Chapter 42
Vienna
Now
I didn’t stop moving until I was far enough from the house to trust that I wouldn’t be seen if someone glanced out of a window.
Even then, I didn’t trust it fully.
The trees at the edge of the compound swallowed me up quickly, branches scraping against my cut and boots crunching softly over damp earth as I pushed deeper into the cover of them until the house was little more than a shape through the dark.
I could still see the glow from some of the downstairs windows through the gaps, still make out the occasional movement if I stared hard enough, but from where I was standing now, I had enough distance to think.
There had been no sign of her, no trace of the usual quiet life she kept in that space, no shadow behind the curtains, no flicker of light, no indication that Gabriella had simply been moved somewhere else in the house for the night.
That was the part I couldn’t shake.
I dragged a hand over my beard and forced myself to breathe through the thoughts trying to crowd in all at once. Panicking wasn’t going to help her. Losing my head wasn’t going to get me answers any faster. If she were alive, then I needed to move quickly. And if she wasn’t…
No!
I pulled my phone from my pocket before that thought could finish forming and stared at the screen for half a second too long before pressing Dante’s name.
He answered on the second ring.
“Talk to me.”
I leaned back against the tree behind me and kept my eyes on the compound as I spoke. “I’ve got her.”
The lie came easily enough that I almost hated myself for it.
There was a pause on the other end of the line, not suspicious, just brief, like he was shifting gears from concern into planning.
“You’re with her now?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“In her room. Got in through the window.”
Dante exhaled slowly, and I could practically hear him recalculating the situation in real time. “How bad?”
I looked back toward the house, my jaw tightening as I searched for movement. “Shaken,” I said after a beat. “Tired. A bit out of it. But she’s breathing.”
“You need backup?” he asked immediately.
And there it was. The offer I knew would come. The thing I had already decided I was going to refuse before I ever pressed call.
“No.”
A beat of silence followed.
“Vienna…”
“I know this place better than any fucker on that compound,” I cut in quietly, keeping my voice level, steady, believable. “If I start pulling men in now, all I’m doing is lighting a flare over the whole thing. I can get her out cleaner on my own.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” I said, sharper this time, then forced myself to ease it back before he started hearing too much in my tone.
“Listen to me, brother. They’ve already had a fight with us tonight.
Their attention’s split. Half of them will be pissed, half of them will be drunk, and the rest will be too busy licking their wounds to expect me to still be hanging around. This is the best chance I’ve got.”
Dante didn’t answer straight away.
He was thinking.
Weighing risk.
Trying to decide whether his role as president overrode his role as my brother.
I knew that silence well enough to know he wasn’t fully convinced.
So I kept going.
“She’s not in any state to run,” I said, letting some of the truth creep in because the best lies always had some truth in them. “And if I have to carry her, I’d rather do it without bullets flying and ten of our lads charging through the gates behind me.”
Another pause.
Then, “You swear to me she’s with you?”
I closed my eyes for a second. He was asking me, man to man, whether I was telling the truth.
And I lied to him anyway.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “She’s here.”
“Fine,” he said eventually, and I could hear movement in the background now, doors opening and closing, voices carrying, the Devils already gearing up into whatever came next. “Then you bring her straight back here.”
“I will.”
“No stopping off anywhere. No trying to be clever. You get her back to the compound and let us handle the rest.”
My grip tightened around the phone. “What’s happening your end?”
“Exactly what you’d expect. We’ve got men checking the perimeter, locking everything down, and the first of the other charters will start rolling in by morning. I’ve already had calls from Scotland and Manchester. The rest are moving now.”
That should have reassured me.
And in a way, it did.
Because if I got her out, if I got her back, if by some fucking miracle I found her alive and breathing and still mine to save, then the Devils would keep her safe. They would lock her down tighter than Fort Knox and put enough armed bikers between her and Nico to start a small war.
And if war was what it came to, then so be it.
Let him fucking come.
“She’ll be safe here,” Dante continued, his tone harder now, more certain. “Whatever state she’s in, whatever she’s got to tell us, whatever mess this turns into after tonight, we deal with it from our side of the fence. You understand me?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean it, Vienna. Once she’s here, she doesn’t go anywhere without a fucking army around her.”
That almost got a smile out of me.
Almost.
“Good,” I said instead.
“You’ve got medical supplies waiting too,” he went on. “Doc’s already setting shit up. If she’s hurt, if she’s been drugged, if she’s in any kind of state, we’ll sort it.”
Drugged.
Something ugly turned over in my stomach at the word.
Because I had already considered that possibility and pushed it away, not because it wasn’t likely, but because I wasn’t sure I could stomach all the ways it might be true.
“Vienna?”
I realised too late that I’d gone quiet.
“Still here.”
Dante exhaled. “Bring her home, brother.”
The words hit me harder than I’d been expecting. Because he believed that was what I was doing. He believed I had her. He believed I was about to walk out of this place with the woman I loved and bring her back to where she belonged.
And God help me, I wanted to believe it too.
“I will,” I said.
Then I hung up before he could say anything else.
For a moment, I just stood there in the dark with the phone still in my hand, staring at the house through the trees and listening to the quiet buzz of blood beneath my skin.
The night had gone colder while I’d been on the phone, or maybe that was just me finally standing still long enough to feel it.
Either way, the air bit harder now, slipping beneath my cut and settling against skin that still hadn’t fully come down from the fight, from the adrenaline, from the slow, creeping dread that had been stalking me since I looked through that window and found nothing.
I shoved the phone back into my pocket and let my head tip back against the bark for one brief second.
I had lied to Dante. I had lied to the club—the only people on this earth who would have torn this entire compound apart brick by brick if I had simply told them the truth.
But the truth was useless right now, because if I said out loud what I was beginning to suspect, they would come.
Not one or two. All of them.
And if the Devils came crashing through these gates tonight, whatever chance Gabriella had left, however small, however fucking fragile, would disappear in a storm of gunfire and retaliation and Nico’s inevitable need to make an example of someone before he lost control of the board completely.
No.
This had to be me. Quietly if I could, but violently if I had to. Either way, it had to be me.
And if I found her alive, then I’d carry her out of here myself and get her back to the people already waiting to protect her.
If I found her hurt, I’d still carry her.
If I found her broken, unconscious, bleeding, half out of her mind, I’d still carry her.
And if I found her dead…
My jaw clenched so hard that it hurt.
No.
But the thought stayed there anyway, ugly and impossible to ignore now that it had finally clawed its way to the front.
If I found her dead, I was not walking away from this place without her.
Not this time.
Not ever.
There would be no leaving her here for these bastards to touch, to move, to bury, to claim as some part of their fucking story.
I looked back toward the compound, toward the clubhouse where the Riders still moved around unaware that I was standing out here in the dark, deciding what parts of myself I was willing to lose before sunrise.
After that, I honestly didn’t care what happened to me.
That was the truth of it.
The real truth beneath the lie I had just fed my brothers with a calm I did not feel.
I had no intention of surviving a world that didn’t have Gabriella in it.
Maybe that made me weak. Maybe it made me pathetic. Maybe it made me exactly what Nico and men like him had always assumed I was beneath the laughter and the charm and the stupid fucking mouth.
It didn’t matter.
Because I had spent years watching that window, years taking scraps and shadows and brief moments where she was still mine in some quiet secret way, years surviving on hope and memory and the belief that one day, somehow, I would get her back properly.
And if that chance had been taken from me now, then there was nothing left in me worth preserving anyway.
I pushed away from the tree and adjusted the gun at the back of my jeans, checking the knife at my belt more out of habit than necessity before casting one final glance toward the compound.
The Devils were gathering.
The charters were coming.
By tomorrow, all hell would break loose.
But tonight was still mine.
And one way or another, I was leaving this place with Gabriella.