Homecoming (Dartmoor Book 8)

by Lauren Gilley

  Yield.

  Ghost said, “The same people who left us this tag at the old mill when they abducted Allie Henderson.”

  ~*~

  “This took some serious string-pulling,” Vince said late that afternoon, when the shadows lay long and blue across the concrete and steel of Dartmoor. It sounded like a token protest.

  Ghost stood at his side, their backs to Maggie’s raised garden, both watching as a handler in a police windbreaker kept instructing the bomb-sniffing dog in his grasp to “seek” beneath the clubhouse pavilion. A second dog was searching the inside of the clubhouse, and they would move all down the property, checking offices and warehouses.

  “No one’s ever launched that kind of assault on a clubhouse,” Ghost said. He could hear the strained detachment in his voice. He’d had to shove the anger down. Action was all that would help, now. “Not ever. I don’t want to take chances.”

  Vince let out a breath that wasn’t a sigh; a nervous exhalation. “What are the odds someone placed a bomb here? You’ve got cameras. You’ve got a dog.”

  “An old dog. All Ares does is sleep anymore.”

  “Maybe you should get a younger dog.”

  “I plan to. Walsh is searching for breeders.”

  “Damn,” Vince murmured. “Who was it?”

  Ghost wanted to take a deep breath of his own – his lungs tight, his skin prickling. He said, “The short answer is Luis Cantrell: the son of a disgraced FBI agent with a hard-on for the club. The long answer is whoever his friends are: a growing crime syndicate who want the Dogs out of the way for their human trafficking agenda.”

  “You’re not serious,” Vince said.

  “They’re headquartered in New York: Italian and Russian mob families. Cartel. The stupid rich fucks who want to buy humans. They’re using a consulting firm as cover, and the girls they’re selling are Americans, snatched right off the street from all over the country.”

  “Jesus. Why don’t you go to the FBI?”

  Ghost turned to him. “You heard the part about the disgraced agent, right?” He cocked a single brow.

  Vince shook his head. “Don’t you have anything concrete? Hell, I can…”

  He trailed off when Ghost shook his head. “Who would you run to? Who would you tell? The mayor was in on it. Who knows how deep this goes. Is there someone high-up you could trust? Who’d believe you?”

  Vince bit his lip.

  “Welcome to my world.” He looked back toward dog and handler, watching the sleek shepherd sniff at their picnic tables with tight focus. He loved his own shepherd, and Ares had been a wonderful dog, but when they’d talked at table, prospects and everything, Tenny had said, “You want a Doberman.” That’s what Walsh was searching for.

  After a moment, Vince said, “Can you stop them? Kenny…if this is national, if this is as big as you say it is…”

  “I can stop them. I will.” He wasn’t sure how, yet, but he knew that his club was bigger, stronger, and more resourceful than it had ever been.

  Vince said, “You might be the only one who can.”

  Forty-Four

  “There was nothing at Dartmoor,” Mercy said, spreading his hands through the air in a gesture that, coupled with his low, accented voice, and his serious expression, had a definite, appreciated calming effect. Leah’s heart still ran rabbit-fast, though. “Not in any of the buildings. The dogs checked it all, and didn’t find a thing.”

  Ava sat beside Leah on the sofa, arms and legs crossed, tense and brittle and defensive, though Leah could only read that because she knew her friend so well. A stranger would have thought her unaffected. “What about all our homes? There’s a lot of them.”

  Leah felt a touch on her hand, and glanced up to see that Carter had leaned forward in his chair, his palm warm and comforting against her knuckles. She managed a bare smile for him, through the beating fear.

  Ava had called her, shortly after Carter left her parents’ place in a hurry, with lots of apologies and a quick kiss for her. Her dad had nodded, looking understanding, and she wondered just what had taken place at the kitchen sink after she left. She’d arrived a little concerned – and then become a lot concerned. She and Ava had been on the couch when the boys arrived, and had taken up seats in dragged-over dining chairs across from them, respectively.

  Mercy said, “There was only the one explosion in New York. None of the private homes were hit.”

  Ava titled her head.

  “I know,” he murmured. “Fillette, I know.”

  Leah said, “Should we be worried?” A dumb question – she was already worried out of her mind – but it seemed like the mature, jaded, old lady thing to say.

  Carter’s hand closed more firmly over hers. He didn’t say no. But he said, “We’re gonna fix it.”

  Ava groaned. “Jesus.” But then she shook herself, even as Mercy was reaching for her hand, and said, “Okay, what do we need to do?”

  Mercy’s smile was small, and crooked, and impossibly proud. “Just keep being you.”

  Ava shot him a glare – one that melted into a gaze so affectionate that Leah felt compelled to look away.

  ~*~

  “I’m sorry,” Carter said, hours later, when they lay side-by-side in the dark, in her bed, facing one another and still catching their breath. The sex had been vigorous, as always, but desperate, and tender, too. He’d been so sweet with her, even as he’d taken her apart completely. His chest still heaved, the sweat on it gleaming in the moonlight.

  The worry of the moment was the only thing that gave her the awareness to keep from getting lost in the sight of him. “It’s not your fault.” She couldn’t resist touching, stroking a hand across his pecs. “You didn’t blow up a clubhouse.”

  “But you wouldn’t have to know that if you weren’t with me.”

  “Carter.” She sighed. “Haven’t we been through this?”

  “Yeah.” He looped an arm around her, and pulled her in closer to his chest, despite the sweat on both of them. “Feels like I gotta sat it, though.”

  She shifted, so her face rested in the hollow of his throat. He smelled like sex, and her laundry detergent, and he was an indescribable comfort. It made her brave enough to say, “Those missing girls. They’re not still in Tennessee, are they?”

  “I doubt it.” His hand stroked up and down her back. “This is…worse than anything the club’s faced before.” It felt like an admission; like he was trusting her with a secret.

  “Are you worried?” she asked.

  His arm tightened. “Yeah. About you.” She scratched at his chest, and, a beat later, he said, “About a lot of things.”

  She took a deep breath and heard – and felt – him echo it. “The Dogs always come out on top.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “Yeah.”

  For good or for bad, she thought, she was tied to their fate, now.

  The rewards outweighed the risks.

  ~*~

  Despite Carter’s arms warm and strong around her, his knife and gun on the nightstand, the front door locked, Leah slept poorly. She spent most of Monday morning yawning into her coffee, and continually rubbing at her eyes, vision blurring, grateful she’d left off mascara and eye liner for the day.

  “You alright?” Gabe, whose desk was closest to hers, kept asking, and she managed to dredge up a smile every time.

  Rochelle brought her a fresh mug of coffee right before lunch. “You look like you could use it.”

  “Thanks. I’m kinda running on E today.”

  It was a cloudy day, beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of the office. The numbers kept sliding together on her computer, and so she found herself glancing mindlessly out at the street more and more. Her body was sore and heavy. She entertained fantasies of a bath, and a glass of wine, and Carter coming over, smiling, not at all worried about bombs and enemies and unstoppable crime organizations disguised as legitimate consulting firms.

  S
he shivered, blamed it on the AC, and tried to throw herself back into work.

  She was poring over the spreadsheet for one of the multi-acre, potential-subdivision plots of land the company was looking into buying when she heard the elevator arrive with a soft ding. The kid from the mail room, probably, with a fresh round of envelopes.

  Behind her, Gabe said, “Leah.” His voice was wrong.

  When she lifted her head, she saw one of the pressed and polished front desk staff from downstairs. Eric, she thought his name was. He didn’t look so polished now, his hair ruffled like he’d been running his hands through it, his tie crooked.

  “Eric?” Isobel said. “What’s wrong? You look terrible.”

  Eric swallowed before he answered, his throat bobbing. “There was a phone call – at the front desk. It – he – there’s a bomb in the building.”

  ~*~

  The door to Ian’s office – his private, appointment-only office – swung open without so much as a knock, and Alec filled the threshold, wearing a light sweater and pair of designer jeans that Ian had bought him, his hair dark, and soft, and lovely, his gaze warm behind the lenses of his frameless glasses.

  Ian’s stomach dropped. His pulse quickened. He knew his face fell, when he saw the joy dim on his husband’s face. “I’ll have to call you back,” he said into the phone, and hung up rudely, not caring.

  “Well,” Alec said, a little stiffly. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  Behind him, Ian saw Bruce’s reassuring silhouette, all bulk and brawn. He sat back, and waved Alec in. “No, no, it is. But I said you didn’t need to come by today.”

  Alec stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. “And I said, in your own words, ‘bugger that,’ because we haven’t had a lunch date in weeks.” He plopped gracelessly down into the chair opposite Ian’s desk, though that wasn’t quite true, because he was graceful – with his long limbs, and his lithe build, and his pretty, cut-glass features – even when he wasn’t trying to be.

  “Darling,” Ian said, holding back a sigh. His hands flexed on his thighs, and he forced them still. He hadn’t been nervous before, but was now, suddenly. Every single time the Lean Dogs got themselves in hot water, he remembered standing outside his other office, the funeral home, while a biker pressed a gun to Alec’s temple. That terror was the sort that he managed to suppress, but never to cure completely. Ghost had called yesterday afternoon, to tell him about the explosion in New York – which had made the national news by midnight. Alec had asked why he was so tense, but he’d set his phone aside and pulled his husband into his arms and not answered.

  “Oh no,” Alec said now, going stern. It was precious. “No, you’re hiding something. We agreed not to do that when we got married.” He folded his arms for added effect, jaw setting.

  “You’re quite right. We did agree.” Ian let out a slow breath. “Alright, then.”

  “Ian.”

  “Yes, yes. There’s been some trouble with the club. Their New York chapter was attacked yesterday afternoon.”

  Alec’s brows lifted. “Attacked how?”

  “An explosion. The news called it a bomb.”

  “Shit,” he said, quietly. “Well. Maybe it’s stupid, but I’m going to point out that we’re all the way down in Tennessee.”

  “We are.”

  His gaze hardened again. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  This part stuck in his throat, because he’d kept it back ‘til now, and that wasn’t good. Wasn’t conducive to a healthy relationship. “Ghost believes that the little fiend who was terrorizing the Texas chapter has been here, in Knoxville. He thinks that he was the one who abducted those missing teenagers.” Just hearing missing and teenager in the same sentence made his skin crawl, and brought old, ugly memories to the forefront. “That he’s aligned himself with the people who planted the bomb in New York.”

  Alec studied him a moment, after he’d spoken. Then stood and moved around the desk.

  “I’m perfectly alright,” Ian protested stiffly, though he felt a telltale pressure in his temples, and a heat behind his eyes.

  “Of course you are,” Alec said, sweetly, tone soothing now. He perched on the edge of the desk, close – Ian had to adjust the way he was sitting – and reached to trace gentle fingertips along the sharp edge of his jaw.

  “Are they taking boys, too?” he asked.

  “Only girls, so far as I know.”

  “Taking anyone is horrible.” Alec thumbed across his cheek, and Ian was struck by the urge to push him away – and to pull him into his lap. He held still instead. “What can I do?”

  Ian sent him a rueful smile. “Well, if you can’t stay clear of my professional life, as I’ve asked, then you can–”

  A knock sounded at the door.

  Alec dropped his hand to his own thigh, but didn’t move to get off the desk.

  When the door opened, Candace stood with an unsteady hand braced on the jamb, wispy hairs coming loose from her tortoiseshell clip as if she’d run here from the elevator, further evidenced by her high color and breathless voice.

  Ian sat forward, instantly tense, and rested a hand on Alec’s thigh. Gripped tight, ready for something – ready for anything. “Candace. What is it?”

  “A call – there’s a – it’s a–”

  “A bomb threat,” Bruce said, appearing behind her, expressionless and efficient as always. He took Candace gently by the waist, picked her up off her feet – she gasped and flailed – and stepped into the room so he could set her down out of the way, coming to rest his huge hands on the edge of the desk. “It was just called in a few moments ago at the front desk. The caller said it was placed overnight, and he has a remote detonator.”

  Just like with the Dogs in New York.

  But this was different, very different. This wasn’t just targeting Dogs, but a Dog ally, and one who, through his careful efforts, wasn’t too publicly associated with them.

  There had been instances, though; sightings together. He’d grown lax, leaning too heavily on the semblance of family they offered.

  But there were civilians here, too. All his employees.

  “Shit,” Alec breathed. “Is it credible?”

  “We can’t afford to act like it isn’t,” Bruce said.

  Ian had to swallow a few times before he could answer. “Alright, then. The thing is not to panic.” Though panic was beginning to crowd his vision into a narrow, dark tunnel. “We have to evacuate the building, absolutely everyone, but in an orderly fashion. We don’t want anyone stampeding. Candace.” She stood with a hand cupped over her mouth, breathing through it. “Are you alright?”

  “No. But I’m here.” She gathered herself, smoothed her hair. “I’ve already dispatched someone to every floor. We’re gathering the employees.”

  “Excellent. We’ll get everyone out on the street. Call the fire department, the police – whoever deals with this sort of thing. And then we’ll–”

  The fire alarm went off.

  Ian sighed. “Wonderful.”

  ~*~

  “A bomb?” Hoaxes happened, sick practical jokes, and Leah wasn’t sure she believed there was a real threat until the fire alarm went off. Like everything else in Ian Byron’s elegant office, the alarm was polite, a muted, ringing chime underlaid with rhythmic pulses, designed to alert you, but low enough that you could still think and speak over it.

  Eric’s eyes went impossibly wider. “Oh, Jesus, oh, shit,” he said, last of his tact abandoning him. He looked like he might cry.

  Leah closed her eyes a moment and took a few deep breaths. It wasn’t a coincidence, she knew: that a Dog clubhouse had been bombed, and now an office belonging to a wealthy Dog ally was being targeted. It didn’t matter that they were states apart: if what Carter had been saying was true, then this new enemy was after all the Dogs, and not a particular member or chapter.

  He’d been so worried, this whole time, that it was dangerous for her to be with him. Afrai
d she’d come to regret the risk.

  Fear welled up in the pit of her stomach. It would make her sick if she let it. But there was no room for regret, not amidst the mounting panic, and the trembling knowledge that, of all the people on this floor with her, she was, in her own way, most equipped to handle whatever happened next.

  When she opened her eyes, she squared her shoulders, and said, “Eric.”

  He whimpered, but his gaze snapped to hers.

  “You have to stop freaking out. We all have to stay calm, and get out of the building.”

  Gabe, Rochelle, and Isobel all stared at her like she’d sprouted an extra head.

  “I’ve gotta make a phone call, and then we’re all going to leave together. We’ll take the stairs, because the elevators might not work.”

  More stares.

  “Hold on.” She pulled out her phone, and her hand only shook a little.

  Carter picked up on the second ring. “Hey…” His greeting died away, and she realized he must be able to hear the alarm in the background. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t talk long,” she said, “but you guys need to know: I’m at work, and somebody called a bomb threat into the building. I’m leaving – I’m getting out, and I have to help my friends. But tell Ghost. Call the club’s cop buddy. Just – you needed to know.”

  “Leah.”

  “I love you,” she said, and hung up, and slipped the phone away. “Okay, guys, let’s move.”

  ~*~

  “Sir, we have to get you out of the building right now,” Bruce said, as stern as he’d ever sounded.

  “The bomb is because of me,” Ian said. “This isn’t a random target – they know who I am, and they want to take me out, or frighten me, or–”

  Alec touched his face. Sweet, brave Alec, always tougher than Ian expected him to be. He really never did give him enough credit, and, oh God, they were all about to be blown up…

  “Ian, we have to go.”

  “My people–”