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“Hey, Uncle Wade, how’s the family?” Hunt sounded relaxed and happy. He should be, after his recent honeymoon with his beautiful wife, Cyn.

“We have a problem.”

Hunt didn’t even pause. “How can I help?”

Chapter Two

Viper lay on the massage table gritting his teeth as the physical terrorist worked on the knots in his shoulder breaking up the scar tissue from an old gunshot wound.

“Relax. Breathe.”

Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one with an elbow digging into soft tissue. She wasn’t the one who had to endure not just the gunshot but the rehab, too.

And that got him thinking about the past couple of years and the state of his life. He hated everything about what he was doing, except for the reason he was doing it.

Two months ago he’d returned a kidnapped baby to her family. That felt pretty damn good. Lana was safe with her aunt Cyn, who’d recently married Lyric’s cousin, Hunt. He’d shown Lyric he could do the right thing, even if he looked and acted sometimes like he was on the wrong side of the law.

Last month, he’d ended up in a gunfight with one of the guys in the biker club he was currently neck-deep in, who was hell-bent on taking out someone else connected to Lyric’s family. He’d ended up having to shoot the guy himself, then give the club president a bullshit story about how the FBI had taken out theirbuddy. Lyric’s cousin, Max, and his fiancée were safe now too because of him.

Not that Lyric knew that.

All he wanted to do was find out who in the club was the head of the snake who set up all the shady shit going on, including the contract killing. It seemed like the club president—who went by the name of Lobo—didn’t know anything about it. Either that or he had the best poker face Viper had ever seen. Which was possible, but his instincts told him otherwise. The guy Viper had killed, Bleaker, had played things close to the vest and had never revealed who set up the jobs, leaving Viper still trying to weed out other members so he could find the mastermind and stop him.

Living a double life was exhausting, especially when you didn’t know who to trust or who’d stab you in the back.

“Ow.” He groaned, and the PT let up on a particularly tender spot.

“Sorry about that. You’re so tense. You need to relax.”

Yeah, try doing that when you’re surrounded by a bunch of thugs. No one fucked with him, but he was tired of the game he’d been playing for years now.

Maybe it was time to change things up and do something different.

The only bright spot in his life was something he wanted but couldn’t have. Not right now. Not when he put everyone around him in danger all the time. He was happy to risk himself for the reward of taking down the bad guys, but not someone else.

Not her.

But wanting her had become an almost tangiblegnawing inside him. The more he tried to stay away from Lyric, the more he wanted to see her. Just being in her presence eased him. Watching her cook or sing or dance or laugh with her friends and family . . . Yeah, he wanted to be part of her world.

But he was stuck in his.

“You’re good to go. See you in a few days. We’ll work on that range of motion. Drink lots of water. Ibuprofen for the swelling and pain. You should be feeling better in the morning.” His PT left with a smile on her face and him feeling worse than when he’d walked in. But she was right, by tomorrow his shoulder would feel better. And if he took better care of himself, it might last.

Viper sat up on the table, hung his head to stretch the muscles in his neck and back, then glanced at the man sneaking into the private room and closing the door behind him. “Hey.”

“How’s the shoulder?” Nick didn’t ask simply because he was Viper’s boss, here to get an update without anyone seeing them together, but because they were brothers.

“Fine.”

Nick frowned at him. “That’s what you always say, but here we are.”

The shoulder was an old wound that plagued him.

His phone rang. He hopped off the table and grabbed it from where he’d left it on his thermal. He checked caller ID. “Huh. Interesting.”

“What?” Nick asked on the second ring.

“I need to take this.”