Chapter 146: What Are You Up To, Drake?

Drake stepped out of the corner store with a bottle of Henny tucked under his arm. The Seattle night chill hit his light-skinned face, but it felt good after being cooped up. His name and face weren’t on any local wanted posters yet, so he could move around without worrying about getting recognized.

That gave him freedom most fugitives didn’t have.

He pulled out his phone and scrolled through Darren’s latest post. The MMA fighter had checked in at some cinema downtown a few hours ago, which meant he was probably long gone by now. It was easy to find his socials, and Darren was quite active when it came to social media as well.

Darren never posted his location until after he left. That habit made him harder to track in real time, but it still left a trail of breadcrumbs if you knew how to follow them.

Drake had been watching those posts for days now. Darren was valuable to whatever came next. A skilled fighter who knew how to handle himself and wasn’t afraid to get dirty when needed. Drake needed guys like that around him, especially now that everything had gone sideways.

He thought back to the job that forced him to run. The hit was supposed to be clean and simple. Enrique had scoped the place out beforehand, making sure there weren’t any obvious cameras. They checked the corners, the obvious spots, even asked around about security systems. Nothing showed up. But that tiny CCTV camera hidden in the ceiling caught everything. Drake could still see the angle of it in his mind, small and black, pointed right at where he stood.

He kissed his teeth thinking about it. The target went down with one shot to the head. No suffering, no mess. Drake pulled the trigger himself while Enrique stayed back. The kill was efficient, professional. But that hidden camera changed everything. Now Drake was the one with a warrant out, but unlike Enrique, they had no idea what he looked like. Enrique couldn’t walk the streets freely anymore, but Drake didn’t mind handling things solo for now.

Walking down the block, Drake noticed the women in Seattle. Thick asses in tight jeans and yoga pants everywhere he looked. A group of three girls walked past him, their curves bouncing with each step. His mind immediately went to taking one of them back to wherever he was staying and bending her over. He wanted to grab those fat cheeks, spread them wide, and drive his cock deep into tight pussy until she was screaming his name.

The thought made his dick twitch in his pants. He hadn’t fucked since arriving in Seattle, and the urge was getting stronger every day. These women had bodies built for rough handling, and Drake was in the mood to do some damage. He imagined pulling one into an alley, yanking down her pants, and pounding her from behind while she tried to stay quiet. His hands would leave marks on that soft flesh, gripping hard enough to bruise.

Drake checked his phone again. Darren had posted from a ride across town forty minutes ago. That meant he was probably heading home or to another location. Drake started walking in that direction, keeping his eyes open for any sign of his old friend.

The rain soon began falling, soaking through his hoodie, but he didn’t care. Finding Darren was priority number one, and these thick Seattle women would still be around when he needed to blow off steam later.

He passed another group of girls with massive asses barely contained by their clothing. One of them caught him staring and smiled. Drake nodded back but kept moving. Business first, pleasure later.

Darren was the key to getting back on track, and Drake wasn’t going to let some ass distract him from that goal. Though the thought of bending one of these thick girls over and fucking her senseless stayed in the back of his mind as he continued his search through the rainy streets.

-

Liam sat in the quiet aftermath of the conversation, watching Arthur’s retreating figure disappear through the restaurant’s entrance, and let the full weight of what had just happened settle in properly.

He’d underestimated him. That much was undeniable now, sitting with it in the silence Arthur left behind. Mrs. Harriet’s dismissiveness toward Arthur — the eye rolls, the offhand comments about her brother-in-law’s pettiness, the general framing of him as an irritant rather than a genuine threat — had shaped Liam’s expectations walking into this conversation more than he wanted to admit.

He’d pictured someone bigger. Someone whose bark exceeded his bite, whose scheming amounted to little more than a nuisance easily brushed aside.

That wasn’t what he’d just sat across from.

Arthur held real position, real resources, and clearly a level of foresight that had already accounted for exactly the kind of retaliation Liam might have pursued. A backup plan built quietly into the original scheme, insurance against the very outcome Liam had been quietly counting on — the courtroom, the exposure, the reckoning he’d assumed he still held in reserve.

That reserve, apparently, had never existed in the first place. Arthur had planned around it before Liam even knew he needed one.

He sat with that realization, turning it over slowly, and arrived at the conclusion that had been circling the edges of his mind since Arthur first mentioned the trump card.

He’d dodged something. Something significant, something that would have gone considerably worse for him had it played out the way Arthur clearly intended. And the only reason it hadn’t — the only variable standing between him and whatever fate Arthur had engineered — was Mrs. Harriet.

Which raised the question that actually unsettled him.

Did she know?

Two possibilities sat in front of him, neither of them comfortable. Either she’d been genuinely unaware of Arthur’s contingency, moving to protect Liam out of instinct without fully understanding the scope of what she was shielding him from — or she’d known exactly what Arthur had planned, and her involvement with Liam, her protection of him, had been calculated from the start.

A way of positioning herself between her husband’s brother and whatever leverage he intended to use, with Liam functioning as the buffer that absorbed the impact.

Liam didn’t like either version much, but the second one gnawed at him harder the longer he sat with it.

He thought back over every interaction they’d had, searching for some detail that might tip the scale one direction or the other, and came up without a clean answer. She hadn’t asked him for anything, not directly, nothing that clearly benefited her at his expense. But that in itself didn’t rule it out. People capable of that level of calculation rarely needed to ask outright. They simply arranged circumstances so the ask became unnecessary.

He exhaled slowly, running a hand down his face.

Whatever the truth actually was, one thing had become clear tonight — he’d been playing this entire situation with less information than he thought he had, and Arthur, quietly, methodically, had already accounted for moves Liam hadn’t even known were on the board.