14. Digger
14
DIGGER
The power in this woman never ceases to amaze me. She fucking broke Connor Creed. I offer Rae my hand, pulling her way from the man and against my side. "You okay?"
She rests her palm over my heart, peeking at me from beneath dewy lashes. "Yeah, Dig. I'm good."
Terry's son licks his lips and eyes the empty whiskey glass on the sideboard. "Can a man get a drink?"
“Don’t have a sippy cup for the kids in here.” Tyke lifts an eyebrow. “Sorry.”
He may have softened toward the guy, but there's no denying that Connor's last name will always be a bone of contention for my brother—that and his history with our woman.
Connor rolls his eyes. "Let it go, would you? I get it. I'm your rival's son. I'm one of the kids, like your boys… or Maddie." He shakes his head. "But quit it with the kiddie jokes when you're fuckin' a girl a year my junior."
Tyke's nostrils twitch. Despite my shared dislike of the kid, I suppress the grin that wants to spread. Connor has a point, and he burned my brother good.
“What you got to tell us then?” I tip my chin, urging him to redirect to more productive matters. “How do we find Maddie?”
Rae shifts a little, leaning into my side. I won't lie and say the sensation of her pressed against my ribcage doesn't urge me to pull her against me, wrap those goddamn legs around my waist. But this ain't the time or place for showing her how I want to comfort her.
“I can’t detail exactly what my old man and your brother are up to—outside of this shit with Maddie,” Connor says. “But I can tell you that Fox came to my father with a pretty specific and weird request.”
The room is silent, each of us allowing Connor the space he needs to continue.
“He wants to use the corridor when it’s complete. Payment is his help in securing your properties to finalize the pathway.”
“Not that weird,” Tyke states, fingers rubbing his bearded chin. “If he’s lookin’ to create business of his own, the private road would be advantageous.” My brother says nothing more, yet it’s there in his eyes.
He’s figured out who gave away his lineage.
"The weird part was asking my old man to allot time blocks for him to do so." Connor lifts his brow.
Fox wants to use the road uninterrupted.
“What the fuck is he up to?” I ask Tyke.
Fox has always had grand ideas—crazy pipe dreams with real results yet unreal expectations on how to get there. For years, he's been excommunicated from the club, and for years, he's been quiet.
Seems the fucker’s been busy.
“No idea yet,” Tyke says with a sigh, cheek twitching beside his nose after. “But I plan to find out.”
“You think he’ll be at the rally next week?” If the asshole has been masquerading around in our fucking colors all this time, then who’s to say he won’t try to use them to his advantage if he intends to start a new business.
No better place than one of the state's most concentrated meetups of criminal connections.
"I want to say no," Tyke answers. "I want to say he wouldn't be stupid enough to show his fuckin' face when we denounced him so publicly. But the fucker has got my goddamn daughter.” He sifts both hands through his hair and tugs at the lengths. “Fuck!”
“Look,” Connor says. “I like Maddie. I really do. So, I want to help. But I also don’t want to screw things up for any of us by sending you charging into my father’s properties on a whim if she’s not there.”
“Why else?” Rae whispers. “Why else do you want to help?”
“I just said,” Connor states, voice a little too high-pitched for my liking. “I like her.”
“Bullshit.” The tremors ease beneath my palm as Rae finds her strength. “You hated whenever I would talk about her. You don’t like Maddie—you despise her.” A strength that comes from defending those she loves.
Connor looks ready to kill.
Tyke senses this also, shifting to stand behind the guy again, one hand on his shoulder in a warning.
“Fine.” Terry’s son steels his jaw, gaze averted to the shelves behind my brother’s desk. “I feel responsible.”
The fingers over Connor's clavicle tighten to the point that the kid winces with pain. "How?" Tyke's one-word question was delivered level and sure, yet the stiffness of his jaw and the madness in his eye suggest he's ready to beat the answers out of the kid.
“Ronan’s been after Rae for weeks.” Fucking knew it. “I may have made it hard for him to get near her on purpose.”
His obsessive stalking. His continued need to show up just to 'check on her.' "You shadowed her so Ronan couldn't snatch her."
Connor shrugs. “Worked, didn’t it?”
“What fucks does Ronan give if you see?” Tyke asks the question on my mind. “Why would you bein’ there stall him?”
"It wasn't me being there," Connor states. It was where I shepherded Rae." He glances at Tyke and me before continuing. "She's always been here or with you. Before that, she had Maddie with her. Keeping Rae scared kept her needing people with her." He shrugs. "It kept her safe, and it kept my old man off my back, with him thinking I did it from a place of obsession."
He did, though. The guy tracked her as an obsession. Her well-being is his obsession.
She is his obsession.
“Why not just tell me that’s what you were doing?” Rae growls, scooting forward on her seat as she does. “Why make me so damn afraid of you instead?”
“Because if I’d told you that my father’s fucking hitman was following you, waiting for an opportunity to shove you in the goddamn dungeon, then you would have freaked out for real.”
“Like I didn’t already?” Rae asks, pitch rising.
"I couldn't risk you doing something stupid like running," Connor yells. He jerks from beneath my brother's hold and moves forward, urging Rae to give him her hand. "I needed you where I could see you." He snatches her fingers anyway, thumb rubbing the back of her palm. "Where I could reassure myself that you were safe.”
“Then why not leave me alone once I was here?” She rips her hand away, rubbing the connection from her flesh. “Like you said, I’m safe here , Connor. You could have left me alone and let me be.”
The guy pulls a deep breath through his nose, assessing Tyke and me as he answers. "I didn't know if I could trust these fucks not to sell you out for their gain."
“We gain by keeping her here,” Tyke states coolly. “We gain by keeping what she knows in our pocket.”
I shove my hand beneath Rae’s and twine our fingers. Partly as a fuck you to Connor when she lets me do it, but also as a gesture of reassurance. We don’t need her like that anymore. Sure—her ability to send Terry to prison is a massive card to play, but we would have dealt it by now if that were the only use she had.
I couldn’t give a shit if Terry remained walking free for the rest of his life. Not if it meant I got to keep Rae here—by my side, with our colors on her back—for as long as I fucking well can before she wakes up to what she’s agreed to.
To the fuck-up she’s let brand her with his name.
“How do we do it?” Rae queries, fingers tightening around mine. “How the hell do we find Maddie then?”
“I’ll give you a list,” Connor offers. “Of my father’s vacant properties.”
"What's the cost?" Tyke asks, his back turned to us as he regards a picture of the club with Maddie at the forefront. "You want our help escaping your old man. Is that your only request, Connor?"
“Access to Rae.” The cocky son-of-a-bitch holds her gaze as he states his terms. “When this is settled, you can’t bar me from seeing her when I want to.”
“Ever occurred to you that I don’t want to give you that?” she answers.
Tyke turns slowly, eyes hardening when he shifts them off our woman and onto the slim thread of hope he has at finding his daughter. “Done.”
“What the—?” Rae jerks from the seat, our hands ripped apart. “Are you serious?”
"Our caveat is that you come here to see her," Tyke explains, then turns to Rae. “You're protected, baby girl. He can't harm you if you're on club grounds."
"I'm just another tool in your arsenal, right?" Her jaw grinds, nostrils flaring as she fights the tears. "All this talk about keeping me safe, but it means shit when you need something done, right?"
“Rae…” Tyke reaches for her, yet she’s already backing away.
"How long until you need to use me for what I know, Tyke? Huh? How long until you force me to testify, knowing it'll send me to prison? Knowing it’ll get me killed."
“I’d never.”
“You just said you would,” she utters, low and despondent. “Fuck, Tyke. You. Just. Said it.” Her chin quivers, yet she holds her head high. “I’m safe here because you need what I know in your pocket. Your words, not mine.” Hips swaying, legs eating up the floor, she bolts for the door. The timber panel rebounds off the wall as Rae storms out of the office.
I rise to my feet to go after her, yet the soft chuckle of the fuckhead to my left stalls my feet.
“I goddamn told you. She’s a real fucking handful, that one.”
“Way I see it,” I say, turning to face the asshole with a fist forming at my side. “Is you made her that way.”
“Be easy to explain then, wouldn’t it?” He folds his arms high on his chest—way too comfortable in the goddamn chair for my liking. “Problem is, she was this fucking crazy—always flipping her shit, changing her moods—from the moment I met her.”
“And that’s a problem?”
"'Course it is." The idiot looks to the two of us as though we'll join in on his misogynistic joke. "No wonder you've fucking teamed up to tame her. It'll take the two of you to make it work." He shrugs. "Then again, it’ll work in my favor when you get tired of her. I’ll wait for you to get so desperate to escape her shit that you beg me to take care of it.”
“Like you already did?” Tyke asks, leaning over the guy once more. “Seems you made a right fuckin’ mess of it.”
“ She’s a fucking mess,” Connor snarls, twisting to meet my brother’s eye. “Tell me you can’t see it. Tell me you don’t feel it whenever she’s around.”
His words shake me deep inside. I do feel it. I feel safe with Rae because she doesn't judge me. Because like recognizes like, and that girl? She’s just as broken on the inside as I am.
My gut sours. Who the fuck am I to put my name on her back when all I’ll do is drag her down? I can’t fix the girl. I can’t fix myself.
"Look," Connor says. "I figured I could heal her, okay? Saw that pretty girl just begging to be loved and figured that why the fuck not? Why not take on a project that brings me a fuckload more joy than any of the shit my old man has me do." He leans forward, elbows to knees as he sighs. "So far, all she did is give me more than I could ever give her." He shrugs. "I failed, guys." Eyes on me, he twists his lips, reluctant to show his hand when he stares me straight in the fucking soul, and begs, "If you're gonna take her from me, at least do what I couldn't."
Tyke leans back, standing tall and exhaling heavily out his nose. It's all we've wanted to do so far: fix her problems. But maybe we're the root of them as much as this jackass before me.
Maybe the issue is giving her the idea that anything about her is worth correcting.
“Maybe you didn’t fail,” I say with a shrug. “Maybe,” I hedge, looking at the two men watching me with matching frowns, “we did. Rae doesn’t need fixing. We do.”