Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
NADINE
Walking into the bar, I look around for any sign of Brody, but he’s not there.
Instead, I’m met with stares from half a dozen men and three scantily clad women.
A few men are playing pool, but stop as soon as I enter the building, standing with their pool cues in hand and their eyes on me.
“Orion,” I whisper.
He chuckles.
“There’s been a lot of talk about you as of late. They’re curious.”
Oh.
Wow.
Well then.
Orion doesn’t make me sit around in the bar area where these people can stand and gawk at me for Lord knows how long.
I assume I would get pretty boring eventually, and they would all move on, but who knows?
Maybe I’m that fascinating.
“This way,” Orion calls out and turns down a hallway.
I follow behind him, glad to get away from the staring.
Except, when he stops at a doorway, he looks over his shoulder at me, and I wonder if this is really where I need to be.
Maybe I made the wrong choice here.
“We usually keep this room for people who need to be questioned…” Orion says, his voice trailing off.
“Tonight, it will be used for protection.”
He holds the door open and jerks his chin as if to guide me into the room.
Looking inside, I suck in a breath as my eyes shift around and take in the room.
It’s completely empty save for the bare cot that’s pushed against the back wall.
I am definitely not sitting on that thing.
“Is there a chair I can sit on?” I ask.
Orion laughs.
“Sure,” he says.
“Stay here.”
A few moments later, he appears with a chair and sets it down in the room.
Before I realize what’s happening, someone else appears and hands me a bottle of water.
“Are you hungry?” Orion asks.
“Ummm, sure?”
I don’t know what to do here, but it’s dinnertime, my stomach growls, and I’m a little discombobulated.
If Orion notices, he doesn’t say anything.
Sinking down in the seat of the chair, I open the bottle of water and take a huge drink.
I’m really parched and didn’t realize it.
In fact, my head is starting to hurt, too.
“I’ll get you something to eat. I’m going to lock you in here from the outside, but I’ll be back soon with dinner and hopefully some answers.”
Lifting my gaze to meet his, I give him a single nod.
“Okay,” I breathe.
“Just take a few moments.”
Without another word, he closes the door behind him, and then I hear the lock click into place.
I don’t know why, but the moment the door is closed and locked, I let out a heavy exhale, and my body relaxes.
I don’t know for sure if I’m safe here, but locked in this room, I know Landon can’t get to me.
There isn’t a window, nothing except for this door that is locked from the outside.
And I know there is no lock to flip into place.
It’s a key-only dead bolt, and I have seriously never felt so safe.
Except when my phone rings in my purse.
Looking down at my lap, I stare at my zipped purse.
The sound of the phone ringing sends a chill of dread down my spine.
Turning my head, I look toward the door, then down at my purse again.
I expect my phone to jump out at me.
It doesn’t, but it does continue to ring, and that’s when I focus on the purse again and expect the phone to actually jump out and attack me.
It doesn’t, of course, but that doesn’t mean I don’t envision just that happening, because the odds of it being Landon again are higher than anyone else.
But I don’t ignore the call, because if I’m wrong, then it could be Brody, and I’m not the only one concerned about him, which makes me feel even more uneasy.
Unzipping my bag, I reach inside and look at the screen.
It’s not Brody.
It’s Unknown again, which means I know exactly who it is.
“Hello?” I ask as I place the phone against my ear.
There is silence and then breathing.
I know it’s him, especially since I only talked to him a few hours ago.
At this point, he’s just being overly dramatic.
I roll my eyes to the ceiling and wait for him to continue.
“Are you ready to give me what I want yet?”
Instead of responding to his question, because I will never give him that thumb drive, I ask him a question of my own.
“Where is Brody?”
Landon chuckles.
“You’re worried about a common criminal?” he asks.
“Seems as if you’re more like your parents than you realize.”
Instead of telling him to fuck himself the way I want, I bite the inside of my cheek, drawing blood yet again and not giving a single shit about it.
I’ll heal later.
Right now, I’m just trying to save my brother, Grayson, and myself.
This motherfucker is getting on my last nerve.
“Give me what I want, Nadine, and maybe you can have what you want, too.”
GRAYSON
The guard doesn’t open the gate for us, and I swear to fuck I’m about to reach inside of my jacket pocket and shoot him in the head.
If I didn’t need to conserve my bullets for whatever the fuck is about to come my way, I just might take him out right here and now.
I watch as the guard makes his way toward the car.
Theron rolls down the window, and my heart slams against my chest because I know that she’s in there.
Nadine is somewhere in the building at the end of the drive.
“Clubhouse is closed. Members only, currently,” he announces.
Theron chuckles, but it’s dry as fuck and wholly without humor.
Then he clears his throat and leans back in his seat slightly, looking across at the man standing next to his window.
“We’re trying to find Brody and Nadine.”
“Nadine?” he asks, his brows lifting.
Inhaling a deep breath, I hold it for a moment, then let it out slowly in an attempt to calm myself down.
I’m not sure it works.
However, I do try because I know that right now, my head is not calm, and if I say or do something, I could fuck a lot of shit up.
I’m trying to have control over myself.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult as each moment passes.
“I gotta call Orion,” he states.
I don’t know who the fuck that is, but if it gains us entrance, that is all I give a shit about right now.
He takes his phone out of his pocket, touches the screen, then holds it to his ear.
“Four guys. Say they’re Securus. Looking for Brody and Nadine. Okay.”
He shoves his phone into his back pocket, then jerks his chin toward us.
He dips slightly so he can talk to Theron.
“Follow this road straight back. The cement building is where you’re going. Black door. Nowhere else.”
“Will do,” Theron says.
He grunts, then takes a step backward before he lifts his hand and taps his palm against the top of the car and turns toward his little guard shack.
A few moments later, the gate slowly slides open, and we’re allowed to enter.
It wouldn’t matter if he said we couldn’t come in.
I am going into this compound to look for my woman, no fucks given.
They’re lucky I have a loose hold of my control right now.
Otherwise, I would kill first and not ask a single goddamn question.
Theron lifts his hand in a single wave and drives down the dirt path road that we were told to head down.
It makes me want to jerk the wheel and take this bitch off-roading.
Sometimes I don’t like being told what to do, and since I’m feeling really goddamn anxious right now, this is one of those times.
“Follow the fucking path,” Boden grumbles.
I chuckle at his words, mainly because I’m thinking the same thing.
A few seconds later, Vaughn speaks, and his words cause my body to jerk, but I was thinking the same damn thing.
“No fucking kidding.”
Then I hear Vaughn clear his throat.
“Grayson?” he calls out.
“Yeah?”
“You got a hold of your shit?”
Turning my head, I look over my shoulder at him sitting in the back seat, my eyes on his, focused on his before my lips curve up into a grin.
“Absolutely not. But I’m not going to jeopardize anything.”
“Before we get to the end of the driveway, I wanted to voice something,” Vaughn says.
“I did a little digging.”
He doesn’t continue immediately.
I suck in a breath and hold it for a moment before he finally speaks.
When he does, a whole new wave of emotional bullshit slides through my body.
I don’t know how much more I can handle.
Instead of feeling any of it, though, I stuff it down where it belongs, as deep as it can go, and hopefully, it never comes back up again.
Because fucking hell, I don’t want to feel any of that shit ever again.
“Landon was the connection on the inside. It wasn’t anywhere in his file. I was able to connect them by digging into the past, the far past.”
“How?” Theron demands.
“How does it connect?”
His fingers grip the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turn white and the plastic begins to crackle.
There is a moment of silence, and then Vaughn tells us something that I could never have fucking imagined in a million years.
“Landon Tate was undercover for a few years back… then .”
I tamp down the feeling that rolls through my body, the way my stomach squeezes at his word.
Then .
I know what he’s referring to.
Every man in this car does.
Thankfully, he doesn’t pause long enough for us to focus on that thought before he continues.
Theron stops the car in front of the building, but nobody makes a move to exit the vehicle.
“Something happened, not sure what, but I have a feeling it’s on that thumb drive and the whole reason Ravet was never bothered again and was a goddamn mystery and so hard to find for so long.”
We need to find Landon Tate.