by Sophia Gray
“Might as well.” I turned around and motioned for Mick to come over from the bar.
“What’s up?” he asked, drying his hands with his bar towel.
“We need someone to run by and check on the penthouse suite at the Hyatt downtown. We think Troy Romero is staying there,” I explained.
“As in Lilah’s Troy?”
“Right. Tell whoever you send to be careful. If he’s there, he’ll have their son with him. No confrontation, just scope it out and get back to us, and let us know if he’s there or not,” I continued.
“What if he’s there?” Mick asked, taking my directions like taking an order.
“Hang out and keep an eye on him until I show up.”
“Hold up. I’ve got a cabin in his name just a few miles from here,” Buck interrupted.
I nodded to Mick to go ahead and send the guy to the suite before turning my attention to the hacker sitting next to me. He typed furiously on his keyboard. His eyes pored over the information on his screen.
“He’s there,” he said suddenly. “He’s at the cabin.”
“How do you know?” I asked, sliding my chair around to see his screen. Unfortunately, the interfaces he used weren’t as sophisticated as what showed up on TV and in the movies. Every window he had open looked like either a web browser or a DOS prompt.
“See this right here?” he said, pointing at a line of information that didn’t make any sense to me, but I played along. “This is his laptop. It’s connected to a mobile hotspot at that cabin.”
“What else can you tell?”
“Well, if he’s online, I can give you whatever’s on his computer. Give me a moment to work some magic.” He tapped away on his keys, working to gain access to the computer.
Meanwhile, I walked over to the bar for another beer.
“Still need the guy?” Mick asked.
“Yeah, tell him to scope it out and hang tight. I might need him to go through the suite to see if we can find any dirt on him. Or maybe just ransack the place for the hell of it,” I told him.
He smiled as he opened another bottle for me and sent me back to the table.
“Bingo,” Buck shouted. “I got into his email. Oh, man. Saw, you’re going to want to hear this.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, sitting back down.
“He’s been emailing some woman in Belize. There’s something here about getting passports for himself and his son,” he told me.
“You’re kidding me.” My heart sank into my stomach. Was I hearing this correctly? Was he planning on leaving the country with his son? “Check his bank statements if you can. See if there are any plane tickets, hotel reservations, or anything else in his name that would indicate he’s got a trip planned.”
My heart pounded in my chest in anticipation of his answer. He typed a few words or commands and clicked on a couple of things, moving a little more slowly than before. I assumed he was slowing down because he was looking for something very specific.
“Got it. Two plane tickets, destination: Belize,” he said.
“When?”
“In about a week,” he said after searching a moment longer.
“Why so long?” I wondered aloud. It didn’t make sense for him to take his son so far in advance – unless he had some other business to handle first. It was my job to make sure that business didn’t get handled.
“Now, that I can’t tell you,” Buck said with a shrug.
“Alright, where’s that cabin?” I asked him.
“Texting you the GPS coordinates for it now,” he said, without even pulling out a phone.
My phone notified me of the text, and I checked it. Sure enough, the coordinates of the cabin were included as an attachment. I tapped on the link and pulled up the map image of the cabin’s location. I knew exactly where it was.
“So, what do you want to do now?” Buck asked me, closing his laptop. His tone and the look in his eyes told me that he wanted to storm the cabin.
“I’m not sure,” I told him. “I feel like I’m still missing something. If he’s been planning this trip the whole time, why did he put the flight out so far, and why did he have someone ransack the house? Why did he try to break into my shop? It seems so unrelated.” I shook my head.
“Maybe he’s trying to misdirect you guys, so you don’t realize what he’s doing. When did he get their kid?”
Then it hit me. He wasn’t planning on already having Micah. “He got him from school after Lilah’s house was ransacked. He wasn’t feeling well at school, and she couldn’t get him herself because she was handling the break-in. Okay, that makes sense now. He was originally planning on it taking longer to get Micah.”
My blood froze in my veins and chills ran down my back. My jaw went slack, and my vision went out of focus, staring off past Buck at nothing in particular.
“What is it?” he asked.
“We don’t have long. Now that he’s got the kid and Lilah is away from home, he might decide to pick up the pace. Keep an eye on his email, especially if he starts talking to that lady again. He might decide to move the date up on the flight, if possible, and get out of here before anyone catches on. Especially now that I’ve talked to one of his men.”
Buck nodded as I sprang up from the chair and hurried over to Mick at the bar. I felt like I was walking under water. My heart started pounding in my chest, but my motions were restricted.
“Hey, call the guy off,” I told him. “We don’t need Troy to know we’re onto him.”
“Got it,” he said, pulling out his phone and texting the guy he’d sent to the suite.
I had no idea what to do with the information I had. I had to talk to Lilah at some point about it. She needed to know what I knew. She needed to know where her son was and what our options were for getting him back before he was taken out of the country.
Chapter Fifteen
Lilah
“Saw couldn’t make it,” said another biker wearing Steel Devils MC colors on his kutte when he met me outside with the passenger door open to the black sedan he drove from the clubhouse.
“Did he say why?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
“He went up to the shop, I think,” the biker said. He held the door until I was in the car. Then, he closed it and walked around to the other side to get in.
Somehow, it didn’t seem gentlemanly when he held my door. If anything, it was intimidating. He was tall, muscular, and quiet. Of course, just like everyone else, he was covered in ink. He had long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and mustache that reached down to his goatee, which he kept neatly cut just beyond his chin. He certainly looked like one of the guys from the MC.
“Did he say when he was going to be back?” I asked.
My driver shook his head, keeping his eyes on the road. I groaned and sank back into my seat. I wondered if anything was wrong. It seemed entirely plausible to me that I’d upset him again by going to work. He didn’t want to come across as controlling, but damn he was controlling.
Cole’s bike was gone when we reached the clubhouse and HQ. It wasn’t that strange for him to be at work, but it was a little odd for him not to pick me up after he said he would. The driver pulled around to the back of the lot where the cars, trucks, and SUVs belonging to the MC were parked.
“Thanks for the ride,” I told him as I got out of the car and started towards the building.
“No problem,” he muttered, cutting off the car and getting out behind me.
I hurried upstairs. I was going to grab the keys to my car and head up to Titan Ink, Cole’s tattoo parlor. I walked into the room and went to grab them off my nightstand, but they were gone.
“You’re kidding, right?” I said aloud as I started looking around the room for my keys, thinking I had put them somewhere besides the nightstand.
No, I hadn’t misplaced them. He’d take them. I was basically grounded. I laughed to myself. It was ridiculous. I knew why he’d grounded me. It was because I had gone o
ff with Razor to get stuff from my house so I could return to work. And returning to work probably played a role in my getting grounded as well.
I was starting to think he knew something about my situation that I didn’t. That would have explained why he was being so overly protective. It would have been nice to have been clued in. Was that too much to ask? Apparently.
Then again, if he didn’t have some secret information about Troy and Micah that he was holding from me, it meant he was being controlling because that was who he was. If that were the case, I needed to start looking for somewhere to go. If he was mad because I was going against his wishes by going back work and all that, I couldn’t continue to stay with him.
I was starting to see potential in our relationship, potential to grow into something more than whatever was going on. However, if he was going to be controlling for the sake of being controlling, I wasn’t going to put up with that. I couldn’t be in another relationship like that.
The more I thought about the whole thing, the more I missed my son. I pulled out my phone and called Troy to see if he’d let me talk to Micah. He didn’t answer. It rang through to voicemail.
I hung up and texted him.
I want to talk to Micah. Let me Skype with him.
I stared at my screen for a few minutes, waiting for a response. When he didn’t reply after a few minutes, I turned up my ringer and set my phone on the nightstand on my side of the bed. I lay back on the pillows on my side and stared at the ceiling, trying not to think about everything that was going on.
Troy had told me he was taking Micah away so they would be safe. He said the person who’d ransacked my house was trying to settle a debt. But someone also tried to break into the tattoo parlor after Jenna and I went by there. Cole had no connection with my ex, so there was no reason for anyone to be targeting him – unless the two incidents were related. That wasn’t very likely.
If they were connected, it seemed to me there had to be another motive besides settling a debt. It also started to seem more likely that Troy had more to do with it than being a possible victim as well. I needed to know where he had taken Micah.
I knew his phone was on because it rang when I called instead of going straight to voicemail. A while back, while we were still married, Troy had installed tracking apps on both our phones. He’d done it to keep track of me, to make sure I was where he thought I should be at any given time. The only thing about it was that the app worked both ways. I could also track him, as long as his location services were on.
I opened the app and tried to pull him up. He wasn’t coming up. The app told me his phone wasn’t available. He’d probably assumed that I was going to try to use that app against him, so he’d turned off his location.
“There’s got to be another way,” I told myself, sitting on the side of the bed. “Come on, don’t let all this time with these rough and tough bikers go to waste. Grow some confidence, Lilah.”
I pocketed my phone, slid my shoes back on, and headed out the door. I didn’t have the keys to my car, but I knew where the keys to the MC cars were kept. I went down to the common room. The keys were kept behind the bar, where someone always had an eye on them.
Mick was behind the bar, so I couldn’t just run back there and grab a set. It wasn’t like I could go down there and ask him for the keys either. He knew I wasn’t supposed to be leaving the clubhouse. He and Cole were too close for him not to know I was grounded. I stayed back and kept an eye on him, waiting for an opportunity to dart back there. There wasn’t anyone at the bar except him. The moment he turned his back, I was taking a car.
Sure enough, my patience was eventually rewarded. He stepped away from the bar, heading for the bathrooms in the back. Once he was out of sight, I crept around and snagged a key. I didn’t know what it was for, but when I got outside without being seen, I pressed the button to unlock the car and saw that I had grabbed the key for one of the black Dodge trucks in the parking lot.
I hopped in, cranked it up, and backed out of the space. I drove away from the clubhouse towards Troy’s penthouse suite. There had to be some clue he left behind to let me know where he’d gone with Micah.
I parked in the parking deck behind the Hyatt. I put the truck out of the way, keeping it out of view from the street. The last thing I wanted was for one of the guys to ride by and see the truck. I locked it with the button on the key and headed inside. I took the elevator up to the top floor, my stomach doing somersaults the whole way up.
I was actually afraid that I would find him at home. I didn’t know what I was going to do if I ran into him. When the elevator door opened on his floor, I hesitated. I considered calling Cole for backup, but if I told him where I was, I was done for.
The door started to close, giving me the perfect excuse to go back down to the parking deck and drive back to the clubhouse before Cole realized I was gone. But I stuck my hand out and caught the door, sending it back to let me out. I took the first step into the hallway.
“There’s no turning back now,” I encouraged myself. I kept walking until I got to his door.
I realized that I hadn’t considered how I was going to get inside. Breaking into places wasn’t exactly a normal occurrence for me. But his door was open when I reached it, just slightly, like it hadn’t closed all the way the last time someone let it shut.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” I said under my breath as I touched the door handle lightly to push it open.
I hadn’t been prepared to see what I found behind that door. His suite was empty and clean. Everything was gone – every piece of furniture, every picture, all of his clothes, all of the stuff Micah kept over there for his visits, all of it, everything.
If that wasn’t proof that something was up, I didn’t know what could have been. Whatever was going on was bigger than some guy trying to collect on a debt. It was obvious to me that Troy had packed up to get out of there. Judging by how clean the place was, it seemed like he’d taken his time and scrubbed it top to bottom. I could have been wrong about that.
I took the elevator back down, going all the way to the main floor. When the doors opened, I hurried to the front desk. I tried not to look like I was panicking, but I could tell from the look on the young man’s face, I wasn’t doing a very good job. I needed to know where my son was. What the hell was Troy up to?
“How can I help you?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”
“I need to know if you can give me some information. I’m looking for my son. He was supposed to be staying here with his father, Troy Romero. I’m Lilah Romero, his ex-wife.” I fished my wallet out of my purse and showed him my ID. “Troy was staying in the penthouse suite, but I just went up there, and it’s empty.”
“Let me see,” he said, stepping away to check the system. He keyed something up on the computer, and I watched him read the screen with focused eyes.
He came back shaking his head.
“What does that mean?” I asked him, trying not to snap as my impatience grew.
“He checked out of the suite a few days ago. I’m sorry.”
“Did he use another address when he left?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but he didn’t leave a forwarding or billing address. There was no outstanding balance on his account.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I cried out, exasperated. I looked down at the floor and took a few deep breaths. I suddenly felt like I was going to be sick. He’d pulled the wool over my eyes, and I’d completely fell for it. He’d run off with Micah.
“Ms. Romero? Are you going to be okay?” the young man asked.
I closed my eyes and took a slow, deep breath, pushing it all down. “I’ll be fine,” I told him. “Thank you for your help.”
I turned to leave and took the elevator back up to the level on the deck where I’d parked the truck. My heart pounded against my ribs frantically as I walked back to the truck. Cole was probably wondering where I was. I was wondering where my son was.
Troy had run off with him. It was too much, entirely too much, to handle.
And, still, I felt that Cole was hiding something from me.
Chapter Sixteen
Cole
“Hey, bro, don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Axel asked, appearing out of the fog next to me at the bar. He slid my glass away from me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. “And gimme that back, bro. What are you doing?”
“Mick called and told me you were sitting down here getting shit-faced. What’s up?” He pulled up on the stool next to mine.
I shook my head and closed my eyes. I ran a hand down my face. I had forgotten how long I’d been at the bar drinking. It didn’t seem like it could have been that long.
