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Story: Reclaimed

Striker was standing outside his plain black sedan. It didn’t look too different from the one I’d given to Harley to use, except I knew this one had a V12 engine and manual transmission. Striker stood with his arms crossed over his chest. There was dirt on his leather jacket, and my nostrils flared at the iron tang of blood in the air.

“What the fuck happened?” I asked as I climbed off my bike.

“This did.” Striker opened the trunk of the sedan. Inside, two bloodied bodies were wrapped in a black tarp. The dragons wereunfamiliar to me. They were wiry and sallow-skinned, and they both smelled like Sean.

“During last night’s watch?”

“This morning,” Striker said. “I was on watch last night, ensuring the warehouse was clean before the shipment came through.”

“Right.” We didn’t typically post dragons at the warehouse, but with the mess with Sean and Levi, I’d decided to keep a closer eye on things. Apparently, that had been the right call.

“Michel’s guys brought the truck in this morning. No sign of any trouble. It wasn’t until we’d unloaded everything, and the truck had gone that I smelled them.”

I nodded. Striker had the best senses of all of my enforcers, on top of his sharp ex-military senses. It was impossible to get anything past him.

“At first, I’d thought it was the cops,” he said. “But the police wouldn’t run a sting like this. I smelled them coming from the woods.”

“The woods?”

“On the backside of the property.” Striker gestured to the tall fence topped with barbed wire. “Went that way to check it out, and these two ambushed me. It seemed like they weren’t expecting to get caught. They weren’t prepared for a fight. I handled them pretty easily.”

I flipped the tarp away from the bodies. Both dragons had deep, long gashes across their chests. Striker didn’t need guns when he was so good with his claws. The scent of rotting flesh assaulted me. I grimaced and covered the corpses again.

“What do you think they were planning?” I asked. “Another theft?”

“No. Look over here.” Striker led me to the back fence. It had been cut through with wire cutters, making a big enough gap for the dragons to slip through behind a few rusty, old cars. Inthe backseat of one of the cars, the intruders had stashed a half-dozen gasoline canisters.

I rubbed my hand over my forehead. “Jesus Christ.”

“Yep. They didn’t care about stealing the shipment. They wanted to destroy it. And probably the entirety of our warehouse while they were at it.”

“Sean sent them here to wait for the completed delivery, then they were going to torch the whole place. That’d probably get the cops involved, too.”

“And by extension, our clan,” Striker said. “It’s clan names on this property.”

“We need to change that,” I muttered. “Run it through a shell LLC.” There were so many little holes I was discovering in the gunrunning world. Tiny mistakes were ways to get caught. With Harley and Dylan in my life, the cost of getting caught was suddenly a hell of a lot higher.

“What’s our next move, Ace?” Striker asked.

“Handle the bodies,” I said. “Standard procedure. I’ll handle Sean.”

“What do you plan to do? Do you know where he is?”

I rubbed my forehead again. “No. I’ll figure something out.”

“Not before tonight, I hope.”

I grinned at Striker. There was a glimmer of excitement in his usually stoic expression. Everyone in the clan was excited for Dylan’s official introduction, not just me. “Definitely not before tonight. Let’s keep this between us and the enforcers for now.”

“Understood,” Striker said. We walked back to the car. He looked at the trunk and heaved a sigh. “This isn’t exactly how I planned to spend my day.”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Hopefully, this’ll be the last time.”

Striker climbed into his car and drove off with a grim promise to meet me at the clubhouse later. I walked into thewarehouse. It was a small space, mostly used to store parts for the scrapyard. The wooden crates had been pushed into their usual place against the wall. I grabbed a crowbar and wrenched the lid off one.

All the merchandise seemed to be in place. Handguns and semi-automatics were nestled in the foam padding. I checked the two other crates to be sure, and they all looked untouched.

So, Sean and his guys hadn’t messed with this order along the way. They’d just wanted to destroy it. Usually, I’d let the order wait in the warehouse, but now I’d have to get a few guys out here to transfer the goods to the garage today.

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