Chapter 1 #2
Probably got caught in the middle of trying to fuck that little piece of his.
I grinned and shook my head as I turned away from the kitchen.
“Ghost!” Ranger barked.
The woman yelped and I heard him shush her, apologizing softly. But it was Cap who stuck his head back around the corner.
“We need you in here,” he said.
I furrowed my brow. “Why?”
Cap shot me a look. “Get in here, Lieutenant.”
The nape of my neck bristled. “I am not your lieutenant.”
Cap stared at me for a while. “Bad day?”
I hated it when he did that. I stormed toward him. “No, now shut it.”
I rounded into the room and found the two girls we were protecting helping the woman try to uncurl from herself. Doc had himself poised with a needle, trying to take blood while the woman looked at him like he was Satan, incarnate.
“Please, I won’t be bad,” the trembling woman choked out. “I won’t do anything. I won’t touch anything. I swear.”
Doc shook his head. “It isn’t punishment. I have to check for infections. I have to check your vitamin levels. If you need medicine, I can—”
I pulled my gun out and cocked it, pressing it right against Doc’s head. The entire room stilled, with Cap shooting me a look of death as the woman gasped and looked up at me.
“You are safe here,” I said as I stared her down. “I will put a bullet in his head before he does something to hurt you. Okay?”
The woman, shivering in Ranger’s grasp, studied me for a while. Raked her eyes up and down my form. They traveled back up to my mask, and I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking what everyone else wondered.
Why I wore it.
“Okay,” she whispered softly before extending her very dirty arm toward Doc.
“You can put the gun up,” Doc said.
The woman whimpered, so I shook my head. “I’m good.”
“It probably doesn’t help that she’s surrounded by a bunch of men right now, anyway,” Amanda said.
Ranger barked. “Anyone who isn’t me, Doc, or Ghost needs to back off. Now.”
The crowd surrounding the woman took a full step back before Ranger shook his head.
“Another.”
The crowd did as he asked, but the woman was still shivering.
“Another,” Ranger commanded.
The crew moved, except for the girls, who slotted themselves onto either side of the woman. Ariel cradled the woman’s feet in her lap while Amanda stroked her fingers through the girl’s hair, and it stilled her enough for Doc to stick the needle into her vein.
“She needs fluids, she’s dehydrated,” he muttered.
“We’ll fix that after he’s done, okay?” Ranger cooed softly toward the sniveling woman. “Get you some water. Maybe a hot bowl of soup? What do you say?”
Oh, he was absolutely going to try and fuck her later.
“You can put the damn gun away,” Doc grumbled as he packed up his things.
“You sure?” I asked.
Doc shot me a look. “Put your gun down, or I’m taking it from you and disassembling it in front of everyone just to watch you struggle to put it back together.”
I stared the man down for a second before I disengaged my gun and holstered it. “There. Better?”
“Much,” he grumbled as he stood up from his stool. “Shouldn’t take me long to run these tests, ma’am. All right?”
“Do you feel comfortable telling us your name yet?” Ranger asked softly.
The woman shook her head so quickly that I honestly wasn’t sure if it was an answer or just her body continuing to shiver.
“Ranger,” Cap said as he took a small step toward them.
The woman flinched hard in his arms, and it made my stomach contents curdle.
This woman was scared for her fucking life.
“Yeah, Cap?” Ranger asked as he scooped the woman closer to him.
I thought it was interesting how she let him do that.
“We really should go over the footage Ghost brought back,” Cap said as he tilted his head. “The girls can get her food and water. Get her settled somewhere where she can get some rest while Doc performs his tests and figures what she needs.”
For the first time ever, I watched Ranger, my brother in crew and in arms, struggle with his answer. “Are you sure I can’t—?”
Cap just shook his head. “We need this footage analyzed sooner rather than later. I’m sorry.”
I furrowed my brow deeply. Since when did our president apologize? For literally anything?
These women are making us soft.
“The girls can handle her just fine. I’m sure she’s tired of being surrounded by dick, anyway,” I said.
Ranger shot me a look. “You know, you could be more—”
“Here, we’ve got her,” Amanda said as she stood and took the woman’s hand.
Ariel was quick to follow suit, scooting the woman’s feet out of her lap and standing. “You know, we’ve got some leftover homemade macaroni and cheese, if you’re up for it.”
“And my sister made some bangin’ lemonade last night,” Amanda said as they got the woman to her feet.
Ranger leapt up, his hands held out, just in case she fell again. His eyes were so attentive with her as the women slowly coaxed her out of the kitchen full of people. Doc had already made his escape, no doubt already out of the clubhouse and heading to his office here on the compound.
And it wasn’t until the women disappeared that Ranger turned toward us, his hand shoved into his pocket.
“Come on,” he said as he pulled out my cell phone, “let’s go get this footage loaded up in my room.”
Everyone was tense. On edge. The girls disappeared somewhere toward the back of the clubhouse, but it didn’t stop the men from walking around on eggshells, hoping to catch a bit of gossip, or to get another glimpse of the woman.
I didn’t care about any of that, though. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
I wanted to know what the hell that logo belonged to.
“All right,” Ranger said breathlessly as he flopped down at his desk. He hooked up my cell phone to some cords and cables that connected to his laptop, “let’s see what we’ve got on here.”
The first watch through was just that, a watch through. To get a good idea of the footage I had managed to obtain.
“You didn’t catch up to them?” Cap asked.
I shook my head and crossed my arms over my chest. “Believe me, I tried. But, no. I couldn’t catch them.”
“Not even with your mods?”
I grinned beneath my mask at Cap. “What? I thought you didn’t like my mods.”
“Not now, Ghost,” he growled.
I tsked and rolled my eyes. “No, even with my mods, I couldn’t catch them. I’d stake my career on the fact that their vehicle was modded as well.”
“Can’t be many places to have that done,” Cap muttered.
“Unless they’re like me and know how to do it themselves,” I said.
“Oh,” Ranger said as his fingers flew across the keyboard.
I watched him pause the video before blowing up the image of the logo on the side of the car.
“Huh,” Ranger said as I watched him sharpen the image as much as he could, “the fuck is that?”
I leaned over his shoulder. “No fucking clue. It’s not a logo I recognize.”
“Me, neither. Cap?” he asked.
Cap came around to his other shoulder and hunched over before shaking his head. “Nope. Not a logo from anywhere in Redd Valley.”
“What the fuck?” Ranger asked as he sank into his zone.
I watched all sorts of search engines come up before he cropped the picture so that it was just the logo.
“Question,” Ranger said as he pointed to a fuzzy part of the logo, “were you close enough to know what that was? It looks like a feather, but that doesn’t seem quite right.”
I leaned forward and drew from my memory. “It’s a swoop.”
“A swoop?” Cap asked.
I reached for a pen on Ranger’s desk and found a ripped open envelope. I drew from memory what I could, and then I circled the part of the logo that sort of swept off to the side.
“A swoop,” I said as I placed the pen down, “not like a Nike swoop, but like—”
“A flourish, perfect,” Ranger said.
I watched so many things pop up on that man’s laptop that I lost track of what he was doing. But after a few minutes of him redrawing that image, cleaning it up, and running it through whatever software he had at his disposal?
We got a ping.
“The fuck?” Cap asked.
Langley, Pierceson, and Dahl.
That was what his laptop said.
And when he double clicked on the link, the logo for the law firm, of all things, popped up.
A dead on match.
“The law firm,” Cap said.
“The one we just found in the intel,” I said with a slight growl.
Ranger clicked around a bit. “Two towns over, if this address is to be believed.”
Cap furrowed his brow as he looked at me. “The fuck are lawyers doing chasing this woman all around God’s green fucking Earth?”
My grin only grew beneath my mask, however.
Fucking hell, I missed undercover work.
“If you’re really that curious, Cap,” I said as I rolled my eyes in his direction, “you know I could find out.”