Dead Souls MC: Prospects Series Books 1-5

by Savannah Rylan

  There was a very large man in the room. Dressed in all black. And he had Piper hoisted up into the air with nothing but his hand around her fucking neck.

  “I’d let her go if I were you,” I said curtly.

  The man quickly dropped Piper down to her feet and she hit the floor. The massive man slowly turned around, his eyes glaring at me from beyond a pair of thick sunglasses.

  “We were just having a conversation, Doctor,” he said.

  “Doesn’t look like any conversation I’ve had with a patient. And you sure as hell don’t look like a patient,” I said.

  “Margot, stop,” Piper said, coughing.

  “The woman’s right. You really should stop,” the man said.

  I backed myself up against a tray of implements as the man came for me. I reached around slowly, gripping a scalpel in my hand. If that man came any closer, his carotid was fucking toast. But he paused halfway for me and snickered.

  “See you later, Doctors,” he said, chuckling.

  Then, he left the room without another word.

  “Piper, holy shit. Are you all right?” I asked breathlessly.

  I rushed to the floor with the scalpel in my hand in case that asshole came back.

  “I’m fine,” she said, coughing.

  “You don’t sound fine,” I said.

  She struggled to breathe and I slowly peeled her hand away from her neck. Her skin was already bruised. The outline of the man’s hand was apparent against her white skin.

  “I’m worried he crushed your trachea,” I said.

  Piper shook her head. “He didn’t. Just—my phone. In my jacket pocket.”

  “What about it?”

  “Call. Rock,” she said, panting.

  And I did what she asked without a second thought.

  11

  Bear

  I never had much to pack up. I didn’t keep a lot of shit, and I didn’t need a lot of shit. Toxin offered to accompany me back to my small, rundown studio apartment to pack up some clothes and toiletries for the journey to this new place. Shockingly enough, he stayed silent the entire way. He did nothing but sit on my couch, keep an eye on me, and walk into the room every time I grunted a little too loud.

  Then, after packing my stuff up, we went to his place.

  I offered to come inside with him, but he wanted me to stay outside. I wasn’t sure why, and I didn’t argue, either. Toxin was a weird one. Crass. Bombastic. But when he laid down the law about something, there was no changing his mind. So, I sat out there on my bike with the kickstand down and basked in the sun.

  It felt good on the parts of me that ached.

  After almost thirty minutes, though, I was sweating my balls off. I was about to go inside after Toxin, but he emerged with a military sack slung over his shoulder. I furrowed my brow as he walked over to his bike, his hand wrapped up tightly in the cord that kept the opening of the bag closed.

  I didn’t know Toxin had been in the military.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “How long did you serve?” I asked.

  But all he did was shoot me a look that told me to shut the hell up.

  Must’ve been bad.

  “Let’s get back to the lodge,” Toxin said.

  “Think we should head on to the new place? Check it out? Snag the better rooms before the old guys get there?” I asked.

  He grinned. “I like your style, Bear. You doing okay on that bike, though?”

  I shrugged. “Could be worse. Come on. Let’s go get ourselves some decent rooms this time.”

  As we cruised along the highway, following the GPS for the address Diesel sent all of us, I drew in the warm summer air. I drew in the ocean’s salted scent. I enjoyed how the wind felt whipping around my body. Because I honestly wasn’t sure when I’d get to feel it again. It sounded like Diesel was about to keep us all on lockdown, which meant curfew times and statements of coming and going and constantly checking in while we were out.

  And while I didn’t blame him for any of that, things like that destroyed the spontaneity of a nice bike ride.

  “Well, fuck,” Toxin said.

  As we pulled up to the building that harbored the address we had, multiple bikes sat out there. Plus, a few cars. Apparently, everyone else had the same idea we did. Toxin and myself parked our bikes in the shade around the corner of the house. Then, we slipped off and grabbed our things to haul inside.

  “Seems like we weren’t the only one with the bright idea,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he murmured.

  I snickered and shook my head as we walked inside. It didn’t even occur to me to pay attention to things until I walked inside, too. I stopped in the foyer of this new place, gazing up at the vaulted ceiling of the sprawling warehouse that sat abandoned on the edge of the ocean.

  Except it wasn’t abandoned any longer.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “We were wondering when you two were gonna show up,” Diesel said, grinning.

  “Do you guys not keep bags packed for shit like this?” Ryker asked.

  “Didn’t know that was a requirement,” Toxin murmured.

  He dropped his stuff at his feet and stretched his arms over his head.

  “Diesel, this place is huge. How big is it?” I asked.

  “This is one of the warehouses abandoned after the first migration out of Redding. Amazon brought some business back into the area, but they never snagged up this warehouse for their needs. It’s been sitting here by the sea, abandoned for almost a decade. So, I decided to snatch it up back a couple years ago after our last massive group problem, and I’ve been revamping it ever since. To answer your question, it’s a little over fifty thousand square feet.”

  “Holy shit,” I murmured.

  “It serves both as a protective bunker and as a last place for war. All the rooms are situated at the back, meaning if the enemy wants to get to us, they either have to climb the rock-face cliff, or navigate thousands of square feet of hallways, tunnels, and dead ends in order to get to our bedrooms in back,” Grave said.

  “That’s… a hell of an idea. Is it finished?” I asked.

  Diesel nodded. “I mean, the women can’t wait to get their hands on decorating the damn place. But the hardware’s in place. Electricity. Plumbing. Insulation. Basic furniture.”

  “Which means there’s a room for each man and his family, should he have one,” Brewer said.

  “No, thank you,” Toxin said, chuckling.

  “So, the real question is, who gets to pick what rooms?” Saint asked.

  “That’s the beauty of doing this thing up from scratch. All the rooms are the same, all of them have attached bathrooms that are the same, and they all have a very nice view of the ocean from the windows I had carved into the metal facade and cased over with bulletproof glass,” Diesel said, smiling.

  “You’re proud of yourself, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Do you see this place? Hell yeah, I’m proud. Two years in the making, and it’s easily our safest place to be whenever shit goes down. Now, when I tell you guys we’re keeping our families here for safekeeping until we figure this shit out, we aren’t trapped in a small area. But we have room to roam. Privacy to have. I can’t wait to show you guys what else this place has,” Diesel said.

  We all chuckled at his reaction, because we all knew it was coming. The pride in Diesel’s face was obvious, and the disgust for a family and kids on Toxin’s face was hysterical. Which, I honestly didn’t understand. Because Toxin was great with kids. But to each their own. Some people wanted that kind of shit—like me—and some didn’t.

  Like him.

  In the middle of the discussion, however, a cell phone rang. It wasn’t the biggest deal since we weren’t having church. But it did catch Diesel’s attention. Rock moved and we turned our attention to him, where he dug into his pocket for his cell phone.

  “It’s Piper,” he said.

  “Pick it up. She’s probably wondering ab
out the new address,” Diesel said.

  “Tell her you’re staying in a motel on the outskirts of town,” Toxin said, snickering.

  “Oh, she’d love that,” Rock said flatly.

  I liked Toxin’s joke, though. I thought it was clever.

  “Well, I’m gonna go take my shit and find myself a room. You said they’re all the same?” Toxin asked.

  “I’ll take you back there. Takes a while to learn how the hallways are laid out,” Saint said.

  “Not like you’ve been here for hours,” he murmured.

  “Oh, let the man help you, idiot,” I said.

  “Margot, calm down. I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” Rock said.

  My head whipped around as Toxin’s bag fell from his hand.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Rock shook his head and held his hand up to me, but I wasn’t having it. I held out my hand as he furrowed his brow, walking up to him as my fingers wiggled.

  “Give me the phone,” I said curtly.

  “I can’t understand her. She’s talking too quickly,” Rock said.

  “Which is why I said give me the damn phone.”

  “I’ll put her on speaker. That good?” he asked.

  I sighed and nodded before he pulled the phone away from his face and pressed the button.

  “Margot, can you hear me?” I asked.

  “Bear? Bear! Thank God. Piper wanted me to call Rock because there was this man in the operating room posing as a patient waiting for her and when I walked into the room to find her and ask her something he had her by the neck and off her feet and he was really big and dressed in all black and—”

  “Margot, take a breath for me. Okay?” I asked.

  I didn’t hear her draw it in, but I heard her let it out.

  “Okay. So. Piper had an O.R. patient, but he wasn’t a patient. Did I get that right?” I asked.

  “Yes. He was dressed in a very nice suit and had her by the throat when I walked in. I grabbed a scalpel to defend myself just in case he did anything else, but when I walked in, he dropped her. She’s got a nasty mark around her neck. He hasn’t crushed her trachea or anything. But he said he’d be back. That they’d talk later. So, she wanted me to call Rock and tell him what was going on. What had happened.”

  “Listen to me carefully. Where are you guys now?” I asked.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered.

  My heart broke in my chest at the shaking of her voice.

  “Margot, I know you are.”

  “What did he look like?” Rock asked.

  “What?” Margot asked.

  “What did that fucker look like? The one who put his hands on Piper?” Rock asked.

  “That’s not the important thing right now,” I said.

  “Not important? A man put his hands on my wife. The mother of my children! He bruised her! I want his fucking head mounted on my goddamn wall!”

  I put my hand on Rock’s shoulder, signaling him with my eyes that he needed to calm down. I took a few breaths with him, helping him to settle himself before I turned my attention back to the phone call.

  “Margot, you still there?” I asked.

  “I’m here,” she said softly.

  “This is what I need you guys to do. First off, I need you to check Piper’s phone for an address.”

  “Already done. When I saw it on her phone, I showed it to her and she instructed me to copy it. The two of us are in our cars, following one another to the address right now,” she said.

  I grinned. “Good girl. Smart. Yes, get to this address as quickly as you can. We’re already here, and I’ll be waiting for you. One question, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  I looked around at all the guys before Diesel nodded his head.

  “If he saw her, she needs to be here,” he said.

  “What was that?” Margot asked.

  “Do you, by any chance, have a bag of your things packed up somewhere you could grab quickly?” I asked.

  She paused. “I always have a go-bag packed in my trunk. Courtesy of a life always bouncing around.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “My father was in the military, remember? One of the many things he taught me was to always have at least a week’s worth of clothes and toiletries ready to go, in case of an emergency. It’ll serve me well, too, with what I eventually want to do with my medical career.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Be a private physician instead of working in a hospital. Which means always keeping a go-bag on hand in case I need to travel quickly,” she said.

  I grinned. “It suits you.”

  “Can we get on with this?” Rock growled.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Rock. But Piper’s in front of me in her car, I’m following her since I’ve still got her phone. I promise you, she’s fine. The bruise is only topical. I made sure to check her out before we left the hospital,” she said.

  “That’s good. When you get here, grab your things out of your car and come through the front doors. It looks like a plain old warehouse outside, but it’s incredible inside. I’ll show you around and explain everything, all right?”

  “Promise?” she asked.

  “I do, Margot. I promise.”

  I tossed Rock’s phone back to him and picked up my things. Rock hung up the phone with Margot after establishing they were still ten minutes out, and I looked over at Saint. He quickly motioned for Toxin and me, then led us through a cascade of hallways. I tried memorizing the turns, but Saint pointed out a very clever way for us to tell where we were going until we could memorize the layout.

  “If the light is adhered to the wall, you’re going down a dead end. If the light is coming from overhead, you’re in one of the main hallways of the warehouse. And if the hallway doesn’t have any lights at all, what it will have is a gun and ammunition closet with gear and a perch. It’s really neat how Diesel’s laid this all out,” Saint said.

  “I’ll have to explore those later,” Toxin said.

  “I just want to get my shit in a room so I can get Margot settled in, too,” I said.

  After finally making our way down the last hallway, there was a massive dump-out, almost. From one end to the other, side to side, there was a massive and uninterrupted corridor. With doors every forty or so feet.

  The place was fucking gigantic.

  “I wonder how much money Diesel’s dumped into this place,” I murmured.

  “The only rooms not taken are on either side of the corridor. Down to the right, all the way at the end, and down to the left. Take your pick,” Saint said.

  “Left has always been my lucky side,” Toxin said.

  “Then, I’ll take right,” I said.

  And together, we picked up our stuff and walked away from one another. Ready to settle into our rooms so we could get on with whatever plan it was this crew was about to cook up.

  12

  Margot

  I saw the warehouse building from a couple miles away. And even then, it looked massive. A looming piece of concrete and brick sitting on the cliffside overlooking the ocean. It was a beautiful sight to see, minus how plain the warehouse looked. It almost looked as if it was still abandoned.

  Minus the stack of bikes and cars outside.

  “I’m shocked they don’t have a way to conceal that stuff,” I murmured.

  Just as we pulled up, Rock rushed out into the middle of the road. He flagged Piper down and rushed to her car. I watched him talk to her for a few minutes and I could easily see just how much he cared about her. He kissed her and then ran quickly towards my car. I rolled down my window and saw his eyes darting back to Piper, trying to assess her condition.

  “I promise you, she’s okay. Shaken up and ready for you, but okay,” I said.

  Rock nodded. “Thank you, for all you’ve done for us.”

  “It’s not a problem. What’s up?”

&nb
sp; “We have a place to park the cars and the bikes, so we’re moving everything.”

  I grinned. “I actually just thought about that same thing. The damn place looks abandoned, except for the mounds of vehicles outside.”

  “Yeah, well, Diesel wanted you guys to arrive before we moved the cars, so we only had to do this once.”

  “Why’s that?”

  But all he did was grin.

  Rock jogged away from my side and ran toward the very far end of the warehouse. I followed him with my car, and as we got around to the very far right of the warehouse, Rock reached into his pockets.

  I wasn’t sure what he did, but whatever he did caused a hidden door to slowly open. Like a garage door.

  “Holy shit, they did a good job of hiding that,” I said breathlessly.

  One by one, we filed our cars in. The women with their cars and vans on one side, and the men with their bikes on the other. But I saw why they wanted us all here first. There wasn’t enough room for all of us to line up our cars, so we had to double stack them. Which meant that while the guys could maneuver their bikes out, only a few cars would get priority as to whose would be accessible.

  And of course, mine took priority because I didn’t know how to ride a bike. Nor was I officially “connected” to someone who rode one.

  After playing a massive game of musical cars, though, I hopped on out. I walked around to the trunk and pulled my to-go suitcase out, ready for whatever was about to drop into my lap. Rock barreled past me, scooping Piper into his arms. She had parked her car in front of me, hellbent on not going into work at all until this was all said and done.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d have that same luxury, though as a resident.

  Again, hence why my car was readily accessible and not blocked in.

  “It’s okay. I’m here. I’ve gotcha. We need to get some ice or something on that mark. Let me see. Can you tilt your head back for me, beautiful?”

  Rock doting on Piper made me jealous. I yearned for that type of connection with someone. I longed for it. My hands trembled as the weight of everything that had just happened came crashing down onto me. It was why I was so good in situations like this. I was always calm in the moment. But after that moment was done, I needed to get somewhere so I could panic. Let the adrenaline run its course.