“He cannot have full control again. Not like that,” I say.
“A man on him then?”
“At the least.”
“Surveillance without his knowledge?” he asks, arching a brow.
A slow smile appears on my lips. “And both of us have complete remote access?”
Gavino nods once. “I have a guy. Once Kade is on his way to New York, I’ll have the whole system installed. I’ll have him send you the codes to have access.”
“I like the fuckin’ way you think,” I grin.
“How about a drink?”
I lift my chin. I know that I should head home. I’m on almost forty-eight hours of not seeing Bella, and no fucking sleep, but I can’t deny Gavino a drink, not after what we’ve been through the past couple of days.
Together we make our way into the clubhouse. I forego the bar, grabbing a couple of expensive bottles of tequila and we head toward my office to enjoy a quiet drink together.
By the time he leaves my office, we’re both drunk as fuck and laughing about something that I can’t even remember. I clap him on the shoulder, squeezing it slightly.
“Glad we did this, Santoro,” I slur.
He smiles, lifting his chin. “Me too. Too bad the circumstances are what they are, but no harm, no foul. We got it all handled,” he shrugs.
I nod my head in agreement. Stumbling, I leave him to his men while I make my way to my room. Slamming my door behind me, I fall down face first on my bed. I haven’t been this drunk in a fuck’ve a long time.
The room spins before I laugh at myself, then it goes completely black and I pass the fuck out.
Chapter Twenty-Five
BELLAROSA
I feel something cool slide down the outside of my thigh. My body jerks, but I find that I’m completely restrained.
My body is laying on what feels like a mattress, my arms out wide and tied down, my legs spread wide and the same. There is some kind of fabric covering my face and it’s a bit hard to breathe. I don’t say anything though, too afraid by what is about to happen.
“She’s awake,” a familiar woman’s voice announces.
I recognize the voice immediately. Margot. I jerk against the restraints, but it’s useless. I am tied too tightly.
Biting the inside of my cheek, I refuse to make a sound. I will not show my irritation, my fear or any emotion at all. It’s what someone like her wants and I refuse to give it to her.
“What happens now?” another voice that I don’t recognize asks. It’s a man’s voice, deep, but not overly raspy or distinguishable by anything unique that I can tell.
Margot hums, a cool object moving from the outside of my thigh to the inside. Closing my eyes tightly, I bite the inside of my cheek even harder. I can tell what the cool object is now. A knife. Its sharp point is pressed into my leg, right next to my pussy.
“I think since this is what Dragon loves so much, we should take it away from him and see how badly he wants a knifed cunt.”
“Margie,” the male’s voice pleads.
The knife disappears and I let out the breath that I had been holding.
“Shut up,” she snaps.
She sounds pissed as hell. Pinching my eyes closed, I wait for whatever is going to happen next. I’m not sure, and honestly, I don’t know that I want to know.
“Dragon isn’t going to be okay with this,” the male’s voice warns.
Margot laughs and I understand the true meaning of the word, maniacal, now. Her laugh is downright insane. I knew she was a bitch. I knew that she wanted Drago for herself, but I did not peg her for being completely off the charts batshit crazy.
“I don’t give a shit,” she hisses.
“He’ll find out it was you and he’ll make you pay.”
She laughs again. “He’s easily distracted,” she announces.
She acts as if she knows exactly what distracts him and how to provide it for him. I know what it is, too though.
It’s women.
He’s easily distracted by women.
Like all men.
It’s not hard to figure out.
With the women in his club, with the way that he kept me for himself. All of it is pretty obvious. I hate it, hate every aspect of this. I know in a few months, after she kills me, I’ll be nothing but a memory to him.
Something fleeting that he will possibly think about from time to time but will eventually fade completely from his memory.
“I don’t know…” The man’s voice trails off. “He’s never branded one before.”
Margot growls and I brace myself for what is to come. Nothing happens immediately. “I don’t give a fuck,” she screams and then pain shoots through my thigh.
Margot makes three stabs in my leg, not too deep, but deep enough that I feel them and the blood that drips from the wounds. I’m unable to move, unable to defend or protect myself at all. I feel as helpless as I obviously am.
“Fuck,” the man hisses. “Fine, since you’re insistent. Don’t fuck up her cunt or ass until I get a piece,” he chuckles before I hear heavy footfalls disappear.
The person that I thought could possibly be my ally is obviously not. Though, I don’t know why I thought that I could have one in this room. I don’t even know who this man is or where I am.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take the hood off when it’s time for that. I don’t want you to miss a second of Jonas inside of you,” she purrs.
A shiver of disgust rolls throughout my entire body. I’m not a praying person, but I decide that it can’t hurt my situation. I try to calm my breathing and my body as I feel the knife penetrate my other thigh over and over again.
I ask God to send Drago to me, to save me, and if he can’t, to at least protect Kora. I don’t know if I’m at Drago’s house and she’s going to come home to see me like this, or not, but I pray to God that she doesn’t see any of this.
DRAGON
My phone starts to ring in my pocket. I ignore the device assuming that it’s unimportant. Every member of my club knows where I am and Bellarosa is home with Kora. There is nothing that important that I can’t sleep off my fucking raging hangover.
My phone finally stops for a beat before it starts again. Reaching into my pocket, I dig the device out only to turn it off completely and toss it across the room. Inhaling a deep breath, I let out a groan and attempt to fall back asleep.
It feels like I’ve just closed my eyes when my door flies open and slams against the wall. Flipping over onto my back, I stand quickly, regretting the movements immediately. My eyes pop open as adrenaline flows through my system.
Silver is standing in my doorway, his eyes hard as fuck as he stares at me. “What the fuck?” he grinds out. Arching a brow, I open my mouth to ask him the same fucking thing, but he’s faster than I am. “I’ve been calling you for the past six hours. Figured you’d answer the fucking phone or call back. Knew you were here, but fuck, brother.”
“What’s the goddamn emergency? I never left. This is coming as a shock?”
He shakes his head. “I went home right after we dealt with everything. Let the boys handle Red and Carmel. I’ve spent the entire fucking night hoping you’d finish with shit and come home.”
“You were at my house? What the fuck is going on?” I demand as a flood of ice fills my veins.
Silver’s eyes meet mine and I watch as he watches me with nothing but pure pity on his face. “Bellarosa is gone, man.”
I shake my head. “No. No fuckin’ way.”
Silver clears his throat. “Presley said she talked to her in the morning and she was fine. They spent all evening the night before together. She doesn’t think that Bella ran off, she’s afraid something happened to her.”
My jaw clenches. I look at my feet, my head pounding and my throat dry as fuck. Christ. What could have happened to her? Did she try and walk somewhere? What the fuck could have happened?
Lifting my hand, I wrap my fingers around the back of my neck and s
queeze, attempting to relieve the building tension.
Shaking my head, I lift my gaze up to Silver. “I got no way to find her, brother. She doesn’t have a phone, there’s no way to track her down if someone took her or if she wandered off and got lost. If she took off thinking to walk somewhere and ended up in the desert, lost, there’s no way we could even begin to find her.”
My heart begins to race, it slams against my chest. She’s gone. I was here drinking and having a good fuckin’ time and my woman is just gone.
“You don’t think she decided to finish her mission of being free, do you?” he asks.
I wish that I could answer him, that I knew one way or the other, but the truth of it is that I have no fucking clue. She could have seen me being gone and Kora being at school as her opportunity to take her freedom in her own hands and attempt to escape.
Fuck if I know.
“Let’s get to my house and look around,” I grunt.
“Kora’s beside herself. Buster and Presley are with her, but she’s pretty fuckin’ upset, brother.”
My eyes close slowly, I curse under my breath at the thought of her being so upset. I don’t blame her for it, though. Fuck, she’s been abandoned by Journee, then Margot, and now Bellarosa in just mere months.
Without responding, I walk over to the floor and bend down to grab my phone. Jogging out of the room, I stop when I’m in the bar area. My eyes scan and I find Coyote. Lifting my chin toward him, I wait until he makes his way over to me.
“I need you to quietly look around for Bella. She went missing sometime yesterday. I’m not sure if she took off, or what,” I admit.
Admitting that shit is a hard fucking pill to swallow. Branded or not, being my Old Lady and possibly knocked up, doesn’t fucking matter because at the end of the day I know that she wanted her freedom. Maybe she doesn’t realize that she already has it.
She’s free with me, free to be herself, free to come and go as she pleases. I’ll never keep her from enjoying life. Fuck, I want to show her all that we can do in this world, together. Maybe I haven’t fully explained myself, Christ I haven’t really had the goddamn time. We’ve been a little fucking busy.
Coyote lifts his chin, then turns from me and jogs ahead of me toward his bike. I quickly make my way toward mine and straddle it before starting the engine. Without waiting for Silver, I take off toward home. I know that he’ll be behind me.
I’m thankful that he and Presley were there for Kora when I wasn’t. I feel like a fucking jackass for not being home, for not going to dinner that I know she took cooking lessons from Presley to make. She’s going to have to understand that club business comes first, but fuck, I could have called.
Now she’s gone.
Fuck.
Pulling into my driveway, I quickly kill my engine and jump off my bike. Jogging toward my house, I don’t bother knocking. I barge inside and freeze when I see Kora and Buster in the living room. Kora is lying against his side, his arm around her shoulders and she has her eyes closed.
“She just fell asleep,” Presley says from beside me.
Turning my head toward her, I flinch at the judgment that is emanating from her toward me. “Club business. I’ve been fucking busy,” I bark.
She shakes her head, her eyes shifting to the side, then back to me. “I’m not going to tell you a damn thing. What I’ll say is that Bella is only nineteen years old. She’s never lived on her own before. She doesn’t have a license or a car. She doesn’t have anyone that she feels she can call a friend. She was left alone all night to care for your child, then all day long the next day. If she ran away, I wouldn’t blame her at all. But if something happens to her, I’ll blame you.”
My body jerks as if Presley hit me. Though hasn’t she, verbally at least? Her tongue lashing is harsh enough to last me a goddamn lifetime. But apparently, she’s not done, because she opens her mouth to hit me all over again.
“Bellarosa is not Journee, she isn’t Margot either. She’s stronger than both of them, but she’s more vulnerable at the same time. She should be taken care of by a man who gives a shit—”
“Presley,” Silver barks.
I hold up my hand to him and wave it slightly. “She’s right, brother. I fucked up. I was going to come home after my hangover wore off and make up for being gone. I know I need to take her grocery shopping and get whatever she needs. Then I was planning on starting driving lessons so that she wasn’t stuck here all day, every day. Fuck, it’s only been a couple of days.”
Presley shakes her head, her eyes meeting mine and she opens her mouth then snaps it closed and turns around.
“Say it,” I call out.
She turns her head to look at me over her shoulder. “It may have been only a couple of days, but everything that’s happened, it feels like months. She’s scared, Dragon.”
She turns her head and walks away from me. She’s right. I should have explained more shit to Bella, fuck. I fucked up, huge.
“Dragon…” Silver calls out.
I turn to look at him, but his eyes are focused ahead of me and I follow his gaze to the back sliding glass door.
“It was dark last night, I didn’t see that,” he says as he begins to walk past me.
I follow behind him as he makes his way outside. Closing the door behind me, I shift my gaze to where he’s staring. There is a glass of half drank juice, a paper towel and a piece of half-eaten bread.
“Maybe she didn’t run away,” he rasps.
I would speak but my voice is completely gone.
My breath has been stolen.
Maybe she didn’t run.
Fuck.
Just then my phone dings with an incoming text alert. Thinking that it could be Coyote, I quickly dig my device out of my pocket and swipe my thumb across the new message.
My blood turns to ice, again.
My eyes widen and my phone falls to the ground at the picture that is displayed on the screen.
She didn’t run.
Holy fuck.
Chapter Twenty-Six
BELLAROSA
The hood is wrenched off of my head, the light bright as it shines in my eyes after being shrouded in darkness for who knows how long. I blink, pinching my eyes closed as I attempt to become accustomed to the brightness.
“Smile pretty for the camera,” Margot sneers then I hear the sound of a phone’s camera.
There is a male’s grunt from across the room that causes my head to immediately jerk. Looking past Margot, my eyes find a man that I have never seen before. I don’t know why, but I expected to recognize this man that is with Margot. His gaze finds mine, locking me into silence with just one look.
I don’t know what he’s trying to wordlessly convey, but for some reason, I feel moderately safe with him. He’s threatened to harm me, but his eyes, they don’t look like the eyes of a dangerous man. Instead, they look remorseful and almost kind.
“I wonder if he’ll be mad or relieved that she’s gone,” Margot mutters.
The man grunts again, this time pushing himself off of the wall that he’d been leaning against. “I venture to guess he’s going to be downright pissed off. Regardless of his personal feelings for the girl, she’s branded as his property. There will be revenge and retribution for anyone who dares to touch what’s his,” he explains to her.
Margot’s head twists to look at him. “I thought you were in on this, that you wanted to get back at him for what he did to me,” she sneers.
“Oh, I do. Fucking with his woman isn’t the way though.”
Margot turns completely around and I watch as she plants one palm in the center of his chest and pushes him. He doesn’t move, his body doesn’t even sway from her touch, it’s as if she hasn’t even attempted a thing.
“You’ve changed your tune in a matter of minutes. What about fucking her? I thought you were going to hurt her? Why are you acting as if this is somehow wrong?” she demands, her voice irritated and almost screeching with her an
ger.
He shakes his head once, his eyes shifting from her to me, then back to her again. “Oh, I haven’t changed a thing. I thought your idea was shit before and I think it’s shit now. I still want to fuck her, I just think it’s really goddamn stupid of you to do what you’ve done.” He shrugs.
My entire body breaks out in goosebumps and if I could move, I would shiver in disgust from his words. These people are vile, but I need to live long enough to not only survive and get away, but to also find out who this man is.
Although, when he does hurt me, I can probably compartmentalize the whole moment and hopefully not come out too damaged. My body, on the other hand, the way she’s been slicing and dicing me, if I do survive this part, I’ll be physically scarred the rest of my life.
“Glad to know how highly you think of your sister,” she grinds out.
“Margot, in our entire lives I’ve never hidden that I think you are selfish, self-centered, fucking crazy and a bitch. This little stunt just proves you’re stupid too or maybe you’re just desperate,” he points out, tilting his head to the side.
Siblings.
Fuck.
He won’t help me, if I thought that he would, that theory is now dashed. He will never put his own flesh and blood on the chopping block to save me, to help me. Family is everything, blood family, there is no way he will hurt her to save some stranger.
I am done.
“I was supposed to be branded as Dragon’s. Not this whore. Me. I have been working my way into that house, into his life, and into his bed for years,” she seethes.
The man shakes his head once. “Why do you want him so bad?” he asks.
She lifts her chin slightly, her hair falling a bit farther down her back when she does. She has pretty hair, I notice absently, trying to think of anything other than my imminent demise.
“I deserve him,” she snaps. “I deserve to be adored by a man like him, all hard edges, who melts for his daughter and then for his woman. I want that life, a man like him. Journee was useless and I knew she’d be gone and I could easily slip into the role of Old Lady.”
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