by Hart, Eve R.
All we had to do was watch. And wait. But fingers crossed, it wouldn’t take long.
I had this feeling in my gut that he would lead us to Keften.
Real fucking soon.
It took me a few minutes to link it all to my phone so that I could keep an eye on it without being stuck in my room. Then I was making my way back to Church to fill everyone in. I knew they’d still be there and I was hoping that they had come up with a few other things we could do.
“You!” Petra’s voice called out the moment I walked into the front door of the clubhouse.
I halted my steps like lighting because that was one voice I hadn’t expected to hear. Especially, not here at the clubhouse.
“Yeah?” I said as I looked right at her.
“Where is your leader?”
“Prez has a name,” I said a little coldly. Yeah, I was kind of being a dick but I still wasn’t sure what was up with her. And after she’d gone off on Iron, I was more on guard to protect my Prez.
Her eyes narrowed at me and that was the only hint of anger she let slip through her cold façade.
I didn’t want to back down and the only reason I did was because I knew Iron would want me to.
I pulled my phone out and put it to my ear. Normally he wouldn’t answer if he was in a meeting, but I had a feeling that he would with all the shit that was going on.
“You got something?” he asked immediately.
“Not yet. Petra’s here.” I almost told him that his woman was here but thought better of it at the last second.
There was a heavy sigh then he told me he’d be right down.
Once he walked into the room he gave a chin jerk to the two prospects that were hanging around. They got up and scampered off without a word.
Mouse, B-ry, Knight, Bocca, and Seven all took different corners of the room. I stayed right next to Iron, giving him a few feet of space to breathe.
“Have you found him?” she asked and didn’t need to say who. We all fucking knew.
“No,” Iron answered and if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a hint of disappointment in his tone.
“You find him. I want a piece of him,” she said with an icy hiss. No, she wasn’t asking us when we found him, she was telling us to find him. Like right fucking now.
Something inside me wanted to tell her that we were close but I’d never open my mouth like that. I could see it, that fire in her that was ready to go on a killing rampage. And I feared what had caused it.
“Not gonna happen, babe,” Iron told her calmly but firmly.
Petra stepped up into his space. I wasn’t dumb enough to get between that. Not until I had to, at least.
“You owe me,” she seethed right there in his face. “This is your fault.”
“I’m not going to argue with you there, Pet,” Iron said calmly. I cocked my head at him unsure if he was calling her Pet as a pet-name or a shortened version of her name. Either way, she didn’t seem to like it by the way her lip went up in a sneer. “But I’m not letting you get near this. Not a fucking chance. You’re going to turn around and walk out of here. Cool off. And let me fuckin’ handle this.”
That tone that usually worked so well on everyone else only seemed to piss her off more. Had to hand it to Prez, he didn’t lose his cool composure when she started shooting laser beams through her eyes at him.
“One of my girls is dead.” The words sounded like they were painful for her to let go of. “I will get blood for this.”
Iron didn’t say anything after that.
I think he didn’t know what to say. And, well… I didn’t either.
The redhead that I’d helped that night popped into my head. I had no clue why, but I hoped it wasn’t her. Which was wrong because I didn’t hope it was any of them.
Another death on Keften’s hands.
“Who?” I asked because I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I liked answers and I knew it would drive me crazy wondering who it was. Plus, something needed to be done about this tension going on here.
Her head turned in my direction so slowly that it was on the verge of being creepy.
She looked me dead in the eyes and I feared for my life right then. But then it was like her heart broke through and realized why I was asking. A flicker of softness as she told me and then it was gone.
“Not Rowan. Esme. She was trampled in the stairway.”
Damn.
That didn’t make it any better and I kind of wished I hadn’t asked.
“I get my piece,” she said as she looked back into Iron’s eyes.
It barely showed, but I could tell he was torn.
As his eyes fell closed and his head did one tiny nod, he gave in to her.
“I expect you to be a man of your word.” With that, she was walking away and out the front door.
“Technically you didn’t give your word,” Bocca pointed out with a hint of humor in his tone. Only a hint though because shit was still tense.
Iron cut his eyes over to the man and his lips twitched like he was trying to hold back.
“Yeah, but I don’t think she’s someone I’d want on my bad side,” Seven said with a raised brow.
“Don’t plan on puttin’ her there,” Iron said and then jerked his head telling us to get back upstairs.
We didn’t talk about the Petra thing. Guessed I’d just have to wait and see how it played out after we caught Keften.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cable
“What’s up, Prez?” I asked as I stepped into his office having been summoned here by a text not even three minutes ago.
I looked around.
Mouse shot me a chin jerk just before my eyes moved to Ky standing off to the side.
“What do you know about this Gilded Rose guy?” Iron asked as I took the other free chair in front of the desk.
“The Claire one?”
He answered me with a nod.
“Not much,” I said. “There wasn’t much to find. I would have thought he was an average guy if he wasn’t connected to all of this.”
“So how the fuck did he get caught up in Keften?” Iron asked and there was an edge to his tone.
“Can’t really answer that,” I said honestly.
I had no clue. Even when Bridget brought up the whole thing about him not having enough money to pay dues at a place like the Gilded Rose.
But then I sort of had other things to think about and honestly, maybe forgot about it for a little while.
I felt like I’d let him down because of that.
“I want you three to ride over there and check his house out,” he said and paused for a moment like he wasn’t quite done. “I’ll go too. After the shit that happened with Steve’s house… well, let’s just be more cautious.”
“You think going is a good idea?” Mouse asked as he sat up a little taller.
“Yeah. I wouldn’t ask any one of you to do something I wouldn’t do myself.”
I could respect that. And maybe that was why I really fuckin’ liked the guy.
“Load up, ride out,” Iron said, getting to his feet. “If we find this guy, we do everything we can to get answers.”
“You got it,” I said and stood up right along with Mouse.
We rode over together, parking right in front of the house. I was pretty sure this guy wasn’t home. There was no way he’d be stupid enough to come back here. I was sure Keften had made all kinds of connections now and maybe even figured out just how the hell we’d found our way to his door.
“Evenin’, ma’am,” Iron said all smooth-tongued to the old lady sitting on her front porch right next to the house we were about to bust up into. “We’re lookin’ for your neighbor here, do you know if he’s home?”
She eyed Iron for a good long minute, all the while rocking back and forth in her wooden rocking chair.
“Not for a few days now.” She made a face like she’d eaten something sour. “Good for nothin’ little shit. Comes and goes at all hou
rs of the damn night. Don’t give a shit, slamming doors, leaving his headlights on too damn long. Wakes me up. I’m old. I need my damn rest.”
Iron chuckled softly.
“We’re just going to check and see if he’s home, alright? We might knock real loud,” he said with a smile.
“I won’t stop you,” she said with a wave of her hand as if she was telling us to get on with it.
Then we did just that, banged the fuck out of his door. So hard we broke the damn thing in. Oops.
“What the fuck?” Ky breathed out as we scanned the front room.
I definitely seconded that.
Because what the fuck?
The place was bare. As in, no furniture, no pictures, no carpet. Even the walls had been ripped out and all that was left were the studs. But this hadn’t been done recently because everything had been cleaned up. Oddly enough, there didn’t seem to be any kind of dirt or dust around.
We all took a frozen moment to glance at each other.
“Watch where you step,” Iron said as he moved further into the house taking slow, calculated steps.
In the kitchen, we found much of the same. Walls ripped out. No furniture. Cabinet doors were missing.
“The sink is full of cement. What the hell?” Mouse said as he poked the hard block just to make sure it was real.
“I got no damn clue,” I said with a shake of my head.
“Oh, shit,” Ky said in a semi-calm tone.
I turned my attention to him just as he closed the freezer door.
“There’s a foot in there,” Ky said as he stepped away from the appliance with quick, but safe, steps.
“A foot?” I asked because it could have been a pigs foot, right? People ate those and shit.
“Yep. Like the one in your boot,” he answered as he kept walking out of the room.
“Just one?” Iron asked and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.
“Just one.”
The whole house seemed to be void of anything and I couldn’t come up with a good reason for it. I would have said that maybe he was remodeling the whole place, but it felt like something else. Something I didn’t think any of us could explain or even understand.
We made our way through the house, finding nothing but bare, empty rooms.
Light spilled out from under the door at the end of the hall.
We all froze for a good long minute and listened for any kind of noise. I could admit that I was a little terrified to see what was behind that door. After being met with silence for far too long, Iron took a step forward.
“Last room,” Iron said as he inched open the closed door.
We all stood there in shock as we looked around and took everything in. And there was a fuck of a lot to take in.
Pictures filled nearly every wall. Maps with red dots. There was a cot in the corner and a laptop set up on a table beside it. A single lamp illuminated the room from the corner, the shade removed and the bulb almost blinding.
“Who is that?” Mouse asked, taking a step closer to one of the walls as he tried to figure out who was in all the pictures.
“Claire,” I said as my stomach churned.
“The Claire?” Mouse asked for some fucking dumb reason.
“Yeah,” I grunted.
Hundreds of pictures. Some of her out on the streets. In alleyways talking to men. Walking. Sitting. Everything you could imagine.
There were a few of her where she looked a little cleaner, healthier. A bunch with her and a male. A boyfriend, I guessed. There was also one of her outside of the Gilded Rose.
“So this guy has an obsession with Claire,” Ky said in an oddly dead tone. My guess was that he was doing his best to hold it together. And I fucking got that. “But how does this lead to Keften?”
“Not just with Claire,” I said as I moved down the wall around to the next one. “There are more girls.”
A blonde girl. Younger than Claire by a few years, I would have guessed. There weren’t as many of her but enough for me to recognize some of the same places in the background. Another street girl and I wondered if she was one of the ones that had been taken.
A different blonde. But basically the same thing.
A couple of brunettes. A redhead.
More pictures.
More girls.
Ones that had that look of the streets.
It was strange to see. So many different pictures but yet it was almost as if the images were the same.
“Let me see that map,” I said moving over to the wall that it was on. “A lot of these places are the ones that Sketch came back with. Some of these I don’t recognize. But most of these… yeah, these are places where the girls were taken from.”
“So, this guy… what… works for Keften and stalks homeless girls to bring back to him?” Mouse asked and I could almost see him scratching his head even though my back was to him.
“Or…” I said, my mind doing its damnedest to put the pieces together. “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” My eyes narrowed as I scanned over the story that was before me like it would somehow give me the answers I was looking for.
“The fuck you talkin’ about?” Iron asked but there was a hint in his tone that he was sort of following along.
“What came first, Keften or this guy’s obsessive stalking?” I couldn’t figure it out though I felt the answer was right there in front of me. My mind just didn’t work that way. “Mouse?” I asked as I whipped around to look at him.
“Why the hell are you looking at me?” he asked defensively.
I raised a brow at him. No, I didn’t think he was crazy or had stalker tendencies. I’d seen the shit he’d ordered. I knew the things he’d been reading lately because I did occasionally check up on everyone. I trusted these men with my life but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a peek to see that things were still as they should be. Maybe it was shitty, but I’d do anything to keep my club safe.
“Somethin’ I’m missing?” Iron asked.
With a sigh, Mouse shook his head and looked down.
“So I got a few books on shit, doesn’t mean that I understand crazy fucks like this,” he said looking a little unhappy to be talking about it.
“Books?” Ky asked. “What books?”
I could see Iron putting something together in his head. Thing was, I felt like I only got half of it.
“You’d know better than any of us,” I said, ignoring Ky.
Mouse shot me a hard glare as he stepped up closer to the wall.
“Just because I read some stuff doesn’t mean I get how these fucks think,” he mumbled. “And this is a different kind of crazy than what I was reading about.”
The seconds ticked on. I guessed he couldn’t figure anything out because he just kept shaking his head. It was a long shot and I knew it. But I’d hoped that maybe out of all of us, he’d be the one that could pick up on something.
“The obsession with Claire has been there for a while,” Mouse finally said. “I can’t tell you how it started or when. But what I get from all of this is that all these other girls came after he started stalking Claire. There are dates written at the bottom right corner of every single photo here.”
I stepped closer and saw the dates there. They were small and written neatly.
“Maybe there’s something on that computer,” Iron said and I got what he was telling me without him having to voice it.
I was hesitant.
Pretty sure I didn’t want to know what the hell this guy had on there.
But it wasn’t like I had a choice.
Since I wanted to get out of this place as fast as possible, I quickly scanned through his files to see if anything jumped out at me. Work shit. More work shit. And a shit load of files full of pictures. I didn’t bother to look through those because I figured it was much of the same as what was on his walls.
One file stuck out to me as odd.
I opened it right away knowing that it might have been a ba
d idea.
There were eight pictures in there. Five of them were of men attacking or carrying girls in different shady areas. I could only guess they were homeless girls. One was of the back of the car that I assumed the men drove off with the girls. The license plate was clearly visible. The next was a picture of the house that Keften had been staying in. You know, before we knew he was there. And the next was a picture of Keften caught coming out of the front door. The last three pictures all had the same date, the very last one having been taken hours after the one before it.
“My guess,” Mouse said right over my shoulder. “He was probably out stalking Claire and saw this shit go down. He was smart enough to figure out what was going on. And either brave or stupid enough to follow them back to where they took the girls. He probably saw a way in with Keften. Or maybe Keften caught onto him.”
“Why wouldn’t Keften just kill him?” Ky asked.
“Because this guy had something that could help Keften,” Iron answered. “Keften lost everything and had to start over. This guy, well, he knew where homeless girls hung out. He knew where Claire… and I’m sure others often went when they needed to keep things private. He became useful to Keften.”
“And Claire?” I asked feeling anger pulse through my veins.
“Caught in the crossfire,” Mouse answered. “One of those ‘I’ll help you, if you help me’ type of things. And to Keften, Claire was a small price to pay. But I get the feeling it didn’t work out quite how this guy thought it would.”
“So Keften gets Andrew into the Gilded Rose so that he can get to Claire,” I picked up where Mouse left off. “Still don’t get why she would just leave and go with him.”
“Money,” Ky said.
“Security,” Mouse went on. “He offered her a chance at something better. I imagine that he had the appearance of being rich there. He had to in order for Petra to let him in. He probably appeared to be normal and everything else helped her overlook anything that might have set her on edge. The only thing he probably had to do was offer her something better.”
