“Where are we at?”
-o0o-
Dawg found out where Hump was living. The Nomads who went there said no one was home, but the place wasn’t emptied, so it didn’t look as if they’d planned on leaving permanently.
The Nomads left one guy close by, but he honestly thought it was a waste of manpower—Hump wasn’t going back there, but he wasn’t gonna start arguing with Russ about how he used his men.
They found no other property that could be connected to Hump or anyone close to him. They checked the name he’d apparently been using the last few years, but that came up empty, too. Mech started on a map, trying to calculate where he could be, given the time frame they were working in, but Mitch told him to stop. The area was way too fucking big for them to search anyway, and there was no telling if they were even in a mapped building. There were so many fucking old military bunkers and missile silos all around Arizona, there was no way they could search through them all.
They’d gone through the cameras and found Hump’s old Volvo, but it had turned into side road and was gone. He assumed they’d changed cars, and when Sisco and Bull searched the area, they found the empty car at a parking lot. Mech kept an eye on the scanners and police reports, but no reports on a stolen car had appeared yet. It wasn’t a priority thing, so it might take a while before something like that hit the files. They also might have a car there waiting, which meant there wouldn’t be any reports.
Finally, they’d gathered in the Chapel along with Russ and some of the Nomads. Mitch hated to fucking give up, and he had no idea how he’d be able to keep it together until the next day, but short of riding around hoping for some luck, they were screwed. There was no finding her until the next day.
“You’re not going there alone,” Mac said.
“What if they see the rest of you and kill her immediately?”
Russ shook his head. “He wants his drop of blood, and he wants to torture you, so he’s not gonna do it fast. And there are only two of them, they’ll both be with her. They won’t have any advance setup with lookouts or anything like that. We can keep out of the way but still be close by, and you’ll need us there.”
Mitch’s bleak thoughts about how he found it hard to believe that anything could torture him more than a dead Anna was interrupted when Tommy and Mace walked into the clubhouse.
“Good news?” he asked.
Tommy smiled and nodded. “It’s not perfect, but it’s doable.”
-o0o-
Mitch’s legs were shaking when he walked into the abandoned house. He dreaded what was waiting for him in there, and when he saw Anna he took a deep breath. She was sitting on a chair with her wrists tied to the armrests and the same fucking red rag was still in her mouth. Her makeup was all over her face. She had some bruising, but that was the only visible injury he could see, and then she started crying when she saw him.
“Baby—“ he started and took a step towards her, but was interrupted when the bitch gave Anna a hard slap over her cheek. Anna tried to scream, but the rag muffled the sound.
“Every time to you talk to her directly, I’m gonna beat her. That clear?”
He looked at Anna when he was nodding. He needed to snap out of his shock, he needed to be alert to what was going on around him, but he wasn’t sure how to when she was just there, and she was in pain. He couldn’t get over the fact that it was his fault—all of it.
He’d spent the night going through the scenarios, and Sisco and Mac had been right there with him the entire time. Sisco seemed to be taking it personally, and when Mitch found out about him losing his wife when she was pregnant, he understood. This was personal to Sisco, as fucking personal as it got. His story hadn’t calmed Mitch down, but he’d known for sure he could trust Sisco through this—to the very end.
But to get a happy ending, he needed to focus, and he couldn’t look at Anna if he wanted to do that, so he turned to Hump. He’d been prepared for a lot of things, but not what he was seeing when he looked at Hump. The guy was not on top of his game, and Russ’s theory that this was something the crazy bitch had come up with started to ring more and more true to Mitch. Hump was a wreck, and despite the months of PT, he just barely seemed able to handle the gun with his left hand.
By instinct, Mitch took a few steps towards Anna. Hump was immediately there and slammed the gun over Mitch’s face. It wasn’t hard enough to break his nose, but it still hurt like hell, and while holding his face, blinking his tears away, he heard Anna screaming and another thump when the cunt hit her.
He looked at Hump through tear-filled eyes. “I’m here. Please let her go.”
“No,” Hump shook his head as he took a few steps away from Mitch. “I’m going to do what you did to me. I’m going to take everything from you and leave you like an empty fucking shell.”
There was hardly any point in trying to tell Hump that Mitch hadn’t taken anything from him. He’d done that pretty fucking well himself, and he’d ended up killing his own blood while going after Mitch. If he was the one who had killed his own daughter, which Mitch had doubted to begin with. Looking at Hump and Anita now, he was getting more and more certain that it was on Anita, and he wondered if Hump even knew about it. Because while Hum looked like a broken man, Anita looked bat-shit crazy, and Mitch decided to test his theory.
“I wasn’t the one who killed your daughter,” he said.
He heard a muffled bang, and despite the rag in her mouth, Anna managed to scream, and when he looked at her, Anita was standing with a gun to Anna’s head and a hammer in her other hand. The end of the hammer was still resting against the back of Anna’s hand.
“Oh God! Fuck!” Mitch screamed. “Please leave her alone!”
“One more lie from you, and I’m doing this to the knee on her good leg.”
When he took a step towards them, Anita raised the hammer into the air again and shook her head.
“Please,” he said, and he didn’t even give a shit about the fact that he was bawling like a baby.
“Then back the fuck off.”
He took a step back again, and Anna was looking at him, crying with a horrible panic in her eyes. He wanted to comfort her, but even if he would be able to talk to her, he had no idea what he’d say. There was nothing to say. How the fuck could he ever make it up to her that she was kidnapped and a psycho bitch smashed her hand with a hammer? Her right hand. So she had a busted right hand and a left leg. At least the leg wasn’t his fault, but if they got to work on her right leg, she’d end up in a fucking wheelchair because of him.
“What did you say about my daughter?” Hump yelled.
“You shut the fuck up!” Anita screamed at Mitch before the question was fully out in the open.
“No! You shut the fuck up!” Hump turned the gun against her while keeping an eye on Mitch. “Shut your fucking mouth. What the fuck did you do, bitch?! You didn’t think I’d lost enough?”
“You, it’s always about what you have lost. ‘Boo-hoo, poor me, I lost my club, and I lost my hand, I can’t ride,’” she said in a mocking tone, and if he hadn’t been so shocked, Mitch would’ve laughed. At the same time, he was trying to decide if the latest development was a good or bad thing, but as long as she had her gun pointed at Anna, he was leaning towards it still being pretty fucking bad. She wasn’t done, though. She kept screaming.
“You never, not for a fucking second thought about what I had lost, you self-centered piece of shit. You decided that we all needed to leave, and that we’d get revenge. I had to live with your moron ex-wife and your spoiled brat of a daughter, while you kept planning and planning, but you never actually did anything. I did it all. This is not your fucking revenge. It’s mine! So you just shut the fuck up about what I have or haven’t done. When this is over, I’m done with you!”
“You killed my ex-wife, too?”
“Don’t pretend like you give a shit,” she snarled, and she turned to Mitch. “You fucking men never get it. You think it’s all abo
ut you, but when you kicked him out of the club and his life, you kicked me out of my life, too. I paid the same price, and I bet you didn’t think about that for a second, but you’re gonna fucking learn how your shit spills over to the rest of your family.”
As Anita was yelling, she started to wave the gun around, and especially in Hump and Mitch’s direction, which was what Mitch needed. That was his shot to get out of this situation. He looked straight at Anita to make sure she kept her attention on him, and away from Anna. And when the gun was no longer aimed at her, he decided to try to keep it that way.
“Don’t see why it shouldn’t have spilled over to you. I bet you lived pretty fucking well off the money he stole, too.”
A shot went off, and for a terrible second, when he couldn’t feel where he was hit, he wondered if she’d shot Anna, but the he registered that he was on the ground with a roaring pain going through his leg. She’d shot him, and while Anna was screaming, Hump and Anita were yelling at each other. Now her gun was moving between him and Hump, which as good, and he couldn’t help to make a note of the absurdness and idiocy of the situation. They’d been executing their plan for months, and it had ended up in this pile of shit. If Anna hadn’t been in the middle of two psychos with guns and a hammer, he might’ve laughed out loud.
Mitch looked up just as a whistling sound pierced through the air. It ended with a splat as the back of Anita’s head exploded. Hump stared at her in surprise, but before he could even move there was a second whistling sound, and his surprised face rained over Anna. She sat perfectly still in shock for a few seconds, and then she started screaming and wrestling against her bindings.
“Babe, be careful, don’t hurt yourself. It’s over, just hang on.” He tried to get up, and as much as it hurt, he managed to get over to her. “Honey.” He pulled the rag out of her mouth. “Talk to me.”
“Blood. Blood in my face.”
“I’ll get it.” He tried to wipe the blood off her face while he was doing his best to not just break into a sobbing mess of relief. “I’m so sorry.”
“Hurts.”
“Give me a sec.”
He turned around when he heard the door open, and Sisco, Mac, and Bull ran inside.
“Get her loose,” he yelled.
Sisco pulled out a knife and cut off the ropes, and she basically fell into his arms. Anna was finally in his arms, and he hugged her tight.
“Water,” she croaked.
Mac handed him a bottle, and Mitch opened it for her. It didn’t look like she could use even her good hand, so she’d probably been tied up for a while. He held up the bottle in front of her.
“Take it easy, honey. Not too much.”
“Hurts.”
“The hand? We’ll get that taken care of.” They should get her to a hospital to make sure it was properly fixed. He didn’t want to take any chances with any more of her limbs. “I’ll get it sorted.”
“No. Stomach. It’s cramping.”
“Oh, fuck!” Sisco muttered. “Is she’s in labor?”
“Yes,” Anna said and nodded after a few more sips of water. “I think so.”
“Where did the first shot hit?” Bull asked.
“My leg.”
“You can’t go the hospital with a bullet in your leg and a girlfriend that looks like that.”
“She needs to go to the hospital.”
“I’m not questioning that, I’m just saying that you can’t go with her.”
“She’s in labor.”
“You can’t go,” Bull said firmly and shook his head, and he must’ve noticed Mitch being about to protest and cut him off before he had the chance. “There’s a good chance that slug comes from the same gun as the one who the killed the other women.”
Mitch looked at Anna; she had bruises on her face and on her arms. Bull was right. If he came into the hospital with that slug in his leg there would be hell to pay, and not only because of what Anna looked like.
Anna stroked his cheek. “I don’t want to go alone.”
“You’re not going alone,” Mac said and squatted down next to them. “I’ll go with you. Think you’d be okay with me until Mitch is done? They’ll pull that slug out, patch him up, and then he’ll be there.”
“It won’t be long,” Mitch tried to assure her. “I promise.”
She nodded hesitantly and tears kept falling down her cheeks, and Mitch wiped them away. He had to ask, he didn’t want to, but he had to ask her what they’d done to her.
“What did they do to you?” he mumbled.
“Beat me up,” she mumbled, and she started sobbing. “She kicked me. I think she kicked Sprout, too.”
Mitch wished they’d figured out a way to get her out of this without killing them fast, but the Tommy’d set it up so he could get them through one of the windows. Mitch had known that was the best way to do it, and the fastest way to get Anna the fuck out of there. He stroked Anna’s belly and tried to feel Sprout move.
“She’ll be fine. She’s a fighter,” he tried to assure her, and himself, before he turned to Mac. “Think you can carry her?”
Mac nodded and carefully put his hand on Anna’s shoulder. “You okay with that?”
“Yes.”
“Where does it hurt most?”
“My back right now.”
“I’ll be careful,” Mac assured her and carefully lifted her up.
“I’ll help you, kid,” Sisco said and pulled Mitch off the floor. “I’ve called Lisa. April and her are waiting for you.”
When they walked outside, he saw Tommy come walking with an M40 rifle over his shoulder. Even if it had taken him a while to pull the fucking trigger, Mitch knew that he owed Tommy a lot. It had been his setup; he’d really pulled through, and he gave Tommy a hug.
“I had to move to get a better shot, I’m sorry.”
“You did good,” Mitch mumbled. “Don’t sweat it. This would’ve been a lot fucking harder if it hadn’t been for you. I owe you, man.”
Tommy looked at Anna who was put in the van by Mac. He pointed at her questioningly.
“She’s in labor,” Bull explained. “Mac’s taking her to delivery, and I’m taking Mitch to the clubhouse so we can dig out the slug before he goes to the hospital.”
Mitch watched the van leave, and he wondered how screwed he was—again. She hadn’t seemed angry, but he figured that could change once she was over the shock.
“Gotta say,” Bull said when he started them towards the other van. “Brick was right.”
“About what?” he groaned, as he tried to get inside. Once Anna was gone he’d noticed how fucking bad his leg was aching.
“Thought he was full of shit when he said you’ll make a good president, but when shit went down, you were on top of it all. Might not feel like it now, but you did good. Really fucking good, and I’m impressed.”
“Thanks.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He didn’t think he’d ever heard Bull give anyone that kind of praise. “Speaking of Dad…”
“I’ll handle it. Get that slug out and go see your baby girl. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Mitch just hoped his baby girl was okay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
My Hand?
-o0o-
Everything was hurting, but my back was the absolute worst, and I had a hard time figuring out what were contractions and what was due to the fact that I’d been tied up and sleeping on a concrete floor—or the beatings, but I didn’t want to think about those.
Then another contraction hit me. It was bad, and I wasn’t wondering about the difference between the pains anymore.
“Oh hell! Oh, this is bad, you need to drive faster!” I yelled at Mac.
“This would be a good time to start with proper cussing,” Mac chuckled. “Focus on your breathing, keep it rhythmical.”
He demonstrated, and I had completely forgotten about all that breathing they’d tried to teach. For a second, I was glad that it was Mac who was with me, be
cause I didn’t think Mitch would’ve been as calm as Mac was right then.
“Good,” he said with an approving nod when I started doing as he’d asked.
When the contraction subsided, I let go of my grip of the door handle. “How bad do you think it was?”
“Mitch?” he asked and I nodded. “Not too bad. Lisa and April will fix it. Don’t worry about it. Focus on this.”
I closed my eyes, and soon I felt another contraction.
“Shit,” Mac muttered when he noticed. “They’re really fucking close.”
“Don’t stress me!”
“Sorry, but they are, I need to step on it. What’s the name of your doc, Anna?”
“Magda Boyarov,” I answered. “Why?”
“Means I got the info I need. Just do your stuff, and I’ll handle the rest.”
I’d never loved Mac more than I did at that moment. He’d take care of things, and that’s all I needed to know—I shut the world out.
The only thing I could focus on for the rest of the drive was my breathing, and keeping the pain at bay to the best of my ability. I’d thought I was getting pretty good at that, but nothing could’ve prepared me for this kind of pain. At the same time, in the middle of all the shit and all the things that had happened, this was a good kind of pain, a pain with a good purpose. I’d never hated being sore from training or my feet hurting, because it was something that came from training, and it meant I was getting better. But this was an even better pain, because it meant Sprout was on her way. She might be a little early, but I didn’t think it was any big risk, since I was in week thirty-seven. It should be okay.
While I kept telling myself that it should be okay, I couldn’t help thinking about Anita and how she’d kicked me. I’d thought it was bad when she kicked my bad leg, but the terror when she kicked my stomach had been worse. I’d tried to protect it with my arms as well as I could, and once they’d left me alone, I’d cried in relief when I felt Sprout move. But she’d kicked me again. When it happened the first time, it had been such a shock. I couldn’t believe that a person I’d been chatting with for months, all of a sudden had started hurting me. It seemed so foreign to me, a behavior I couldn’t understand, and didn’t want to understand.
Center of Gravity (Marauders Book 3) Page 39
