Lone Star (Dartmoor Book 7)

by Lauren Gilley

  “I didn’t carry you,” Reese pointed out. He’d only kept an arm around his waist and supported his weight for the slow, careful trip.

  “Ugh.” He closed his eyes and pressed his head back into the pillow, finally wincing. The bandages on his throat looked rumpled – they would need to be changed – but there was no blood leaking through. Yet.

  Reese was shocked, honestly.

  When it became apparent that Ten was secure, and not about to roll off the bed or have a stroke, Reese turned to the dresser and started sorting through his things. He needed some fresh magazines, and he’d take the sawed-off this time, in its sheath, and he was definitely wearing the grease paint.

  Behind him, Tenny croaked, “What are you doing?”

  “Preparing. I’m going with Albie.”

  A pause. “Oh, bollocks, you’re not painting your face. Tell me you aren’t painting your face.”

  Reese dipped two fingers into the grease paint and striped his cheek with it.

  “You’re an idiot.”

  Reese didn’t respond. Finished his face, until he looked properly skull-like, wiped his fingers, collected his guns and magazines. Pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt; he’d worn the long black one, full of holes, its hem tattered from so much use, and so many washings, but with the deep hood that shadowed his entire face. Then he turned.

  “You look ridiculous.”

  “So do you.” He headed for the door. “Don’t get out of bed. You’ll tear your stitches and bleed out.”

  “Fuck you.” But when he was in the hall, and the door was nearly shut, he heard the faintest thread of hoarse laughter.

  Felt his own lips tug in response. Another facial malfunction, this one not unwelcome.

  Forty-Eight

  Candy had been placed in the second row on the van, just behind the locked metal grate intended to keep the drivers and officers up front safe. Through the mesh, and over the top of Cantrell’s head, he had a view through the windshield and of the street ahead. Afternoon was melting into evening, the shadows growing long and slanted across the pavement. Two cruisers rode ahead of them, and doubtless another trailed. Candy wondered, with no small amount of delight, how Michael and Mercy planned to get them out of the convoy and to someplace where they could uncuff them all.

  Colin was still whistling, and though Cantrell’s shoulders looked tight, he hadn’t ordered him to stop yet.

  Candy wanted to poke the bear – a bear most of them outweighed.

  “So he’s your kid, huh?” he asked, tone conversational, but much too loud.

  Fox put on an obnoxious Texas drawl. “That’s what the paperwork says.”

  “Who is whose son?” Victor asked.

  “Cantrell’s been holding out on us,” Candy said. “Our boy Luis is his kid.”

  “Right there on the birth certificate,” Fox said.

  Cantrell twisted around in his seat – which set the muzzle of his shotgun forward, pointed toward the dash. And gave Mercy a clear opportunity, when the time was right to take it. If the way his head turned, wicked little smile visible in profile, was any indication, he’d thought the same thing.

  “That’s enough,” Cantrell said, and maybe he would have sounded stern to someone who wasn’t a Lean Dog. Maybe he left ordinary criminals shaking in their boots. To Candy, he sounded scared and desperate. “Knock it off, all of you.”

  Candy offered him a lazy grin. “Knock it off or what? Your kid’s already trying to cut all our throats. You think you’re scarier than him?”

  A chorus of laughing oohs went up behind him.

  Cantrell’s jaw clenched, and his face reddened – but the whites of his eyes gleamed like a spooked horse’s. He opened his mouth to respond, and Candy spoke over him, growing serious.

  “Look, I don’t care if you hate me. I don’t care if you’ve somehow convinced yourself you’re some kinda upstanding cop despite the fact that your kid is literally terrorizing this city.” He sat forward, and saw the tension shudder down Cantrell’s neck; saw the way he wanted to lean back from him, even though a metal grate separated them. “And right now, I don’t give a shit about that. Or about you, or about this.” He lifted his hands and rattled his cuffs. “That little fucker has my wife. And you know that. You arrested me knowing Michelle’s–” He couldn’t finish the sentence, biting the inside of his cheek hard to keep the possibilities from flooding his mind and rendering him useless.

  He couldn’t think about that now. Couldn’t get lost, couldn’t help her that way.

  He swallowed, and his voice came out low and threatening; Cantrell did lean back this time. “Whatever I am, whatever I’ve done, whatever you think about me for whatever reason – she’s innocent. Are you going to let an innocent, pregnant woman suffer just to get me? Because your son told you to?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Cantrell said, strained.

  “That’s pretty messed up, bro,” Mercy said.

  Cantrell started to turn toward him, but Mercy brought the baton up in a swift, brutal arc and clipped him in the temple with it. Cantrell went boneless and flopped down into the seat – and then onto the floor of the van. Mercy watched it all with something like warm amusement, and didn’t attempt to catch him or slow his fall. His head thumped dully off the rubberized floor.

  Mercy stood and stepped over him, grinning, key ring jangling as he pulled it off his belt and moved to unlock the gate.

  “Having a good time?” Candy asked, mildly.

  “Oh, yeah.” The gate opened with a squeal and Mercy picked out a different key that he used to open Candy’s cuffs.

  “I like the hat.” The whole moment felt surreal. Candy half-wondered if he’d been hit on the head and this was a hallucination.

  But, no, Mercy was moving down the aisle, turning everyone loose.

  “Me, too,” he said, reaching up to scratch at his hair beneath the brim of the ill-fitting cap. “Don’t think Ava would, though. My girl: she likes the hair.”

  Chuckles all around.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, big guy,” Fox said, as he was being freed, “but infiltration and subterfuge aren’t exactly in your wheelhouse.”

  “He means you’re big and stupid-looking,” Colin chimed in.

  Mercy shot his half-brother the bird. “Walsh may or may not have installed a scanner in his truck. And there may or may not be two cops tied up behind a Seven-Eleven.”

  Candy snorted, and stood, hands braced on the seat backs around him. “Okay, geniuses. How are we getting out of this convoy?”

  Mercy turned to face the front, fingers lacing through the grate. “Mikey?” he prompted, expectantly, grinning again.

  They were approaching an intersection. Michael reached for the radio on the dash and brought the receiver to his mouth, thumbed the switch. His voice was appropriately bored and flat when he said, “We gotta stop for gas.”

  A crackle of static, and then an officer from one of the other cars said, “What? You didn’t gas up before?”

  “Sorry.”

  Mercy glanced over and waggled his eyebrows. “Y’all ready?”

  The van slowed, and turned right. The two cars ahead kept going, but a quick check proved the one behind followed.

  Just two officers to deal with, then.

  Mercy took a spare pair of cuffs off a seat and squatted down to secure Cantrell’s unconscious form.

  “They’re gonna have your photo up in every precinct in Texas,” Candy said, chuckling, cracking his knuckles.

  Mercy shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  ~*~

  Eden grabbed an extra magazine off the dresser in the dorm she’d been sharing with Fox, slipped it down into her boot and then sprinted back down the hall and through the common room. Threw up a hand in passing at Jenny’s question, grabbed her helmet off the peg in the foyer, and pelted out the door.

  Albie was just climbing onto his bike beside Reese, Walsh, and the uninjured twin – she couldn’
t keep them straight and didn’t care to try.

  “Wait! I’m coming with you.”

  Albie gave her only a fleeting, dismissive glance as he buckled on his helmet and slipped on his shades. “No.”

  “There’s only the four of you,” she said, aiming for reasonable. “You need all the guns you can get.”

  He lifted his head, and she could tell by the set of his jaw that he was glaring at her through his mirror lenses. “What part of ‘no’ didn’t you understand? Go inside. Help Jenny.” Savagely, lip curling: “Bitches ride bitch; they don’t go out on jobs.”

  The obvious grief and panic in his voice softened the sting of the words, but she glimpsed Walsh’s brows go up, and felt her own do the same.

  Before she registered doing it, she’d closed the distance between them, and had a finger aimed at his face. “That’s beneath you, Albert Cross,” she hissed. “You’re not a sexist fucking pig, so don’t start acting like one just because you’re scared. We’re all scared.”

  He stared at her through his glasses, unmoving save the flaring of his nostrils as he inhaled.

  “Walsh,” she said, appealing to the more reasonable of the two of them. “I’m armed, I’m trained–”

  “You’re bloody stupid,” Albie interrupted. “I’ve already gotten my old lady and my niece taken off to be murdered,” he spat, gesturing violently toward the tire tracks in the yard. “But oh no, that’s not enough. Let me tell Fox I got his old lady murdered, too!”

  She recoiled a fraction. What kind of answer could she give to that? She had no way of soothing or comforting him now. Though she couldn’t see his eyes, she could envision the look in them, the emotions turning that Devin Green blue hard and cold, and ready to crack.

  She glanced toward Walsh again. He wasn’t spitting and hissing like Albie, but he was hurting, too; she knew these brothers well enough to read the stress lines at the corners of his eyes, the tension in his mouth. “Let me come,” she pleaded. “I can help. I want to help.”

  He stared at her a moment – long enough that Albie huffed in annoyance, muttered let’s go and cranked his bike. Then Walsh gave a fast jerk of his head in acquiescence.

  Eden had her helmet snapped into place before she slid onto the bump seat behind him. The rumble of the Harley coming to life beneath her was familiar, but Walsh’s waist was not as she wrapped her arms around him and held tight.

  She sent a fleeting prayer across the distance that separated them for Fox to hurry up and get himself un-arrested. Whatever awaited them at the end of this ride, she feared it would require Fox’s expertise more than anyone’s.

  Forty-Nine

  The steady throb of pain at the back of her skull woke Michelle. Her head weighed heavy on her neck, a sensation that dragged at her, left her feeling like she was falling. She had no sense of her limbs, only of her head, and the terrible pain, drumbeats in time with her pulse.

  It was a long moment before she could crack her eyes open, and even that hurt, eyes tender and bruised-feeling. Concussion, she thought, dimly, her first coherent realization.

  The next was don’t panic. That wasn’t her way, wasn’t how she’d been raised and trained; panic drowned out thought, and thought was the key to staying alive in situations like these.

  A few blinks, and her vision had cleared enough to reveal her surroundings – or some of them.

  They weren’t what she’d expected. She glimpsed a bit of blue-painted wall, and a pair of sturdy wood-and-leather chairs set at angles across from one another, a table between them: a seating area set in a bay window, sheer drapes letting in diffuse light.

  She wet dry lips and tried to move.

  Pressure at wrists and ankles. She was flat on her back, her head turned toward the window, and she could roll it, look up at smooth, clean white ceiling, but she couldn’t move her arms or legs. Tied, then. Hand and foot. Spread-eagle like all the victims.

  Like a star.

  She let out a long, slow breath. Not panicking, not panicking.

  The surface beneath her felt soft, and supportive. A bed, then, and not a hard table like Benny had described.

  She wet her lips again, for all the good it did; her mouth felt full of sand. “Axelle?” she croaked.

  Silence a long beat. Long enough that Michelle thought–

  But then: “I’m here.”

  Thank God. They were together. If Michelle could orchestrate an escape – Ha! You’re tied up, stupid – she wouldn’t have to go hunting for the other girl.

  “Are you okay?”

  Another hesitation. Axelle’s voice came out very flat, save for a hitch at the end, like she was trying hard not to give in to fear. “I can’t move.”

  “Me neither.” Michelle rolled her head the other way – the heaviness turned that simple movement into an effort, left the room spinning.

  She was in fact on a bed, and there was a second one next to hers: clean white sheets and even a pillow, Axelle star-fished out just as she was, secured to the bed posts with cuffs on her wrists and ankles.

  Axelle turned her head, so they faced one another; her eyes gleamed like blue glass in the wash of pale evening light. She looked frightened, but not, Michelle noted with approval, panicked.

  “I don’t know. A house, think.” Beyond Axelle’s bed lay another stretch of wall, this one adorned with a watercolor print, a pastoral scene in soft colors. Under it sat a dresser, the same heavy wood as the chairs, and a small, flat-screen TV. The room didn’t look lived-in, but the furnishings were too fine for a hotel. “Have you got a bump on your head?”

  Axelle shifted again and winced. “I figure that’s why it hurts so bad.”

  “Yeah.”

  Being taken was a blur. She remembered an explosion; a crash of sound, and things flying, shouts, and a roar like a train. Remembered being thrown to the floor – throwing herself to the floor. After Benny… But there had been another noise, after the gunshot. It hadn’t been a bomb; she’d heard too many of those in her life to mistake them for anything else.

  She closed her eyes, struggling to remember. “I think…I think someone drove through the wall of the clubhouse.”

  “Shit. I thought I dreamed that.”

  “We both did, then.”

  Michelle took a deep breath, but could smell only laundry detergent, and, faintly, her own dried sweat. She heard the twitter of birdsong somewhere beyond the window, and the low hum of a house with working lights and HVAC and appliances plugged in.

  Axelle swallowed audibly. “We’re tied up like–”

  “I know.”

  “Do you think they’re gonna kill us?”

  Michelle’s next breath shivered in her lungs, and she fought to keep her voice level. “Maybe. But we’re more valuable as hostages to ransom.”

  “Guess it depends on whether they mind pissing the guys off.”

  “Yeah,” Michelle agreed. Pissed off was far too delicate, but it was easier to think of. She didn’t want to envision Candy; didn’t want to picture the ugliness of his grief. He’d gone forty-five years without a mate, it was still such a fresh thing for him…but it would cut him. Cut him wide open and unleash the kind of fury she didn’t want to imagine.

  A wave of nausea moved through her, and she swallowed against it. She couldn’t think about her body, about the baby; couldn’t think about anything but getting away.

  What would Fox do? That would have to be her mantra; her guiding light.

  She tested her bonds, rotating her wrists and feeling the dull bite of metal. These weren’t police handcuffs, but solid manacles secured with screws. They weren’t locked – if she had one hand free, she could have worked the wingnuts off and gotten loose. But with both hands bound like this, she might as well have been secured with a combination lock.

  She let out a breath and willed her muscles to relax. She could feel the first phantom warnings of a cramp in her back, strain in her upper arms. Fighting it would only heighten the pain.

&n
bsp; “Do you hear that?” Axelle asked.

  Michelle listened, and detected the sound of approaching footfalls: hard-soled shoes on a hardwood floor. “Someone’s coming.”

  “Shit,” Axelle swore. Her chains rattled as she tried to surge against them. “Shit, shit…”

  “Don’t struggle,” Michelle said, as the footfalls drew closer, closer.

  The footsteps halted, and then she could hear their breathing, quick and open-mouthed from fear, out of sync with her galloping pulse, and the distinctive clicks of a key entering a lock and working the tumblers.

  The door opened, and Michelle pressed her head back on the pillow, refusing to crane and search. She didn’t want to look fearful. Didn’t want to show curiosity or desperation. Fox would lay here like he was having a nap, totally unbothered until he had the chance to strike.

  The footfalls again; expensive shoes, she decided, with hard leather soles and slight heels. A light step, rather than the heavy tread of a booted thug. A figure stepped into view – and it took every ounce of willpower not to gasp.

  He’d been described to her, and it was a simple image: a man in a dark robe with a deep hood. A staple of plenty of fantasy movies. A wizard, a Ring Wraith. In a way, given the way they were laid out, she’d expected him.

  But the sight of the Holy Father coming to stand between the beds cut to the bone, a razor-sharp fear that took her breath and rendered her momentarily stupid.

  The robe was dark brown, shapeless, full of folds, and tattered at the edges, where the rough weave of the fabric was fraying. The hood was cowled, and deep as promised, throwing a dark shadow over all but the tip of a pale nose. Manicured hands waited at the ends of the sleeves, folded together across the figure’s middle. He halted, and the hood turned one way, and then the other. Michelle thought she saw the glitter of dark eyes.

  Should she speak? She had no idea what to say. Without a glimpse of his face, she couldn’t read how to play this – and he seemed supernatural, besides. Not a man, but a monster from a child’s nightmare. An urban legend in the flesh.