Nitro: MC Romance (Dark Pharaohs Motorcycle Club Romance Book 4)

Chapter 3

    “What in the hell happened out there?” Prophet roars.

“We were ambushed,” Cosmo said.

“By who? Was it Zavala’s guys?”

Prophet paces the clubhouse floor, his face pinched, his body taut. His hands are clenched into fists at his sides, and the scowl on his face is fearsome. After the guys who’d ambushed us put Monk down and forced Cosmo and me to stop, they’d caught up to Blake and Grease. They put a bullet through Grease’s leg and roughed Blake up then left them on the side of the road and made off with both vans. All of the guns and the weed we’d just picked up were gone.

The first thing we did was take Monk to the hospital. He has a couple of broken bones in his hands but other than that, he’s very lucky. Other than a really bad case of road rash, he didn’t suffer any major injuries. He’s going to be laid up in the hospital for a little while, but he’s going to be okay. All of us breathed a sigh of relief when the doctor came out and gave us the good news.

As for Grease, we obviously couldn’t take him to a hospital with a gunshot wound, so Doc, our MC’s vice president, is patching him and Blake up in the newly built med center that sits behind the clubhouse. Doc’s reasoning was that if he was going to be patching people up, he needed a proper facility rather than laying patients out on the tables in here. So Prophet finally had a prefab building constructed that would serve as our own little hospital.

The hope was that with Zavala out of the picture, it wouldn’t need to be used much. But with this new threat staring us in the face, there’s no telling how often we were going to be needing it.

“How’d they get the drop on you guys?” Prophet asks.

Cosmo shakes his head and takes a long swallow of his beer. It’s just the three of us in the clubhouse right now, Prophet having sent everybody else out. The anger is crackling off of him and his jaw is clenched so hard, I wouldn’t be surprised if he could chew through stone at the moment.

“They came out of nowhere,” I say. “I happened to see them racing up from behind just before they hit us.”

“Were they watching you out at the pickup site?” Prophet asks.

“I don’t know, Prez,” Cosmo replies. “It’s possible.”

“They weren’t out there. I scouted the area and kept an eye on things. There was nobody out there but us and Cort’s crew,” I say.

“That you know of,” Cosmo replies. “They could’ve been keeping tabs on us from a distance. Long-distance scopes. Drones, maybe.”

I start to object but close my mouth again knowing it could be true. While I know what I’m doing when I scout an area and know what to look for, I’m willing to admit that I’m not perfect. I’ve missed things before, and I will miss them again. I’m human and as such, I’m not infallible.

But I’m almost positive that I didn’t miss anything out there. I scouted extra carefully precisely because I don’t trust Cort. I operate under the assumption that he’s going to screw us at some point, and I want to be prepared for it. I’m more than thorough in my scouting and prep work.

Having said all that though, I know it’s possible I missed something. And it’s possible that whoever hit us was keeping eyes on us with drones. I honestly never thought to keep my eyes peeled for them. It’s something I’m going to have to start doing from now on.

“Losing that shipment’s going to be costly,” Prophet mutters. “We’ve got buyers, and we’re going to need to replace the load we lost.”

“I’ll put a call into Cort,” Cosmo replies. “Hopefully, he’s got stock.”

“But that brings me back to my original question,” Prophet says. “Who hit us? Was it some of Zavala’s guys? They finally work up the nut to take a run at us?”

“Maybe you need to set up a meet with Tarantula. See if he’s heard anything about what’s left of Zavala’s army.”

Prophet nods. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

Tarantula is the President of Montezuma’s Warriors, an MC that runs in the Central Valley. For a long while, the Warriors worked with the Zavala cartel. The former Warriors’ President was chummy with the cartel leader and enjoyed a good working relationship with him. But not all of the MC was on board with what they were doing. Most of them drew the line at human trafficking.

So Tarantula and his number two, a guy named Bala, came to us for help. Long story short, we took out the former President, allowing Tarantula to slide into the club’s big chair. And after that, they worked with us, feeding us important intel that allowed us to take Zavala out.

Over the last six months since we did that, our relationship with the Warriors has never been better. Our bond with them is tight. And if there is anything going on south of the border, if the remnants of Zavala’s empire are indeed pulling together to take a run at us, they’ll probably know it.

I find it hard to believe that it’s Zavala’s guys though. Last I heard, they were too busy fighting among themselves and fending off attacks from the outside to put up much of a fight against us. The death of Zavala left a power vacuum in old Mexico, and all of the would-be players are stepping up and fighting it out for their slice of the pie that Zavala’s death left behind.

I personally don’t think it’s Zavala’s men. Not only do they have a lot on their plate and probably can’t deal with us but the shooters in the SUVs were also white. Not Mexican.

“What’s goin’ through your head, man?”

Prophet’s voice cuts through my thoughts, and I turn to him, trying to focus and order my thoughts quickly.

“You think it was Zavala’s crew?” Prophet presses.

I shake my head. “No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, the guys who ambushed us were white. They weren’t Mexicans.”

“Are you sure about that?” Prophet asks.

I nod. “I saw them.”