Jesse lets out a long sigh. He stands up and walks over to put his arm around her shoulders. Pulling her tight against his chest, he kisses the top of her head.

“Nothing for you to worry about, sweetheart,” he tells her. “I’ll take care of this. Go on upstairs and feed Missy while we call Flint. I’ll tell you everything later. Okay? Everything will be fine. We’ve got this.”

She nods, but I can tell she’s worried. As she should be. We all have a right to be worried. A hell storm is about to rain down on the Steel Infidels any minute.

I take a sip of coffee and wait until she walks down the hallway before speaking.

“Listen Jesse, I’m sorry,” I say. “I know I let the MC down and the family. For Lila to do something like this completely shocks me. And I know what you’re going to say. That I shouldn’t have trusted her. And you’re right. She fucked me over. I honestly did not see this coming.”

He gives me a long look.  I wait, expecting him to give me a good cussing out for being such an stupid idiot. I deserve it. Instead he grips my shoulder and squeezes.

“Let’s call Flint,” he says. “He’ll know what to do next.”

He punches in Flint’s number on his burner phone and puts him on speakerphone so we both can hear.

“Jesse,” Flint answers when he picks up on the second ring. “Why are you calling so early? Something wrong?”

“Lila has left town,” Jesse says. “She picked up the surveillance equipment on her way out when she split. Sam is here with me now.”

“Fuck!” Flint yells through the phone. “I knew this was going to happen. Sam, did she say anything to you before she left?”

“No,” I answer. “She slipped out in the middle of the night. I didn’t even hear her leave.”

“We need to find her fast,” Flint says. “Maybe we can stop her and coerce her into our way of thinking before she goes into the field office. If she isn’t there already.”

“Stop her?” I ask. “How? We can’t stop her. She’s hours ahead of us. I’ve called her a hundred times and her phone keeps saying her voice mail is full. What are you suggesting anyway? That we snatch her off the street? And then what?”

I glance over at Jesse and he looks down at his coffee mug. There’s something he’s not telling me.

“Lila is an immediate threat to us now,” he says. “To the MC and to the family.”

It takes me a minute to comprehend what he’s suggesting. I stare at him, not exactly shocked but horrified all the same.

“You mean stop her as in physically stop her? You would hurt her?”

No.

They wouldn’t do that.