Chapter Eleven
Grayson
“ A re you doing alright?” I ask Lex as the guys and I step into the kitchen where she sits at the counter with Presley and Jayce.
“I’m good. Presley let me spend the day with her since I wasn’t sure what to do.” She chuckles nervously.
“Like I said, just make yourself at home. Everyone will be welcoming,” Pres tells her with a warm smile.
“Did anyone have plans for cooking dinner tonight?” I ask Presley, noticing out of the corner of my eye how Ryker is intently focused on his phone, his brows dipped in frustration.
“I don’t think so. You want to cook?”
“Yeah. I haven’t in a while and feel like I need something different to do.”
“You can cook?” Lex asks, raising a brow.
I shrug. “I try.”
Presley scoffs. “He can cook. He did well on his own, and then I started helping him. Just don’t ask these two for help, or you’ll run into trouble,” she says, gesturing to Cade and Ryker.
Cade rolls his eyes, but Ry doesn’t make any snide remarks, and it doesn’t go unnoticed.
“Ryker, you good?” Cade grumbles.
“Harley and Rage are still gone.” I go to cut him off and tell him to stop obsessing, but he beats me to it. “I know, I know, let them be, they are bonding, but they were on their way back the last time I checked the trackers on their phones. They should’ve been back thirty minutes ago, and now, the trackers aren’t loading.”
“Let me see.” He hands me his phone, and I check over the system we use for phone trackers. As much as Ryker insisted on tracking our bodies after Cade and Harley were taken, Nerds and I have to do more research on it. It has just kind of been shoved to the back of our plates, so we settled for phone tracking until we can figure it out.
I reboot the system on his phone, and when it still doesn’t load it up, a bad feeling settles in my gut. I walk out without a word, heading back to the tech room.
I faintly hear Lex asking if everything is okay, then Presley responding to her.
“What’s wrong with it, Gray?” Ryker asks as he and Cade trail behind me as I walk into the tech room.
“I don’t know. Let me bring it up on my computer.” Once I get the system up, I am able to check their last location. It was about an hour and half from here, and when I look at the history, Ryker is right. They should’ve been back by now. “Taking a risk that this is just a malfunction would be stupid of us. We should find Sugar.”
Cade leaves the room, and not even three minutes later, he comes back with Sugar, Axe, and Stone in tow.
“What’s happenin’?” Sugar asks.
“We don’t know. Ryker was stalking Harley and Rage, but their trackers stopped working, and based on when they left, they should have been home already,” I say.
“Let’s go find them,” Ryker says, a slight edge to his voice.
Luckily, Sugar doesn’t even question it. “Ryker, Cade, go find Noah and take the truck. The rest of us, mount up. Grayson, send Axe the location.”
I nod and plan to say something to Ryker, but he is already flying out the door. Nibbling on my lower lip, I run a hand through my hair as Cade looks from the doorway to me. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
I nod, and he takes his leave while I sit back down to see what I can do from here.
Ryker
“You need to relax. No matter what the reasoning is, losing your shit will not help anyone,” Noah tells me from the driver’s seat of his truck.
Fuck off. I want to tell him but don’t. I know where he’s coming from, but nothing except laying my eyes on Harley is going to fix me right now. We’ve been through this once before, and she was taken right in front of me. I will not do this again. I will not hold it together again. I will tear the fucking world apart to make sure she is okay.
The bikes pull off to a random gas station on the side of the road, so Noah follows, and I jump out before the truck even comes to a complete stop. My heart pounds in my chest as I approach the two empty bikes sitting at the pump.
Everyone separates, but they don’t find anything. My blood feels like it’s on fire as my own skin becomes uncomfortable.
Just black out. Just fade out and destroy everything until you find them. Shaking the thoughts away, I head up to the small gas station, Axe looking in the windows. “Is it locked?”
He nods. “I don’t even see anyone inside, and I knocked a few times.”
Walking straight up to the shitty little glass door, I pull my gun from the back of my jeans and fire three times, completely shattering the door.
“Fucking hell, Ryker.” Axe says, not having expected it.
Ignoring him, I kick the pieces of glass away and step through the doorway, glancing around.
Axe and some of the others come up behind me. “Was that really necessary?” someone grumbles.
“Body,” I announce as I come across a young man with a gunshot wound right between his eyes laying behind the counter.
“Fuck. Call Nerds and Grayson,” Sugar tells someone.
“Get Parker here with the trailer so we can grab their bikes. We need to set fire to this place and get the fuck out of here. We aren’t in Jacksonville, so we don’t have any law enforcement on our side.”
“What the fuck are we going to do about Rage and Harley? Where the fuck are they?” I question, spinning around to glare at Sugar.
“We will regroup after we get back to the club. Right now, we need to take care of this shit and then split off and check for any signs of them.”
“Fine.” Leaving the gas station, I head back outside. There is nowhere to look around here. It’s all open space, with an abandoned building next door that has already been checked. It’s just a random ass gas station in the middle of nowhere. “Let’s go,” I yell towards Noah and Cade.
Once we are all in the truck, we start driving farther down the road. “I don’t think we are going to find anything. I’m guessing they would be long gone by now,” Noah says.
Cade gets into a conversation with him about what the next steps would look like and how we would even go about looking for them, but I stop listening and don’t join in. There are no words I could even say right now that would be helpful. All I know is I want to fucking kill someone. How could we let this happen again? First time was Harley and Cade, and now, it’s her and Rage.
Are we that fucking weak?
By the time we make it back to the club, most everyone else is back as well, besides the few who went with Parker to get the bikes and torch the place. As we walk into the main room where everyone is gathered, I hear Grayson asking, “Do we think this has to do with the explosion from months ago? Or is this Tammy?”
“Do we really think Tammy is still around here somewhere? How could she have flown under the radar so close to us? I think when they fled, they truly left,” Axe says.
“Maybe this is the person Tammy was talking about?” Grayson muses, scrubbing a hand down his face.
“What do you mean?” I ask, stepping towards him.
“When Tammy came here to confront Rage about killing David, he kept denying it. Eventually, she said something like he’s back and then left.”
“Well that’s cryptic as shit and doesn’t fucking help us,” I growl and catch Grayson’s flinch as he lowers his eyes. I try, I really try, to find it in me to comfort him when I know he needs it, but I can’t.
Cursing under his breath, Nerds looks around at everyone. “We got a message. Same as the last one after the explosion came in.”
This is your second and final warning.
My fingers ball into tight fists as confusion and anger war inside me. “How the fuck would they even know it was us looking into the ball? We haven’t even done anything yet!” I yell and slam my fist into the wall, basking in the pain that radiates through my knuckles.
“This isn’t good, but we can also use this,” Axe says calmly. “This means the people who more than likely run the Black Night are the ones who took them, so if we move forward with our plan to take them down, we should find Rage and Harley.”
“And if they aren’t fucking there?” I growl.
“Then we get to have some fun and take out all our anger in my nightclub's basement,” Noah responds, a dark gleam in his eyes as he stabs his switchblade into the table.
Five days. Five more fucking days we will have to wait to find them. And if they aren’t there, then we will be five days behind and fucking screwed.
“Calm, brother,” Cade murmurs, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m not going to be fucking calm until we have them back here. And you shouldn’t be either,” I seethe.
“I’m not calm on the inside, Ryker. I am ready to bring out the demons inside me, but doing that right this second will get us no fucking where.”