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“What the fuck is this all about?” Lobo asked.

“You tell me,” he shot back, giving Lobo a chance to confess to what he really knew.

“Fucking Maria. She’s into something, but I haven’t figured out what. The girl is always scheming and whispering with some of the guys.” Lobo shook his head. “Whatever she’s done, she took a father from his child today.” The disgusted scorn on his face only made him look angrier.

“You seriously don’t know?” Viper didn’t trust Maria’s word that she’d done this all behind Lobo’s back.

“My guys are loyal. Like you. They love the club and the brotherhood. But when there’s a woman... they fucking go brain-dead. I’ve seen her sniffing around you. She’s fucked just about everyone else, so it doesn’t surprise me. You know why I was so angry about her keeping that baby a while back?”

“Why?”

“She wanted to ransom her back to her family. She said the club would make a lot of money if we used our brawn. What she wanted to cultivate was a deadly reputation. I don’t mind when behind that is aYou fuck with us, we’ll fuck with you. But to actively harm people just to earn a buck?” Lobo shook his head. “I know MCs have a reputation, and maybe there’s some shady shit we do, but we aren’t monsters. We don’t keep babies from their families.”

“What do you think she’s been doing with some of the guys?”

“I’m guessing some sort of enforcement kind ofthing. Someone owes money to someone, and one of the guys makes sure he gets what’s owed.”

Viper knew Lobo and the guys did that kind of work sometimes.

He spilled the hard truth. “It’s more that she eliminates a problem in someone’s life.”

Lobo’s eyes went wide, and then he turned and stared at Viper, looking for a lie and seeing only the truth. “No.”

“Yes. I did a job for her.”

“What? No.” He shook his head. “I’m not going down for murder.”

“I have a feeling she’s going to try to pin it all on you.”

Viper’s prediction came true an hour later when he was standing in a room next to the interview room where Maria said for the third time, “Lobo ran the club. Those guys will do anything he says. It wasn’t me. I’m just his sister, one of the women.”

Viper had to give her credit for using the hierarchy in the club against the members. Women weren’t given any power. In fact, they were subservient to the dominant men. But Maria had used sex and money to lure the men into doing her bidding.

Nick sat across from Maria and held up the notebook Viper had stolen from her. “This is an interesting list of names and figures. All in your handwriting.”

“I kept the records for Lobo.”

Viper wasn’t surprised she’d sell out her own brother. She didn’t feel things like others did. She was only out to save her own ass.

Nick flipped open the laptop on the table, the one the tech guys had no trouble getting into since Lobo himself had given them permission to search it. Viper had supplied the URL, username, and password. Thatgot them into the site where Maria took the orders, but there were also other files on the computer, hidden files, that the tech guys also found that gave them the chat logs for all the customers who hired Maria.

She was blackmailing them after the fact, too. They paid for the kill, then she made them keep on paying.

“We have everything. Including the bank-account information where you’ve stashed all the money.”

Maria gasped. “How is this possible? How did you even know?”

Viper wondered how she’d known he was at the police station this morning. He’d snuck in the back and only two people had seen him. Officer Bowers and the lieutenant. He also wondered how Maria made sure the people who hired her were legit. Google? Yeah. You could find a lot on an internet search, but she seemed so sure about who she agreed to work for.

The answer to his questions walked into the office.

Viper met him right outside the door where Maria sat dumbfounded by her arrest. “Lieutenant. What brings you here?”

The lieutenant didn’t miss a beat. “I heard about the arrests and came to get some information about what’s been going on in my town.”

Viper knocked on the interview-room door.

Nick opened it, leaving the door wide enough for Maria to see her visitor.