Table of Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
THE END
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Copyright © 2019 by Savannah Rylan
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Chapter 1
Willow
I pushed into my apartment and dropped my things. My keys. My wallet. My laptop bag. I closed the door behind me and leaned against it, feeling the latching mechanism click into place. I’d listened to that sound for years, shift after shift at the FBI. Coming in late and closing my eyes while I slowly inched the door closed with my back. My butt. My head. Nights where I leaned my forehead into the cold wood and sighed. Nights where my ass slid to the floor as tears dripped down my face.
Despite the sadness, my job at the FBI was so much more exciting than some dumbass company.
I just wanted to relax. After chasing two different viruses through my company’s security system all damn day, what I wanted was a stiff drink. A rum and Coke but holding the Coke. A whiskey cocktail, but with none of the cocktail elements. I turned around and flipped the lock on the door. I pressed my hands into the wood, like I had so many times before. Over the years, that door and I became best friends. It had soaked up tears and sorrows. Anger and frustrations.
Even fear, when that mob boss had found me.
“Nice to see you, Miss Willow.”
Every time I walked into my apartment, I heard his voice. Every time I turned around and looked at my couch, I saw him sitting there. In his tailored suit, leather loafers, and his hair slicked back. He had been shining his gun, stuffing it with bullets. When he rose those black eyes to me, I froze in my spot.
“Your response should be, ‘What are you doing here?’” Sleek asked.
“And if I don’t ask that question?”
As I turned around and stared at the spot on the couch he sat on, a chill worked its way down my spine. I’d never gotten rid of it. Never traded it out for another. But, I sure as hell never sat on that cushion, either. Every piece of training that had ever been required of me fled my mind. I was trained in basic self-defense. Basic tactical knowledge. Enough to defend my post if someone ever barged into my office at the FBI. I wasn’t trained in one-on-one combat. I wasn’t trained in keeping my cool. I wasn’t trained in learning how to stomach my fight-or-flight responses.
I worked in fucking cyber-crime. I wasn’t a damn field agent.
Sleek held his gun out to me, leveling it with my forehead. He didn’t say a word. Merely answered me with his actions. If I didn’t ask the question, he’d kill me. And I wasn’t ready to die that day.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Sleek grinned. “The answer’s simple, Miss Willow. You’ve found something of great importance I’d like you to forget.”
“You mean your digital trail you attempted to encrypt with regard to your money laundering scheme?”
The mob boss slowly stood to his feet as he cocked his gun.
“Something like that,” he said flatly.
That was the day my life changed. The day that mob boss got into my apartment and waited for me to get home, I knew I’d never be able to go back to the FBI. I remembered the smell of his breath after he walked toward me. I still remembered the feel of his gun as he pressed it against my temple. I still remembered my legs shaking and feeling like jello as he backed me up, pressing me against my wooden apartment door.
The same door that had held up my body for years up until that point.
On days like this, when I chased around viruses and practically fell asleep from the boredom, I reminded myself of that moment. Of the moment when I knew I’d never feel safe again. Sure, the FBI was exciting. And yes, helping some Fortune 500 company protect their infrastructure was boring as hell. But it paid more than the FBI. Came with great benefits regarding health as well as a decent 401(k) plan. It was better for my health. Better for my sanity.
Better for my safety.
I leaned back against the door, looking for something sturdy to lean on. I wanted a drink, but the memories rushed over me too quickly. My legs felt weak again. I slid down the door as my head fell against it. My ass hit the floor in front of my apartment door, and I sighed, trying to pull myself away from the image. Away from the memory. Away from the one source of all my nightmares for the past two years.
“He’s not here. He’s not here. He’s not here,” I whispered to myself.
I was pulled from my thoughts by my phone ringing inside my laptop bag. I opened my eyes, unaware that tears had been brewing until they slipped down my cheeks. I really needed a new place to live. My hand reached out and I unclipped my bag, then stuffed my hand down into it. I rummaged around until my fingers fell upon my ringing phone, and one last deep breath pulled me from the last of my visions.
I smiled when I saw Olivia was calling.
Liv and myself had been friends for a while now. In fact, she was my best of friends. Hell, she was the only friend I had after leaving the FBI. Not only did we grow up together, but we both studied criminology at the same school together. I was there for her when her father was arrested. I was there for her initiation into the FBI, just one year after me. I was there at her father’s funeral, holding her while she cried. While she grieved the loss of her other parent and coped with the idea of being an orphan.
I knew she was on an assignment right now in Redding. I also knew she’d call me once it was over.
Hopefully, this meant she was in town to get drinks.
“Well, look at who the cat’s dragged in,” I said.
“Willow.”
The sound of her voice prickled the hairs on the back of my neck.
“What’s wrong, and where are you?” I asked.
“Willow, I’m scared.”
“Liv, talk to me. Where are you?”
I scrambled to my feet and hoisted my laptop bag over my shoulder.
“I-I-I’m… I’m still in Redding. I’ve been threatened, Willow. I’ve—my life—there are pictures of me and—”
“Slow down. One step at a time. Talk me through what’s going on,” I said.
I ripped my laptop out and tossed it onto the kitchen table before I took a seat. I knew I’d have to dig up some sort of information because whenever Liv got flustered, she couldn’t speak.
But the first thing I did was book a plane ticket out to Redding.
“There’s so much. So much, Willow. I-I-I don’t—I don’t know where—”
“Punchline, Liv. You’re better at those. Does this have to do with the case you’re working?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Did you catch someone?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good. That’s good. Have you been threatened because
you caught that person?”
I heard her sniffle as I pulled up the Redding P.D. website. I cracked my knuckles and started logging in, and the damn thing was easy as pie. Took me less than twenty seconds to log into their main system and start poking around in their files.
“Don’t poke around,” Liv said.
“Little too late for that,” I murmured.
“They’re going to kill me, Willow,” she said.
My fingers paused over the keyboard as I stared at files popping up on my computer. Names of men I didn’t recognize. Dean. Maverick. Someone named Colt. I found scanned copies of notes written in Liv’s handwriting.”
“Don’t. Dig,” Liv said.
I puffed air through my lips and closed the tab. I navigated over to my email and started typing out a letter to my boss. He’d been on my ass about never cashing in my vacation days. Said it looked bad on his yearly audits to have an employee that never took vacation. Seemed like an appropriate time to take my vacation anyway.
Barry,
I need my vacation time. Family emergency. All twenty days. See you at the beginning of next month.
-Willow Price
Then, I navigated back over to the airline website I had pulled up earlier.
“You there, Liv?” I asked.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she whispered.
“I do. The first thing you’re going to do is prepare a space for me. My flight for Redding leaves in two hours.”
“No, you can’t come. It’s way too dangerous right now.”
“Tough shit. I’m already packing up my stuff now. I’m flying straight into Redding-Tahoe International. I land at 8:13 PM your time. Someone better be there to get me,” I said.
“Willow, I just—”
“Liv. I know what this feels like. I had a gun shoved in my face, remember?”
The phone call fell silent and I heard Liv sniffle. The sound broke my heart, and I knew that whatever had happened had managed to rattle the strongest woman I knew. A woman I constantly attempted to model myself after.
My blood boiled.
“I just took time off work. The whole month. I’m coming to stay with you and make sure you’re okay. We can figure this out together, and in the meantime, we can catch up on all the girl’s nights we’ve missed,” I said.
“Thank you so much, Willow,” Liv whispered.
“No thanks needed. You came and stayed with me for two months after I found that asshole in my apartment. It’s the very least I can do.”
“It’s not safe here right now. I need to warn you about that. Things are so… so fucked up.”
“Then, have a bottle of wine ready and we’ll talk it out. Like we did when this shit happened to me. Okay?” I asked.
“You said 8:13?” she asked.
“I did, yes.”
“What airline?”
“American Airlines.”
“Okay. I’ll make sure I’m there in baggage claim,” she said.
“I won’t be packing that much shit. You know me. Just meet me out where the taxis always are for airports like that. I’ll find you there,” I said.
“I love you, Willow.”
I stood up and shoved my laptop back into my bag before I turned toward my bedroom door.
“I love you, too, Liv. Keep an eye out. I’ll be there soon,” I said.
Chapter 2
Thor
The wrench clanked along as I sat on the ground. The garage of my house was filled with my workshop; shelving I’d put up myself and metal storage to hold all my tools I’d collected over the years. My bike needed a bit of a tune up. Not to mention, the oil changed in it. I licked my lips and furrowed my brow, focusing on what I was doing. Every couple of years, I took my bike apart as much as I could and cleaned it. Shaped it up. Replaced whatever needed replacing and tuned up the engine well. But today’s project wasn’t my own bike. Oh, no. It was a treasure of a bike I’d found at a junkyard. A piece of scrap metal that had been tossed away without anyone understanding what the hell it was.
A beautiful Honda CB750.
I could tell the original colors were silver, black, and a deep hue of blue. But I would change all that. All black suited me just fine. Possibly with a stripe of yellow to signify who I rode with. But usually, I defaulted to all black, the deepest shade I could find. Black comforted me. Darkness was a friend of mine. I had been born into it. Fought my way out of it. Explored it during my free time and slept in it comfortably with my guns at my side.
Darkness was an escape for me. But, when it didn’t work, my bikes were a close second.
With all the shit going on in the club with the cartel and Dean flying off the fucking handle, I needed any extra time I could get to escape. To clear my mind. To let it fall blank. I knew where the conversation was going the second Duke asked me how I felt about Dean. The two of us had spoken about a week ago. He asked me how I thought Dean was, and I gave him a look before clocking the sounds around me.
I wanted to make sure no one else was around to hear us before I told him I thought our president was losing his damn mind.
The side piece of the bike fell off. It was rusted over but could easily be restored. Well, the rust could at least be removed. I reached for the rust-away and slowly wiped at it. Small circles, like my father had taught me growing up. This was a thing the two of us did together. Hell, it was the only thing we ever did together. My father was a bonafide mute. Deserted by my mother just after she’d had me, he raised me on his own. And shit was rough with a father who couldn’t talk. To this day, I still didn’t like talking if I didn’t have to. To this day, I preferred using sign language over verbal speech. My father did what he could to keep things afloat for us, but that didn’t mean what he did was always legal.
In fact, I found out from a very young age that my father helped make designer drugs to sell on the streets.
That was the only reason why I kept going along with the club’s insane plans to try and rid this area of the cartel. Drugs were not a thing I dabbled with. It ruined my childhood. Ruined my father. Put us in a scope we should have never been in and constantly made my father look over his shoulder. Sure, there was food on the table, but at a great cost. I’d always admire him for doing what he could.
I’d never respect him for choosing the path he did, though.
I picked up the cloth and started to wipe down the bike. Clockwise four times, then counterclockwise four times. It was crazy, the things that stuck with me from my childhood. I frowned deeper as the rust slowly peeled away. I could tell already that the faceplate was damaged beyond repair. Fuck. That meant drives to more scrap yards to try and find one that would fit. The thing about these old motorcycles was that I couldn’t go online and Amazon what I needed.
It would take me potentially two weeks to find another faceplate like this.
Still, I kept cleaning. That was a lesson my father taught me. Never leave anything half-finished, no matter how disappointing the end result might be. The mark of a man was staying true to not only his words, but his actions. If a man started something, he needed to finish it.
The issue?
That principle was what led me to kill my father.
I closed my eyes and sighed. I’d never forget that weekend. That night. Sixteen years old, and not a care in the world. Except, I had every care in the world. I was painfully aware of what my father was doing in our basement. I was painfully aware of what was happening to all my childhood stuffed animals I refused to let him get rid of. I was painfully aware of what his “meetings” consisted of when armed assholes came to my house at two and three in the morning. The problem was that my father had dedicated himself to them. Committed to their cause with his actions and his words. I watched him go from making drugs to selling them. From selling them to distributing them into the hands of sellers. I watched him work his way up a chain of command he had no idea about during my teenage years. All my father knew was that the money kept pouri
ng in.
And then one night, I heard muffled cries coming from our basement.
I crept down the stairs. The muffled cries grew louder. I walked over to the basement door, listening as the cries turned to groans. I heard the clanking of metal. Heard something squirting about. I was a scared sixteen-year-old boy looking for his father because he had no idea what kinds of sounds were reverberating from the dark. I thought my father was being hurt. I ran and grabbed a small pistol he had taught me how to shoot at only twelve years of age. I crept silently down the stairs like he had taught me as a small boy. I kept myself silent. Held my breath. Steadied my aim and pointed the barrel of the gun straight at the man in the chair. A shadowed figure, slicing nicks into a man that was bound and bloodied in front of him.
It wasn’t until I pulled the trigger and called out for my father that I realized what had happened.
The man in the chair hadn’t been my father.
The man doing the torturing had been.
Four swirls clockwise. Four swirls counterclockwise.
I joined the club at eighteen. I dropped out of high school and never looked back. I didn’t talk unless I had to. I trained my six-foot-eight form until I was so stacked with muscle that everyone feared me when they looked at me. I became the darkness that surrounded me. The darkness that swallowed me up. I took my grief, shock, and anger and I turned it into an impenetrable man who knew no boundaries when it came to protecting those that needed it.
Like the man my father had tied to that fucking chair.
The only person that had ever pierced through that darkness was Debra. She was everything of my opposite. Bright. Cheerful. Pale in complexion and always smiling. She was beautiful. A vision in red, whenever she wore it. The smallest little thing anyone had ever seen. She was no more than five-foot-three. One hundred and twenty pounds. I towered over her. Loomed over her in the darkness while her light shined into the world. I dedicated my soul to the club but gave her my heart.
And her breast cancer ripped her away from me three years ago.
She had been the only light shining in my darkness. The only flickering flame that illuminated my world. And burying her took me out of the game for a long time. I took a leave of absence from the club. Stepped down from my position as their main muscle and coordinator of outside clientele. I barricaded myself in my home and threw myself into restoring old bikes. Sold them for some side money. Enough to keep me afloat. It took me so long to recover from that loss. To everyone else, I needed a break. Time to piece my world together after a particularly rough job with the High Rollers.
Thor (The Black Hornets MC Book 5) Page 1
