and my hope didn’t feel so false.
Chapter 24
December
Deck
My brain was fucking much, mush, hush… I started laughing at myself. The euphoria was back again, but before I could really become fully cognizant, I was smacked in the face, hard.
“What the fuck did she give him this time?”
“Don’t know, she’s always going on about how it’s some special brew the doctors cooked up for her so she wouldn’t damage him as much this time.”
My eyes rolled at first, but once they were able to focus, I recognized the face staring angrily back at me. “Is she dead?” I managed to ask.
“No,” was the curt reply.
“That sucks,” I mumbled.
The man laughed at my response instead of hurting me. “You have no idea how much it really does.” He moved away from me and started talking to one of the other men present. It was only then that I registered there were other, real people in the room with us. I thought maybe the voices I heard earlier were just someone on speaker phone. “Get him packed up and ready to go within the hour. We need to be gone before she catches wind that we’re here. I’m not letting her stop his transfer back to his people this time.”
“Back to my people?” I parroted and then fell off as I laughed myself straight to the fucking floor.
“Find out what she gave him so we can have a doctor on standby to fix it!” The demand was shouted at whoever else was left in the room. I had no clue because the world tilted sideways. Maybe I was the one who tilted sideways. The cold floor against my cheek felt good though, so I wasn’t going to question it.
“Come on you fucking lump of useless shit!” A man growled the words at me as I was lifted by two sets of hands and dragged to my feet. I could have sworn I heard the rat-a-tat, ping, pop of gun fire. It almost sounded like music to my ears until someone banged my head into the wall. Then everything faded to a blackish nothing.
Before the lights went completely out though, I could have sworn I heard my brother calling out to me. That was weird because I hadn’t seen Jay since his son Pike was born. “Jay,” his name came out more like garbled nonsense and I’m not sure if he even heard me because the ping of bullets hitting too close to home sounded once more and then I was out.
Chapter 25
Too late
Double-D
We were too fucking late again.
“I swear to you, I saw him going out the back. I called to him but he looked completely out of it. They tossed him into the back of a black sedan and took off out of here like a bat out of hell.”
“Then what are you still doing here?”
“Hard to follow when the only car I had access to back there was blown to shit,” he growls in frustration. “So fucking close! How the hell do we go home to our family, to Ever, and tell them that we just missed getting him back?”
“We don’t. That’s not a fucking option,” I snarled back at him.
He ran both hands through his hair and tugged the shit out of it as he did. “What now?”
I took my cell out and hit one of my top three contacts.
“Keys,” she answered immediately.
“We were about 10 seconds too late,” I admitted.
“Noooo!” She whined into the phone.
“Listen, J-Bird caught sight of them putting into a dark sedan. Gonna put you on with him, get what details you can, and track them.”
“On it,” she answered as I handed my cell over to Jay.
“Look who the fuck was slinking through the basement while we raided the place!”
“You can’t hurt me! Declan will kill you! I’m carrying his baby! He loves me!” The stupid bitch was shouting down the whole place as we all stood there and watched some of our men from our other chapters dragging her ass out.”
They brought her directly to me. “What do you want us to do with her?”
“She’s coming with us,” I informed them.
“Do you know who I am?” She hissed in my face, or as close as she was allowed to get to it.
“I sure as fuck do.” I glared down into her eyes and finally, saw the fear that she had been missing in this situation. “The question is, do you know who I am?”
“W-what? Why would I know who some dirty, old biker is?” I