Outlaw Daddy: Satan's Breed MC

by Paula Cox

  “Why the sudden change?” Gunner asked. It was a legitimate question, even if it did make the guy glare up at him, murder in his eyes. “It’s awfully easy to give out shitty information in order to keep us from getting where we need to. It’s why most people avoid torture.” He let his grin get just a little wilder, a little more deranged. “You want to know why I don’t avoid torture?”

  Roth gave him an almost mulish look, and all Gunner did was lift one eyebrow a little higher. The man winced and looked away. Gunner chuckled to himself. He’d get to skip the speech about how he loved to hear grown men scream, then. That was nice. It had worn thin over the years.

  “Look, we, years and years ago, had an operation — bigger money than we’d ever handled before. And some intern from legal aid showed up to help with a completely unrelated HR complaint. She saw more than she should’ve. We dealt with it.”

  The rage at hearing Sam reduced down to something so small and pathetic was white-hot, but he choked it down and pushed it away. It wasn’t what he needed right now. It wouldn’t help him.

  “Keep talking.”

  “We thought it was sorted. Legal aid never picked anything up, and we didn’t even have to pay off the damn cops. Hit and run, they never looked further. Woman had a kid, in the car at the time, but the kid was a baby. We were done. No more worries. We kept on with business.

  “But it turns out that someone’s kid goes to school with this kid. As she grows up, she starts talking about finding Mommy’s secret notebooks, where she put all her secrets. And my backers get scared. What if that ancient deal gets blown, and suddenly we’re all on the hook for a lot of money? We decided we needed to find out if the kid knew anything. We hired an organization. A group who was going to take the aunt, the one who cared for the kid. We were never going to hurt the kid. They would find out if the aunt knew anything, and then they’d let us know, and we’d decided what to do. We had contingencies.”

  The son of a bitch actually shook his head with a sense of ruefulness. “We were never going to hurt anyone. That was never our plan.”

  Gunner had a crystal clear image for a moment where he leaned back, lifted up his boot, and kicked so hard that this fucker’s nose was imprinted on the back side of his skull. He took two long, slow breaths, forcing himself to let the violence and blood fade from his mental vision before he spoke. But before he got the words in, there was a flying piece of furniture, and a long piece of solid wood, the leg of a chair, cracked into the back of Roth’s head, pulling another scream from him. Lola stood there, her face flushed and her eyes wet.

  “The aunt has a name,” she said, her tone tangled and angry and frightened. “The child has a name. They are people. They are real, living people who you hurt because of money.”

  The man looked up with a snarl, all veneer of civilization stripped away by being hit by a woman. He started to try and step out of the chair, but it was easy enough for Gunner to press his boot against the fucker’s sternum, and then he wasn’t going to go anywhere. He didn’t need to do anything else to protect Lola; she clearly was ready to handle herself.

  “There’s no other reason in the world,” Roth said and spat in her direction.

  Horse growled even before Gunner did, and the gun he’d put down when he and Lola had stepped away from the table earlier was suddenly in his hand again, the barrel pointed at Roth’s forehead.

  “You’ve disrespected my family before,” Gunner said, his voice coiled and so tight with so much rage and years of loneliness as he had truly believed that the best thing he could do for his daughter was to stay the hell away from her. “You’ve disrespected my child. My wife. My sister. And now my girl. I should kill you where you sit.”

  Roth faced him, and even though there was suddenly a sharp smell of urine in the air, he didn’t flinch away. There was nothing more this bastard could give him. Nothing more that he could find out. He was ready to put this man in the ground and know that he would never have to think about him again.

  Lola was there next to him, her eyes steady on his face. Afterward, he would think to himself that if Lola had flinched away, if she had shown fear at this man, at who Gunner had the capacity to be and the lengths he would go to protect the people he loved, he would have shot Roth in the head and walked away, calling it done. But the softness and mercy in his eyes let him put the gun down, never having flicked the safety off.

  Misty, the hacker sister who was working the monitors, let out a happy yell. “The trace worked!” she said to the room at large.

  Gunner glanced at Horse. The older man nodded, moving closer to keep an eye on Roth, although all the fight seemed to have gone out of the man with his story. Gunner walked to Misty, and Lola followed him.

  She was working on a tiny laptop hardly bigger than a composition notebook, the screen covered with words he recognized as computer code, but didn’t come close to understanding. Her laptop was wired to another machine, the one that appeared to have been controlling the monitor displays. He could see the small thumbnails in the corner, but pulled up was an image of Grace, curled up in a small room with cinderblock walls. She was still; she looked—he pushed back on the thought before it could fully form. She was asleep, he was sure of it. Children could sleep harder than anyone else, wasn’t that true? Especially given what she’d been through in the past few days. He found himself searching the grainy image so hard, looking for any sign of her condition. Any sign that she was well. He missed everything Misty said about the technical details, and it didn’t matter. All he wanted in the world was to touch the screen of the computer, somehow pressing his touch through the technology to let his baby girl know he was coming. He was going to take care of her. He was going to make her safe, and no one would ever hurt her again.

  When Misty said, “The weird thing,” though, he forced himself to break his focus and pay attention. Nothing good ever followed that statement.

  Lola’s hand rested light on his arm, pulling his attention to her. It was good to have her there, beside him. It was good to believe that she saw something better in him than most people did. That the darkest thing inside of him had not frightened her, not for even a moment. She had stayed by him, even when he gave up entirely to the monsters inside of him to try and save his baby girl. Maybe, just maybe, he was going to find a way to make this work.

  “The weird thing,” Misty started again, seeming to realize that she had his attention now, “is that I couldn’t get through the firewall at all, and then it just… disappeared.”

  “What do they say?” Gunner asked, stopping himself from asking what “the kids” said just before the words escaped his mouth and turned him into an old man on the spot. Proof that he was rapidly aging, apparently. “You’re leet? Your hack-saur are the rock-saur?” He knew the words were written differently, with numbers in where the letters should go, but he’d never given a shit about computers in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now. He pronounced them like he’d heard them pronounced, like they were some weird species of dinosaur.

  Misty choked on a guffaw. “Yeah, maybe if you’re ninety, you might say that. But no, this wasn’t me.”

  “So, what was it?” Lola asked.

  “It almost seems like someone saw my attempt to bring down the firewall and dropped it themselves. So, I could run the trace and figure out where they are.” She looked up, and Gunner saw a wariness in her eyes that he could feel in his own mind. “But why would they do that?”

  “I can think of some reasons,” Gunner started to say, and then Lola’s phone started to ring. She pulled it out of her pocket, and her face went blank. “What is it?” he said as the phone went into its second ring.

  “Cassidy,” she replied. Her face had gone ashen, her eyes nervous.

  “Isn’t that—” and then he remembered who had been on the line, every time “Cassidy” had called or sent a text for the last few days. “Answer it,” he said, pushing a command into his voice that made him nervous, but that he
couldn’t have left out if he tried. “Answer it now.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Lola stared at her phone for another long inhale before she tapped the button to answer the call. Before she completed the gesture, however, the call dropped. Her stomach plummeted, and her heart twisted in her chest. She looked up at Gunner, expecting to see horror or anger on his face, but he was just still. Hurt, maybe, but she didn’t think it was directed at her. Just existing.

  Before she could get herself together enough to call the number back, her phone gave a quick vibration in her hand. She glanced at the screen and saw a text from “Cassidy.” All it said: Pay attention.

  “Pay attention to what?” she murmured. She didn’t see any other notifications on her phone, or around her. She looked up at Gunner again — which is when the movement on the computer screen in front of her caught her attention. She let out a gasp and tried not to scream.

  Grace was curled up on a narrow pallet, appearing to be sound asleep. Lola could see the girl’s backpack next to her, her inhaler laid out in easy reach. The child was curled up in a tight little knot, but she’d probably been through a hell of an ordeal. Sleeping tightly curled up made plenty of sense.

  But as Lola studied the image, her eyes moved from the sleeping child to the movement on the far edge of the frame. As she looked in that direction, she saw the man who had kidnapped her once and drawn her into public where she could be kidnapped a second time. He was dressed as he had been in the car—when he gave her to the Vipers like a piece of property. Dark jeans that could almost pass as business casual, depending on where he was, and a collared shirt. She couldn’t identify the color on the grainy black and white image; it wasn’t a light color.

  What was difficult to look away from, however, was that Soren Keller was standing next to Grace, holding a gun.

  He didn’t wave it around or point it at the girl, but of course, he didn’t need to. The threat was implicit and very, very effective. He stared up into the camera and waved with his free hand. His mouth was curved up into a small smile. He brandished the gun for just a moment, making sure that she saw it, and then holstered it in a shoulder rig. With both hands free, he pulled out a smartphone and tapped away at the screen for a few minutes.

  Her phone vibrated again. She didn’t look down until she’d already opened the message. I dropped my firewall, so you should have my address now. Come alone, just you and the girl’s father. If there is anyone else here, I will not release her. I will keep her safe, but I will take her far away from here. She is too important to be allowed to fall into their hands. You have an hour.

  Her stomach twisted, but she messaged back, I understand.

  “The hell you do,” Gunner roared next to her, his voice and his demeanor enraged. “The hell you get to say things like that about my daughter without saying something to me. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” His hand moved faster than she had thought possible, and her phone was in his hand so fast she was startled. Her hands flew wide, and she stumbled back, staring at him with a wide, angry expression.

  He was entirely gone, his pupils exploded with rage. He turned and threw the phone in a perfect major league pitch. It smashed against the cinder block wall and burst into its component parts, glittering down the wall in shards of metal and plastic. Part of her wanted to curl up and cry like she had when she was a little girl; part of her wanted to run and hide like she’d never been able to do. She froze somewhere in the middle, her stomach twisted and a scream caught in her throat.

  It was Misty who reacted. She caught Gunner’s wrist and yanked his hand back down to his side.

  “Hey!” she shouted, loud and sharp enough that it seemed to cut through the rage that had consumed him. “The hell are you thinking? No one here is responsible for what is going down with your kid. You don’t get to act that way, you get it?”

  Lola watched while Gunner closed his eyes, obviously struggling to get control of himself. There was part of Lola that wanted to reach out and take his hand, reassure him that she was okay, not hurt, and that it wasn’t his fault what he’d just done. But it was. What was it her old therapist had said? We are not in control of our feelings, only our actions. She forced herself to hold still and wait while he heaved a few deep breaths, brought himself back under control, and then slowly turned to face her. He brought his hands up to his face, scrubbing for a moment at his eyes, which she imagined were tired beyond belief.

  “Okay,” he said. “What do we do now?”

  The easiest thing would’ve been to just let him continue, take the calmer tone and the effort at control as an apology, but the thing was, Lola wasn’t interested in making it that easy. On her own, by herself, maybe she would’ve let it slide, talked about it later, but with Misty there, watching, it pushed her towards a different response.

  “First,” she said, her hands shaking but her voice steady, “you could say that you’re sorry about what you just did. We don’t know why Keller has been contacting me through that phone, but we know he has. You might’ve just hurt your chances of getting your daughter back.”

  His eyes were thunder and lightning, but he gave her a curt nod, then seemed to realize that what he was doing wasn’t going to help. He closed his eyes, took another one of those long, deep breaths, and said, “I know you’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s go get the girl. Okay?”

  He held out his hand, and she took it in hers, letting his fingers twist around hers. “All right,” she said. She turned her gaze towards Misty, who was watching them with a small smile on her face. “Did you get the address? Do you know where we need to go?”

  “Yes.” Misty rattled off an address back in the middle of the city. Lola wasn’t familiar with the street, but Gunner was nodding.

  “Does what he said match up? About taking down the firewall so that you’d be able to track him?” she asked.

  Misty bit her lip, then nodded. “I hate to say it, but yeah, it does. My skills are great, but his encryption was going to keep me out for a lot longer, and then it just opened up. I could’ve believed I’d gotten lucky, but it did feel off. It makes sense that he let me through if his goal was to get you to Grace.”

  Lola turned towards Gunner, waiting for him to meet her eyes. It only took a moment for him to do so, but it was a moment longer than she liked. “Are we ready to do this?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Are we really going alone?”

  It was nice that he asked. “I believe him when he says he’ll take her farther away, Gunner. He truly believes he’s keeping her safe by doing this, and we know he went and got her inhalers to make sure she was okay. I don’t think he’ll hurt her, but I also think he’s unwell.”

  “True,” he said. “He worked for a wetwork agency, contracted to deal with troublesome people. We’ve never used them, of course, but they have a reputation. And when I asked them about Keller… it seems Keller has a reputation within the group. They are very concerned about his actions, was the way they phrased things, and it doesn’t sound like Keller is going to have much use to them after what he’s pulled here.”

  “Do you think they’ll intervene and try to take Grace for their own purposes?” Lola asked.

  “No,” Gunner said. “But I do think they’ll be trying to take Keller out, and not too worried about who gets caught in the crossfire if it accomplishes their goals.”

  Something cold settled in the pit of Lola’s stomach. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m going to have Horse and the rest of the Breed follow us back into the city. Let the Vipers decide what happens to those shitheads in the other room.” His mouth spread into an angry smile. “They’ve got plenty of vengeance to sort out for Billy Calhoun. Let’s let them take care of it. I want to go get our girl.”

  She took his hand and followed him through the warehouse, her head full of happy fuzz as he stopped to speak quietly with Horse, who nodded, and then had a brief, whispered conversation with Marv. She let that phrase, “our girl,”
buoy her as Horse let out a shrill whistle, and the members of the Breed who were present looked up, left their tasks, and formed up behind them. She focused on the feeling of Gunner’s hand in hers.

  This was finally going to be over. Grace was going to be safe. She didn’t know exactly what would happen after that, but she believed in her heart that it would involve this man, together with her. It was going to feel good, and it was going to be good. And that little girl, who she already loved, was going to be safe in her own bed tonight.

  And, if necessary, she would put her own life down in order to make it happen.

  ***

  She didn’t start getting nervous until she and Gunner hit the point where Gunner and Horse had agreed that the Breed would fall back and wait for some kind of signal that it was either clear to enter, or that the pair needed backup. After that, Lola found herself wondering exactly what she and Gunner would be walking in to. In the face of everything she’d dealt with in the past few days, it was easy to look at Keller as the civilized criminal, but he’d kidnapped her, tricked her, turned her over to masterminds who had gotten another young woman killed, and hidden a child from her parents to “protect” her instead of going to the police. It was far too easy to believe that this was some kind of trap, which would end up with a “News At Eleven” headline and her face splashed across TV screens.