Free VENDETTA: A Bad Boy, Motorcycle Club Romance by Lauren Devane

ass back to the clubhouse ASAP.
    Didn’t seem safe to stick to main roads, not when Manuel would have the entire fucking cartel out gunning for Emily and me. The club was officially battened down and ready for the shit to hit the fan. Piston was already negotiating with Manuel, who was enraged that Emily had killed his son.
    “Thank god you didn’t pull the trigger,” Piston drawled. “I wouldn’t be able to talk his bitch ass down then. He wants to cut her into chum.”
    That wasn’t going to happen.
    The Fallen could handle themselves, but I wasn’t about to let someone plug Emmy in the back while I tried to outrun their SUVs. Wasn’t going to happen.
    I headed for Sonora, thinking we could grab a hotel and maybe some chill time. Letting Manuel and his men think that we’d beat pavement to cross into San Diego inside a day and a half was the best defense. Sonora was out of the way, a place where we could sleep and heal before making the last leg of the journey.
    One thing was certain: Emily was moving into my room at the clubhouse once we made it back. Leaving her shit at the resort had been a mistake, because I knew it would take Manuel no time at all to track it down and find out her real address from her identification or employment papers. Cameras dotted the courtyard of the villa. He’d know exactly who had killed his son and he’d be out for blood.
    Her blood.
    But at the time, I didn’t see going back as an option. Emily told Santiago where she’d been staying, which meant Manuel probably knew as well. If he’d sent men there immediately, they could have intercepted us.
    Besides hoping the men on our trail would pass us by, I had another reason for wanting to spend a few days somewhere safe. Emily was cracking. Even if she tried to hide it with shy smiles and quips about every place we stopped to refuel, I could see the shadows beneath her eyes darken every hour while she wrestled with the guilt that consumed her over Santiago. She’d only said something once—that even if he’d deserved to die, she didn’t want to be an executioner—but had walked away to get a bottle of water when I tried to reply.
    The fucker did deserve to die. The Fallen had talked about it, after nasty little rumors about his nighttime habits reached our ears, but no one was willing to talk and confirm. That meant we couldn’t take action—especially when action would mean bringing Manuel down on us. So we didn’t act.
    Rafael would have . I missed the man and the way he held the cartel in a steel grip without losing himself to the darkness. Anyone who worked under him was held to the standards to which he held himself, which is one reason why The Fallen had signed on to deliver his shipments in the first place. We weren’t cut out for manufacturing our own product and he’d believed in ethical labor practices.
    That’s something you don’t see a lot in drug lords.
    But everyone who worked for him that I’d ever met—right down to the guys who packaged coke into bricks—was sober and taken care of. He didn’t have a house full of hookers waiting to service any man who came in. Women who worked for him in that way were healthy and compensated fairly. In all the years I’d spent making runs to the villa, I’d never seen a woman who looked unhappy or who wasn’t free to walk out the door.
    The Deleon Cartel was a good operation back then. Maybe that’s why Dad and Rafael got along so well—they’d both seen other motorcycle clubs or cartels rise and fall as the leaders and members got hooked on their own shit and ruined everything. Both of them—and my grandfather, our president before Piston—thought real loyalty meant keeping things clean enough that the club or cartel didn’t fall apart around your feet.
    That all changed when Manuel took over. I remember seeing Rosaline age ten years overnight, though she refused to pack up and come work at the clubhouse.
    “You hate him,” I’d said to her, eating