Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
RJ
Something's wrong.
I've been staring at the door of Bubba's for twenty-three minutes.
Twenty-three minutes since Dalla walked through it, promised to sit by the window where I could see her, promised to be back in thirty minutes.
She's not by the bloody window.
I noticed about ten minutes ago.
Got up to check the angle, make sure I wasn't missing her behind a pillar or something.
But the booth by the window is empty.
Someone else is sitting there now—an old-timer with a beer and a newspaper, completely oblivious to the dread coiling in my stomach.
She moved, I told myself.
Found a better seat. She's still in there.
But my gut is screaming.
That instinct that's kept me alive through years of combat, years of protection details, years of walking into dangerous situations—it's never been wrong.
And right now it's telling me something is very, very wrong.
I check my phone for the fifth time in three minutes.
No texts. No missed calls. Nothing.
Hey, where are you? I type. Everything okay?
I wait.
The message shows as delivered.
No response.
Twenty-four minutes.
I'm being paranoid.
She's fine.
She's in a bar full of club members, surrounded by people who would die to protect her.
She probably ran into someone she knows, got caught up in conversation.
Lost track of time.
Forgot to text me back.
That's not like her, though. She knows how worried I've been.
She knows I'm watching.
Twenty-five minutes.
Fuck this.
I'm out the door and across the courtyard before I've consciously decided to move.
The afternoon sun is bright and warm, the compound still bustling with activity, but I don't see any of it.
My entire focus is on the entrance to Bubba's, on getting through that door and finding her.
My heart is beating too fast.
My palms are sweating.
These are physical symptoms I recognize—fear, anxiety, the body preparing for fight or flight.
But I've never felt them like this before.
Never felt them for another person.
Every protection detail I've ever run, every principal I've ever guarded, none of them made me feel like this.
Because none of them were her.
The bar is loud and crowded, the lunch rush still going strong.
I scan the room—every booth, every table, every face.
Looking for blonde hair and blue eyes and that smile that makes my chest ache.
She's not here.
She's not fucking here.
"Hey." I grab the bartender's attention, my voice sharper than I intended. "The woman who was sitting by the window. Blonde. Blue eyes. Where did she go?"
He frowns, trying to place who I'm talking about. "You mean the president's daughter? She left maybe... fifteen, twenty minutes ago?"
"Left where?"
"I don't know, man. Some woman came in, they talked for a minute, then they both walked out." He shrugs, unbothered. "Seemed like she knew her."
My blood turns to ice.
Every muscle in my body goes rigid.
"What woman? What did she look like?"
"I don't know. Older, maybe forties? Dark hair? I wasn't really paying attention, we were busy." He's starting to look concerned now, picking up on my energy. "Is something wrong?"
I don't answer.
I'm already moving toward the door, my heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
A woman approached her. Talked to her. Got her to leave the bar.
Some woman came in.
Seemed like she knew her.
I burst through the door and into the sunlight, spinning in a circle, scanning for any sign of her.
The courtyard is full of people—prospects working on bikes, old ladies on the porch, kids running through the grass—but none of them are Dalla.
"Dalla!" I shout. Heads turn. People stop what they're doing. "Has anyone seen Dalla?"
Confused looks. Shaking heads. Someone asks what's wrong.
I don't have time to explain.
I run around the side of Bubba's, checking every angle, every corner.
My training kicks in—systematic search pattern, controlled but urgent.
The gap between buildings catches my eye—a narrow shadowed space between the bar and a storage shed.
The kind of place you might take someone if you didn't want to be seen.
The kind of place where no cameras would catch you.
I slow down as I approach, every sense on high alert.
The gravel is disturbed here, scuffed and scattered like there was a struggle.
Deep gouges in the dirt, like someone was dragged. And there—
Her bag.
Dalla's bag, lying in the dirt like she dropped it.
Or like it was torn from her shoulder.
I pick it up with shaking hands.
My hands never shake.
I'm trained to be steady under pressure, to maintain control in the worst situations.
But right now, holding the bag of the woman I love, knowing someone took her—
My hands are shaking.
I open the bag, scanning through the contents.
Her phone is inside, the screen dark.
Her wallet with her ID and credit cards.
A tube of lipstick in that shade of pink she always wears.
Chapstick. A hair tie.
And something else—a small plastic stick with a pink cap that I don't immediately recognize.
I turn it over in my hand.
There's a small window on one side, and in the window—
Two pink lines.
For a moment, my brain doesn't process what I'm looking at.
A pregnancy test. A positive pregnancy test. In Dalla's bag.
The world tilts sideways.
She's pregnant.
Dalla is pregnant.
She was going to tell me tonight—that's what she meant when she said she had something important to share.
Something life-changing.
She's carrying my child.
I shove the test back in the bag, my heart hammering.
Can't think about that now.
Can't process what it means.
I need to find her.
I need to find them both.
I keep searching, and that's when I see it.
Blood.
Not much.
Just a few drops, dark against the pale gravel, already drying in the afternoon sun.
But enough.
Enough to tell me she didn't go quietly.
Enough to tell me she fought.
She fought them, and they hurt her, and they took her anyway.
For a moment, the world goes white.
Pure, blinding rage—the kind I've only felt a handful of times in my life.
The kind that makes men do terrible things.
The kind that erases everything except the primal need to destroy whatever threatens what's yours.
They took her.
They hurt her.
They might have hurt the baby.
Then the rage crystallizes into something colder.
Something sharper.
Something more dangerous than heat.
They took her.
They hurt her.
And I am going to kill every single one of them.
Slowly. Painfully. Without mercy.
I don't remember running to the clubhouse.
Don't remember climbing the stairs to Runes' office.
One moment I'm standing in that gap between buildings, staring at her blood in the dirt, and the next I'm bursting through his door.
Runes looks up from his desk, and whatever he sees in my face makes him go pale. "What happened?"
"She's gone." My voice doesn't sound like mine. It's too calm. Too controlled. The eye of the storm. "They took her."
Vanir is in the room too, I realize—the club's tech officer, a thinner man with blond gone gray hair and tattoos crawling up his neck.
He straightens from whatever he was working on at the side table, his expression sharpening.
"Who took her?" Runes is on his feet now, coming around the desk. "When?"
"Twenty, maybe thirty minutes ago. Someone lured her out of Bubba's. A woman. The bartender said she was older, dark hair." I hold up Dalla's bag, my hand steadier than it should be. "I found this in the gap between the bar and the storage shed. And blood. She fought them."
Runes' face goes through a series of emotions—shock, fear, fury—before settling into something hard and cold.
The MC president.
The man who's kept this club alive through thirty years of war.
"Solveig, or someone that works for her," he says.
"Has to be."
"Vanir." Runes doesn't take his eyes off me. "Security footage. Now."
Vanir is already moving, pulling up feeds on a laptop. "What time frame?"
"Twelve-thirty to one o'clock. Bubba's entrance and the surrounding areas."
We crowd around the screen as Vanir pulls up the footage.
The timestamp reads 12:43 when Dalla walks out of Bubba's with a woman—older, dark hair, exactly like the bartender described.
They're talking, the woman gesturing urgently.
Dalla looks concerned but not afraid.
She doesn't know.
She has no idea she's walking into a trap.
They disappear around the corner of the building, out of frame.
"Fucking hell," Runes mutters.
"Different angle," I say. "There has to be a camera that covers that gap."
Vanir shakes his head. "It's a blind spot. Always has been. Never thought we'd need coverage there."
Of course.
Of course they picked the one spot on the compound that isn't covered.
They've been watching, learning, mapping every weakness.
The satellite camera in the woods.
The sedan on the road.
All of it leading to this moment.
"What about the street?" I ask. "They had to have a vehicle. They couldn't have carried her out on foot."
Vanir switches feeds, pulling up footage from a camera mounted near the main gate.
We watch the timestamp tick forward—12:44, 12:45, 12:46—and then a dark van appears on the road, slowing as it passes the compound.
"There." I point. "That's them."
The van stops just past the tree line, out of direct sight of the gate but still visible on the camera.
A few minutes later, we see movement—figures emerging from the shadows between buildings, carrying something.
Someone.
They're carrying Dalla.
She's limp. Unconscious.
One of them has her over his shoulder like a sack of grain.
The sound that comes out of me isn't human.
It's something raw and primal, torn from a place I didn't know existed.
"RJ." Runes' hand is on my shoulder, gripping hard. "Focus. We need to find her."
I force myself to breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
Focus.
She needs me to focus.
"Get me those fecking plates," I say to Vanir. My voice is steadier now, the rage banked but not gone. Never gone. "Whatever it takes."
Vanir zooms in on the footage, enhancing the image frame by frame.