Chapter Sixteen

Cali

I guess I'd been expecting other, I don't know, important documents. Or maybe even more of the flash drives like Brooks had found.

I didn't expect what we found instead.

Stacks and stacks of money.

And a gun.

"Fuck," Brooks said, closing the lid.

"What are—"

"Cameras," he whispered under his breath, barely moving his lips in the process.

"Oh," I said, casually glancing around.

"Here," Brooks said, grabbing my purse, and swinging it up and off of me, placing it on the table, then unzipping it as he positioned the box so that when the lid was raised, it seemed to block the camera's view.

He was deathly silent as he unzipped my purse, then held it open, giving me a prompting look.

With numb hands, I carefully shoved the money in, but his hand dropped on top of mine when I reached for the gun.

"Prints," he said.

I didn't really understand why that mattered if we were taking it.

Brooks slipped a bill out of the stack in the purse, using it to grab the gun, and shove it into the purse without touching it.

"Let's get out of here," Brooks said, handing me back my purse, then closing the box. "Act normal," he demanded in my ear as he pressed a kiss there.

He wrapped an arm around me and led me out of the bank.

My heart was punching against my ribcage, sure the security officer was going to follow us out, that cop cars might come flying into the lot, grabbing us, and hauling us off to jail.

None of that happened, though, as we silently climbed on Brooks's bike.

I wasn't surprised when we pulled into the clubhouse lot instead of toward my apartment.

I could practically read Brooks's thoughts.

That whatever Clay was involved in was clearly illegal, and he didn't want that shit in my home.

But, I guess, most things about Brooks's life were, you know, illegal. So it made sense for him to bring it into his home instead.

His hand reached for mine, fingers slipping between mine, and pulling me in through the bustling common area.

"I might need to talk to you later," he said, nodding his chin at a tall, good-looking man who had that kind of swaggering confidence that came with leadership.

The man's gaze moved over me, then back to Brooks, nodding. Like he almost understood the whole situation immediately.

Once inside his bedroom, I flung off the purse, then dropped down on his bed, exhaling hard.

"You know, criminal stuff isn't quite as exciting in real life as it looks in the movies," I told him, getting a surprised huff of a laugh out of Brooks as he grabbed the purse from off of the floor, and placed it on his nightstand.

"You get used to it," he admitted as he went into his bathroom, then came back with disposable gloves in his hand, slipping them on, then going into my purse.

"Why did he have a gun?" I asked, the question plaguing me since the moment I'd seen it.

"That's a good question," Brooks said as he pulled it out, turning it in his hand.

"You know about guns?" I asked.

"Since this club is in the business of running guns, yes," he said, giving me a small smile.

"Oh, right. So, what does the gun tell you?"

"Guns don't really do much talking, baby," he said, but he did something that made the clip or magazine or… I didn't even know what to call it… pop out. "Except it's been fired."

"He shot someone?"

"We don't know that," Brooks said, shaking his head. "We don't even know if it's his. But we do know that it's likely not a legal one if he was hiding it in a safety deposit box."

"Right," I agreed.

"But to be safe, we're not gonna touch this shit," he told me, holding the gun in one hand, then going over to his nightstand to open a drawer, and pull out a small box with a handle.

"What's that?"

"Gun safe," he said, tapping a code, then opening it to reveal, well, a gun. That he casually took out, placed back in the drawer, shut it, then put Clay's gun inside instead.

When he was done, he stuck it up on the top shelf in his closet, then came to sit next to me, pulling off the gloves and tossing them onto his nightstand.

"You alright?" he asked.

"My head is spinning," I admitted. "A gun? Stacks of money? I've never seen that much money," I added, shaking my head. "How much was it?"

"Those were ten grand stacks. Looks like, rough guess, a hundred grand. Maybe more."

"A hundred grand?" I gasped, eyes huge. "How? I don't…"

I didn't understand.

Clearly.

Because the brother I knew was a law-abiding citizen. I often wondered if Brooks's choice not to be was part of what had driven a wedge between them.

But the cash, the gun, the car he shouldn't have been able to afford, the scary guys with his watch?

It wasn't looking good.

"We're gonna figure it out," Brooks assured me, his hand landing on my thigh, giving it a squeeze. "That note he left me is making more and more sense now."

"You think he was worried about me?"

"I think whatever he was wrapped up in was dangerous, yeah. And it was in his nature to worry about and protect you."

"I'm sorry he dragged you into this," I said, shaking my head.

"Hey," he said, his tone having a bite to it as he snagged my chin, and forced me to face him. "Don't do that. First, none of this is your fault. Second, I'm happy to be here to help."

"You won't get in trouble with your, er, boss?"

"President," he corrected. "No. Fallon and I are close. And, fuck knows, he's used to the women in our lives bringing their own particular brand of crazy into the club. It's fine. But the sooner I can give him the answers to the questions he's gonna have, the better."

"Let me see the paperwork," I demanded.

"We don't have to do that today," he said.

"Might as well try. At least it will be off our plates if we can figure it out."

"Alright," he agreed, getting off the bed to pull a box out of his closet, placing it on the bed, then removing the stacks he'd sorted everything into. "Do whatever you want to it. I was just trying to see if organizing it might show me something that the mess didn't. But that got me nowhere."

With that, he left me with the papers as he went to my purse, removing all the cash, and stacking it on the dresser.

"Was your estimate right?" I asked, looking up from a stack of bills, all of them having the word Paid on them, along with a date.

"One-twenty," he said.

Jesus.

That was an unfathomable amount of money to me.

It wasn't that I was struggling or anything. I made a decent living. I generally lived right below my means. I could cover the cost of an emergency car repair, but not much else. You know… like the average American my age. So the idea of that kind of cash was insane.

Brooks, on the other hand, seemed unfazed.

How much money did bikers make?

Enough for this much cash to not make his eyes go wide, it seemed.

And whatever he made, he likely had in savings, since he didn't seem to have a lot of living expenses, living in the club.

"What?" Brooks asked, making me realize I'd been staring with my brows pinched.

"Do bikers make a lot of money?" I asked.

It was a rude question, of course. You weren't supposed to ask what someone made. Other countries thought it was incredibly tacky how we so freely asked that kind of thing, like your income had something to do with your worth or something.

But this was Brooks.

I didn't have to feel weird around him.

"We make a nice living. All of us. But some of us more than others."

"Because you have a higher rank."

"Exactly," he agreed. "Most of us, when we're ready to move out of the club are able to buy our houses outright," he said, shrugging that off.

In this area, that was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"Maybe I should be a biker," I mused, thinking of all the clothes I could buy with that kind of income.

"It pays based on the risk involved," he reminded me.

That was true.

And it was something I hadn't really stopped to consider since things had gotten more than friendly between us.

If I wanted him—and there was no denying that fact—then I would have to live with the fact that he was an outlaw biker, that he did illegal things, that he might get in trouble for that. Or, worse yet, get hurt or killed because of that.

"Don't go planning my funeral yet, baby," he said, shooting me a tight little smile. "I'm not gonna say that the club never sees any action. We do. But I don't remember the last time someone in this club died from it. Get a little roughed up, maybe shot? Sure. But not killed. We're careful. And a lot of the club members have very… specialized skills."

"Like ex-military," I guessed.

"That, yeah. And lots of other shit. Been here since I was nineteen, and I'm still kicking."

That was true.

Besides, my family was proof enough that even being on the right side of the law, living normal, kind of boring lives, didn't insulate you from injury and early death.

"Cali, I'd get it if, now that you've had time to think it over, you're having second thoughts."

"I'm not," I insisted, even if there'd been a few fleeting ones.

"Well, if you think on it more, and they come up, like I said… I get it."

If I were looking for reasons not to like this man, he would be making it really hard. I mean, what guy told you, just when things were getting good, that he would understand and not hold it against you if you suddenly decided you wanted to kick him to the curb?

"Don't be ridiculous," I said, brushing him off as I refocused my attention on the bills. When, suddenly, something jumped out at me. "Hey," I said, frantically fanning out the pages.

"You have something?" he asked, a hint of eagerness slipping into his tone.

"I think… maybe…" I said, looking over the papers, tossing away the ones that didn't fit the pattern I was starting to see.

"What is it?" he asked, getting impatient as he looked at the same pages, and clearly didn't see what I was seeing.

"These… look," I said, grabbing the first one I saw. "This is an electric bill for January," I explained.

"Right," he agreed, looking at it.

"Which, objectively, should have been paid in January or, at the latest, February, right?"

"Right."

"Why did he write it was paid in April?" I asked, stabbing my finger at the four on the date.

"Huh," he said, taking the page.

"Same thing here," I said, producing a car insurance bill. "It says he paid it three months earlier than the date on the bill."

"Okay. You're onto something," he agreed, taking that page too.

"And look at this," I said, flinging up two pages.

"The dates are right on those," he said, squinting at me.

"Yeah. Look at the word Paid," I demanded. "He'd capitalized the wrong letters."

"It's a code," he said, taking those letters as I fished for others.

"A passcode," I clarified, glancing over toward his laptop on his dresser.

"That's why it was in a mess like this," he said. "Tons of bills, no one is going to stop and analyze if the bill dates and paid dates are right."

"Exactly. He hid it in plain sight, but in a way that those of us close to him would know something was wrong. Thank god you didn't just recycle all of this."

"How many combinations do you think this would make?" he asked, looking between the pages I found that were wrong in one way or another.

"I suck at math, but I think, like, thousands."

"Fuck," he said.

"Do you have a pen?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, finding one in his nightstand, and handing it to me.

I took it, and jotted down the numbers and letters on the back of another sheet of paper, rewriting them a few times to try to make sense of them.

"Stick to the letters," Brooks suggested. "If they spell something, the numbers might make more sense."

"Right," I agreed.

Some of the bills had the dates written in number form, others were written out with the weird capitalizations.

"It's my name," I finally concluded.

Cali.

"But there's leftovers."

"BL," he said, pointing. "My initials."

"Oh, right."

"Do the numbers correlate to anything? They're not your birthday."

No, they weren't. And I pretended to ignore the gooey feeling in my chest at realizing he remembered my birthdate.

"Or yours," I concluded. "Wait," I said, something tickling the edges of my memory. "Remember the last time we all went out?" I asked. "You know… before…"

"Yeah, we got burgers," he recalled.

"It was cold, right?" I asked.

"Yeah. I had to lend you my coat," he said.

"Right. Yeah. Maybe… December?" she asked.

"Sounds about right."

"Twelve," I said, bringing the numbers together. "And these… the year," I told him, grouping those, ignoring the pang in my heart at seeing how long ago it had been.

"Which just leaves the four."

"The fourth of December," I agreed. "I think we have the passcode."

"How did he know we would remember when the last time we were all together?" Brooks asked, speaking to himself.

"He knew I would remember," I clarified.

Suddenly, I was pretty sure my secret, massive crush on my brother's best friend wasn't quite the secret I always thought it was.

Had he always known?

If he did… what did he think of it?

Would he have been alright with it?

"You're looking a little gray," Brooks said, head cocked to the side.

Honestly, I was feeling green, so gray seemed a bit of an improvement.

"Is it wrong that I don't want to know right now?" I asked, looking up at him.

"No, it's not wrong. This is all… a lot. And none of this is going anywhere. We don't have to know anything else right now," he said, already reaching to toss the papers back into the box. We didn't need them anymore anyway. "I promised you lunch," he said. "And you look like you need something in your stomach."

"I could eat," I agreed, even though I was a little too queasy to actually be hungry right then.

I just needed some space to compartmentalize all of this.

Then I would be ready to finally know the whole truth of what Clay had been hiding from me for months. Or longer. I had no idea.

"Tacos?" he asked.

"Does anyone ever say no to tacos?" I asked, forcing a smile I didn't quite feel.

"And after you have some food in your stomach, we can find a field somewhere, and I will let you give the bike a go."

Early morning coffee and an epic sex session followed by an actual date with the guy of my dreams followed by ticking off a bucket list item?

It was practically the best day of my life.

If not for the dark cloud hanging over us.

Involving a gun.

Illegal cash.

And whatever the hell was on that flash drive…