“Let me go, Lo.” It’s both a warning and a plea I give to my brother.
I see Adam move closer in my peripheral vision. Fine, I’ll take them both on.
“No.”
I shove him, and this time he does go back on a foot and he releases me.
Wade’s not stupid. He’s a clever guy, and he’s putting the pieces of this puzzle together fast. “Is there something going on with you and Piper?” he demands in a low growl.
Ah, shit. Here we go.
“We don’t have time for this,” I say, and we don’t.
Piper is taller than Cami, standing at around maybe five-eight or five-nine, but she’s small-framed despite her height. She’s also slender—mainly because she eats like a fucking sparrow (something I think her bitch of a mother instilled in her). She wouldn’t have stood a chance against the scum who attacked her. Thinking of her face bruised and bloodied like Cami’s makes my entire body lock solid.
“Your sister is in trouble, Wade. I’m going to Manchester to get her back. You can come with me or you can stay here. Up to you, brother.”
For a moment, Piper’s face floats across my memory. She inherited her brother’s dark hair, which she wears scraped into a top knot when she’s feeling more casual, more relaxed. Piper’s a beautiful woman, although she’ll never believe it, but she isn’t a fighter—not physically. I just hope she can mentally survive whatever is happening to her.
I start to move past him, but a meaty hand grabs my bicep, stopping me in my tracks. Shit. I move back out of his grip, and put a little distance between us.
“You didn’t answer my question, Jem.” Wade’s voice is dangerous. “Is something going on with you and Piper?”
The air crackles with tension and I feel Logan shift behind me, preparing for whatever is about to happen. I lick my lips, my mouth feeling a little dry. This is not how I intended to tell Wade I’m with his sister, but fuck it, she’s mine and I won’t deny it any longer.
“Yeah,” I admit and wait for the inevitable fall out.
The brother has made no secret of the fact he doesn’t want anyone touching his sister. The fact I’ve gone there with her isn’t going to please him. He’s not going to care that I love her, that this isn’t a fling for me.
Wade’s eye twitches as my words settle into his brain. I steel for his reaction, watching as he squares his jaw.
“How long?” he grinds out.
I don’t want to admit it, and it leaves a bad taste as I say, “Months.”
I see the punch coming, but I don’t move to avoid it. I take it. I deserve it. Wade’s fist catches me square in the jaw and I would go down, but Logan catches me, his thick arms wrapping around my back.
I grit my teeth against the pain and shake my head. This is not helping my hangover.
“You done?” I demand, rubbing my burning face.
Shit, that hurt.
Wade glares at me, his chest heaving, his mouth a tight line. “Fuck no, but we don’t have time for me to beat you to a pulp, you backstabbing cunt. Piper’s in trouble.” He turns to the Manchester Devils. “This went down in your patch. You think you can help us?”
Axel and Foz exchange looks. “Let us talk to Dax, but yeah, bro, whatever you need.”
Dax is their president, and was here for the wedding last night. He’s also a friend of the Club. I can’t see him having an issue, but I don’t give a shit if he does. I’m going to Manchester and I’ll scorch through his territory to get Piper back with or without his blessing. Hell, I’m going with or without Derek’s blessing as well. From the fire Wade’s spitting, he might just feel the same.
Cami comes off the bench and fists her hands in my kutte. “You bring her home, Jem.”
“I’m going to,” I promise her.
“I mean it, you bring her home. She’s my best friend, and she needs to be okay. So you bring her home.” She bats her hands against my chest before she seizes my shirt again.
I prise Cami’s fingers off me. I’m not sure if she’s trembling or I am. I’ve been through a lot of crap in my life, but I’ve never felt dread like this before. Knowing Piper is in danger terrifies me.
I cup the side of Cami’s neck, the only part of her head that isn’t bruised, and say gently, “Sweetheart, you don’t have to worry. I’m not coming back here without her.”
And I mean that. There is no scenario that ends without Piper coming back here with me. I’ll die before that happens.
God, she better be okay.
Ice settles in my gut and claws dig into my heart. Bike. I need to be on my bike. I need to get to Manchester and find Piper now. She has to be okay because if she’s not, I’m going to tear the city apart.
Whoever took her is going to die slowly and painfully. For every bruise they inflicted on Cami and Piper, I’m going to do ten times worse to them before I eviscerate them. There will be no mercy for these fuckers. They took my woman forcefully from a place she should have always felt safe. They took Lost Saxons property. They’re going to die. Horrifically.
I give Wade a look as I pass him. “I’m sorry, brother. I never meant to lie to you, but I love your sister, and I’m going to fucking get her back. You want to come with me, then by all means, come. You want to beat the shit out of me for lying to you, fine. But you wait until Piper’s back here and she’s safe to do it. I need to be focused on her and nothing else.”
Wade stares at me a beat and I can see the conflict playing across his face for a split second before he nods.
“Let’s go get her.”
Chapter Two
Piper
Five months earlier…
‘Welcome to Kingsley…’
The sign at the edge of the road mocks me as the car rushes past it in a blur of motion. Nothing about this trip is welcome. I can think of a thousand places I would rather be.
I try to focus on the landscape beyond the windscreen, but my eyes lock on the wipers as they frantically swipe back and forth over the glass, trying to clear the stream of rain battering the vehicle. Since we left Manchester, it’s been a nonstop deluge that hasn’t let up at all—a fortuitous omen perhaps, one that suggests I should have stayed home. It’s too late to turn back now, even if I could. I’m miles from home in a car with a man I met just over an hour ago, a man who could very well slit my throat and dump me in the nearest ditch where even the most vigilant police officer would not find me. I doubt the local bobbies in Kingsley are crack detectives, capable of solving major crimes, however. If they were, they wouldn’t have a motorcycle gang operating on their doorstep.
And that is who picked me up almost an hour and a half ago—a member of a motorcycle gang.
Not just any gang, but the Lost Saxons Motorcycle Club—a Club that just under three years ago took my half-brother from me and brainwashed him into joining their little biker cult. From the sounds of it, I’m about to lose him again because of them. This time perhaps permanently. I have no idea what’s happened to him, only that he’s in the hospital and that it’s serious—life and death serious.
The thought sends a chill racing up my spine. Josh and I haven’t been close for a long time. We’ve never really been close, in fact, but knowing he could die is the only reason I’m sitting in this car right now with a total stranger, driving a fifty mile trip to the back-end of Yorkshire to see a brother I haven’t spoken to in years—a brother who ditched me for Harleys and drug running and God knows what else.
Cautiously, and without drawing attention, I slide my eyes to the side and sneak a peek at my chauffeur. Charlie—that’s the name he gave me when he turned up on my doorstep. He hasn’t done anything dangerous or concerning since I got in the car with him. He’s been perfectly gracious, if not a little annoying, but I don’t doubt he’s capable of violence, even though he’s just sitting there, his hand lazily resting against the steering wheel, the other on the gear stick. I probably should have thought through my decision to get into his car, not that I had much ch
oice. I was more or less bullied into being picked up.
At the time, I was too muddled by the call to argue and Cami, my best friend since birth (and my roommate), didn’t think anything was wrong with me jumping into a vehicle with a near-perfect stranger—one who probably maims drug dealers and steals from grannies in his spare time.
I should have put my foot down.
I should have refused to go anywhere with Charlie, who turned up on my doorstep wearing jeans, a pair of battered boots, and a T-shirt saying ‘Motorcycles are not all I ride’.
He’s not exactly hard on the eyes, but looks are not the pertinent issue here. He’s a criminal, and I’ve never been in trouble in my entire life. Even at school, I was a straight-A student. This man looks like he teaches mayhem, and I say ‘man’ in the loosest sense of the word. He looks barely old enough to be behind the wheel.
I’m not an expert on ages, but I guess he’s younger than me by at least five or six years, which puts him barely out of his teens at twenty—twenty-one at a push. He has sandy, shaggy-hair that falls into his eyes, and light blue eyes that have been appraising me the entire journey, although he’s barely said two words to me. If it wasn’t for the ink covering his skin, I’d find him attractive, but I’m not into the punk-rock look—or whatever the heck this is he’s projecting. I like my men suited and booted, and less… well, grungy. I’m certainly not a fan of the dirty leather vest he’s wearing, proclaiming him a ‘Prospect’, and I’m not keen on his ties to the Lost Saxons Motorcycle Club either—a club that all but stole my brother from me.
This thought has my jaw clenching, and I turn my attention back out of the side window, watching the high-rises form as the car navigates through the busy town. Kingsley is nothing like Manchester. My hometown is a bustling metropolitan, filled with eclectic architecture and brimming with culture. Where the old and the new meets it gives the city an interesting vibe that is sadly lacking here. Kingsley is washed out, a graveyard filled with throwbacks to the nineteen-seventies and hints of its once industrious history as a colliery town. Even without the rain, it would be a bleak place.
“I didn’t know Wade had a sister,” Charlie says, finally breaking through the silence. I jolt at his voice and twist in my seat, taking a moment to collect myself.
“I don’t imagine he talks about me much.”
I doubt he talks about me at all. We haven’t set eyes on each other in close to three years, and we didn’t exactly part on the best terms.
Charlie brushes a hand through his hair. He could pass for a boy band member, if he wasn’t dripping with tattoos and chains.
“Wade doesn’t talk much full stop.” His lips kick up at the corners. “I’m sensing that’s a family trait.”
I want to roll my eyes at him, but a healthy dose of self-preservation keeps me from doing so. I still don’t know this man and what he’s capable of. I also don’t know enough about my brother to contradict or agree with what he’s saying.
When I first met Josh, when he was in jail, he was surly, angry—not at me, but at his situation, at his father, our father. He had no problem talking to me, though. Not that I recall anyway. He’d said plenty to me, not all of it positive.
“You call him Wade,” I say quietly. Wade is our father’s surname. “I noticed your friend, Weed, did that on the telephone, too.”
I don’t add how stupid I think his name is.
Weed.
He’s the man who called me out of the blue to tell me my half-brother is in the hospital and that I needed to come to Kingsley immediately. He told me Josh might not make it and that the prognosis didn’t look good, although he didn’t say it exactly like that. He used many more F-bombs. What did I expect from a man called ‘Weed’? What kind of name is that anyway for an adult man? I was surprised when Charlie didn’t introduce himself as Grenade or Tank, or something equally ridiculous.
“I’ve only been with the Club four months or so, but he’s been Wade for as long as I’ve been here. I’ve never heard anyone but you, and now the doctors, call him by his first name before.”
This reminder of his situation makes a lump gather in my throat and I have to swallow hard.
“Do you know what happened? Weed didn’t really say much.”
Charlie’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel, but he says, “Above my pay grade, Piper. They don’t tell prospects anything other than what they want us to know.”
“Right.” I rub my hands together, trying to ward off some of the chill suddenly seeping into my bones as I imagine all kinds of scenarios that could have led to my brother getting shot. A question flits across my mind, a question I’m not sure I want to know the answer to, but it escapes my mouth before I can stop it. “Do you know if Josh is alive?”
He shifts in the seat, his hand rubbing at his neck. “As far as I know, he is.”
How vague.
“He was shot, right? Weed told me that much.”
“In the abdomen. Sorry, darlin’. That’s as much as I know.”
And he does sound sincere.
Shot in the abdomen.
How does that happen in Yorkshire? It doesn’t. Not to normal people anyway. Joe public doesn’t get shot in the bloody gut and need lifesaving surgery. Nobody does outside of the police or the army.
Unless you’re in a motorcycle gang…
I push that thought down. The last thing I need to do is lose my head with one of its members, even if he’s just a novice. The anger I’ve buried for all these years that the Lost Saxons took my brother from me isn’t as deeply buried as I believed and one wrong word has the potential to reignite the embers, so I bite my tongue and remember the manners instilled in me by my mother and stepfather, Grant.
“Why didn’t they call me as soon as it happened?”
He lets out a long breath, and I sigh.
“Let me guess… above your pay grade?” I’m unable to keep the bite of sarcasm out of my tone.
He snorts. “Something like that.” After a moment, he says, “There was some shit going down. They didn’t want to put you in the middle of that, I expect, and then they couldn’t find your number to get you here.”
I don’t even want to know what ‘shit’ was going down. I close my eyes and take a steadying breath. I should be annoyed they waited to bring me here, but how can I be? Charlie didn’t even know Josh had a sister. I’m lucky any of Josh’s friends knew I existed, even more so that they managed to find a contact number for me. How can I be pissed off for a situation I caused?
Besides, what could I have done if I’d been here when it first occurred? Weed told me on the phone Josh was in surgery for hours and the drugs he’s on have kept him unconscious since.
I tamp down my irritability to ask, “How far to the hospital now?”
“About another ten minutes. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more about Wade.”
Since there is no point getting annoyed at this guy, I force a smile and say, “I’m sure the doctors will be able to update me when we arrive.”
I doubt this. As his sister, I may be able to get information from the medical staff about his condition, but I’ve been out of Josh’s life for a long time now. I don’t know if he has a partner who takes precedent.
“Is… is Josh married?”
Charlie shakes his head. “No.”
“Dating?”
“Single, as far as I know.” Charlie’s smile is a little wry as he splits his gaze between me and the road. “The brothers don’t exactly put out bulletins every time they hook up.”
I don’t even want to consider how promiscuous these men are. I can imagine the debauchery that happens at their little clubhouse. I’ve seen the television shows and read enough books to be aware of what goes on behind closed doors in these clubs. I have no doubt the Lost Saxons is no different.
“Right.”
Silence falls over the car again, and I pull my phone out of my handbag, just for something to occupy myself; I’m not sure talking to Cha
rlie is helping my mental wellbeing.
A text message is waiting for me. It’s from Cami, who I am seriously considering killing when I get back home to our very beautiful and safe loft apartment.
CAMI: Are you okay?
ME: I’m surviving.
CAMI: Oh, thank God you replied. I was getting worried they might have dumped your body in the Atlantic.
I half-smile at her message. It’s dramatic, but not exactly outside the realm of possibility, given who these men are.
ME: I doubt I’d be responding to you from the depths of the ocean, Cam. And considering you practically shoved me out the door with the strange biker who showed up, I hold you responsible for whatever happens to me.
CAMI: I’m not responsible for anything, not even myself. Are you all right, though?
ME: We just drove into Kingsley, so I’ll let you know once I’ve seen Josh.
CAMI: Whatever happens, I’m here for you, P. I should have come with you.
ME: I can handle myself.
CAMI: I know you can. You can handle anything.
This is not remotely true, but I love her unshakable faith in me. There are plenty of things I can’t handle.
CAMI: I still should have tagged along.
ME: You’d be bored to tears. I suspect there’s going to be a lot of waiting around. The biker who picked me up said Josh was still being treated.
CAMI: Keep me posted, darling. If you need me, call. I’ll be with you in a flash.
I tuck my phone away and resume my vigil out the window. I want to ask Charlie more questions about my brother, about what he’s like now, if he resembles the man I knew when he left jail, but the words stick in my throat, and by the time my courage appears he’s guiding the car into what is clearly the hospital complex.
Kingsley General looks like any hospital grounds in any town I’ve ever seen. It’s a squat series of buildings spanning across a large area with parking sections around the main building. It appears to have been constructed at least fifty years ago and could do with modernising.
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