Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
HUNTER
My phone had pinged with an incoming message a couple minutes ago, and I’d been staring down at the words on my screen since.
Liam: Luke said you’re coming to the wedding. Can’t wait to see you, Uncle Hunt!
Looked like Luke hadn’t wasted time spreading word that I’d be down for a visit for their mom’s wedding.
I was thrilled to be seeing the boys again, no doubt about it. But I’d have rather had my teeth ripped out with pliers than go to that wedding.
A knock on the opened door of my office jerked me from my haze and took my attention from my phone.
“Jesus, brother. Who the hell walked over your grave? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I let out a whoosh of air, feeling my entire body deflate with it.
Bryce Dixon was the closest thing I had to a brother.
We’d served together, we lost Danielson and Moss together.
Together we’d grieved those losses, and the loss of the lives we’d lost with them, and we both had demons from those battles in the desert that no one could fully understand but us.
He was the only one who knew everything about me, and I did mean everything.
“Just got a text from Liam,” I said before scrubbing at my face with both hands.
He moved fully into my office, taking one of the chairs on the other side of my desk. “Everything good?” He knew all about my love for those boys and the feelings I still had for their mother. He’d stayed in touch with them as well, only on a different level.
“Yeah, it’s fine, I guess.” I could feel the steady pulse of an impending headache behind my eyeballs. “But I got sucked into agreeing to go to the wedding.”
He let a hiss out from between his teeth. “Fuck, man.”
I pressed my fingers into my eyes, hoping the pressure would alleviate the thrumming inside my skull. “I just couldn’t say no to Luke when he asked.”
“You can’t say no to any of them, that’s always been the problem.”
I opened my eyes and saw him shooting me a hard, knowing look. “Don’t start,” I warned him in a low growl. “I don’t want to hear this shit again, man.”
The muscle in his jaw ticked and his nostrils flared on a deep inhale. This was a fight we’d had more times than I cared to think about. One that had nearly cost us our friendship. I held my breath, silently praying he’d let it go, because I really wasn’t in the fucking mood.
Finally, he held his hands up in surrender. “Fine, man. I’ll drop it. Just answer me one thing. You sure about this?”
I hesitated a beat, unsure how to answer because I wasn’t sure what the hell the answer was. “I don’t know, man. Honestly. It’ll probably be a fucking nightmare, but I’ll get through it.”
“Well, fortunately for you, you’ll have me—and Tessa—at your back.”
I let out a steady breath of relief knowing they’d be at the wedding as well.
I knew he’d been invited, but there had been a sort of unspoken agreement between us to not bring up Vera’s wedding, so I hadn’t bothered asking if he was planning to go or not.
It was good to know I wasn’t going to have to suffer through the day alone.
Just then, commotion out in the hall caught our attention, and we glanced to the doorway just as Cord barreled past.
“Whoa, brother,” I called out. “Where’s the fire?”
He back-peddled and popped his head past the doorframe. “Just got off with Rory. Something’s going down at the bar. Not sure what, but Serenity Ryan’s apparently waded into the middle of it, and the cops have been called. They’re on the way right now.”
The tension that had been tying my shoulders into knots snapped as adrenaline surged into my bloodstream at the mention of Serenity’s name.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was on my feet and charging around the desk. “I’m going with you,” I clipped, earning bewildered looks from Bryce and Cord.
“Guess I’ll tag along to see the show,” I heard Bryce say, but I was already out the door and down the hall.
I didn’t stop to consider how my sudden behavior might look to my friends.
There wasn’t much that got me on my feet and moving as fast as I just had.
Sure, I reacted to serious situations appropriately, but usually those involved assholes with guns and penchants for violence.
In this case, the police had it under control, so me reacting so strongly had to have seemed strange.
But when Cord said Serenity had gotten in the middle of something that was bad enough to warrant a police presence in the first place, I simply reacted.
“You wanna tell me what’s going on?” Bryce asked as he pulled the passenger door of my truck closed and buckled himself into the seat. “It’s not like you to go off half-cocked like this.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I grunted as I threw the truck in reverse and hit the gas.
The bar was only a few blocks from our offices. We easily could have walked it, but I wasn’t willing to wait. I didn’t know why, but I needed to see for myself that Serenity was okay, and like hell I was going to delay doing that.
“Bullshit you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Bryce muttered from beside me, but I ignored him, all too happy to let us lapse into silence until we pulled into the parking lot of the Tap Room.
A cruiser sat near the entrance, parked catty-cornered across three spots. The engine was still running and the lights were on. I parked in front of it, not giving a single damn if I was properly between the two white lines, and killed the ignition.
Cord, who’d been right on our tail, met us on the sidewalk, and the three of us shoved into the bar, one after the other.
I spotted Rory first. “I told you we had it under control and you didn’t need to come,” she said as Cord made his way to her while I scanned the mostly empty bar.
There was a boy who looked like he was skin and bones, somewhere in his teens, standing near the bar, one of the bolted-down stools supporting most of his weight.
He looked like he could keel over at any moment.
But it was the woman standing beside him, hovering in almost a protective, Momma Bear kind of way, her hand resting comfortingly on his arm, that drew me in that direction.
While the kid was as white as a sheet, Serenity looked no worse for the wear as she talked to one of the uniformed officers I recognized, a man by the name of Fred Duncan.
In fact, she looked fierce, her free hand gesticulating wildly as she talked, her cheeks flushed.
The relief at seeing she was all right was overwhelming, but I refused to think too hard about it, at least for the moment.
There was time to freak the hell out about it later.
My feet carried me in her direction without a single thought to what I was doing. As I grew closer, I could hear the anger in her voice. However, the moment she spotted me, her entire demeanor changed.
The anger melted away, replaced with shock. The pink tinge on her cheeks remained, growing slightly darker, and her full, rosy lips parted slightly. I wanted to pull her hair free from the messy knot on the top of her head and bury my fingers in it as I plundered her mouth.
Damn it, this was not the time to get hard.
“Hunter?” Her voice came out in a squeak. “What—what are you doing here?”
I didn’t stop until I was right in front of her, barely a few inches separating us.
Needing to make sure there wasn’t anything I’d missed, I gently took her chin in hand and tilted her face side to side.
When I was confident nothing was bruised or broken or injured, I grabbed her by the shoulders, unable to stop touching her now that I’d started, and crouched just enough to meet her eyes. “Are you okay? What the hell happened?”
“I . . . uh . . .”
When it became obvious she wasn’t going to answer for herself, Fred filled me in on everything that had gone down.
My company worked closely with the local PD on several cases and had a good relationship with every cop in the place.
They came to us when their hands were tied by legal constraints.
Knowing we operated in that gray area they tended to have to steer clear from.
I’d known Fred for years. Back in the day, the man had been a pain in the ass, a guy not many had much respect for.
But after being the first on scene of a brutal murder a few years back, something in him changed.
A switch had been flipped. Gone was the ego that some men developed when they started carrying a badge.
He took his job seriously, and he was damn good at it.
“Man by the name of Cyrus Whitlock came in and caused a scene.”
I looked to the boy Serenity still refused to move away from.
He was watching me warily, as if he was conscious of my every move and had to keep his guard up.
The kid looked like he had more baggage than his lanky shoulders could possibly carry.
But I saw something else in his eyes, eyes that seemed much older than his years.
Behind the fear and the cautiousness, there was a strength that I recognized all too well.
It was the kind of strength that came after undeniable suffering.
It said he’d seen far more than he ever should have, but that he hadn’t let it break him.
“It was my father,” he spoke in a voice much steadier and deeper than I would have expected. “He came in because he wants me to go back home.”
I arched a brow, waiting for more, but Serenity chose that moment to cut in. “But that’s not going to happen.” Her voice was unwavering and resolute. “I swear, we won’t let that happen.”
The kid looked to her, his face pinched with an emotion I couldn’t put my finger on. “You shouldn’t have gotten involved,” he said in a whip-cracking snap. “You should have just stayed the hell out of it.”
Serenity’s eyes narrowed as she planted her hands on her hips. Total Momma Bear. “First of all, watch your damn tone,” she scolded, and the first thought in my head was that she looked fucking adorable just then. “Second of all, I was just trying to help you—”
The kid surprised us all just then by shooting off the stool and whipping around to go toe-to-toe with Serenity. “I don’t need your help,” he barked out so loud that Serenity flinched back.
“Watch it,” I growled.
Fear flashed in his eyes when I got between him and Serenity, but he quickly masked it with anger. “This isn’t any of your business. Just stay out of it.”
“You made it my business when you started disrespecting the woman who had your back.”
“She shouldn’t have done that,” he insisted, his face falling for just a moment, long enough for me to catch a glimpse behind the wall of ice he’d erected and see what was truly bothering him. He was scared, not for himself, but for Serenity. “It wasn’t her place.”
Serenity popped her head around me, fire licking in those sweet hazel eyes of hers. “Well, someone’s gotta do it,” she insisted.
Christ. Adorable.
I held out my arm and guided her back as gently yet firmly as I could, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing at the tiny growl that rumbled up her throat.
I turned my focus back on the kid, who couldn’t have been much older than Luke. Suddenly, I understood Serenity’s protective instincts.
“Tell me what’s got you so worried.”
His chest rose and fell with fast, labored breathes, as though he’d just run a marathon. “She shouldn’t have threatened him like she did. When he gets mad, he can’t let things go. He’s not going to forget about that, trust me.”
My insides seized as I slowly turned my head to look at Serenity. She at least had the decency to look nervous as she chewed on her bottom lip and shifted from foot to foot.
“You threatened him?”
“Well, not exactly.”
That pressure I’d felt in my head earlier had returned and was starting to grow. “Then how, exactly.”
“It was more like baiting him.” She slapped her hands on her hips once more, that defensive fire returning and heating her cheeks.
“But in my defense, he came in here and started harassing Fletcher, scaring the shit out of him. I tried telling him to leave, but then he started in on how I needed to learn my place and he was above the law and yadda yadda yadda—”
The rest of her words were drowned out by the blood rushing through my ears as I turned back to Duncan. “Cyrus Whitlock. Who is he?”
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that was justified when he answered, “It’s what you’re thinking,” he started, reading the sudden tension in my body clear as day. “He’s part of the prepper community, up in the mountains. One of the extremists.”
“God damnit,” I hissed violently before whipping around on Serenity. “You and I need to talk. Privately.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but I wasn’t having any of it.
“Now.”