I had Tommy Gun and Dragon with me as back up, but Dragon was a fucking prospect and I’d known Tommy since birth and he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. I trusted them to have my back, but I wasn’t about to put them in a situation where they would need to—it was the first meet I was in charge of, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up.

I thought I was free and clear. I’d been stoked to be headed home with money in my saddle bags, and I was looking forward to the long ride with nothing to worry about but piss breaks and truck stop food.

When El Presidente asked me to stop by and handle some business with Jose, saying he had a quarter of the money they owed in his house safe, I was irritated as hell, but I went anyway. Apparently, Jose had been dealing for the gang, and he’d just come into a shitload of cash, but he hadn’t yet paid up. It was supposed to be just a quick stop on our way out of town, but when we pulled up to the house I knew shit was going to go down.

The dude had a fucking house full of people when I knew he’d been told we were coming. I didn’t know if he was feeling squirrely, or if he just didn’t care who knew he was doing business, but I wasn’t pleased with either scenario. It was business, and I was getting tired as hell of these fucking dicks acting like they were hot shit and not giving us the respect we deserved.

We parked our bikes by the road, and my brother Deke pulled in behind us in his little rice-grinder car. I wasn’t sure why Deke felt the need to follow us, but the hair stood up on the back of my neck when he told me he was coming along for the ride. I never ignored that feeling, so I just slapped him on the back before I climbed on my bike. I met Dragon’s eyes before we took off and I knew he was feeling it, too. Something was off.

The house was as full as it appeared from the outside, with people everywhere when we walked inside. I kept my guard up, but lucky for me, the dick I was looking for was standing in the entryway when we showed up. He had his arm around a woman who seemed to be having a hard time standing up, but I just barely registered her as I took everything in.

I didn’t see her as a threat, but I should have.

I glanced around the house and looked back at Jose just as the woman dropped her head back against his shoulder and I got a good look at her face. She was gorgeous. Nice tits, tan skin, and light blue eyes; a weird mix that seemed to work on her. But those weren’t the things about her that were the most apparent. She wasn’t a woman; she was a girl. Her cheeks were still a little chubby, and when her mouth went slack I could see braces in her mouth with little purple rubber bands. It made my stomach clench that Jose, who was at least ten years older than me, was groping the girl, but it wasn’t my problem, so I deliberately looked away from her face even though it fucking killed me to do it.

There was something about her. I’d been around a lot of bitches in my life, whores and good girls, but this girl was different. She didn’t fit the situation. She was like a colored puzzle piece mixed in with a black and grey puzzle. It bugged the shit out of me—but I couldn’t let it break my focus. Whatever she was doing there had nothing to do with me.

I started talking to Jose, telling him we had business to discuss, when four of his boys showed up from somewhere in the back of the house. As soon as they were close, Jose dropped the chick he was holding and I knew shit was going to get bad. Really bad. Three of his boys were packing, and what had seemed like an easy pick-up suddenly turned into something I hadn’t seen coming. I was trying to assess the situation, wondering why Jose was being an idiot instead of just handing over the money, when the girl he’d been holding crawled across the floor and grabbed a hold of my leg.

It only took a second.

I looked down at her when she grabbed a hold of my thigh, her fingernails scratching across my jeans, and that was enough of an opening for the fuckers. The pulled their pieces, and before I could say a word, started firing.

When people are shooting at you, it isn’t like the fucking O.K. Corral. You don’t stand there and shoot back and hope you don’t get hit. You get the fuck down and then you shoot back. So that’s what I did. I dropped hard on top of the girl as I reached for my piece in the back of my waistband.

When all was said and done, there were people all over the house fucking screaming and running, but Jose and his men were dead. My boys may have been new—or in Tommy’s case, completely fucking stupid—but they’d done their job. I climbed to my feet as people rushed out the back of the house and started to step toward the front door, but the look on Dragon’s face stopped me. He was staring at the floor, and that’s when I remembered the girl.

She was completely out of it, sprawled out on the hard wood. She wasn’t wearing revealing clothes, nothing that a normal teenager wouldn’t wear, but the way she was sprawled out on the floor made her short shorts and tank top look fucking obscene. Her legs were spread wide with the legs of her shorts gaping, one of her arms was crossed over her chest and the other was close to her face. With the way her hair covered everything from the neck up, it almost looked like she was sucking her thumb. She looked so goddamn young that I felt like I’d been punched in the throat.

I couldn’t leave her there like that—alone and vulnerable to any dick that came across her.

So I took her with me.

Getting her on a bike wasn’t going to happen, so I stuffed her into the back of my brother’s car before we headed to a motel by the freeway. We’d been staying further south, but after that mess with Jose I wasn’t going to stay where we’d been. The gang had to have known within minutes what had gone down and I wasn’t about to be ambushed for something that wasn’t my doing in the first place. Their boy had decided he felt froggy and was going to stiff me the twenty-five grand he owed us. Bullshit. He took the first shot—fucking bad luck for him that he didn’t make the last one.