2. Dante
I should have expectedRiley to make a break for it once we pinned her, but I’m still a little thrown by how much this whole shit with the gun has surprised me tonight, and it takes me a half second to catch my balance after she shoves me back. By the time I make it out of the kitchen, one step behind Maddoc, Logan’s already handled it.
“She’s out?” Maddoc asks, his emotions on the kind of total lockdown I usually see from him when we’re facing off with pussy-ass shit heads like Austin McKenna’s people.
Logan looks up after lowering her to the floor, his face blank, and nods.
He heads back into the kitchen, leaving Riley on the floor at our feet. She’s sprawled at an awkward angle, naked and smeared with blood, sweat, and cum.
Maddoc’s cum.
Huh.
I can’t say I’m all that surprised he gave in and broke his own rule about not fucking her. There are certain things Madd and I are both drawn to, and Riley has them in spades. No reason he should be able to resist when I haven’t.
This shit with shooting him is another thing entirely though. That fucking surprised me. A rare occurrence, since I’m usually hella good at reading people and I legit thought things were going a different way with her.
I wanted them to.
I shake off the pinch of disappointment about being wrong. No time for that shit. Besides, I still don’t know what actually went down.
“What happened?” I ask Maddoc, catching myself before I crouch down to check on Riley.
No need. Logan knows what he’s doing. She’ll be fine.
More importantly, whatever the fuck her justification was for shooting Madd, there shouldn’t be any question where my loyalty lies now that she has.
There isn’t any question. He’s my brother.
I turn my back on her sprawled body, raising an eyebrow when Maddoc’s slow to answer.
“You okay, Madd?”
He nods, his gray eyes flicking toward Riley and his frustration coming through loud and clear.
It sounds a lot like his teeth grinding.
Or that could be from the pain.
He’s got his hand pressed against his shoulder, but the blood flow has slowed, so I’m not too concerned. It probably hurts like a bitch—and there’s no exit wound, so that’ll be fun for him when Logan digs the bullet out—but it’s not gonna kill him.
“Riley knows we’ve got plans for Chloe,” Maddoc finally answers me, the clipped irritation in his voice telling me I was right the first time.
It’s not from the pain.
Maddoc fucking hates being blindsided.
“Does she know what those plans are?” I ask, resisting the urge to turn back and check on Riley again. Also avoiding thinking too hard about the nature of those plans Madd just mentioned, since I’m all in—’course I am, because it’s not just smart, but also fucking brilliant and a hundred percent necessary—but that doesn’t mean the idea of one of us getting shackled like that doesn’t sit a little funny with me.
“No,” Maddoc says, scrubbing a hand over his face and painting it with blood. “It sounds like she heard you and me talking earlier. All she knows is that we had our own reason for getting Chloe away from West Point.”
I smirk. “Hell, she knew that going in.”
He gives me a scathing look, and I rein it in. My default may be to make light of shit and dissipate tension, but yeah. Now’s not the time, no matter how much I fucking hate the current complication.
And this most definitely is one.
Riley knew it would fuck with McKenna’s gang when we saved her sister from them. It’s why we agreed to help in the first place. But whatever plans Maddoc had for easing her into the knowledge that we now need to use Chloe for our own gain are out the window, and that’s gonna change things between Riley and the three of us.
Hell, it clearly already has.
I sigh, staring blindly into the kitchen for a second. It’s fucking trashed, and in any other circumstances I might be amused at the look of disgust on Logan’s face as he takes in the broken appliances, knocked over chairs, and blood splattered everywhere. It’s exactly the kind of mess that he can ignore when we’re out on a job but can’t fucking abide by here at the house, and I’ve got no doubt at all that whatever else tonight entails, he won’t rest until he’s put it all to rights.
Gonna take more than some elbow grease to move ahead with Riley and her little sister, though.
“So, does she realize that Chloe is—” I start to ask, turning back to Madd.
“Gone,” Logan snaps before I can finish what I was actually trying to ask.
But if I had to guess? No, Riley had no clue. Not with the craptastic apartment the two sisters were living in before West Point took Chloe.
Logan tosses something at Maddoc. His boxers.
Maddoc nods grimly as he slips them on, the muscle in his jaw twitching harder than a stripper when the beat drops. “I figured the girl got away. Seducing me had to be Riley’s way of covering for it.”
I snort, crossing my arms over my chest. Riley seducing him? That’s what he’s going with? I’m pretty sure Madd’s been wanting to fuck her ever since she first hit us up back at Clancy’s, but okay.
He spears me with a sharp glance. “I know you were fucking her too, despite the rule I had in place, so I don’t want to hear any shit about this, Dante.”
I hold up my hands and shake my head as if I wouldn’t dream of it, even though we both know that normally, I absolutely would. The truth is, that’s just a knee jerk reaction, though. The longer Maddoc holds my gaze, staring me down, the more I realize I’m not actually in the mood to give him shit about whatever went down tonight.
Besides, nothing feels fucking normal right now.
Madd doesn’t let women in his life anymore—at least, not as anything other than an occasional fuck toy—and I’m the king of casual with my hook-ups. I sure as hell don’t normally develop… feelings when I decide I need to get my dick wet.
Riley’s different, though. Even Logan’s been a bit off around her recently. So even if no one’s gonna come right out and say it, I’m pretty sure this shit tonight has rocked all of us out of whatever the hell normal is supposed to be around here.
Maddoc finally nods at me, and when he turns to stare back down at Riley, I catch the slightest wince.
“You should get that shoulder taken care of, Madd.”
He looks back at me with a scowl. “Later. It’s not that bad.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Yeah, but it’s still gonna need stitches… after Logan gets the bullet out.”
Logan gives the kitchen one more tight-lipped glare, then nods at Maddoc. “Best to handle it now so it’s done, then I’ll check the security tapes for the sister.” He walks over to us and nudges Riley’s body with his toe. “What are we going to do with her?”
Maddoc’s jaw starts twitching again. He’s fucking pissed, as anyone should be when they get shot.
I’m pretty sure that’s not all he is, though.
Something I don’t mention, since, no matter how close we are, there’s just some shit that you don’t remind a guy of, and his history with women who fuck him and then betray him definitely falls in that category around here.
“Take her back up to her room,” Maddoc finally says. “We’ll keep her there.”
I’m about to point out that that’s gonna be a fucking challenge, but Madd’s already one step ahead of me.
“Cuff her to the bed,” he adds. “If we’re lucky, we’ll have her sister back before she comes around.”
Maddoc heads for the stairs, and Logan and I share a look that says it all. We’re not gonna be that fucking lucky. Our surveillance doesn’t extend beyond the property, and Chloe’s already got a head start.
We will find her, but she’s Riley’s little sister. She survived weeks of captivity under West Point’s sadistic asshole of a leader. I’ve got no doubt at all that she’s inherited Riley’s grit, and she’s not gonna make it easy on us.
“It’s a good thing we’re the best,” I murmur, not needing to spell out what I’m talking about since Logan gets it.
He almost smiles. Not that anyone who didn’t know him like a fucking brother would have caught it. But then he glances back at the blood-splattered disaster zone our kitchen has become with a pained look, and sighs. “I guess that will have to wait.”
I nod. Maddoc will come first, then he’ll start the hunt for Chloe before letting himself come back and take care of this shit.
“Want some help cleaning it?” I ask anyway, knowing that with Logan’s chronic need for order, he’s already jonesing to make it right despite having the self-discipline to stick with priorities. ’Course, I also know he’s going to say no, because it’s the kind of thing he’ll need to make sure is done to his own exacting standards.
But he’ll also take the offer as it’s meant—a reminder that I’ve got his back. Fucking always.
“I’ll handle it,” he says, just like I expect. Almost-smiling again. Then he nods down at Riley, his expression going totally unreadable, even to me. “You handle… her.”
“Sure,” I say to his back as he turns and follows Madd upstairs.
I look down at Riley’s body, then can’t fucking help myself and crouch down and straighten out the awkward angle he left her at.
Even passed out and fucking filthy like this, she’s gorgeous. Every single thing about her just does it for me, and I’d be lying if I said the streaks of blood smearing her satin-smooth skin—and fuck, even the sight of Madd’s cum drying on her thighs—doesn’t add to my attraction.
Still, I don’t like seeing her so fucking limp and lifeless, and that part is hard to acknowledge.
I’ve watched her sleep, but this is different. Drugged up like this, she’s just gone. She’s missing that spark, that fiery spirit that makes her so fucking alluring. She looks… smaller like this. More breakable. Vulnerable in a way that brings a whole host of protective bullshit up inside me that I’m not sure I want to feel about her. About anyone.
“Too fucking late,” I murmur, sighing as I lift her into my arms, then rise to my feet.
For someone with such a big fucking spirit, she’s a little slip of a thing. Her slim, athletic body is almost as strong as her heart, but it sure as shit doesn’t weigh much.
“What the fuck were you thinking, princess?” I ask her, pausing on the landing of the stairs to brush some of that vibrant, blue-and-purple-streaked hair back from her face. But those dark eyes of hers don’t open, don’t even fucking flicker, and I miss the angry glare I’d get if she could actually hear my question right now.
Not that it was anything but rhetorical.
“Protecting your baby sister,” I answer for her, resuming my trek to her room. “I know, I know. But shit, you’ve just made it that much more complicated. You know that, right? I respect how fucking loyal you are to Chloe, but…”
I sigh.
But nothing. I’m just talking to myself here, and it’s that damn no-holds-barred loyalty of hers that’s the whole problem right now.
I don’t just respect it, I understand it down to my DNA, because I’m the same way.
Hell, I’m that way even deeper than DNA, since Maddoc and Logan don’t share any with me but are my brothers all the same. And I may know fuck-all about how close siblings-by-blood actually are to each other, never having had any, but what I do know is that blood alone doesn’t guarantee a damn thing.
Not everyone is as dedicated to their family as Riley is to her baby sister, and even without blood to bind us, I’d kill or die for my chosen brothers in a heartbeat. I’m loyal to them above all else, and no one has ever tested that bond between us.
Except her.
Riley… puts a strain on it. I still know where my loyalty lies and I always will, but I can’t deny that it doesn’t feel right to be on opposing sides with her, either.
“Fucking stupid,” I mutter, this time talking to myself. Of course our plans for her little sister were always gonna put us at odds. I just didn’t want to look too closely at that, because I didn’t—I still don’t—like it.
I make it up to her room and lay her out on her bed, then go fetch a pair of handcuffs.
Some dirty-ass shit flashes through my brain when I get back with them.
“We could’ve had some fun with these, princess,” I whisper, swinging them around my fingers as I stare down at her still-too-silent form. And it’s true, but my cock isn’t interested when she’s so unresponsive, and instead of cuffing her to the headboard right away, I hesitate for a second, battling with all these insidiously soft feelings that have crept up on me, then toss them aside.
She’s definitely gotten under my skin.
“Be right back,” I promise her, making quick work of gathering a warm, damp washcloth from the bathroom and then some comfortable sleep clothes from the chest of drawers.
I clean her up, going carefully around the fresh, angry-looking stitches in her side, then get her dressed. And it’s a damn good thing I have faith in Logan’s knowledge of pretty much everything, because the way she’s so fucking out of it from whatever he drugged her with is really starting to bother me.
He wouldn’t hurt her, though. Not right now, and not this way.
I run my finger over her neck, then gently grip it, mirroring the way he had his hand wrapped around her throat when I found them alone that night, right after she came to stay with us. He has such control that he barely even left a mark on her.
Part of me thinks it’s a shame. It’s not that I want her to be hurt—at least, not any more than it takes to get her off—but I have liked seeing our marks on her body.
Maybe some new ones will show up from her scuffle with Maddoc.
I release her throat and shove those thoughts aside, because now isn’t the fucking time. I don’t know how to fix shit between us now that she’s taken it this far. And the fact that I’m even worrying about it just goes to prove what a mistake it is to go soft for her.
I fix the cuffs on her wrists, then attach them to the headboard.
And then, despite having just told myself I know better, I lean down and bury my nose in her hair, breathing in that unique spice-and-smoke scent of hers, overlaid now with the musky tang of sex.
It’s fucking addictive.
I press a kiss against her forehead, then wipe it away with my thumbs. “Sorry about the cuffs, princess. It’s not personal.”
Then I shake my head in disgust and make myself walk away, because that’s not really true, and I know it.
I head toward Logan’s room, then go on through it to the attached bathroom, where I can hear Maddoc’s voice.
The truth is, shit has gotten far too personal with this girl, so maybe Madd was right. Fucking her that first time, at the strip club, was sheer goddamn heaven. But once she got mixed up in Reaper business?
Yeah, that might have been a mistake.
It definitely was for Maddoc.
I see the bloody bullet Logan pried out of him lying in the sink, and Logan’s just about done stitching up the hole it punched in Maddoc’s shoulder when I join them.
“…a grid search,” Madd is saying into his phone, nothing in his voice giving away the fact that Logan’s currently pushing a needle through his skin. “Call in everyone… no, that’s not… yeah. Okay… No. I don’t care, Payton,” he finally growls, “pull them off and make this a priority, right the fuck now.”
He stabs a finger at his phone, ending the call, and tosses it down with a curse.
“No luck on the security cameras?” I ask, knowing for a fact that Madd wouldn’t have held still for this shit until Logan did at least a preliminary review of the footage.
“Nothing useful,” Maddoc says tightly. “The cameras caught her leaving, of course, and we know she went east when she left the property.”
“I… shut off a few of our security feeds a while ago,” Logan adds, his face even more stone-like than usual. “I should have turned them back on, but I didn’t. So we don’t have a more clear picture than that.”
My brows jerk upward a bit, surprised to hear that. It’s not like Logan to leave anything to chance or forget something like that, and I can’t help but wonder if it has something to do with Riley. In a way, he’s been the least affected by her, out of the three of us. But at the same time, the fact that she’s affected him at all means a hell of a lot. My brother is usually completely unflappable.
“There aren’t enough nearby surveillance feeds once our cameras lose her trail,” Logan adds, and I know he’s referring to other home security systems he’s able to hack into. “Not until that house on Downing.”
I nod. That part isn’t news, but it still would’ve been nice if we were able to get an easy win here. We’re in a residential area though, so no traffic cams or convenient ATM machines to tap into if we want to see farther than our own setup, and most of our neighbors don’t have decent security. The closest one with a camera system pointed anywhere worth watching is a four-bedroom owned by a bank manager on Downing Street.
Of fucking course Riley’s little sister wouldn’t have waltzed by right in front of it, though. She’s gotta be smarter than that. It’s in her blood.
“So Payton’s organizing a street-by-street search?” I ask, picking up on the tail end of Maddoc’s phone call.
“You heard me,” he says. “I’ve pulled in every able body we have. We need to fucking find her before any of McKenna’s people do.”
I nod. “We need West Point to keep on thinking Chloe died in that drop at the warehouse.”
The drug deal McKenna’s gang was trying to initiate with Capside.
The one where we gunned everyone down to get Chloe out, then burned the place to the ground—along with a dead body we tossed in that was as close to Riley’s sister’s description as we could get on short notice—all to make sure the girl would stay off West Point’s radar once we got our hands on her.
“If they find out that shit was staged, if West Point realizes Chloe Sutton is still alive…” Maddoc says grimly.
He doesn’t have to finish. We all know that for as big of a bastard as Austin McKenna is, he’s not stupid. Chloe meant nothing to him when he accepted her as payment from her father for her father’s debts. He treated her like she was disposable. But after all the trouble we went through with this shit, he’ll be like a dog with a bone until he uncovers what she’s really worth.
He’ll wonder why someone went to so much trouble, but he’ll also know that whatever the answer is, it means she’s valuable.
Logan snaps off the end of the surgical thread and efficiently wipes down the blood dripping from the neat row of stitches in Madd’s shoulder, then quickly bandages it.
He steps back to clean up his supplies while Maddoc shrugs into a fresh shirt. “After that scene Riley made in McKenna’s club when she saw Chloe dancing there, it won’t take long for him to figure out that we’re involved,” Maddoc says.
“If he finds her,” I point out, still holding out for things not to go to total shit. “So how about we don’t let him?”
Maddoc gives me a tight smile. “That’s the plan. This is a fucking war, and we can’t afford to lose the advantage Chloe will give us. We need her.”
And none of us say it, but we also need to keep her out of the hands of our enemies. We can’t afford to let them discover the same thing we did, and turn that same advantage against us.
Destroying West Point isn’t just a personal vendetta against Austin McKenna, it’s also necessary. His gang is a fucking parasite on the streets of Halston and, more importantly, a threat to every last member who’s sworn allegiance to the Reapers, each and every one of whom deserves the protection and security that come with the loyalty they give us.
“Well, fuck,” I say, raking my fingers through my hair in frustration as the enormity of just how big of a cluster fuck this might turn into hits me. “This night has really gone to shit, hasn’t it?”
Maddoc and Logan both meet my eyes, neither one of them answering and all three of us grim as hell.
I don’t need to hear them say they agree. I can see in their faces that they feel it too.
The minute Riley pulled that trigger, shit started to spiral out of control.
And the longer it takes us to find her sister, the higher the body count is likely to be.