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