42. Hayden
42
HAYDEN
I paced back and forth, boots crunching over the gravel on the edge of the road, and checked my watch for at least the third time in twenty minutes. The bluff road didn’t get a ton of traffic in the middle of the day, let alone at nearly one in the morning, but I felt like a goddamn sitting duck, waiting for Luca to show.
Impatience had my muscles all locked tight, and it was a minute-by-minute fight to just stand there and wait, when Kara was just a few miles away through the woods, packing her bags, readying to run with me.
At least I hoped she was.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I muttered to myself in the darkness. “What the actual fuck business do you have asking anything of that woman?”
I’d tried convincing myself that anything I’d felt for her hadn’t been real.
But those few minutes we’d stolen in a theater bathroom tonight called me a liar. Those few minutes had told me that the last five years of thinking about her had been beyond my control. I couldn’t have stopped it, even if I’d wanted to.
There was no forgetting what she’d suffered. No forgetting what I’d put her through or what we’d survived together.
No woman would ever understand. No woman would ever compare.
There was no walking away. I was in this up to my fucking eyeballs.
So I stood on the side of that goddamn road, praying Luca had some sort of plan for getting her out.
And she’d come with me.
I wouldn’t force her. I wouldn’t be that man.
She had to want me as much as I wanted her.
From the darkness, two vehicles approached, slowing down when their headlights lit me up. A black van with the name of one of Luca’s Italian restaurants painted on the side. And behind it, Luca’s silver Porsche.
I nodded at the guy behind the wheel of the van as he got out. I vaguely recognized him as one of the guys Luca had working at our restaurants. “Steve, right?” I held out my hand for him to shake.
The man nodded and offered me a smoke from the pack he pulled from his glove box.
I shook my head and went to Luca’s car, since he seemed to be making no effort to get out of his vehicle. He wound down the window as I approached.
He leaned on his elbow. “When you get to the Slayers’ gate, tell them you have a pizza delivery for Riot. No one will stop you. Once you’re inside and you’ve made the delivery, what you do afterward is on you. There’s a lot of people in there, if sources inside are to be believed. And the Slayers have a ton of land behind those fences. Maybe if you’re lucky, they won’t recognize you in the crowd.”
There was fat fucking chance of that. The Slayers, at least the Saint View chapter, knew exactly who I was.
And I knew going back inside that compound was suicide if they discovered me.
It didn’t matter though. I already knew I was going anyway.
Kara hadn’t said yes. But she hadn’t said no either.
I couldn’t stand the thought of her in there, Hawk with his hands all over her. Not going in there wasn’t an option.
I refused to let another man clip her wings. I’d done that to her once. I owed her the chance to fly.
I just wanted her to fly to me.
Steve whistled between his teeth, getting my attention, and then tossed the keys to me.
On instinct, I caught them before they could hit the ground.
Steve walked around to the passenger seat of Luca’s car and got in.
A sinking feeling of dread washed over me.
I hit the button on the key fob that unlocked the back doors of the van and yanked one open.
At least ten sets of terrified eyes stared back at me.
Ten pairs of bound hands.
Ten gagged mouths.
I spun around, glaring at Luca. “No.”
Luca raised an eyebrow at me. “That’s not what you said earlier when you agreed to this job. ”
“You told me I was delivering pizza!”
Steve snorted. “Yeah, because bikers order pizza from five-star restaurants, and five-star restaurants deliver at one in the morning.”
Luca’s smile widened. “The man has a point, don’t you think?”
I didn’t fucking care if he did. I’d known pizza didn’t mean pizza. I’d known there’d be drugs or guns in that van.
And I would have moved either without saying a word.
But women were different.
I was such an idiot. I’d known. I’d known from the very second Luca had walked back into my life that this is where I’d end up. Doing things so abhorrently awful I’d spent five years not sleeping while the goddamn guilt ate me alive.
I was weak.
That was what it came down to. I’d let him woo me with pretty words and opportunities I was too fucking poor and dumb to create for myself. I’d let my own damn desire for more overrule any common sense I should have had.
You couldn’t be mad at a leopard for showing its spots when you were the one who got into bed with it.
I could live with guns and drugs. But I wasn’t helping him traffic women. “Take your fucking keys. I’m not doing it. Go to hell.”
Luca shrugged, taking them back. “If you don’t want to do it, then Steve can.”
Nothing was ever that easy with Luca.
I only had to wait a second for the slow, snakelike grin to spread across his face. He leaned across the console and picked up his phone, pressing a button on it so the small screen lit up his face in the dim light. “Steve,” he said with a chuckle. “You’re good to go on in there and party it up with Chaos’s girl, right? Want a sneak peek of what she’s doing in there? I figured he might need some encouragement so I had Thunder send me a homemade movie.”
I froze as sounds of a party poured through the tinny speakers on Luca’s phone, a video rolling.
Steve let out a holler. “Big titty baby, come at me!” He glanced past Luca at me. “She dance like that for you, Chaos? All big tits in your face?”
Luca turned the phone around and let the video play for me.
Kara, still dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing at the movie, danced on a table with two other women, both in various states of naked. She swung her hips side to side, swaying seductively, her eyes closed.
Around her, a large crowd of bikers watched on. Some threw money at the women. Some catcalled and whistled. Hands reached for her, running dirty fingers up her calves and thighs, that she seemed wholly unaware of in her drunk or drugged state.
Something deep inside me erupted into anger as men around her started undoing their pants, stroking their cocks, getting off on watching her when she was too fucking out of it to consent.
“That’s your girl, right, Chaos?” Luca asked innocently. “You just gonna leave her in there for that entire club to plow like a field?”
Hawk had turned her into one of his club sluts .
Over my fucking dead body was another man going to use her the way Caleb had. Or hold her against her will the way I had.
Luca tossed the keys back at me. “Make the delivery, Chaos. Go get your woman. We both know you aren’t going to stand here doing nothing, knowing those men are going to take whatever they want from her pretty little pussy.”
Luca held the keys out the window again, and when I didn’t make a move to take them, he dropped them at my feet. His tires spun in the gravel, and I turned away instinctively, shielding my eyes.
By the time I turned back, he was gone.
Leaving me alone with a van full of women I didn’t know.
And one I did, just a few miles away inside the Slayers’ clubhouse, surrounded by men who didn’t give a flying fuck about what kind of state she was in. Just that she was there, and theirs for the taking if they so felt like it.
But I couldn’t drive in there and swap these women for the one I couldn’t stop thinking about.
“Get out,” I muttered to the woman closest to the door.
She stared up at me with huge eyes that leaked with tears as I untied her restraints. When her hands were free she pulled the gag from her mouth.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
I shook my head, unable to even look at her. “Help the others.”
She did, turning to the woman next to her and yanking off her bindings. I did the same to a dark-haired woman to her left.
Her cheeks were wet from crying. “You’re letting us go?”
I nodded, not caring about the consequences, only knowing that I had to get to Kara and this van was my way in. But I wasn’t driving it past those gates with these women in the back.
“Where are we supposed to go?” one of the women asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Another gazed around wide-eyed. “We’re in the woods! You can’t just leave us here!”
It was near pitch-black, and we were in the middle of nowhere. But other cars would drive past eventually. Someone would come. “You can hitchhike. Go back into town. Into the police station. Someone will help you. But it can’t be me. Just go. Please. Just fucking get out and run.”
Headlights lit up the road once more, and I shouted to the first woman. “Hail that car down!”
There were still five more women in the van, all of them making desperate noises behind their gags.
I couldn’t get to them fast enough. Kara’s face was all I could see in each of their terrified eyes.
“They’re stopping!” the woman called.
I didn’t stop what I was doing to check. I just needed these women out of the van so I could get in it.
All I could see in my head was those men dragging Kara down off that table. Touching her. Taking things from her that they didn’t deserve.
Car doors slammed .
Women spoke in frantic tones that echoed around my head, along with silent screams that belonged to Kara.
“Where. The fuck. Is Kara?” a deadly low voice came from behind me.
In the next instant, the barrel of a shotgun pressed to the back of my head.
Of all the people to stop, it had to be Hawk, didn’t it?
I froze, fingers wrapped around the ropes tying down the last woman. Her huge eyes frantically flicked between me and the man standing behind me with a weapon held against my skull.
Hawk’s voice held barely concealed rage. “Start talking, you piece of shit, because I swear to God, I’m barely keeping it together. Where the fuck is my woman?”
I spun around, not caring that it put me face-to-face with his gun. “Your woman? Are you joking me? You’re feeling her up in movie theaters. You have her dancing on tables for your ‘brothers.’ She’s not your fucking woman. You’ve turned her into your whore.”
Hawk pressed the gun to my lips. “Call her a fucking whore one more time and I swear I’ll pull the trigger. I’m going to ask you again, but you better believe this will be the last time. Where the hell is Kara?”
I stared at him, wide-eyed at his goddamn ignorance. “She’s at your club! I just saw a video of her.”
He shook his head. “She’s not there. She’s packed her bags and left. Where was she meeting you?”
Hope smacked me in the face, so stupid and out of place considering the situation I’d put myself in. But something deep inside me was damn giddy over Hawk’s confession.
She was coming. She wanted to leave with me .
I was every bit the smug bastard, knowing she’d picked me. “Why would I tell you that?”
“Because we have acres and acres of land and about fifty bikers in there just waiting to take women back to her fucking cult leader of a husband.”
I blinked. “Her what?”
Hawk lost any semblance of patience, his roar of frustration a scream of desperation. “Just tell me where she is, Hayden!”
For the first time, I saw past Hawk’s bravado. Past the asshole biker front he put on.
And saw the pure terror in his eyes.
In an instant, I believed every word he’d said. Knew in my gut that Kara was in danger and I was just as responsible for putting her there as he was.
“She was meeting me at the back gate,” I whispered.
“Try again, asshole. That was the first place we looked.” His fingers trembled over the trigger.
“I swear. That was where we were supposed to meet.”
“She’s not fucking there, Chaos!”
I stared at him. “Then where the hell is she?”
He dropped the gun to his side and shook his head. “I don’t know.”