Page 48 of Beware of Dog (Lean Dogs Legacy #6)

Raven dropped her wedding bomb on them—Shep honestly felt a little bad that Cass hadn’t been involved, and hadn’t gotten to make any decisions, creative as she was, but she seemed content enough with Raven’s efforts, and the clock was ticking besides—then swung on her cape like some kind of opera villain and whisked her way out the door.

Since it was Saturday, and Cass didn’t have school, she’d planned to spend most of the day working on her gallery pieces. She went to change into her painting clothes and connected her phone to the Bluetooth speaker over in her studio window.

The Fox boys, Shep knew, weren’t the sort to sit around and watch TV. “You two come with me,” he said, as he shrugged into his cut. “I’ve got midday patrol in Brooklyn and you might as well make yourselves useful.”

Tenny was still mopping up egg yolk with his last corner of toast, and lifted a disbelieving look Shep’s way. “You’re not giving me orders, are you?”

“You’re in my city,” Shep said, “in my house—”

“The club’s house.”

Fuck Tenny and his technicalities. And his superiority. Shep had sat at the kitchen island an hour ago and watched Tenny go cow-eyed and stupid over Reese. He could play assassin all he wanted, but the kid had a melted caramel center.

Shep put his shoulders back, and cocked his head, and played up every second of their age difference.

“When your bottom rocker says ‘Tennessee,’ and you come where I’m living, and you let yourself in in the middle of the night, and you scare my old lady while she’s in bed, you’re in my house .

And this right here.” He tapped the Sergeant at Arms patch on the front of his cut.

“That means I outrank you. Get your ass up, and come on.”

Tenny stared at him a moment, stared through him, and it was incredible how different Cassandra’s blue eyes looked in Tenny’s face, what they were capable of.

Shep had a vision of a flashing hand, a wink of metal, and a thrown knife landing in his throat.

But the thing about little shits: you had to risk the knife to knock them down a peg or two.

Nobody was going to embroider that shit on a pillow, but it made sense to Shep.

The knife didn’t come. After a few long beats, Tenny grinned, and slid off his stool. “Aye aye, sergeant.”

“Shuddup. Get your shit.”

~*~

“How’d you get here so fast?” Shep asked as the three of them crossed the lobby. “You fly?”

“Yeah. Ian let us use the jet.”

“Rich prick,” Shep said, without any heat. Ian wasn’t the sort of person he wanted to hang out and have a beer with, but he doted on the girls, and his riches had come in handy more than once.

A pleasant thought struck. “That means you don’t have a ride.”

“Oh no.” Tenny slipped his shades on, smug. “Ian helped with that, too.”

A black Range Rover sat parked at the curb out front.

“Man, fuck you guys,” Shep muttered.

An arm, Tenny’s, slung around his shoulders. “Only if you ask nice,” he said with a nasty chuckle. He laughed when Shep shoved him away.

Surprisingly, Reese was the one who slid behind the wheel. “You can take shotgun,” Tenny offered, and climbed into the back. “Manhattan traffic makes me want to shoot someone.”

Can he drive? Shep wanted to ask. Reese was, according to everyone who knew him, “a lot better” than he used to be, whatever the hell that meant. But he cranked the Rover, checked the street, and pulled smoothly away from the curb, so Shep assumed he’d operated a vehicle before.

Shep pointed through the windshield. “Take the next right. We’re gonna—”

“Pffft,” Tenny interrupted from the back seat. “Just put the address in the GPS. He’s not stupid.”

A glance in the rearview proved that Tenny sat slumped across the center of the seat, bent over his phone, but his gaze flashed up to meet Shep’s in the mirror, and it bristled with a clear threat.

Leave Reese alone. Got it.

“Alright.” Shep had to look the address up on his phone before he punched it in. Then he settled in for an awkward ride.

It was silent the first few blocks, save the expensive purring of the engine. Then Reese said, “This is Cass’s friend’s house we’re going to?”

“Yeah,” Shep said, and then, not knowing how much they knew, gave them the quick and dirty on the whole situation.

Tenny hummed thoughtfully as they crossed the bridge. He’d put his phone away and sat up to peer between the front bucket seats. “Tell me again why you haven’t offed this little wanker?”

“Believe me, I want to so bad I can taste it,” Shep said, letting his bitterness and frustration bleed through. “But the friend’s a civilian, and so’s the little rich shit who raped her, so the girls went to the cops, and now…”

“Now if something happens to him, everyone’s going to point to the Dogs,” Tenny said. He tsk ed. “What were you thinking? Flying colors while you slapped him around.”

Shep stiffened in his seat. He hadn’t included his little pistol-whipping transgression in his version of events.

Tenny chuckled. “What, you thought Raven would leave that part out?”

“I hoped she would.”

“No such luck. Idiot.”

Shep sighed. “Yeah, okay, I deserve that one.”

It was quiet a beat, tires hissing over pavement. Then, with an edge of grudging respect, Tenny said, “No. I’d have sent a message, too. But ,” he stressed, after. “I would have done it with a ski mask and without my cut. Idiot .”

“He doesn’t usually mean it when he says idiot,” Reese offered.

“Pipe down, you,” Tenny said. “I mean it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shep muttered. “I won’t do it again.”

Tenny hummed and flopped back against the seat. It proved more damning than any further insults.

Shep had been thinking for weeks that this whole shitshow could have been avoided if he’d exercised a little caution.

In the wake of Abacus collapsing, the Dogs across the globe had enjoyed an unprecedented level of influence.

So much so that, on the day Shep walked into that townhouse with his face bare and his cut on full display, he’d thought he could leverage that influence without repercussion.

Apparently, there were still those willing to go running to the authorities when the big bad Dogs showed up at their doorsteps.

“You know,” Tenny drawled, a sly lilt in his voice. “Sending a message isn’t a liability if you send the right message. And if it’s strong enough.”

“And,” Reese added, “if you disable the cameras afterward.”

Tenny snapped his fingers. “Yes.”

The GPS told them to turn right in five-hundred feet. Reese slowed, eased through the turn, and Shep spotted the van.

It was the same one he’d seen a few days ago, when Raven came to talk to Jamie’s parents. Black, tinted windows, dent in the left rear door, right below the handle.

“Hold up,” Shep said, sitting up straighter in his seat. “That’s the van.”

“Stop,” Tenny said, “babe, stop.”

Reese braked to a halt, only halfway through the turn. Tenny popped the door and rolled out before Shep could finish saying, “What?”

The door closed almost soundlessly, and Tenny had disappeared behind a parked car by the time Shep turned his head to search for him through the window.

“Shit.”

“He can get closer on foot,” Reese explained, touching the gas again. “Is anyone sitting on the house right now?”

“No. I’m on shift, and I just got here.”

“Okay. Hold on.”

Shep figured out what they were doing as Reese swept the Rover in close to the van, and then angled it, suddenly and sharply, so that it blocked in the van’s nose. “Shit,” he muttered, pulled his gun, and leaped out.

He had a glimpse of the driver through the window, his hands tight on the wheel, his profile twisted up hilariously with shock as he stared at the front end of the Rover overlapping the van.

Shep saw a neck tattoo: tall, bold black letters in an intricate old English script.

He couldn’t read it, but he’d seen its like before.

Beyond the driver, the passenger threw open his door, clearly intending to make a break for it on foot. But a narrow black wraith in a hood and mask reared up like a cobra and snatched him. Shep heard a scream, gratifyingly terrified, and then the passenger dropped like a stone.

Tenny.

Shep lifted his gun, and when the driver turned his direction, he came face-to-face with the dark bore of Shep’s M1911 through the thin barrier of glass.

“Get out of the van,” Shep said, loud enough to be heard. “Slowly.”

~*~

Reese had zip ties and duct tape on him, because of course he did. They secured the two men and wound up putting them in the back of the van, for lack of a more immediate place to question them.

At first, both of them pretended not to understand English. But then Tenny let loose a string of Spanish that left both of them shrinking back, brows lifted.

“That’s what I thought,” Tenny said, tone brimming with satisfaction. “Now. This is simple. We’ll ask questions, and you’ll answer them. If you tell the truth, you can drive out of here with all your fingers and toes still attached. Sound good?”

The men traded wild-eyed glances, and then the one on the right nodded. “Okay.”

“You’ve got a lot of ink,” Shep said. They’d tugged at their shirt collars and shoved up their sleeves to examine it. Lots of hard-to-read script in Spanish, some animals and numbers and tally marks that were clearly gang-affiliated. “Who are you with?”

When the guy hesitated, Tenny produced a knife like a magician, its blade winking in the gloom of the van.

“Okay, okay! Tres Diablos.”

“That’s Three Devils,” Tenny explained.

“I know what ‘diablo’ means, dickhead,” Shep said. To their captives, he asked, “Who hired you?”

Tenny twirled the knife in his hand, walking the hilt down his knuckles, showing off.

The one on the left said, “Blackmon. Some rich man named Blackmon.”

~*~

Shep was so furious he was having heart palpitations.

“Did you not expect that?” Tenny asked, brows raised, as they watched the van trundle down the street and turn at the intersection. “Really?”