Knuckles (Dragon Riders MC #4) - Savannah Rylan Page 0,21

of me with a quizzical look on her face.

“You okay?” she asked.

I reached for my drink. “Just tired.”

“Of the running?”

I paused. “What?”

She nodded to my arms. “Got a lot of small cuts and scrapes for someone that was riding in a car all this time.”

I kept sipping my drink to keep myself from replying. The less this girl knew, the better. And I needed her to hire me.

I mean just a few days’ worth of wages would get me a bus ticket back to…

To…

Why can’t I remember!?

Then, Dani broke the silence. “All right. If you don’t wanna talk about it, I won’t press it. But you’re in luck.”

My ears perked up. “Why’s that?”

She smiled. “Because here in Cherry Branch? We make a business of second chances.”

I had no idea what that meant, but I knew it would play in my favor.

“Whatever kind of work you’ve got—washing dishes, another waitress, a food runner—I can do it.”

She nodded. “Of that, I have no doubt. You eaten lately?”

My stomach growled. “Not recently, no.”

She patted the table. “It’s my lunch hour anyway. I’m gonna go have Pete whip us up some gumbo. His specialty. Then, we can talk about this job I have for you.”

And as I watched Dani get up and walk her ass into the kitchen, I felt hopeful for the first time since I first laid eyes on JayJay back at his place.

His place in…

In…

It’ll come with time.

Or so I hoped.

9

Knuckles

Two hundred miles this way. Four hundred miles that way. Four exit ramps. Two hundred and twelve tread marks.

Days. It had been days since I’d started my journey to find Simone. It started with me showing pictures of Skeleton and ended with me dredging up a long-lost picture of myself and her when we were teenagers. I couldn't believe I actually found a picture of her buried deep in my emails and digital files I kept tethered to my phone. But I did, and I kept showing it around to people.

Especially people on the four exits where I found tread marks.

I followed that fucking car and its marks for hours outside of where we actually were. And when the tire marks pulled me into a rest stop, I practically tore that place apart. I made so many people uncomfortable that the police were called, and I had to explain to them that I was looking for my foster sister. She was missing, and I had to find her.

Of course, the police “did what they could.” Which was to say, they put out some warning about her attached to a picture that looked nothing like her now.

Which meant I’d gotten nowhere in the past week.

It made no sense. The tire tread marks kept circling around this one stretch of the highway just outside a place called Cherry Blossom. Or Branch. Or Charter Blossom? I didn’t know, some idiotic small town that didn’t mean shit to me right now. There were four exits off the highway where those same fucking tire treads were found, as if the driver didn’t know how to take a damn turn without putting everyone’s life in danger. But the more I looked, the more frustrated I grew. I combed that rest stop at least four different times. I walked around in the woods and hit up every fast food restaurant on the four exits I knew those assholes had used.

And I came up with absolutely nothing.

“Come on!” I roared.

I stepped on the gas and tore up the highway. Maybe there was an exit they had taken that hadn’t left those dreaded tire marks. It was worth a shot at this point. Because with Simone being gone well over a week, I knew that increased the chances that Skeleton had sold her off to the highest bidder.

Or killed her just to spite me.

“God help your soul if you’ve laid a finger on her,” I growled.

I sped off the exit and found a slew of hotels. So, I started with them. I showed Simone’s picture of when she was a teenager but described her as I knew her now: tall, long-legged, wearing a pair of cream-colored heels and a dress of some sort. I knew she was wearing that outfit because it was the only outfit missing from the ones she stripped out of our first night in that motel. Plus, with those ocean-colored doe eyes of hers, surely someone had seen her.

Yet, all I continued to get were head shakes and “sorry, man’s”.

Hope drained from my veins.

I wasn’t going