in and hearing her voice shocked me. “Go away.”

“Verity, talk to me.”

She was asking for the impossible. How could I talk to her, confide in her now that I knew who her brother was? Everyone around Kalamazoo, hell all of Michigan, knew who the Dark Leopards were, and while I didn’t know all of their businesses, they were bad news and murderers. “Please, just go away,” I whimpered.

For eight years, I’d steered clear, never coming across this gang of thugs since that night. Why did the one man I found myself craving have to be part of the Dark Leopards MC?

“I need to know you’re all right,” she insisted.

“I’m fine!” I screeched, sounding anything but.

“No, you aren’t. Talk to me. Is this about what happened in the alley?”

An out. “Yes, that’s exactly it.” Far from it. Wes had been high and couldn’t be responsible for his actions, and then that cat… My head snapped up. “How did you know about the alley?” I hadn’t told her or anyone except the cops, and they thought I’d lost my marbles.

“Dimitri told me.”

Of course, he did. He probably had the cops on his payroll, which is why they wouldn’t take me seriously. Then again, calling about a giant snow leopard eating a man did sound a little farfetched. Snow leopards didn’t exist outside of the zoos or the mountains in Asia. Maybe one escaped? But I’d been to the zoo a couple of years ago, and I couldn’t recall any of the snow leopards being that large.

Fuck! Here I was throwing myself a pity party, and Wes died. It wasn’t normal! A normal person would have locked herself up in her apartment or demanded the police take her seriously. She would have not gone to a friend’s birthday party to live it up while her ex lay in some dark alley becoming cat chowder.

“You’re in shock,” Siam called out as if she could read my mind.

Shock? Maybe. Seeing a giant cat flying over my head and landing on Wes was enough to put anyone in shock.

“Verity, open up and talk to me,” she urged again.

“I can’t,” I cried. She was the enemy now, and I couldn’t trust her.

370

Snow

At seventeen, Knox finally allowed me to be a prospect. I demanded he allow me to become a full patched member since I’d been there for two years, but he said I had to prove myself to the club, more than just running simple errands. I did that and more with Eagle at my side, a raptor shifter who could shoot anything no matter how far the target. Still could, but he was away more often than not dealing with other club business. No one got away from him.

We prospected at the same time and were given the same task to complete. He thought I was some snot-nosed kid who had been shown some favoritism and didn’t want to be shackled with me for any reason, but he wasn’t given a choice. In the end, we made the best of it and became good friends.

Another club had moved in to distribute drugs, and they chose to sully our name by wearing our cuts. The drugs smelled sweet and were highly addictive. Targeted toward college students in the area, they got a taste and constantly came back for more. Every time the club thought we had them cornered, they disappeared like smoke in fog. Eagle and I were sent to see if we had any better luck on our own. It felt odd leaving our cuts behind, but we couldn’t take the chance someone from the other team would spot us wearing them.

It took months, but we finally got a break, and then we broke them. The cuts didn’t even look genuine. Just our logo sewn onto a leather vest. The leader wanted to use our reputation to instill fear in his customers while doing what he could to disgrace us. It didn’t work. The cops knew, and since they were on our payroll, we got tipped off every single time some rookie thought he cracked the case.

Cops, judges, lawyers, they could all be bought. They cared about the green and not anyone else. But it was the fact we paid the chief of police well that he told us about the man who approached him and offered to pay him half the amount we did to look the other way. He agreed, accepted the money, and then called us.

The one thing that the other team got wrong, they were all scum of the earth humans, and the real Dark Leopards is comprised of all shifters. They fucked up, and we caught up with them. Too bad someone else found them before us, we only got to clean up the mess, but we took them out, which was all that mattered. The drugs were destroyed, and anyone associated with the fake crew was dealt with.

After that, Eagle and I became patched members. Since he hated dealing with politics, he didn’t climb up the ranks like I had, not that I necessarily liked the politics, but I didn’t want someone else to control me. My parents had, and then they threw Siam and me away. Knox and Gray are above me, but I respect the hell out of them, and that made all the difference in the world.

The drugs were back.

Climbing off my Harley, I went behind the compound and into a special building we used for our special guests. I grinned, seeing how comfortable he’d been made. His arms were strung up above his head, his feet barely touching the ground. I thought the gag was a nice touch. Was that a dick? “Run out of tape?”

Our newest prospect, Dogg, chuckled as he nodded. “Couldn’t find the tape, and his bitch ass wouldn’t shut up. I figured, filling his mouth with something might do the trick, and it did.”

“Do I want to know where you got it?”

“Kite’s room,” he snickered.

The other prospect, Kite,

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