by Vivian Gray
Cat shook her head hard, as if she was trying to get away from a fly buzzing in her ear.
“Cat.” Bree made her tone sharper. It didn’t make a difference. She looked up and around again. There were figures in the dark now, and she couldn’t make them out easily. She turned to try and run back into the building, but there were people between her and the door.
Kane stepped into the light. Bree froze. She didn’t want to, she wanted to fight or run or scream or get help, but her body did none of those things. Kane’s face was a mess; bruises and blood. His leather was gone; he wore a dark T-shirt, jeans, and a leather vest over the shirt. It wasn’t patched, though, and it wasn’t the leather she’d seen him wear.
“Your boyfriend thought he could kill me,” Kane said. His voice was roughened, like someone had choked him or caught him in the throat with a solid punch. “Son of a bitch. He’s a fool. Me and the boys are going to make him pay for that. And just to make sure that we get back what’s ours…” He stepped closer, and that hand ran over her stomach again. She screamed and tried to back away, but there was a thick wall of a man behind her, keeping her from moving. “You can fight if you want. Cat will tell you; I like it when you bitches fight. But you are coming with me.”
The man behind her lifted her up in such a way that her arms were bound to her upper torso. She screamed and kicked out; she caught Kane in the leg, but he twisted to the side enough that she didn’t catch his balls. She fought to catch Cat’s eye, still screaming.
“Please,” she cried out. “Please, don’t let him do this. Cat!”
Cat shook her head, her face completely miserable. “I told you, Bree. I told you he’d kill me. I told you I was scared. That part wasn’t a lie.” She looked at Kane, and she looked tired in a way Bree had never seen before. “Are you going to let me go now?”
Kane burst out laughing. “I wanted the two of you together since the night I saw you. Why the fuck would I let you go now?”
Bree waited for Cat to scream or fight back, but it didn’t happen. Her shoulders slumped, and when Kane started walking back to the cars that had brought them to the club, Cat followed. Everything about her screamed defeat.
The only option left in Bree’s head was to make as much noise as possible, hoping she’d wake someone up. She screamed and kicked and flailed, but a big hand clapped over her mouth. The hand pressed close enough to the bottom of her nostrils that taking a deep breath was hard. She didn’t have any air left to scream.
This was happening. This was happening, and she was pretty sure she was going to die.
The baby. She’d do anything she could to save the baby. The rest of it – of her – wasn’t as important as that.
She managed one more scream as she was stuffed into the back seat of a car, and then she felt a heavy thump on the side of her head. Her body went boneless and her vision filled with stars. Once they passed, there wasn’t anything left but darkness.
Chapter Sixteen
Jet woke to the pounding of a fist on his apartment door. He had the sense it had been going on for a few minutes, but he was muzzy with the kind of heavy sleep that comes after pain, and it took him a minute to collect himself to understand – well, even where he was or what he was doing there. He stretched out his arms to push himself up and out of bed. The spot next to him wasn’t just empty, it was cold.
He searched his memory as he hooked a pair of jeans off the floor and slid them on. He’d been hurting. He’d taken the painkillers and fallen into bed with Bree. He’d held her as best as he could with his ribs aching. He couldn’t remember waking, or even stirring, when she’d eventually gotten out of bed.
“We have to stop doing this to each other,” he muttered as he walked through the small apartment. Maybe she’d gone downstairs for something to eat, and the door had somehow locked behind her? He glanced at his smartwatch; it was the middle of the night. She might have gotten some kind of craving, but he’d been more careful about actually keeping food in the kitchenette, so it seemed unlikely that was all it was.
“Coming,” he shouted as the pounding continued. He padded barefoot through the apartment and pulled the door open.
Trisha stood outside, her eyes wild and afraid. “What the hell, Trish—”
She pushed him into the apartment, then stepped around him. “Is she here?”
“Trisha, what’s—”
“Goddammit, Jet, answer me! Is she here?”
For a moment, he was completely taken aback. Trisha had never yelled at him like that, not once in her life. The pretty woman was older than she looked, and she had been around the Choppers as long as he could remember. He knew she’d taken Bree under her wing in a lot of ways, but she was yelling at him, and that was a surprising turn of events.
“Bree?” He scrubbed his face again. “No, Trish, I woke up when you were knocking, and I was just getting up. She’s not in bed, and I’m not sure—”
Trisha held up a phone he knew immediately. He’d bought Bree the phone a couple of weeks ago, and she’d insisted on adding a sparkly case to it. It had cost almost fifty dollars, but he’d laughed as he’d shelled out the cash. She said she’d never had a nice phone, and it deserved a nice case. It had seemed so oddly out of place with her wardrobe of maternity jeans and comfy T-shirts, but it made her smile, and he loved seeing her smile.
“There was screaming,” Trisha said, her voice quick and more level than he felt. “I only heard it because of where my apartment is, I think. I went outside to try and see what was going on. Cars peeling out of the parking lot and this on the ground.”
Jet’s heart started to slam inside of his chest. “Trisha, what are you saying?”
“She’s not here. She’s not downstairs. If she’d left the club, why in the world would she have left her phone?”
“Hold on,” he said.
When he walked back into the bedroom, there was nothing slow or sleepy about his movements; he went to the small table next to the bed where his phone charged and pulled it up out of the cradle. There wasn’t a notification, but he tapped into the messages anyway. Nothing from her.
Why hadn’t she texted him to let him know why she’d gotten out of bed? They’d both been careful. Even if it was as simple as, “I couldn’t sleep. I’ll be downstairs,” they’d said it.
He tucked his phone into his back pocket and forced himself to take a breath. It wasn’t calming, but it centered him a little better. He walked back out to where Trisha stood, still holding the sparkling phone. Her fingers were tight around the case, her knuckles bright white.
“Tell me everything,” he said, taking the phone from her.
His brain registered the details without paying too much attention. Three cars, all too dark for her to make out much of their makes or models, but she’d lean towards new. License plates covered. Screaming. One person screaming, and she was sure it was a girl, but she couldn’t swear it was Bree. She hadn’t seen what happened to the person, just saw the phone sparkling in the exterior lighting when she went down to see what was happening.
Jet put in Bree’s passcode. Part of him felt disgusted doing it; he knew it, of course, because that was the sort of thing you figured out when you spent most of your time with someone, but he’d never once dreamed of going into her phone without her permission. It felt dirty, but it was necessary.
There weren’t any recent texts, but when he tapped to the call history, he felt that heady mix of fear and anger ripping him apart again. The most recent call was from Cat. It had come in at 3:00 a.m., which was just after the club would have been both closed and deserted for the night. He obviously had no idea what had happened on the call, but that it had come in and then Bree was gone, it seemed too much of a coincidence.
Cat had been hanging around Kane. Kane, who he had beaten and humiliated, and then sent men after in the night. Kane, who had the kind of vendetta against him that was only satisfied by blood.
“Get me Brass,” he said to Trisha, who nod
ded. “Can you put some coffee on?”
“Yeah. Of course. And I’ll try to hustle up some food, too.”
“Thank you,” he said.
She was already gone.
He took one long moment to sit down and feel terrified. He let it squeeze his stomach into knots, let his hands shake, let his mind go to all the dark places that told him what monstrous things might have happened to his girl and his baby. He gave his entire self free reign to be as panicked and frozen as a human being could be.
And then he packed it all away, one by one. The fear. The worry. The anger, directed at both her, for leaving without telling him, and for him, for letting her. The irrational thoughts of what could happen. The bone-aching terror that made it hard to think about what had happened and what could happen next. While he was doing it, he put away the pain from his bruised ribs, as well as the tension in his back and legs. No one told you what a jarring experience it was to have a physical fight. But it didn’t matter right now.
When he put it all away, he was a colder man than he’d been in a long time. But he was efficient, and he could get done what needed to be done. When either Bree and the baby were safe, or they were – Well, when the situation was resolved either way. Then he would unpack all of those things again and let himself be broken.
But until then, he needed to be just like this. This person who was a little bit of a monster, but if there was any way on God’s green earth to bring them home safe? He would be the man who could do it.
***
Brass looked somehow even worse than Jet felt. Of course, Brass had taken over Jet’s role in the club operations the night before, after Jet had gone upstairs to nurse his aching body. He’d probably gotten an hour of sleep.
But there was no resentment in Brass’s eyes, just a look of gratitude when Trisha set the pot of coffee down in front of them, along with some sandwiches she’d put together quickly. She’d given Brass a quick rundown of what happened while she collected him from his rooms in the clubhouse a few miles away. Across the table, Brass’s mouth was set in a grim line.
“Don’t tell me that you told me so,” Jet said to start, his voice a bit more snappish than he would have preferred.
Brass put both his hands up in a make-peace gesture. “I won’t. This isn’t the kind of shit I ever dreamed Kane would pull. Fucking psycho. Going after someone who has no business in this kind of thing is disgusting, but involving a baby? He’s a monster.”
It was a strange code of honor they adhered to, but it was there.
“The men who were out looking for Kane to put him down. Have they reported back?”
Brass eyed Jet warily for a second; after all the veiled conversation earlier, having the question asked straight out like that must have felt odd, to say the least.
“It’s fine,” Jet said. “I didn’t have the balls to do what needed to be done last night, and regardless of what you say – if something happens to them, it’s on my head. So just tell me. What do you know?”
Brass watched him for another moment, then gave a slow nod. “East reported back in. He hasn’t been able to track down Kane, and he thinks it’s weird. The Runners don’t seem to know where he is, either. A few of their men – some of the ones who came to the club with Kane – seem to be gone as well. East’s looking for them. Jacob is working other angles. They haven’t turned up anything yet.” Brass shook his head. “I gotta tell you, boss, this seems weird to me. Yeah, it’s a big city, but huge guys running around in patched leather aren’t usually hard to track down. There’s something weird going on here, and it’s got me watching my back. You know?”
Jet nodded slowly. “Yeah, man, I do.” He sighed. “What else do we know?”
“Turns out the Runners haven’t liked Kane’s behavior for a while. Yeah, he’s been their leader on the surface for a while now, but there were already rumblings of frustration below the surface. So this absence, even just overnight, is giving another faction the chance to consolidate their power. Frankly, if we can get through the next few hours and deal with Kane – and, frankly, offer his head to the Runners – we’ll have allies that will last for a long time.”
“They’re that unhappy?”
Brass’ mouth tightened again as he took a long sip of coffee. “Turns out it wasn’t just women here that he was rough with.”
Jet’s anger rose again, and he forced himself to tamp the emotion back down. I don’t have time to be angry right now, he reminded himself. That was the real sticking point. If he’d seen Kane’s violence for what it was – not when he’d gone for Bree, not when he’d showed up at auction after auction, and he’d seen the women flinching, even though they swore it was fine, but when they’d come back from their tours, and he’d seen a different light in the man – how much grief would he have saved the world?
He shook his head. It didn’t matter. He’d find a fucking therapist to talk to about it later or something. Right now, he had a job to do.
“So we’ll have the Runners on our side once we find the son of a bitch, but right now, it’s turning out to be hard to find the son of a bitch. Why is it hard?”
Brass nodded again. “East has been to all his known holing up spots. He has an apartment, a spot at the clubhouse, an off-the-books apartment where he keeps a woman and a kid, and a sister outside of the city. We’ve checked them all, and he’s not there. He’ll be found, soon enough, but it’s weird that he’s not at any of those places.”
“Chance he spotted East and is trying to run?”
Brass shrugged. “Could be. I wouldn’t peg him for the “live to fight another day” type, but he certainly could have done.”
The silence included what both of them were afraid to say. If that was what happened, then their chances of finding Bree were going to get slimmer with every hour that passed.
And then a thought occurred to Jet. “What about Cat? That girl Bree used to be friends with. She was hanging around here all the time, then ended up spending more time with the Runners. Word was that Kane had taken her up.”
Brass nodded slowly as he remembered the other girl. “Yeah, okay?”
“Does she have hidey holes around the city? The girls’ old apartment, a parent’s house, something like that? I don’t know if she’s still with him, but she probably doesn’t have to be, not exactly. Not if he got the keys and the address, something like that.”
Brass nodded more firmly. “I’ll get Jacob on it.”
Jet nodded, and Brass started to stand. “Hold on,” Jet said, and Brass sat back down again. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Brass cocked his head to the side. “What’s up, boss?”
“It’s exactly that.” Jet sighed and run his hands through his hair. “We need to admit that I’m a vulnerability to the club.”
“What?”
“Don’t play it like that. You know that I am. And the baby and Bree... It’s all going to take a lot of attention. And... man, I want to be there for them. I don’t want my attention divided. I don’t want—”
“Your kid to grow up like your dad did.”
Jet was surprised Brass knew. Not many people did. Jet’s father had been in a different club for a long time, and most of Jet’s memories of his father involved the man leaving. As a kid, Jet remembered being terrified that one day his father just wouldn’t come home.
And then one day, his father just hadn’t come home. And the most horrifying part, as an adult, was realizing how very little it had actually changed Jet’s life, to have his father gone. He’d missed the man, especially as he’d been a teenager working to find his own path, but the day-to-day parts of his existence didn’t change very much at all.
He wanted his kid to know he was there, and if he was taken out of that kid’s life for some horrible reason, he wanted his kid to feel that loss. Maybe it was greedy or unfair, but it was also true.
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t want that.”
Brass nodded. “So w
hat can I do?”
“I’m ready to step down. When this is done, when I have my girl back, I’m ready to be done.”
Brass went utterly still. “Be done for good and all, or just step down from your role?”
Jet had been thinking about this all night with Bree, even though he’d mostly kept his mouth shut. The words came more easily now than they would have twenty-four hours ago. “From my role. The Choppers are my family, and I don’t want to leave them. I love this club, and I love that I’ve built it up from the ground. I don’t want to walk away from that, and I’d love to stay here as a manager. But as the President of the War Choppers? It’s time for some fresh blood.”
Brass nodded, and it was strange; he’d never seen a statue nod before. “Okay. I get that. You have someone in mind to step into your shoes?”
“You, man,” Jet said, and for just a second Brass seemed surprised. “You’ve been my right hand here for years. No one knows this place like you do. The men already trust you. You know every aspect of every business.”
