big black man. “Ferret this fucker out.”

Lee, as in Lee Nightingale, a top-notch private detective with a team of the same, all of them covering skillsets that were extreme, all of them scary-good at what they did.

And all of them were allies.

“Nightingale and his boys got skills, but we now know this is Chew. So this is Chaos. It started with Chaos. It’ll stop there,” he replied.

Knight nodded understanding, but Rhash gave him a look, because he didn’t.

Hound got Rhashan’s reaction.

The faster this shit could end the better and Nightingale could assist in taking it Mach one.

But Chew had once worn the Chaos patch. He’d get the degree of respect he had left, which he’d earned when he’d earned that patch.

When he wasted that, the gloves would come off.

“We all got shit to do,” Hound said to them both. Then he spoke right to Knight, “Gratitude for arrangin’ that meet.”

“Good luck, Hound,” Knight replied.

Hound lifted his chin to Knight and then to Rhash.

After that he walked away thinking they didn’t need luck.

They needed what they always needed in the never-ending quest of dealing with this shit with the hope of finding an end to it.

Heart.

And balls.



Keely

I struggled in the back door with six bags of groceries dangling from my fingers, thinking that when Hound and I moved, we were so totally going to buy a house where the garage led right into the kitchen.

I hadn’t thought about taking that trek outside, along the back of the house and up the back stoop, not for years. It was just what I did, laden with grocery bags or not.

Now that my future included something different, I couldn’t wait to rush out to meet it.

What I could do was wait about ten more days (or ten more years) for that night.

We were having dinner with the boys to share with them that Hound and I were going to come out to the Club (or Hound was, he wasn’t allowing me anywhere near the Compound when he shared that information with his brothers, no matter the fits I’d pitched, and I’d pitched some fits in the two days since we’d made the decision).

It wasn’t that I couldn’t wait to have dinner with all my boys. I was looking forward to that.

It wasn’t even the fact that if that news went over okay with Dutch and Jag, we were also going to share that, once we were out with the brothers we’d be putting the house on the market and looking for something a little smaller.

I didn’t get the sense either of my sons were attached to the house. They were attached to me, not the house.

But if I was wrong and one or both of them was, we’d find a way to keep it for them. Rent it out or even let them move in and share it until the time came when the decision had to be made about which one would get it.

So, all that would be all right.

However, that night, Hound also wanted to tell them we were eventually going to get hitched.

I wanted him to officially ask me to marry him before we shared that news with my boys.

At least he’d agreed to that.

Obviously, we were not going to share we were planning on giving them a baby sister.

Not yet.

So that night I figured would go okay.

It was once that was done, the next step was telling Chaos.

That was what I could wait ten years for.

I dumped the bags on the kitchen table and started rooting for the stuff that went in the fridge and freezer, trying not to think about the fact that dinner tonight with the boys was step one of a two-step process with the second step not being a fun one.

In fact, I was back to wanting to postpone this step so the next step wouldn’t come and was even thinking I could convince myself that Hound and I could live the rest of our lives in hiding from his Chaos brothers if it meant he wouldn’t have to stand the gauntlet.

I knew he could not only handle it, in some badass part of his mind, he felt he needed to withstand it in order to finish the act of earning the honor of calling me his old lady.