by Mary Potter
Annoyed, I shake myself. Mandy, from what I’ve gathered, is part of Reaper’s crew, and she’s the sister of one of Reaper’s closest men. She would have no reason to be at a club owned and managed by Reaper’s enemy.
“Ready to go, Kyra?” Mandy asks, hooking the hose back up. “I’m just going to pay. Do you want anything?”
I shake my head. There was no point since I can’t eat or drink while I’m riding on the bike with her, and I’m hoping that it won’t be too long before we reach our destination.
After all, it’s hot, I’m frustrated and annoyed, both at the entire situation and myself, and there’s a part of me that just wants to turn away and forget all of this ever happened, take Emma, and run as far and fast as I can.
But I don’t. When Mandy returns, I swing my leg over the bike and seat myself securely. In the back of my mind, I can’t help but think that I don’t feel as safe on the bike with Mandy as I did with Reaper, but I push that thought away. I don’t need to be distracted. Regardless of how I got here, I know that I’m close to my goal.
The sun beats down harshly on us as we leave the city entirely, roaring out into the desert beyond. I duck my head to protect my eyes from the flying sand, which is why it takes me by surprise when we start slowing down barely ten minutes into the drive. I blink, brushing away a bit of sand that had managed to hit me, and look up.
A house? Someone lives out here? Then reason catches up to me. The house Mandy has brought me to is old and run down. It doesn’t look like anyone has lived here in years.
“Where are we?” I ask, unable to help my wariness.
“This is somewhere I used to go to escape.” Mandy grins at me, a glint in her eyes. “Fury always hated it when I disappeared, but I needed some time to myself, so I’d come out here. He never found me here.”
“You lived close?” I guess.
“Pretty close.” Mandy hums, tapping her bottom lip. “Fury joined the Devil's Mayhem with a lot of others. None of us came from great families. We were poor as dirt.” She laughs. “Crusher was a godsend! Even if I wasn’t in the club, he still looked after me.”
“Crusher?” The name isn’t familiar to me.
“Reaper’s dad.” Mandy shrugs when I stare at her. “Reaper inherited the whole thing recently. His mother was diagnosed with cancer, and Crusher went to take care of her. So Reaper was dragged back from whatever hole he’d dug himself into.”
I glance at her, surprised by the bitterness in her voice. Then again, I heard the vitriol that she had slung at the man back at the house. I wonder if something happened between the two of them in the past to make her so bitter. Whatever happened, it’s definitely one-sided. Reaper has always been polite when speaking to her, and he’s given no indication that anything is amiss between them.
For some reason, this makes me uneasy.
“Are your friends here?” I ask.
Mandy checks her phone.
“Soon,” she says. “You know, I never asked why you wanted to go back to Night Pleasures.”
I frown at her.
“I told you,” I reply. “It’s important to me that we shut down whoever is doing this.”
“Important enough to throw yourself back in danger,” Mandy states.
I shift uncomfortably.
“That’s not the point,” I try. “Look, I have a daughter, Mandy. One day, she’s going to grow up and go out into the world, and something like this might happen to her. I want her to be more successful than I ever was, but I don’t know what her future holds. If I can shut this down, that’s one step closer to protecting her.”
Mandy looks up from her frown.
“That’s bullshit,” she scoffs bluntly. “Your kid is going to go out into the world, and it won’t matter if you just shut down one place like this. There’s going to be others. There’s going to be people working for those places that you’ve never met, people that you would never have guessed would be against her. She won’t have eyes in the back of her head. Night Pleasures is just one place. Somewhere else is going to take its place.”
I know that. Fuck. I know it. I know the world is a dark, rotten place at times, that Emma is going to go out into it one day, and that she’s going to face her own kind of suffering. But if I can do just one small thing to prevent her from facing something like this? I imagine getting the call, in the future, that my girl is missing, kidnapped for a trafficking ring, and a shudder goes down my back.
I can’t bear the thought.
“It doesn’t matter,” I murmur.
I can almost feel Mandy eyeing me, but I don’t look up. I feel sick with tiredness and guilt. I want to go back to Emma, where I can hold her close and promise her that I’m safe now.
“Are they going to be much longer?” I ask. “Because if we’re going to be stuck waiting out here forever, I’d rather just go back to the house. Emma is waiting for me to get home, and I promised her I wouldn’t be long.”
I look up in time to see Mandy’s face relaxing from a grimace, as though something I said had pained her.
“Yeah,” she says, and her voice slightly cracks before she clears it. She draws in a deep breath. “Come on. Let’s go inside. Get out of this heat already.”
That sounds amazing. With the sun beating down on me, it’s hard to think straight. I follow Mandy into the cool interior of the house, taking a split second to sigh in relief at the lack of sun.
Then something hard strikes the back of my head, and the world goes dark.
Chapter Eighteen: Reaper
I slam my hand on the desk.
“What do you mean, you can’t track it?” I demand.
“She drove out of the boundaries of the city’s cameras,” Thor replies coolly, looking up. “Don’t lose your temper with me. I’m doing my best.”
“I thought you were tracking all of us?” Viper asks before I can snap back.
“I am,” Thor agrees. “As per church agreement, each bike has a tracker installed since Tex’s capture two years ago, in case of an attack by Hell’s Riot.”
“Don’ remind me,” Tex grunts.
“But I think Mandy has removed her tracker,” Thor continues, ignoring the interruption. “It wouldn’t be hard to do. Everyone knows where the tracker is. If she removed it, it’s because she doesn’t want to be found.”
I pull back and glance around the room. Currently, Viper, Thor, Tex, and Fury are here with me. Fury is sitting in the corner, a dark look on his face. He hadn’t been able to believe, at first, that Mandy would do something like this. Now, though, with the evidence that Mandy had specifically prevented us from tracking her down, the truth is dawning on all of us.
Mandy has betrayed us.
“Which way did she go?” Viper asks, leaning forward. “When she left the city?”
“West,” Thor answers, pulling up some video footage. “Which ties in with Emma telling Reaper about taking Kyra to the desert. There’s nothing much out that way. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you exactly which way she went once she left the main roads.”
It should have been stupidly easy to track down Mandy and Kyra. She had a tracker on her damn seat, a tracker that is currently blinking right on my property. Her number plate is recognizable enough that Thor was easily able to hack into the street cameras and trace her path when she left my place.
But Mandy has obviously planned this. She turned off the main roads as soon as she was able, ducking down a few alleyways and heading in the general direction of Night Pleasures before disappearing off the footage entirely. We knew she went west, but the exact roads she took are completely unknown.
We’ve been completely played by one of our own, and now there’s very little we can do.
“Griffin has to have something to do with this,” Viper says after a long moment. “He was here, distracting you.”
“No doubt,” Tex agrees in a dark voice, eyes narrowed. “I say we track him down and make him tell us what’s goin’ on.”
I smile grimly. The t
hought isn’t a bad one, but I’ve worked hard to keep us off the police’s radar. I don’t plan on putting us back on it just because we beat up a sack of shit.
Unfortunately, that takes us back to square one.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to find Griffin that easily,” Viper sighs regretfully. “He’s too clever. He would have run as soon as he left.”
“Coward,” Fury scoffs. It is the first time he’s spoken since Thor first started trying to track the bike. He looks up at us, eyes burning. “That’s all he is. A fucking coward. And he isn’t the only one. Chains and Mandy are, too.”
“Fury…” I start.
“No,” Fury interrupts as he abruptly stands. “Don’t try and make excuses. Don’t try to fucking comfort me. I knew Mandy was up to something. She was always leaving, always sneaking out while I was at church, you know? She wasn’t coming around the bar as much.” He opens and clenches his hands several times. “She’s been in with him since the start, hasn’t she?”
“It’s looking like it,” Viper agrees. “Did the two of them ever have anything between them?”
“If they did, I’ll fucking kill that asshole,” Fury says darkly.
“Maybe she just prefers his way,” Tex suggests. “It don’t make it any better, but lots of us have left for the same reasons.”
“They wanted the freedom to do as they please,” I murmur, feeling tired all of a sudden. “They wanted to walk on the other side of the law.”
I blame Crusher, my father, for all this. He created Devil’s Mayhem, created it’s long, bloody history, and then, when he realized he couldn’t continue going that way, he toed the line between both sides, balancing us on a knife’s edge so that he never had to commit one way or the other. He tried to make everyone happy.
And now I’ve come in. I’m tired of the fucking one-percenters that think they can get away with murder. I don’t want the Devil's Mayhem to go down that road any longer, but obviously, I haven’t been strict enough.
When all this is over, I’m going to raze this place and weed out everyone who I can’t trust. Trying to keep any part of my father’s legacy was a mistake. I’ll start from the ground up.
“I don’t care,” Fury snarls. “She doesn’t get to do this to us. She was one of us! What could Chains offer her that we can’t? Is she that desperate to kill and maim?”
“Look, getting worked up isn’t going to help,” Viper reminds him. “We’re here to track Kyra and Mandy. As soon as we find them, we can deal with her.”
“No, if she’s involved in any of this, she can go with the rest of them, straight to fucking jail,” Fury snorts. “She won’t have our colors anymore.”
“That might be a bit harsh,” Tex starts.
“No.” Everyone turns to look at me. “Fury is right. She’s betrayed us. She won’t have the right to ride with us after this. All we need to do now is find out just how far the betrayal goes. If we’re lucky, this is her only offense.”
I don’t say how unlikely that is. Simon told me of the woman who hung around, befriending the strippers and helping Jessica take them elsewhere. I suspect that Mandy has been involved in this project from the start, which means she won’t escape justice. But it won’t be at our hands. She won’t be one of us any longer, which means she’ll no longer have our protection when the law comes for her. When that happens, even Fury won’t be at her side.
Fury slumps, staring down at the floor. Then he sighs and looks up.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Don’t,” I reply. “It wasn’t your fault. You don’t control her. She made her own choices, and now she has to face the consequences of them. I’m sorry that we can’t do anything else for her.”
Fury gives me a short nod. He knows the rules as well as I do. Mandy is now on her own. None of that, unfortunately, helps us actually find her. She has taken Kyra right out of the city, and now we have to chase her somehow.
“Do we have any other ways of tracking them?” I ask, trying not to sound desperate.
“What about Mandy’s phone?” Fury suggests, his voice slightly wobbling at the suggestion. “She’s connected to her location on some apps, so can’t we track her through that?”
“I thought about that,” Thor grunts. “The bitch is smart. I’ll give her that. I can’t track her because she turned the fucking thing off.”
Such a simple thing to completely stop us in our tracks—it’s frustrating. I want to lash out and fight, but I have nothing to hit. All I have are two missing women and a creeping darkness trying to tell me that it’s happening again, that I’m going to lose someone because I couldn’t protect them in time.
“What about Kyra?” Tex suggests, crossing his arm. “Why don’t we track her phone?”
“I wouldn’t know how,” Thor answers with a shrug. “I don’t have her number.”
“I do,” I breathe. “We exchanged numbers, just in case, last night. I can give it to you.”
“Good, but don’t get your hopes up yet,” Thorn warns. “It might not work.”
I scribble Kyra’s name and number down on the pad of that paper he gives me and wait with bated breath as Thor runs it through his system. We’ve been so focused on tracking Mandy that it hadn’t even occurred to me that we could potentially track Kyra instead. Several painfully long, quiet minutes pass. Then Thor sighs.
“Hers is off too.”
I slump down into a seat, all the energy fleeing me at once. That was our last chance. Fuck. They’ve really completely disappeared.
“Now what?” I sigh.
All of a sudden, two things happen. My phone vibrates in my pocket, and something lets out a sharp ding on Thor’s computer.
“What the fuck?” Thor asks abruptly, his eyes widening. “For a moment… I got it!”
“Got what?” Viper asks, shooting to his feet.
“The location of the phone,” Thor says, typing madly. “It’s gone again. She must have turned it on for a split second, or…”
“Or she came back into service for a moment,” I slowly finish.
My eyes run over the message on my phone.
“Sorry for leaving. We’ll be back soon.”
It is from Kyra. I don’t know when she typed it out. Perhaps she sent it and left it to wait on her phone until she was in range.
“Where was the phone?” Tex asks sharply, striding toward the computer.
“It’s gone again,” Thor says tightly. “Fuck! I wasn’t quick enough.”
“Can we try it again?” I demand.
“There are two things we can do,” Thor replies. “Either you can send her a message and hope the service cuts in long enough to force it through, wherever she is, giving me a second to get her position. Or I could hack into a top-secret government service that could triangulate her position, potentially getting us all arrested but giving us a definite on where she is.”
Frankly, I’m highly tempted to go with the second option. Then I shake my head. I don’t know whether Thor is joking or not. He often makes jokes about hacking the government, and we’ve never figured out what is true and what isn’t. I don’t assume he would kid around at a moment like this, but it is also too large a risk to take right now.
“I’ll send a message,” I reply.
I tap the screen for a second, trying to think of the appropriate words to say. Maybe she hasn’t realized who she is with yet. A warning would be a good idea.
“Danger. Mandy is a traitor.”
Then I hesitate. Anything more would be stupid and sappy, which would be foolish, considering the circumstances. I shake my head and send it as is. Anything else can wait until we find her.
And we will. I know we will.
“Now we just wait?” Viper asks.
“And hope,” Thor adds gravely.
The seconds tick by slowly. Tex and Fury gravitate toward the computer, crowding behind Thor as they all stare intently at a program that currently isn’t doing anything. Viper is standi
ng near the door, arms crossed. His figure is tense as he guards the entry point, protecting our small gathering from anyone who might approach.
I find myself pacing restlessly, unable to deal with staying still right now. I’ve never been a spiritual man, but everything in me is calling on anything in the universe that will listen, hoping against hope that we can get just a split second of a tangible location.
But then the doubts start creeping in. Maybe Kyra sent the message and turned her phone off, not wanting a reply from me. Maybe it isn’t just crappy service that’s plaguing her. It could be her battery dying, instead. Or maybe Mandy has gotten hold of her phone and is making sure none of us can reach her. There are too many variables in what could be happening right now. Too many things to be unsure of.
I promised Emma that I would look after her mother. I can’t fail here. Not when Kyra will need us the most.
Ding.
Thor bursts into motion at the sound, tapping several keys so fast that his fingers almost blur. I swing around sharply, staring, waiting, hoping.
“Got it!”
Fury and Tex reel back with shouts of excitement, and Thor tips his head back with a huge sigh. Viper relaxes and grins. We did it.
But there’s no time to relax, not now.
“Right,” I say, and I can feel a grin spreading across my face. This is it. “Move out! We’ve got a phone to track!”
The realization that there is something that I can do right now fills me with energy. It’s time to get out there and bring this whole operation down.
It’s time to bring Kyra back.
Chapter Nineteen: Kyra
“…fuck are you?”
Consciousness returns to me very slowly. My head is pounding, and the world is swirling all around me. I can hear a voice nearby, but nothing is really making sense right now.
“Because you said so, asshole!”
The voice is loud, and it makes me wince, the sound spearing through my aching skull. Pain radiates from my head down my back, making me feel like one giant bruise.
What had happened to me? I struggle to pull the pieces of my memory together. Where’s Emma?
