Chapter Seventeen
HUNTER
Two weeks missing…
For two weeks, I’ve been plagued by the same dream of the night Coby disappeared without a trace.
A nightmare, really. And no matter how it goes, it always ends the same—with the taillights of a black Denali speeding away with my best friend trapped inside.
And when I wake up, I’m haunted by the shadowed outline of the man who’d taken her.
The only cure was to hold off sleep for as long as I could, so I’ve spent every waking moment since she was taken combing the streets for my other half. And whenever I eventually collapsed from exhaustion, I made sure I was too intoxicated to dream.
Like now.
Tipping back my head, I poured the last of the vodka down my throat while a river of fresh tears soaked my face.
All around me were pictures of Coby and me scattered all over the floor.
They were all hers since she was more sentimental than I, and now I was the one drawing comfort from them, wondering if I’d ever see her smile again.
I’ve been putting feelers out to find out who the hell had taken Coby. I’d only gotten a glimpse of the dark-eyed stranger, but his description and the circumstances were enough to spook anyone who knew anything from talking.
And now there was this anxious twisting in my gut telling me that I’d never see Coby again. None of it made any sense. All the evidence pointed to a targeted attack, but there was only one problem.
Coby didn’t have an enemy in the world.
Coby didn’t, but that didn’t mean the people in her were without them.
My gaze fell over the pile of glossy four-by-sixes until it zeroed in on one of Coby posing with her brother in front of his club before it opened. The picture was taken the day Roshaun got the keys to the building, and Coby insisted on being there to celebrate with him, dragging me along.
“Bitch ass,” I growled at that grinning piece of shit before crumbling the photo in my fist and tossing it away.
Picking up my gun that had been resting by my side and stumbling to my bare feet, I spent the next half hour trying to sober up fast. Once I was steady on my feet, I left the apartment I shared with Coby.
“Aye, what’s up with you, Hunter?” Gary greeted me with a smile as I passed him on the stairs. He lived a couple of floors above me and had been trying to fuck for years.
“Not now,” I snapped as I stormed past him.
“Damn, my bad,” he grumbled.
Ignoring him, I jogged across the parking lot toward Deborah, who was parked by the pond overlooking our apartment building.
It was the wee hours, so the streets were empty, charging me only ten minutes before I reached the hospital.
I’d come the night Coby was taken to question Roshaun about what the hell happened, but the bitch had suffered a pneumothorax and had been surrounded by doctors and nurses in the ICU.
I prayed all night that his ass would die, but he just kept right on living.
I hadn’t returned since that night, but there was no time to kick myself for it. I didn’t even know if he was still here, but I wasted no time parking and rushing inside the hospital.
It took another ten minutes of navigating the hospital maze and a little white lie with the nurse at the desk to find out what room he was in, but then I was walking into his private suite without warning, paying no mind to the startled nurse on the other side of his bed, who was swapping his IV bag.
“Oh!” she gasped when she noticed what I was clutching. “Absolutely not. No, ma’am. You can’t bring that in here!”
“Shut up and stand over there,” I ordered with my gaze fixed on a sleeping Roshaun and my gun pointed at the corner where I wanted the nurse to stand. After a brief hesitation and realizing she’d never get between me and the door in time, she stumbled into the spot I’d pointed out.
The pain meds they had Roshaun on must have been heavy because he was still out of it when I stepped up to his bedside.
“Wake up,” I ordered with zero emotion as I slapped his cheek with my gun a few times.
It took a few minutes for Roshaun to fight off his meds and the initial confusion after a long and deep sleep, but then his gaze widened when he noticed me standing there and felt the muzzle of my Ruger on his cheek.
“What the—Hunter?” He blinked at me. “Fuck are you doing here?” His gaze darted around the room, unfocused and hazy. “Where’s Coby?”
Roshaun was one of those types who assumed having a dick between his legs put him in charge. Being ordered around or bested by a woman would strike a huge blow to his pride and damage him more than any physical blow.
Still…
The nurse cried out when I adjusted my grip and began smashing the butt of my Ruger into his face without a word. “Arrgh! Shit! Arrrgh!” Roshaun shrieked in pain while curling into a ball and trying to duck out of the way. “Fuck are you doing?” he shouted.
I didn’t stop until I heard a satisfying, sickening crack, followed by blood gushing from his shattered nose. Some of it splattered onto the machines reading his vitals and the whiteboard on the wall next to his bed.
“Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” The nurse muttered hysterically before opening her mouth wide to scream. “Help! Somebody help!”
Swinging the gun the nurse’s way, I met her terrified gaze and felt no mercy in my heart—not even for an innocent woman just trying to do her job.
The only good thing about me was gone, and without Coby, I had nothing to fucking lose.
“Last warning to shut the fuck up. I’m not here for you.
I’m here for him. He’s not worth getting shot over, sis. Believe me.”
That seemed to calm her down. “Okay,” she said with a quick and jerky nod, making the large bun of her box braids loosen. She threw her hands up in surrender. “Okay.”
Returning my attention to Roshaun, who was groaning in pain and clutching his side, I felt nothing but hate for Coby’s brother—a man I once trusted and looked at like a brother. “Don’t play games with me, Roshaun. Tell me who they took her, where, and why.”
“Who?”
Snatching the pillow from behind his head, I placed it over his thigh, pressed the Ruger into the pillow, and pulled the trigger. The muffled shot was punctuated by Roshaun’s scream of pain and the sound of a body hitting the floor across the room.
The fucking nurse had fainted.
“Arrrgh! My leg! My leg! Aww, fuck! You shot me, you crazy bitch!” The pussy motherfucker was crying now as he reached for his leg, only to be stopped by the pain of his broken ribs.
“You’re in a hospital,” I reminded him. “The sooner you tell me where she is, the sooner the doctors can save you.”
“Save my—what are you talking about? You only shot my leg.”
I retrained the gun, aiming for his liver this time. “So far.”
Roshaun collapsed against the bed with a groan and spent a few precious seconds trying to catch his breath. “It’s no use…Hunter. You’ll never…g-get…to her. She’s gone.”
“Where?” I urged through gritted teeth.
“He has her now. Kilpatrick.” The name made my stomach sink because I knew what it meant.
Coby hadn’t been kidnapped by traffickers or garden-variety creeps.
She’d been taken by the Fola. People with the power to make her disappear forever and get away with it.
Roshaun chuckled, baring his blood-stained teeth as he stared at me knowingly. “I doubt Ocean will want to share.”
“What does he want with her?”
Roshaun coughed before shaking his head weakly. “Don’t know. Didn’t matter.”
“It didn’t matter, or you didn’t care?”
“Just kill me,” he muttered as he looked away, a stubborn look that reminded me of Coby entering his eyes. I hated how much they looked alike. Coby was fucking beautiful. Looking at Roshaun’s ugly mug just made me want to vomit. “I’m dead anyway.”
“No.” I shoved my gun inside my thigh holster to keep from using it again.
It’s not that I didn’t want to kill him. I really did. But I knew Coby would never forgive me. She loved her brother, and that love kept her from seeing just how much he resented her.
Having what I needed, I grabbed the remote-looking device, pressed the button to call another nurse in, then turned to leave without another word.
“Hey…”
Roshaun’s voice stopped me in my tracks just as I reached the door.
Reluctantly, I turned to face him and found him glaring daggers while his breathing grew increasingly unsteady.
“Judge me all you want, but Ocean gave me no choice, and Coby owed me. You should know better than anyone that I always collect my debts.”
Chuckling without any humor in the sound, I leaned my weight on one leg and crossed my arms. “You know what, Roshaun? I do know. I know you still ain’t shit and you don’t deserve Coby.
She didn’t kill your parents. A drunk driver did.
And it’s not her fault she was born second, and that responsibility of guardian fell on you, but even if it had…
” My heart felt a thousand times lighter thinking about how much larger Coby’s was.
“She would have done the same for you, and she wouldn’t have blamed you for any of it. Not for a second.”
He shrugged while looking away. “Guess we’ll never know.”
Hearing multiple footsteps outside the door, I quickly pulled it open and left the room.
Down the opposite end of the hall, where the elevators were, two security guards jogged this way with their hands clutching their holsters.
The nurse posted at the reception desk was nowhere to be found.
She must have heard the screams and alerted them.
“Hey!” one of the guards shouted when they spotted me. “Stop right there!”
Nope. I immediately ran in the opposite direction toward the stairs. There was no reason for me to linger now that I had a name.
Ocean Kilpatrick.
I wish I could say I’d never heard of him, but as I flew down the stairwell in an attempt to avoid capture, my bravado slipped until I was having a full-blown panic attack.