Compass (Valiant MC Book 1)

by Mary B. Moore

  “Ha, look at the puta,” a heavily accented voice said as it walked toward me. I didn’t recognize it as the one from the night before.

  “Boss says we leave in two days,” I heard someone else say almost conversationally in between the sounds of chewing.

  They swapped to Spanish, a language that no matter how hard I tried I hadn’t mastered and a rapid spitfire of conversation took place. There were words that stood out to me, but with the thumping still going on inside my skull, I was struggling to translate them.

  The voices moved away from me and I heard as they left the room, closing the door and locking it behind them.

  I didn’t know what was happening or why, but I just hoped that Sam was okay and that they hadn’t taken him. The thought of them having him and him being sold on had my gut turning over on itself and I turned my head just in time to be sick on the floor beside me.

  Days ago, I’d had it all back in the palms of my hands. I had a healthy son, Hunter, my family. Now I didn’t know if they were okay, even alive. And I didn’t know what was going to happen to me.

  I’m proud of you, too.

  The words kept going around and around in my head as I tried to figure out what the fuck had happened. We were helping retrieve a Senator’s daughter, a little girl who had been snatched. Instead, Piper was gone and so were Mace’s sister and woman.

  I had flashes going through me of anger so intense that I felt like I’d explode, to fear so overwhelming that I struggled to breathe. These weren’t unknowns to me. In the military, they teach you to rationalize those emotions to keep your head in the game, and my therapist had been teaching me to do the same to cope with the PTSD. She’d also been teaching me Cognitive Behavioral Therapy which was in my understanding the art of distraction and every time I’d felt it becoming suffocating, I’d will myself to do something that would distract me.

  Right now, I was looking out of the small window at the license plates below and was adding up the numbers on each one. Then, I’d put them in order of value. Ironically, mine was the highest so far; something which almost made me smile.

  “They knew,” Preacher was pacing back and forth repeating the same words.

  “Of course, they fucking knew,” Mace shouted at him. He’d visibly struggled with Gia and Ava being taken, whereas I was keeping it all inside me like a pressure cooker. The pressure was building looking for a way out, but so far there wasn’t one so it continued to build. Part of me was scarily calm, the rest of me had irrational thoughts and images of finding Piper like the girls we’d found at that place all of those years ago. Raped, brutalized, beaten…

  “Data, look into the feeds and do searches on signals near the compound and the Valiant compound,” Kai ordered. “Find us the link.” Moving over to where I was sitting, she knelt down. “I’ve made contact with Bo. I’m waiting for her to return the request.”

  Right now, she was the best thing we had that would give us an in to getting Piper back.

  “I have men searching for Gia and Ava,” Coleman added to the updates. “One of them is the best tracker I know. We’ll find them.” He looked over at Mace who nodded before turning away, his body visibly trembling with the anger. “Bo will help us with Piper, Hunter.”

  “We need to find the rat too,” Preacher said firmly.

  “You’ll fucking excuse me if I don’t make that one of my priorities,” I spat scathingly at him, trusting myself to talk for the first time in a while. “My woman is who knows fucking where. Mace’s woman and sister are missing too. We don’t know what the fucking plans are for them,” I roared, feeling the pressure starting to hit its peak inside me. “Your rat is your problem.”

  Stalking past him, I left the room that we’d holed ourselves up in to make plans. I needed to get away from him right now.

  I’m proud of you, too.

  Those words brought me a sudden calm and I stopped mid stride causing Blake, who had followed me, to walk into my back.

  “What the fuck, Hunt. You okay, man?”

  “I’m going to get her back,” I said firmly, finally believing the words as they came out of me.

  Seeing the look of admiration on Blake’s face, I walked into the other room that we’d booked when we’d pulled into the motel. In total, we had taken five rooms all scattered over the motel. Spread yourselves thinly and it makes it harder for the enemy to hit the target, huddle together and the target is easier. I wasn’t going to make jack shit easy for this fuck which was why my parents and Piper’s parents had taken Sam to my great uncle’s cabin near the lake that I’d fished at as a kid.

  Getting the burner phone that I’d been carrying since we left The Knights compound out of my pocket, I dialed the one that Dad had picked up on his way there. I needed to hear my son’s voice.

  It was only a couple of hours until Bo called Kai back, but it felt like days. A couple of Preacher’s guys had just brought in take-out for us all when Kai’s phone had started ringing on the table in front of us. I’d been watching it since I’d come back into the room begging for her to make contact.

  Seeing the unknown number, we all stopped what we were doing as Kai reached for it and hit the answer button and then put it on speakerphone.

  “You’re not being smart, Kai.” Bo murmured over the line. “I can’t take this risk.”

  “Bo, it’s Hunter,” I interrupted, not letting Kai answer.

  “She’s okay, Hunter,” Bo whispered. “I’m working on it.”

  “That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all you can say?” I’d always respected Bo, but at that moment I couldn’t care less about history and what we’d done for each other in the past, she felt like the enemy.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” she whispered. “I didn’t know what they were planning until it was done. You need to clean shop Preacher.”

  “How did you know that I was here?” Preacher asked sounding confused and pissed off.

  “You were part of the retrieval. You need to clean shop,” she said again, stressing her voice and trying to give him a hint of something, but it was falling short.

  “Bo,” Noah growled. “When I see you…”

  A dismissive tut sounded out of the phone interrupting what he was going to say and instantly dismissing him.

  “They’re coming. I’ll call you when I have an answer.” The phone cut off after that cryptic remark leaving us all sitting staring at each other in confusion and frustration.

  I wanted to throw things around, smash everything I could get my hands on, make people bleed so that they felt the terror and fear that I felt every second that I didn’t know where Piper was, if she was even okay. I had to keep fighting against the images that wanted to play through my mind – Piper lying broken, brutalized.

  Fighting off the panic attack that wanted to take over, I went to my calm place that got me through the worst moments when I was in active situations. Memories of me and Piper as kids flipped through my head quickly, now joined with ones of Sam.

  I’m proud of you, too.

  “Oh fuck, I know who she meant,” Jagger whispered loudly just as Kai’s phone went off again with Data’s details on the screen.

  Snatching it up, she put it on speakerphone and we all sat listening intently. “Got em…”

  “Ahhh, Store,” I said, walking around the chair with the bitch on it. I’d give her credit, she was that fucking hard that she wasn’t showing any fear, but I’d change that.

  “What are you going to do, Kai?” She sneered at me. At that moment, the heavy makeup she’d slapped on that morning was still in place, but I’d be changing that soon. Thankfully we hadn’t been far away from one of the MC’s chapters, and as luck would have it, this slut had been there too. “You know, your Daddy has always been great with his dick. How he made you I’ll never know. But then, he always wanted a boy, didn’t he? Couldn’t face having a daughter so he named you like a guy.”

  I had hated this bitch in front of me for years, what I wa
s about to do would bring me great pleasure.

  “That’s nice, Store,” I yawned and sat back looking at her bored. “But it’s not me who’s gonna be the one to do it. See, my daddy,” I choked on the word, on calling him that when he’d been nothing to me for so long, “has something he wants to say to you.”

  “Probably the same thing that he was saying to me two nights ago, the same thing that your bitch mother walked in on years ago and then blew her brains out…” I stood up and walked slowly over to her causing her to stop. She did well to hide her fear, but I saw it flash in her eyes.

  “Oh no, no, no,” I tutted as I bent over. “See, I know where my father was two nights ago and it wasn’t with you. In fact, you’ve been a fucking nothing for a long time now haven’t you.” I smirked at her, knowing I’d scored a direct hit when her ugly face twisted making it even uglier. “That’s why you did it, isn’t it Store? Figured you’d get some payback because you weren’t looked as anything in the MC. Been a while since any of the guys, even the prospects, would touch you, right?”

  “You bitch,” she tried spitting at me, but I’d moved out of the line of fire. Fucking hell these bitches were predictable. She was stopped from saying anything else by Preacher, the man I refused to call father, entering the room.

  “Well, isn’t this interesting,” he said as he walked over to me, presenting a united front when all I wanted to do was move away from him. Some things couldn’t be forgotten or ignored, but if it meant that this bitch died filled with the knowledge that she’d fucking failed, then I’d tolerate the proximity and references to him as my father.

  Pulling up a chair, he turned it around and sat on it leaning his arm on the back of it.

  “She’s lying,” Store whined. The bitch must be in her forties, but fuck me she may as well be twelve she was that dumb. “She’s lying, Preacher. I went to see Dragon because I needed a break…”

  The man himself walked in and leaned against the wall with his arms crossed in front of him. Hunter followed as did Mace and Coleman. I turned back to face her, aware that even more bodies were filtering in to the room behind me.

  “You were saying?” Preacher said, looking relaxed, but I knew that he had a hair trigger and that it wouldn’t take much for it to spring.

  Her mouth opening and closing and making her look even uglier if it was possible, Store just stared behind me. I had no doubt that as many of the guys involved in Perry’s retrieval as possible were lined up against the walls.

  “Jesus Christ, Preacher,” Jagger said, sounding sick to his stomach. “You fucked this?”

  The guys all let out a snort, but the jab had hurt something inside of me. Yeah, this was what had led to my mom killing herself. And no, she wasn’t fucking worth it. No one was.

  Renewing the disgust and hatred that I held for my sperm donor, I straightened my shoulders and drew on every bit of training and experience that I’d had, making sure to stay expressionless and be ready for quick movements from anyone. Trust no one, that was something that I had a ton of experience in.

  Jagger’s jab had also struck a chord with Store because she snapped, her face twisting in a way that shouldn’t have been humanly possible, but I guess with all that cheap makeup on her face, gravity would be acting in weird and magical ways for her. “Fuck you, Jagger. Fuck you all. You don’t know who you’re up against, you don’t know what he can do,” a smug sneer crossed her face. “He’ll come for me and you’ll be fucked.”

  Not one person reacted to this last declaration, we all knew that he had no intention of coming to help her.

  Shifting his position so that he was more comfortable, Preacher calmly said, “This guy?” As he held up his cell screen with a picture of Demingo on it for her to see. Her smile and nod didn’t get the reaction that she’d planned on it getting though. Looking back around the room, Preacher asked, “Do you think he’s on his way?” to Hunter.

  Shaking his head in humor, Hunter said, “No fucking way.”

  Looking over to Jagger, Preacher merely raised an eyebrow. “She’s off her fucking meds if she really thinks that,” he said without needing to be asked the question. I hadn’t known him for long, but The Knight’s VP had hit an empty spot inside of me. Looking up, we made eye contact briefly, before I turned back to the show in front of me.

  One by one, those of us who knew Demingo shook our heads. With each shake, Store started to panic more and more. “But he told me…he said…he’s…” She broke off, hanging her head and sobbing. Walking around the back of her, I grabbed her hair and yanked her head back.

  “Now, you’re going to answer the nice men and tell them what they need to know,” she almost scalped herself with the ferocity of her nods of agreement.

  Twenty minutes later, the men started to file out, but I’d been promised this moment with her if I let her live and didn’t use my rifle on her when we’d realized who was responsible for feeding information back to Demingo. It had been unfortunate that she actually knew jack shit, but we hadn’t actually thought that he’d trust the likes of this cunt with any real information anyway.

  Walking toward her, I let the hatred and malice bleed onto my face along with a grin. “Now it’s my turn.”

  Twenty-four hours later and we were still waiting for fucking Bo to call. I didn’t know what Kai had done to that cunt, and I didn’t care. All I cared about was that my woman and son were safe, and right now only half of that was the case and I worried that Demingo would go after Sam too.

  “Why did he set this up against us now?” Kai questioned. It was something that I’d wondered earlier, but I’d planned to come back to it once I had Piper safe.

  The door to the room opened and Duke came in, throwing a bunch of papers on the table. “We found some shit,” he said. Crossing over to them, I picked one of the papers up to have a look at it. “Data went digging even deeper and found this.”

  It took about ten minutes of reading what was on each paper before picking up the next one for what I was seeing to sink in.

  “Son of a fucking bitch,” Kai gasped before I could do it. “He did it.”

  Noah, who had been leaning against the wall waiting for us explain what was on the paperwork on the table walked over and picked one of them up. “What does this mean?”

  “It appears that old Demingo was the head of the Diavoli cartel,” Duke replied. “He worked his way to the top, starting a year before he joined the FBI. Once he had his position within the FBI, he used it to become el hefe. With the combined power and authority, he basically had control of one of the major routes from Argentina to the USA.” The reality of that power was mind numbing. Normally, traffickers and cartels had an unspoken agreement that meant that some of them could work in correlation with each other, but the power was distributed amongst a lot of them. Obviously, some would be more powerful than others and have control of a bigger proportion, but still it wasn’t centered completely around one cartel. For Demingo to be able to control and work from the American government, the power and authority that he had was huge.

  “What does that have to do with us?” Noah questioned. “We didn’t shop him, we never got the chance. Just as we were about to fuck him up the bastard burst into flames. So, why the fuck is he doing this now?”

  “It’s not just now.” I’d tried to say it in a normal voice, but I was so shocked by what I was seeing that it only came out as a raspy whisper.

  “Well, nothing like this has happened before now, so obviously, it is.” One of my guys Elijah said, walking over with his arms crossed over his chest and a furious frown on his face.

  Looking up at Kai, I hung my head trying to get the words out.

  “He planned the bomb,” Noah growled, looking at the page in front of him. “He paid that fucking bitch to put her babies in the car and hit the button.” There was a chorus of gasps around the room as Noah picked up a chair and threw it against the wall. The cheap plastic and metal furniture buckled on impact and fell apart
.

  “He also planned that RPG attack on us a couple of months before that,” Kai added. She’d been included in it and had she not had the skills she did, she would have had her neck slit by one of the buddies whose launcher had taken out the building that we’d been hiding behind.

  “You can’t be fucking serious,” Blake said disbelievingly. “He had his freedom, he wasn’t bound to the government anymore. He can fucking move in any way that he wants now and isn’t under the microscope. What the fuck does he want with us?”

  “Revenge,” Kai’s voice was almost monotone. “He lost the power that working for the government gave him too. Now he’s answering to other people and having to work with other cartels. He wants to prove his strength and get that power back.”

  Standing up and pacing back and forth, I thought through all the shit we’d just learned. He was responsible for so much and for the death of so many people, good men, innocents. Now, he had my woman and was doing fuck knows what to her.