52. Kaos
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
KAOS
I pace restlessly through the apartment, my entire body screaming at me to do something, but we’ve been ordered to stay put.
I don’t remember ever appointing Wyatt guardian of the Syndicate if something happened to Crew, and yet when he barked down the phone at us, none of us went against him.
He did promise to find them, I suppose. And he did say that us running around half-cocked would only make it harder for him to do that.
“You’re making me dizzy,” Bishop groans as he leans back on the couch. He’s been on the phone for the last hour trying to follow any leads we can, but there’s nothing. It’s like Camilla and Crew disappeared into thin air.
All we know so far is that Rogers betrayed us, which I think we probably should have seen coming, if I’m honest. He knew Caleb, and out of us, Caleb probably gave him the least work to do. But more than that, money talks, and Rogers has always been an opportunist.
“I can’t just sit around doing nothing,” I growl.
He sighs and hangs his head. I can’t tell which of us is handling this the worst. Kovu did exactly as Kovu does and destroyed two rooms of the apartment with his bare hands, right down to throwing a chair into a wall so hard it’s now lodged in the drywall.
Bishop went into work mode and has been almost too calm, something that tells me he’s close to the edge.
And I can’t sit still. The dread that washes over me every time I think about Camilla at the hands of my dad, of losing Crew to the man who betrayed us, has made me sick to my stomach.
“We’re not doing nothing, K. We’re waiting for our next steps.”
“Sitting around doing nothing,” I repeat.
Bishop runs his hands down his face and lets out a frustrated huff. “I need you to hold it together, Kaos. Kovu is already losing his shit, I’m doing everything humanly possible to figure out where they are, and I can’t be chasing you across the city if you decide you’re going to take matters into your own hands. We need to stay calm. We need to wait for Wyatt to give us a lead. And we need to hold it together until we have them back.” His voice cracks as the final words leave his mouth, and it’s only now I notice the tears in his eyes.
We are not men who cry, especially not around one another. But this show of emotion is enough to tell me he needs me to be strong right now, just like I need him to run point, and Kovu needs both of us to stop him from hurting himself.
I give him a single nod and stalk from the room to find my best friend. The last I saw him, he was in the makeshift gym we had installed in the apartment in case we were stuck here for any extended amount of time. It’s nothing special. Just a punching bag, a treadmill, and some free weights, but it’s enough to tide us over while we’re here.
I find Kovu crouched in the corner, his chest heaving so hard it’s as if he’s just run a marathon. His fists are bloody and torn, and his usually wild blue eyes are more animal than they are human.
I don’t know how we’ve kept him within these four walls for the last five hours, but I have a feeling if we don’t get a lead soon, he’s going to throw the whole wait-and-see plan out the window and start killing people until he gets answers.
“Kovu?” I say as I carefully cross the room toward him. When he first lost it, I got a bedside table thrown at me for getting too close, so I’d rather now repeat that in a room full of dumbbells.
“Unless you have information, fuck off,” he growls.
I sigh and stop a handful of feet from him, carefully dropping to my knees a safe distance from my unpredictable best friend. “We’ll bring them home.”
“You don’t know that,” he snaps.
He’s right. I don’t, but I have to believe that this morning when we were woken up and forced out of our home wasn’t the last time I saw my uncle and our girl.
“Do you think Crew won’t fight like hell to get Camilla away from Caleb? Do you think our badass woman won’t go to the end of fucking earth to come home to us? Hasn’t she proven over and over how capable she is? How much she can handle?” I ask, but it’s not really a question because we both know Camilla is a survivor. From the very first day she’s shown us that, and now more than ever we need to believe it.
He glares at me but doesn’t open his mouth to argue, which means he knows I’m right.
“I know it’s hard sitting around here doing nothing. Believe me, I get it. But we have no leads to go on right now, and what if they’re waiting for us to go off and start killing people in order to take us out as well? As much as I hate to admit it, Wyatt is right. Our best course of action is sitting tight until we have something to go off.”
He’s about to argue when the sound of footsteps behind me turns both our attention to Bishop standing in the doorway with his phone in his hand. His eyes are glassy, and my throat closes over as I prepare myself for bad news.
“Rayne has taken Emerson and Snow back to Chicago with the rest of the girls, and Storm will return to join Elijah and their team. I’ve called in our favors with our allies, and they’ll all be here before sunrise tomorrow morning.”
“Anything from Wyatt?” Kovu croaks.
He shakes his head. “He’s working on it with Everett and Ace, but they’ve been careful. All we know so far is that Caleb and Charles went underground the day after the ship docked, and they haven’t been seen since.”
“At all?” I ask.
“Not once.”
“And Rogers?” Kovu pushes himself to his feet, and I follow his lead.
“He’s in the wind. We think he’s skipped town, but we haven’t been able to find a trace of where yet, and Wyatt doesn’t want to waste resources that he could be using to find Crew and Camilla.”
I hold my breath as I wait for Kovu’s reaction, but he just turns away from us and slams his bloody fist into the punching bag.
Bishop and I share a look before his gaze flicks down to his phone, and he immediately brings it to his ear. “Wyatt, what you got?”