I had them.
Feelings.
And as my headache slowly started to ease, all I felt was a bone-deep sort of fury that because of whoever had taken me, I might not be able to explore those feelings, get more of them, maybe, possibly, in some fantasy world, know what it might be like to have them reciprocated.
I pulled myself up, sliding halfway behind the door, making myself small, wrapping the blanket around my shoulders.
I figured that someone would come in that door at some point.
And maybe, if I was alert, if I was fast enough, I could grab the door, slam it back into whoever was entering, disorient them.
Then, I guess I had two choices depending on if I heard other voices or not.
I could run.
Or I could attempt to keep my freedom quiet by pulling the person in, and attempting to suffocate them with the blanket, giving me a chance to find a way out of the house without running across others.
Once I was on the street, I could run and scream and hope someone would take pity on me.
I wasn't someone who was certain in their ability to take another human life.
But, I figured, in this sort of situation, if it was me or them, I could do it.
The only problem was, no one came.
Hours passed, long enough for me to reach for the bottle of pills again, taking another two to get rid of the lingering headache.
It was the pills that consumed my mind then.
Why were they there?
How did someone know I would need them?
Even if they did know, why would they care if I had a migraine, if I was sore from being bumped around?
But before I could come to any logical conclusions about it, I finally heard them.
Footsteps.
Coming my way.
Chapter Thirteen
Huck
"Where is she?" I roared, slamming the guy up against the wall, watching the pain slice across his face, feeling a sick sort of satisfaction seeing it there.
I'd felt anger in my life before. I'd even felt twinges of rage. When someone threatened what was mine, hurt my people.
This, though? This was something else entirely. This was an inferno that swallowed me up whole, burning away anything even resembling rational thought.
I'd always been a careful leader. That was why there had never been any question about my role as president, why my men trusted me with their lives. Because I thought shit out. I made sure every move we made bettered us as a club or, at the very least, didn't put us in more danger.
But then Harmon was taken.
And I was flying across town at thirty over the speed limit without a helmet, just daring the cops to pull me down, putting my men at risk of new marks on their rap sheets because they had to keep up with me.
I didn't even try to hide my gun as I hopped off my bike in front of the little ranch house on a corner lot in a rough area of town, charging up the front path before my men could even get off their bikes to follow, and offer backup.
I didn't know what I had been expecting inside. A crowd, maybe, the crew who had shot up our place what felt like a lifetime ago now.
All I found, though, was a guy sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of Fruit Loops while he scrolled through his phone.
"Where the fuck is who, man?" he asked, chin lifting, chest puffing, even though he was at a clear disadvantage with four of us standing there, armed, when his gun was across the room next to the fridge beside the half-empty carton of milk.
"The woman you came into my clubhouse and stole, you fuck," I growled, yanking him back, then slamming him up against the wall again.
"You're going to kill him before you get any answers," McCoy warned as the guy's focus went in and out.
"Why are you standing here, and not tearing this place apart?" I snapped, sparing him the barest of glances, seeing his tight jaw, but too far gone to give a shit whose feelings I was hurting.
We had to find her.
Who the fuck knew what could be happening to her? What she might be going through.
If absolutely nothing else, I knew that after a seizure, she was in pain and miserable.
But I knew a thing or two about the scumbags in the world, the kind of lowlives who would involve innocent women in shit that didn't have anything to do with them. They didn't stick the woman in a spare bedroom and bring them three square meals a day.
They hurt them.
In ways my mind didn't even want to consider.
"I don't know what you're talking about, man," the guy said as I heard two sets of footsteps moving around, going out toward the front of the house, the other moving around back where we were, going into the garage, down into the basement. "There's no fucking girl here," he added.
"There's no signs of her," Che told me a moment later, as I stood there trying to convince myself not to press my hand over this fucker's windpipe, watch him squirm before his life left his body.
I'd never gloried in torture. That wasn't my thing. But I would enjoy watching the man who took Harmon suffer for a while before I put a bullet in his forehead.
"Let me have a conversation with him," Remy suggested, knuckles cracking as he moved in at my side. "You know how much I like people who pick on anything weaker than them," he added.
He wasn't wrong about that. It wasn't long ago that I'd seen him nearly beat a man to death over a bait kitten meant to be used in a dog fighting ring. Right there in the back of a packed nightclub. Remy, unlike me, had a darkness that he didn't wear on his sleeve. But when he had a reason to wear it, it was an evil fucking look on him.
"Yeah, fine, have fun," I snapped, shoving the guy toward him, listening to him scream for a moment as Remy and McCoy dragged him down the stairs.
"If nothing else, Remy can get the names of his friends out of him," Che reasoned. "And we can hit each of their places to find her."
"She should have been fucking safe with us," I snapped, curling my arm back, and punching forward, my fist going through the soft Sheetrock.
"Yeah," he agreed. "She should have been. But we can't fix that now," he reasoned. "All we can do is find her, get her out of there, and make sure she's safe in the future. Even if that means she shouldn't be with us anymore," he added.
"She's not going any-fucking-where," I snapped, flexing my hand. "She's going to stay right where I can keep an eye on her. I'm not letting her out of my sight again."
"Is that the way of it?" Che asked, head dipping to the side a bit, looking me over as I paced the small kitchen, hands opening and closing, jaw tight enough for a muscle to tick there.
"What are you asking me, Che?" I asked, pausing when I heard a muffled scream from the basement, feeling my lips curl up in response. Remy was wasting no time.
"I'm asking if she is just an innocent woman caught up in our wars. Or if she is your woman being used against us," he clarified, not mincing words.
The question stopped me in my tracks.
Because it was the right one to ask.
It was the one I needed to have the correct answer to.
Because it changed shit.
An innocent woman caught in our problems, that required getting her free, getting her safe, taking care of the threat.
It was dispassionate.
Cut and dry.
But touching a woman who belonged to one of us, that was a different thing entirely. We didn't just need to take care of those who hurt her; we needed to make an example of them. We needed to put the fear of God into the hearts of anyone who would even think about touching a woman who was ours.
That said, you had to be sure, didn't you? She had to be yours in a more permanent way. The whole criminal underbelly needed to see her on the street, and know who she belonged to, know she was off-limits, unless they wanted to have their cocks cut off and shoved down their own throats to choke on.
"She's mine," I decided, the words popping out before I even thought them through.
She was mine?
She was in my bed, sure. In my house. In my kitchen. On my arm in public.
That didn't make her mine, though, did it?
No.
But the burning rage inside? The choking sensation in my throat that felt a fuckuva lot like panic? The way my mind kept wandering, racing to conclusions about what could be happening to her right then, how scared she must have been, if she was calling out for me?
Yeah, that shit felt a lot like she was mine.
As did the way I wanted to charge in, grab her, wrap her up, get her home safe, take her to bed, and never let anything ever fucking touch her again.
I wasn't a possessive man.
I didn't ever feel like I wanted to hold onto and protect a woman, or shelter her away from the world.
So the fact that I wanted to do that with Harmon said something, didn't it?
"It was looking that way," Che said carefully. "But it's new, and I didn't want to assume shit."
It was new. But not that new. Since she'd been staying at the clubhouse, kicking around with all of us for a bit now. It all seemed like an equivalent of a month of dating. And by then, didn't most people know if there was something there or not? Otherwise, what the fuck was the point?
I mean, did I know she was Old Lady status? That she'd be wearing my name on her back one day? That there would be rings and kids and all of that?
No.
I mean, who the fuck could predict that kind of thing? Who even knew if I would live long enough to even want to settle down, let alone do it.
But did I think I was closer to wanting those things with Harmon than I ever had been before? Yeah.
And did that mean that she was mine, albeit even in a temporary way? Yes.
So even if she was just temporarily mine, she was mine. That meant heads needed to roll for even thinking about hurting her.
"Maybe we should put some music on," Che said, wincing when the guy in the basement started wailing.
"Yeah, might be a good idea," I agreed, watching as he moved out into the living room, finding the stereo, then turning the music up loud before coming back in. "Did you look through this yet?" he asked, reaching for the phone on the table.
Fuck.
I was off my game.
I needed to focus.
My men shouldn't have been the ones with all the ideas.
"No, check the texts," I demanded, taking a deep breath, hoping it would bring some focus back into my system. "Any mention of her?"
"Nothing here about taking anyone. But there is a mention of seeing you with a 'blue-haired bitch,'" he said, air quoting it. "Here. This is suspicious. He said something to this guy about finding out she's rich. But that's where the conversation ends."
"Even stupid low-level guys are usually smart enough not to talk about concrete plans in a text," I said, shrugging. "From the looks of this place, they could use some cash."
"But why risk taking her? When she's not only connected to a powerful family in the area, but also us? Seems like a lot of risk."
"They're young," I said, shrugging. "Stupid usually comes along with that. Thinking you can do whatever the fuck you want and get away with it unscathed. We were all like that once."
Hell, some of my earliest chopping schemes involved me acting like a valet, actually talking to the marks before I stole their cars.
Che used to drive over a hundred just to prove himself to some nobody locals, refusing to even take the pink slips when he won, just doing it for the glory.
We'd all been that level of stupid.
The only difference was, we were raised with the morals not to hurt women. These days, though, that shit was rare. Everyone was fair game in this world. Women, kids, beloved grandparents. Whatever it took to get you what you wanted.
"Yo, Huck," McCoy interrupted my racing thoughts.
"Yeah, what?"
"We got some addresses. I don't think he has shit else to give us. But... well, you know Remy," he said, looking a little pale.
Yeah, I knew Remy.
Which meant I needed to rein him in a bit before he got too crazy. So far, he'd never come out of one of his rage stupors and regretted what he did. But I didn't want that happening now, being down a man who was struggling with his own inner demons.
"Alright," I agreed, running down the stairs to find the man tied to a chair, blood sprayed fucking everywhere, a goddamn screwdriver sticking out of his stomach.
"Think he's got a little left," Remy said, reaching for a pipe on the floor, that sick, evil little smile pulling at his lips.
It was hard to reconcile this version of Remy with the one I saw cutting up fruit and vegetables for his tortoise every morning, who sat cradling his dog during thunderstorms because she was scared of them, who made a catwalk all around his bedroom for his cats.
"I don't got shit. I told him everything. I told him everything!" the guy cried, trying to rock his chair.
"That's enough," I decided, raising my gun, and putting a bullet between the guy's brows.
"He had more," Remy snapped, tossing the pipe.
"He was done," I told him. "Wipe down anything you touched and meet us upstairs," I demanded, turning, and making my way up myself, finding McCoy and Che already wiping down anything they'd touched—the phone, doorknobs, the stereo.
"What's the neighbor situation?" I asked, looking out the window, not exactly having been observant enough on the way in to have noticed.
"House to the side is boarded up. The one across the street has grass three-feet high," McCoy said. "If anyone is living there, I doubt they are doing it legally right now. It's a shit area. No one is going to be talking about the bikes. They don't want to be involved."
That was one perk to the bad areas. People minded their own business. They knew how things went. You talked, you caught a bullet too. And while we weren't in the business of killing innocent people, they didn't know that, and their fear worked in our favor.
"Wash your hands," I said to Remy as he stepped out of the basement, looking a little less crazed than he had been a couple minutes before. "You're sure you wiped everything?"
"Yeah," he agreed, always being a little quiet when he was coming back to himself.
"Where to?" McCoy asked, holding the list.
"That one," I said, pointing to the address that matched the text conversation Che and I had looked at.
"Are we just going to pick through this list?" McCoy asked.
"If that is how we can get her back, yes," I said, moving out.
The second house was more of a meeting spot than the first one, meaning we had to fight our way in, two cocky guys taking a bullet before we could even talk to them.
"They drew first," McCoy said, as if I had any objection to the fuckers biting it.
"Don't give a shit," I growled, holding onto my own bastard as he tried to kick and bite the arm I had around his neck. "Help Remy get these bastards downstairs and talking," I said, flinging the guy at him, turning to make my way through the house, calling out Harmon's name.
"Prez," Che said, making my head snap over. "There's a detached garage out back," he told me, making me break into a run, barely able to think of anything but Harmon back there, chained up, or huddled in a corner, scared, alone, praying to be rescued.
I was nobody's white knight, but I wanted to be the one to save her, to tell her she was safe, that she was going to be okay, that I would make the bastards who took her pay.
Finding the door locked, I grabbed a rock, breaking the window in the door on the side, and reaching in to turn the lock, feeling the broken glass cut into my hand and arm, the burning sensation making it clear I was bleeding. But all I could think of was finding Harmon as I threw open the door, rushing inside.
My pulse was pounding, my stomach twisted into a painful knot.
"Fuck!" I growled, grabbing the side of a wooden folding table, flipping it - and all its contents—onto the floor.
Goddamn it.
No
thing.
Not a hint that anyone had been inside here, save to tinker with a car.
"We'll find her," Che said, voice calm, as he stepped in behind me, taking in the mess. "You're bleeding everywhere," he told me, a mix of concerned and frustrated. Because I was making shit more complicated by bleeding all over the place, leaving my DNA carelessly around a crime scene. "Here," he said, grabbing a handkerchief off a work table, handing it to me. "Wrap it up. I will deal with the clean-up," he said, shooing me out.
I was just walking back into the house when I heard my phone ring in my front pocket.
I reached for it, finding Seeley's name there.
"We're busy, Seeley," I said in greeting.
"Doing the wrong thing," he told me. "No disrespect," he added, sounding tense.
"Don't give a fuck about formalities right now, Seeley. Trying to find my woman."
"Yeah, that's why I'm calling. I've called a dozen times. You're looking in the wrong place."
"What are you talking about?" I asked, stomach clenching at the idea that we were torturing and killing people who had nothing to do with the drive-by, with taking Harmon. "Arty said these were the guys."
"Who shot me, yeah," Seeley told me. "But not who took Harmon."
"How do you know that?"
"Because we got this person on camera. And they don't match up to any of those guys in that cartel."
"Then who the fuck are they?"
"That's what I'm getting at. He doesn't know yet. Wait," he said when I tried to speak. "He's working on it. You know him. He's on it. But the thing is, he thinks this isn't about us."
"What do you mean it isn't about us? They took her from our clubhouse."
"Yeah, but he thinks that we had two things going on that were unrelated. Well, technically, we only had one thing going on. Harmon had something else."
"Harmon?
What the fuck could she be involved in?"
"Not involved. Stalked," he said, and it felt like my stomach bottomed out.
I mean, stalking was common in general. But add on the fact that she was relatively famous in her circle, that she was hot, that she was accessible to her fans, some of whom I'd seen for myself were fucking inappropriate with her, and, yeah, I could see her having a stalker.
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