by Addison Jane
Emerald’s gaze was clouded and confused. She couldn’t understand what was happening. “What is she doing?” she asked, looking to Optimus for an explanation as to why our little sister was here, alone, walking the street.
“You tell me,” he snorted. “Your sister here wants to run out there and rescue this little girl, not even bothering to ask how the fuck she got here, where the hell she came from, and what in God’s fucking name does she think she’s doing.” Optimus looked at me like I’d lost my mind, and maybe I had. He was right, there was no good explanation for why Delilah would be in Athens unless someone had brought her here. But it didn’t change the fact that my heart was breaking as I saw her wandering down the center of the street toward the compound, looking like she was walking toward her death.
The brothers moved swiftly around the clubhouse, setting themselves up with rifles and handguns, pulling pieces of wall away to reveal secret holes that they could fire from and still be protected.
“They’re using her to pull us outside,” Wrench said, shaking his head in disbelief. “A child, Op. A fucking child.”
Optimus gritted his teeth. “They have to be watching from somewhere. They’ll have someone with a lock on her in case one of us walks out.” He placed his palms flat on the table, staring at the computer screen like it was his worst enemy. “Leo, take Ham out the back and around, there’s only a handful of abandoned multi-story factories around here that they could be in, something empty, possibly high up with a view of the road.”
The two boys instantly ducked out through the kitchen to the back door of the clubhouse, their guns tucked tightly to their bodies and determination on their faces. That was one thing my father underestimated about these brothers, the people I called my family—they weren’t afraid to fight back.
“She is expendable,” Emerald announced abruptly, drawing horrified looks from club members left in the room around us. She seemed to be staring into nothing, her eyes glazed as she stared out the window. “They will kill her.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Blizzard yelled from his post beside the door, his face was red, the veins on his neck tight with the tension of his body. “She’s a kid, a fucking child!”
It was sick to think that they would stoop that low, and scary to think that my father would kill one of his own children in order to exact his revenge or to prove a point, but unfortunately, it honestly wasn’t all that surprising. This was who he was, this was the way he raised my brother and the other men who stood by him.
The punishment was to be made in pain and blood.
Emerald didn’t startle when Blizzard screamed at her across the room. She just looked at him in confusion.
I knew why.
Because being a child had never been an excuse for our father to not to raise his hand or beat us. We hated it, but we never knew that it was wrong.
“Her red hair… our father always said it was a sign that she had been touched by the fire of hell. He said that her mother had thought bad things about the Colony while she was pregnant.” Emerald was just rattling now, she was turning off her emotions and trying not to think about the fact that we might be about to watch Delilah killed. This here was her survival mode—‘if I’m numb, it can’t hurt me.’ “Even her name in the old testament was one of a temptress.”
“Stop Emerald,” I snapped, tears pooling in my eyes as Delilah got closer to the compound. “Please, just stop.”
Hadley rushed down the stairs. “Eagle’s on his way back with Skins and Jess,” she said, holding out her phone. “I told him everything I could. He’s hurrying but said to text him any extra details. They’re five minutes out.”
Optimus grabbed her phone and started typing furiously.
Maybe they would be able to pick Delilah up as they came down the street. The idea was hopeful, but I kept it stored in the front of my mind. Even then, my body still ached to run out the door and across the gravel to the compound gates in hopes that if I just got her inside she would be safe.
She just needed to come a little bit—
The sharp, high-pitched sound of a bullet cutting through the air was followed by something I hoped I never heard again—the painful cry of my eleven-year-old sister being shot.
I stumbled toward the computer screen, while all the brothers looked back and forth at each other in confusion and utter fucking shock. There she was, sitting in the middle of the road, clutching her calf muscle and screaming for forgiveness.
Blood seeped through the cracks in her fingers, dripping down her leg.
I wanted to vomit.
Seeing her stare at it in horror, a pain that no young girl her age should ever have to experience. She should be complaining about doing homework, kissing boys in the playground and making friendships that would last a lifetime.
Not this.
I tried to make another run for the door, but Optimus was on me before I could even move. Then before I knew it, I was sobbing, screaming at no one in particular to just leave her the hell alone.
I couldn’t look away.
I swear it was an image I was never going to forget.
For the rest of my life.
“Get in the fucking truck!” I yelled, running around the vehicle to where Jess and Skins were loading the groceries in. While Jess looked at me in shock, Skins being the levelheaded man I liked, hooked his hand through all the grocery bags and tossed them all into the back seat. Loaves of bread, milk, cheese, beer, went scattering all over the seats and the floor, but there was no time to fuck around.
Once Jess found her head, she just shoved the shopping cart across the lot in the general direction of the cart return and dived in the backseat with the explosion of shopping items, just as I started the engine.
My foot was flat on the accelerator, and we were roaring for the exit within seconds.
The call from Hadley wasn’t good, and I already felt the angry haze settling over me. Some bastard was going to pay. Today, tomorrow, preferably fucking yesterday. Hell was going to rain down around them. Fucking ironic, given that these people are so scared of ending up in that place. I’ll happily bring it to them.
“What’s the situation?” Skins asked, looking at me with complete seriousness. We all braced ourselves as we bounced out and onto the street, Jess cursing when her head smacked the window.
I gripped the steering wheel, pushing Op’s truck as fast as fucking possible without getting us killed. I quickly informed them about what was waiting for us when we got back. The club had the clubhouse in lockdown basically, and there was a little girl, another of Sky’s sisters, standing in the street crying.
Jess paled instantly. “They aren’t going to…” she couldn’t say it, and I didn’t know what else to tell her, so I just let the words hang in the thick air of the cab. “What do we do?”
My phone started to vibrate, and I pulled it from my pocket, passing it to Skins. “Read,” I ordered, sharply.
“They want us to try and snatch her off the street as we drive past,” Skins relayed, his eyes scanning the message. “Leo plus two are out trying to hunt down whoever is out there, but so far they haven’t made a move to do anything.”
“Snatch her off the street?” Jess exclaimed, her eyes meeting mine in the rear vision mirror. “We pull up, I drag her in on top of the Wheaties, and then we run to the clubhouse before Sky’s brother and his friends can fill the car full of bullets.”
“Basically,” I responded, only really half listening to what she was rambling on about, but even then realizing that it sounded fucking ridiculous.
Then things changed.
“They shot her,” Skins whispered.
“What?” I asked in shock.
Jess wasn’t moving, sitting in the backseat staring straight ahead, her chest rising and falling steadily. My eyes flicked from the road, to Skins, to her, trying to figure out if what I was hearing was real.
“They shot her in the leg,” he finally corrected, not ma
king my heart slow down any, but at least giving us something. She wasn’t dead, but we had to try and get to her before they decided that she was worthless to them and did the unthinkable.
“These people need to be put down,” Jess said with absolute rage in her voice. “They need to be removed from this world.”
“How are we gonna get the girl?” Skins asked as he reached over and took Jess’s hand, giving it a squeeze. “I’ve got all my medical shit back at the clubhouse, there’s a chance she can come out of this if I can get to her quickly enough.”
My foot pressed harder against the accelerator, and we jolted forward.
I was running through all the scenarios in my head—what we knew, what we didn’t know, what the risks were and how we could avoid them.
“You think these guys are that stupid that they assumed we would let Skylar or Emerald run out the door to her sister without thinking… oh hey, this is kinda weir—” I stopped mid-sentence and Skins eyes widened.
“What?” he prompted as I went through things once more, trying to convince myself that I must have been wrong. “Eagle, man, we’re just about there, we need to—”
“It’s a distraction.”
Skins mouth dropped open for a brief second, but soon he was fumbling with the phone, pressing call at least ten times in his rush.
“I don’t like what you just said,” Jess pointed out, sitting forward and placing her hand on my shoulder. “Please tell me you don’t mean what you mean.”
Skins voice cut her off before I could tell her that I meant exactly what I meant.
“Op, Eagle said it’s a distraction, you need to watch your back,” Skins relayed into the phone.
I could hear my president curse and start screaming orders at my brothers.
“Jess, you better dig the gun out from underneath your seat and hope like hell those lessons you’ve been having with Hadley have paid off,” I told her. I was trying to keep my cool even though, in that moment, I wanted to be a selfish bastard and drive straight through the compound gates and find Skylar. On the other hand, I had Jess sitting behind me, her hand still on my shoulder and her body shaking as we drove foot flat to the floor, toward danger and guns and bullets. “Jess…now’s the time where I could really appreciate that smart mouth and cocky attitude.”
“I’m s-scared, Eagle,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
The more time I’d spent with Sky, the closer I got to look at who Jess really was. She could be a total bitch and overly abrasive, but when it came to the things that counted, she stepped up to help the people she cared about, showing her true colors, even if she didn’t like people to know. It was almost as if she was afraid people would try and get close to her if they thought she wasn’t as much of an asshole as she made out to be.
“Get the gun,” I told her calmly. Skins had already found his weapon and was loading the chamber. “Jess, trust me, you’ll feel a lot better when you have something in your hands to protect yourself.”
I looked at her out the corner of my eye. She blinked a couple of times before she took in a deep, all-encompassing breath and like a light switch she was diving for the rifle and tearing open the ammunition that was attached to it with her teeth.
“Fucking cunts, shoot a fucking little girl, gonna shove my gun up their ass,” she mumbled to herself, the fear being taken over by adrenaline. “How are we gonna get the girl in the car and then into the clubhouse?”
“I’m going to assume the fire is coming from the abandoned multi-story factory down the left side.” This was a huge assumption, but we were going in totally blind, so it was one that had to be made. “So I’m going to use that side to shelter you as you throw the door open and drag her inside.” I tried to explain the plan, it was messy, but it was all I had right now. We hadn’t heard back from Op, so I just knew it was likely he was dealing with his own problems and I hoped like fucking hell that Skylar was okay.
Sky was strong and stubborn as hell, if someone came at her, she would fight back. At least that much I knew.
I turned the corner, pulling into the club road and I could already see the shape of the little girl sitting at the end of the street, almost directly outside the clubhouse gates. “You ready?” I asked seriously as I lined up the car straight and screamed down the street.
Jess placed her gun on the seat beside her and scooted closer to the doorway, her hand resting on the handle as she caught my eye. “Ready.”
I drove down the left side of the road so she would be on the right side to open her door and drag the kid inside. I was the one left vulnerable like this, well, assuming that the shooter was coming from one of the factories on this side of the road. The driver’s seat was leaned back just enough so that the pillar in between the front and back seat was protecting my head.
Just as I hit the brakes with pressure, a loud bang resonated above the truck’s roaring engine as it fought to slow down. I felt it hit the car, right in my fucking tire. “Shit!” I yelled, trying to control this monster of a fucking vehicle with a blown out tire while trying not to hit this kid in the center of the road.
My control was horrible. With the front left tire now flat, I was fighting to keep it from pulling us to that side and off the road.
The ping of a bullet hitting metal had us all leaping out of our seats. Thankfully for us, after what happened with Hadley and Ham being shot at while Macy was in the car, and the fact that a lot of the boys had kids now or were wanting kids, they all got armoring placed inside the doors of their vehicles through the International Armoring Corp.
The truth was, cars were not fucking bulletproof, no matter how many Hollywood movies tried to tell you they were. Hadley was lucky in her instance because they had shot at Leo’s truck mostly from the rear, so the tailgate formed an extra layer of protection.
“Here she is!” I yelled as I slammed my foot down as hard as possible on the break, throwing us all forward. Jess managed to recover from the momentum and flung the door open, the girl just three or four feet from the rear tire.
“Get back in!” Skins yelled and raised his gun to the narrow gap in his window. Jess managed to get the door shut just as a flurry of bullets skimmed at leg height across the vehicle. The young girl outside was screaming, lying flat on the ground, covering her head. Skins returned fire with three rounds, enough to force the gunman back behind the tall metal fence across the street from the clubhouse.
There went my assumption and the whole plan.
They were coming at us from both sides.
Suddenly, my window shattered, throwing glass all over my lap, the bullet just skimming my jeans before burying itself into the center console. “Motherfucker!”
We were gonna have to leave the kid where she was, or in a few seconds, when they finally got a good shot, we would be fucking dead.
Jess was lying flat on the back seat, just as another bullet shot through the car, smashing her window on entry and the other side on exit. I heard her growl, turning my head just enough to see her gripping the rifle in her hands. “Stupid bastards,” she cursed, rearranging her body so she was on her knees on the floor and the rifle was propped in the now open window.
“There’s three on my side at least,” Skins blurted as he tried to keep his head below the window line. “We need to make a decisi—”
Bang!
My body buzzed as the sound of the rifle being fired from inside the fucking vehicle vibrated through me and made my ears ring. I scratched at them, trying to make the ringing stop and not let it set me off in the middle of a fucking war zone. I could feel my body tingling already but I was fighting it, I wouldn’t let the haze beat me this time.
Fuck no, not when my family was at risk.
Inhale.
I wouldn’t lose the people I love again. No one was going to take them from me this time.
“Now there’s only two!” Jess said, her voice suddenly calm and deadly. “Hang in there, honey, we’re gonna get you out of here,”
she called out the window.
“It hurts!” she called back, her voice painful and distraught. “I feel dizzy,” she cried, followed by an emotional sob.
Skins looked at me, his eyes a melting pot of anger and hatred, mixed with the pain of trying to understand how someone could do this to a little girl who was so innocent. “We’re getting her out of here,” he clipped, his lips barely moving because of how tight his jaw was clenched.
He was right.
We weren’t cowards, we wouldn’t run, and I refused to leave this earth without knowing that I did my fucking best. I’d lived with guilt for too long now, wondering why the fuck I’m here. Why the hell did I get to stay to live with the flashbacks, the nightmares, the memories that paralyzed me?
What if this moment was it?
This was why.
I couldn’t fuck it up.
The screeching of tires coming up the street behind us drew everyone’s attention. I recognized the car instantly, it was Deacon. Without thinking, I sat up and threw my body out the window, hoping that the shooter was watching him and not me.
Using my arms, I pointed to the other side of the car, hoping that if he had any sense, he would pull up on the other side of the kid to shield her from the fuckers hiding on the side that Jess was still determined to take down one by one.
His car swerved in the direction I was pointing just as a spray of shots pelted his SUV from both sides. He skidded to a stop right in place, and Jess didn’t waste another second, bounding from the backseat and scampering across the ground to pull Sky’s little sister into her arms.
“What the fuck is going on!” Deacon called. “Op rang and said shit was getting ugly, but holy crap!” He covered his head and ducked, disappearing below the window as a barrage of bullets slammed one after another into the side of his car.
