Compass (Valiant MC Book 1)

by Mary B. Moore

  I was pulled from my thoughts by a groan from the beautiful woman lying still on the bed in front of me. She hadn’t made a sound since we’d arrived. Every time I was allowed back to see her, she was lying in exactly the same position, her skin the same gray color and drenched in sweat. Hearing a noise, even a minute groan, was like heaven.

  “Piper?” Nothing. “Piper Black,” I stressed my last name knowing full well that that would be her name as soon as I could arrange it.

  She lay still, not one noise coming from her again. Sitting heavily back down in the chair that was beside her bed, I gave my ear a good itch, not finding the tick as reassuring as I normally did and then hung my head.

  I was contemplating my shoes and trying to control the frustrated tears that I desperately wanted to cry, when I felt something brush gently against my hair. I figured a chunk of it had fallen forward from the position that my head was in when I felt it again.

  Lifting my head, the first thing I saw was that her hand was raised slightly and had been what I’d felt on my hair. My eyes jumped to her face and the second thing that I saw were her beautiful blue eyes looking back at me; a weak smile on her face.

  “Piper Black…” she rasped, her voice sounding painfully dry. “Want…my…ring…back.”

  Jumping up, I put my head next to hers on the pillow, trying to muffle the sobs of relief that had taken over and now wracked my body. I couldn’t even speak I was crying that hard.

  Turning her head to the side, she rubbed her nose along the side of my face and beard while my body jerked beside her. We stayed that way for a couple of minutes before I pushed the button to call the doctors and nurses through.

  My woman was awake, she was alive. Piper Black was going to be okay.

  Two weeks later...

  “She’s fine. We took her to a new location where she has good guys guarding her who know what the fuck they’re doing.” I told Preacher with a sneer. Apparently, he’d had two prospects on her who had been more concerned with getting out of the wind than keeping an eye on the mark that they’d been told to. Guess who wasn’t patching into The Knights now.

  Nodding his head, he watched Kai as she unrolled a big piece of paper which turned out to be an aerial view of a property surrounded by trees. He looked sad as he took in what she was doing, but I knew Kai’s story and I doubted if she’d ever forgive him.

  Her parents hadn’t had a happy marriage, Preacher had been an asshole who fucked everything he could and one day her mom had walked in on him getting it from Store. She’d gone home, lain on the ‘marital’ bed and blown her head off. It had been Kai who had found her and had read her suicide note saying how much she loved her daughter and how much abuse she’d had to put up with from Preacher. Kai had left two days later and had met up with her uncle, Duke, and had joined The Ghosts. Any contact from Preacher was rejected and she hadn’t been anywhere near the compound since, until she’d come back from a mission and had immediately been drafted into this shit storm.

  I figured that there was a lot more to the story than we knew, but it was enough for Kai to want fuck all to do with Preacher and she made it very clear on a daily basis that he was nothing to her. Jagger on the other hand definitely meant something to Miss Kyle. You’d have to be blind to not see it.

  “I have news,” Kai said in her usual calm way. I still laughed when I looked at her and tried to put the fact that I knew she was one of the best snipers in the history of the US military as well as a kick ass helo pilot and could fight better than most men. When you heard the name Kyle you pictured a big guy, so the lithe blonde that actually appeared, took a while to get your head around. No matter how many times I’d worked with her, it still threw me as I watched how she now commanded the room with just three words. “Data ran a search on high traffic, but isolated areas related to Demingo. Twenty minutes ago, we sent drones to three of the properties and got this photograph back from our Charlie Drone.” She gestured at the printout that took up a good portion of the table. “As you can see, at the time it was taken at,” she paused as she looked at the large watch on her wrist, “oh-nine-seventeen, there was a helo here,” she pointed at an area that if you just glanced at it you wouldn’t have seen what we were looking for. Underneath the netting that was made to make it blend in with the surrounding area you could just make out the faint outline of the rotor blades of a small helicopter. “Over here,” she pointed to a track that looked fresh in tall grass, “we have an area where they’ve parked their vehicles, again attempting poorly to camouflage them.”

  We all stood and stared down at the photograph recognizing more fuck up’s the longer we stared at it.

  “They’ve got someone stationed over here,” Kai nodded as Jagger pointed at a wooded area and I squinted at it. Going slightly closer to the photo, I finally saw a sharp line protruding about two millimeters from the area and recognized it as the barrel of a large gun.

  “Oh goody,” I growled. “They want to play rough!”

  Kai smirked at me, before lifting one more, smaller roll of paper from where she’d been standing while watching us as we looked at the first printout. “Charlie Drone is a prototype created by the Ghosts. We haven’t yet pitched the idea to the government and quite frankly if it wasn’t for the rest of the military whose lives were on the line, we most likely wouldn’t. I digress,” she stopped and tapped the roll to the table. We all felt the same way, sometimes the higher ups and red tape made assisting fucking unappealing. “So, Charlie Drone is pretty fucking awesome. This was the more complex of the three locations which was why we sent it in. It’s like the Stealth bombers of the military drone world. It can travel at further distances by carrying extra charging cells that are spread throughout the device to create an even distribution of weight. It also has a higher powered camera than Alpha and Beta drones, meaning that it stays at an undetectable distance and gets these high res photo’s for us to enjoy.”

  Looking down at the new images on the table I took in the photos of Demingo facing me. It was a collage of eight. Two were of him in his bathroom, one was him looking worriedly out of the window of the property, a further two were of him eating his breakfast on the porch of the property looking cocky and smug as a couple of his men stood talking to him as he lounged back in his wicker chair, the following two were as the men walked away and the scared expression on his face now that they weren’t looking and the final photo was of him asleep in his bed.

  Grinning, I felt a boost through me that I hadn’t felt in years. “I have a plan.”

  “I swear I won’t be gone for long,” Hunter sat gripping my hand tightly. What he didn’t get was that I wasn’t scared. I didn’t remember that much of my time being held wherever it was that they had held me. The clearest memory that I had was of the monster’s face in the light from the screen of my phone and also being rescued by a troll version of Hunter. Everything else was a blur and I struggled to put the information they had given me of my time there, into a realistic version where I was literally there. If anything, it was more like a fictional book or movie as they told me.

  I remembered Bo, though. I remembered her strength and determination. Hunter had told me when I’d woken up that she’d been injured as we escaped and that they hadn’t had any success finding her yet. Noah was a mess over it, he spent a majority of his time searching for her or contacting people for information. Apparently, the people that they were working with had some pretty awesome toys, so they were using those too to find her.

  “Piper,” Hunter said interrupting my train of thought. “I need you to listen, okay?”

  Nodding my head at him, I snuggled deeper into the feather pillow under my head and pulled the knitted blanket over my shoulder. I was still exhausted and taking it one day at a time with my recovery. The doctor who treated me still had me on some steroids and a couple of other things to continue helping me fight the effects of the septicemia. We had to massage my hands hourly to help the tissues that hadn’t had a pr
oper blood flow for the four days that it turned out I was in captivity for. So far there had been no necrosis and the doctors were positive that I’d regain full sensation in my hands and fingers. I could feel roughly seventy-five percent of them, it was just the tips of my fingers and random patches that still felt like they had local anesthetic in them. I got the odd moment of pins and needles here and there, but as yet the full sensation hadn’t returned.

  I watched Hunter as he moved from the chair he’d been sitting in and sat down on the table in front of me.

  “It will only be for a day and when I get back we’ll be able to get home to Sam.” I missed my baby hugely and couldn’t wait to see him again.

  “Will you be safe?” This was something that I had an even healthier respect for now after everything that I’d been through. I still had no idea what Hunter had been through physically, mentally and emotionally, but I could empathize slightly.

  “You have no idea how safe,” he grinned at me. The smile wasn’t one of his normal sweet ones, it had a lot of sinister to it and if I didn’t know that it was the man who had taken and almost killed me I might feel sorry for whoever was on the receiving end of it.

  As it was, they’d found some paperwork that showed that the man who’d taken me was trying to source a buyer for me. The area that he’d been looking at had been in Boko Haram which was well renowned for mistreating women and allowing other men to use their women as they wished. The chances of me surviving what they had been known to do would have been slim to none, and it was a terrifying thought that my final moments on earth would have been spent like that. I wouldn’t have ever seen Sam again and I would have suffered in ways that no woman should have. The thought had me shivering and snuggling deeper under the blanket.

  “Please take care of yourself,” I begged him softly.

  Leaning over and kissing me gently, Hunter rubbed his nose against mine and whispered, “Oh, I will. Then when I get back we can go and see our boy.”

  I couldn’t wait.

  Taking the cell phone from Data, I sat back and watched the screen showing the footage from the camera of Charlie Drone as I sent the text with a picture to the cell phone on the table beside the soon to be dead fuck, Demingo. I saw in real time as he picked up the phone and the look of pure panic that crossed his face as he saw the crystal clear photograph of him sleeping in his bed.

  Watching as Data scrolled through the other photographs taken previously by the drone, I pointed at the next one that I wanted to send to him and waited for Data to send it to the phone in my hand.

  As soon as it arrived, I hit forward and selected the number for his phone and watched as he paced around the room and then stopped and stared at the phone as it beeped notifying him of the text waiting for him. He looked at it like it was a poisonous snake about to strike him, he would be finding out about Hell’s serpents soon enough though.

  After a couple of minutes of watching him just standing there with his head turning in all directions as the paranoia took over, I sent a further text.

  Tick tock, tick tock…

  It was the same thing that he’d sent me under the photo of Piper.

  We watched as Demingo walked over to the screen and peeked quickly at it. Seeing the words and recognizing them, a look of fury crossed his face as he snatched the phone up. It soon left his grip and dropped to the floor as he saw the high resolution photo of him in the bathroom that morning.

  “We’ve also got a short movie clip,” Data supplied helpfully pointing at a small file on the screen in front of us.

  “Sound?” When he nodded with a grin on his face, I nodded and forwarded the file on as soon as it hit my cell. The sound of Demingo singing Danza Kuduro as he shaved and did a little shimmy filled the screen in front of us.

  “What the fuck?” Demingo roared as he watched it. “Come out you fucking coward!”

  Laughing, we sent a couple of other files waiting for the nod from Kai to say that she was in position. Her and a couple of The Knight’s had been searching for the perfect position to test one of the weapons seized from his ‘homosexual orgy house’ and had had to neutralize a couple of problems as they did it. Finally, we got the message confirming that they were in position.

  Nodding at Data, he hacked into the camera on Demingo’s phone and played a split screen on the screen of the phone which was still in his hand. The top one had the live feed from his camera and the bottom one was a night vision one of his property obviously being shot from a distance. His shock at the display on his screen was over quickly as he saw the distance and thought that the small amount of reinforcements that had been added to his walls would keep anything out.

  With the weapon that we’d seized, a military prototype which had explosive bullets similar to RPG’s on a much smaller scale in size, but carrying bigger explosives inside them, it would take a shit ton more than that to protect him.

  I heard the double click of Kai’s throat mic confirming that she was ready and had him in her sight and then returned it with the single click required for her to fire the weapon.

  Giving my ear a good itch, we watched Demingo as he now saw Charlie Drone’s live footage of him standing staring at his phone, then the flick across to a higher up aerial view of his property from Beta Drone which was currently hovering above it.

  He was suddenly spinning around and trying to move to whatever place he’d decided was safe when the explosive from Kai’s weapon hit the house and the other explosives that Jagger and his guys had wired up to Demingo’s house. The explosion knocked Beta Drone off and Charlie Drone’s footage went haywire as it spun around before getting control back.

  “Fuck me,” Kai coughed and gasped through her throat mic.

  “Kyle,” Jagger could be heard yelling through the still live feed from her mic. “What the fuck?”

  There was a lot of coughing and rustling and then she was back. “How much C4 did you use? Warn me next time you dick head. I think I broke my arm when I fell out of the tree,” she groaned the last bit and we heard Jagger checking her over and Preacher joining them.

  The panic in the Presidents voice was evident as he helped Jagger check her over even though Kai kept telling them to fuck off. The chick just didn’t do fuss. If they’d seen the shit she’d been through on her missions they’d shit themselves. This was nothing in comparison to what she was well known for having gone through.

  “Get off,” she snapped and then the feed went silent.

  Looking at Data, I wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or to give into the residual fear that I was struggling to shake off. The image of Piper that Demingo had sent me, the state that she was in when we got her back, her unconscious in the hospital…it was overwhelming me.

  My private cell pinged on the table in front of me, and I looked down at the screen seeing the photo that Piper had just sent me of her snuggled up, a grin on her face and the words ‘love you more…’ underneath it. Maybe she was right, maybe we were connected because fuck me I’d needed that.

  Standing up, I turned to Data as I put my phone in my pocket. “Thanks for everything, man.” I wouldn’t have Piper back if it wasn’t for this guy and I sure as shit wouldn’t be going to get her and head to collect our son if it wasn’t for him.

  Shrugging, he started to close the lids of the cases that housed his weird and wonderful technology. If Willy Wonka had had a technology wonderland instead of candy, I reckon this would be what was all over it. Most of it Data had put together himself, the rest he’d worked on with some of the best IT experts in the world, knowing exactly what he wanted. He was an evil technological scientist. “It’s cool. We know what you did for Kai and we look after our own.”

  I never thought of the time that Kai had almost been taken in Afghanistan. She’d been in a helicopter on her way back to base after retrieving two missing soldiers when the helo she was in was hit by a lucky sand soldier. His bullet hit the rotor and caused it to lose control and spin down into the sand. Th
ere were a lot of injuries and the sand soldier had radioed in his good fortune to his other fuck buddies who were shooting at the wreckage trying to hit the injured personnel.

  We’d been out on a recce at the time of the crash when the pilot had radioed their position out to our base. We’d gotten there just as one of the sand soldiers had grabbed Kai out of the wreckage and was making to take off with her.

  When we’d surrounded their position, he’d held a machete to her neck and had been going to decapitate her. Fortunately, when we’d approached their position, my team had split into three units – two visible to the hostiles, one not. I’d come around behind them and had dealt with the soldier. His death was not one that haunted me. We’d known of the group for a long time and they had left a trail of murdered innocents including kids behind them in a display of power. Saving Kai that day was a stain on my soul because I had to kill a man, but I wouldn’t change it; she was worth saving. That was also why I didn’t want it being looked at as something that deserved an I owe you.