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ACE

“ Y ou’re sure you’re okay with this?” I asked Harley.

She threw me a smile that nearly knocked me off my feet.

She always looked so damn beautiful in the mornings, with her hair piled up in a messy bun and her curvy legs bare save for her tiny sleep shorts.

I especially liked mornings like this, when she’d nabbed one of my old T-shirts to sleep in.

My dragon preened at the sight of our fated mate wearing an old Cole’s Garage shirt.

“You’ve asked me this three times in the past two days,” she said. “I’m okay with it. It’ll be good for Dylan.”

I caught her lips in a quick kiss. “Thank you. Everyone’s excited for tonight.”

She smiled, but I could sense her slight nerves, too.

I knew this was a big step—and it was a step Harley probably wouldn’t have taken if we hadn’t talked on the deck a few nights ago.

This agreement felt like an olive branch between us.

She was ready to start building a life with me, but not all at once.

We were taking baby steps. But this was more like a leap of faith.

Tonight, Dylan was going to meet the entire clan. Or most of them, at least. He’d met the inner circle—the club members—but now the extended members of the clan were invited to the clubhouse for a big-ass cookout and the introduction of their next alpha.

There would be a lot of shifters around.

It’d be good for Dylan to meet most of the clan’s shifters before his first shift.

I wanted his dragon to recognize its family, and I hoped it might encourage the shift to happen.

We’d been going out more together, practicing more with teeth, tail, and claws, but his dragon had yet to show itself fully.

Even when I spent time in my dragon form, letting Dylan climb all over me and taking him on short flights, his dragon refused to come out.

It was getting painful for Dylan, and I wanted to encourage the process to speed up a little.

Tonight would be good. Food, fun, and family. Hell, we even had a few of the younger clan members ready to play some live music. I had no work on my plate for the day. All I had to do was make sure we had all the drinks, groceries, and everything else ready for tonight.

It had to be perfect. Not just for Dylan, but for Harley, too. Because I hoped that one day she’d be part of the clan, too.

“I’m going to get a head start on work,” she said.

“I’ll clean up here,” I said. “You go on.”

She smiled. “Thanks, babe.”

The pet name ran down my spine like a touch, making my dragon purr. Harley’s eyes sparkled. She knew exactly what she was doing to me. I caught her mouth in a quick, heated kiss.

“Ew!” Dylan shouted as he came down the stairs. “You guys are always doing that in front of me. Quit it.”

Harley laughed. “Good morning to you, too.” She winked at me, then grabbed her coffee and laptop and headed onto the deck to work in the morning sunshine.

“What’s for breakfast?” Dylan asked. His hair was a wild mess, but his eyes were bright and awake. My dragon could sense Dylan’s, wide awake and close to the surface.

“Eggs? Toast? Sausage?” I looked in the fridge. “Leftover pizza?”

“Pizza!” Dylan shouted.

“Of course, my liege,” I said with a laugh.

As I slid the pizza onto a sheet pan to reheat in the oven, my phone started ringing. I stuck the phone between my ear and shoulder. “’Lo?”

“Ace, we’ve got a problem.” Striker’s voice was low and furious.

My stomach dropped. Of course some bullshit had to happen the same day as Dylan’s introduction to the clan. “What is it?”

“I’m at the border. We’ve got two dead dragons here.”

My stomach sank even further. “Ours?”

“No. Clanless, as far as I can tell. They attacked me.”

“I’m on my way.”

I hung up. I turned off the oven and left the cold pizza on the stove. Dylan blinked at me. “You’re leaving?”

“Yup.” I pulled him into a headlock, and Dylan let out a shriek of laughter as I rubbed my knuckles against the crown of his head. “You’ll survive with cold pizza.”

“I will, I will! Ahhh, stop!” Dylan laughed wildly.

I let him go with a big smile. I didn’t feel as happy as I looked, but I didn’t want Dylan to worry. He was already nervous enough about meeting the clan. “Just a quick errand. I’ll be back before tonight so we can get ready for the party, okay?”

“Okay.” Dylan looked a little disappointed as he grabbed a slice of pizza. “Don’t take too long, though.”

“I won’t.” I stepped out onto the deck. Harley’s gaze flickered up, and something in my face made her expression drop.

“I’ve gotta run out, but I’ll be back in a few hours,” I said.

She sighed. “Work?”

“Yeah,” I said. She didn’t ask for details, and I didn’t explain.

This was exactly the kind of work she wanted me to stop doing.

Right now, it was the kind of work I had to handle before it got worse.

I wished I could tell her it wouldn’t—that the clan was going completely legitimate with the distillery—but I wanted everything to be open and confirmed, first. I didn’t want to make more promises I couldn’t keep.

I leaned down and pressed my face into the curve of her neck. She smelled sweet there, the natural scent of her skin and the soap from last night’s shower. It calmed the worst of my nerves, but at the same time, it made me even more reluctant to leave.

“Be careful, okay?” Her voice was soft and resigned.

“I will,” I promised.

That’s all I could say. It’s the only thing I could promise.

I jumped on my bike outside the house and rode to the storage warehouse we managed near the border.

It was a transport stop more than anything else.

Michel used it as brief storage once goods came across the border, thanks to the border control agents on our payroll.

The warehouse was small and dilapidated, tucked in at the back of an old scrapyard.

I drove down the dusty gravel road, past rusting cars, and pulled up to the warehouse.

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 were unfamiliar 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. In the 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.”