Wrecker (Iron Battalion MC #2)

Chapter 1

WRECKER

Amanda woke up like she expected to fight her way out.

One second she was limp against the mattress, hair spread over the pillow, breathing slow. The next, her back bowed, a quiet sound ripped out of her throat, and her hand clawed at the blankets like she was still trying to get free.

I was out of the chair before I even thought about it.

“Hey. Hey, Red.” My hand closed over her wrist, warm and small and shaking under my fingers. “You’re at the compound. You’re safe. Breathe.”

Her eyes snapped open. Wild, unfocused, then sharp. They landed on my face, on my cut, checked the room fast. Ceiling. Window. Door. The old dresser in the corner. The cracked paint. A mental checklist, like she was looking for cameras and exits.

Her nails dug into my palm. She didn’t apologize. Of course she didn’t.

Four days ago, she’d been undercover in a logistics warehouse tied to the same trafficking ring that came to light when Ariel was taken.

Four days since everything escalated fast and ugly.

Since Amanda saw something no one should ever have to see, froze long enough for it to burn straight into her nervous system, and we pulled her out before they realized exactly who she was.

Since then, sleep came in jagged pieces, fear lived just under her skin, and the compound had become less a clubhouse and more a shelter.

Not because she was weak. Because what she walked away from had teeth.

“What time is it?” she rasped.

“Little after six.”

“In the morning?”

“Yeah.”

She slumped back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. Her chest rose and fell in short, shallow bursts. It took her a minute to drag her gaze back to me.

“You’re still here,” she said.

My neck popped when I straightened. Sleeping in the chair all night had done a number on it. I rolled out my shoulders and tried not to wince.

“Yeah.”

“You shouldn’t have stayed.”

“I’m not leaving you alone. Not now.”

Her mouth twitched. It wasn’t a full smile. More like she wanted to argue and didn’t have the energy yet.

The room we were in was one of the side bedrooms off the main hall.

It had bare walls and old wood floor. The bed frame had seen better years, but the mattress was decent.

She had two blankets piled over her, a third kicked halfway to the floor.

Someone, probably Ariel, had left a pair of slippers by the bed and a hoodie folded on the chair I’d commandeered.

The hoodie was mine. She pretended she didn’t know that.

“How long was I out?” she asked.

“Couple hours. You crashed around three.”

“Did I wake anyone up?”

“Just me.”

“Liar.” Her voice was dry as dust. She swallowed and winced like her throat hurt. “You stomp around like a freight train in those boots. Half the clubhouse probably heard you when I… when it started.”

I thought about the way she had come out of it earlier. The choked noise. The way her hands had locked into fists so tight her knuckles had gone white.

I had heard worse in my life. I had heard men scream, heard the way sound broke when people thought they were going to die.

Hers still cut straight through my ribs.

“You want water?” I asked.

She nodded, so I let go of her wrist long enough to grab the cup from the nightstand. Steam curled from the top. Doc had insisted on warm, not cold. Better for shock or some bullshit like that. I had not argued. Doc knew his shit.

She pushed herself up on one elbow, took the cup with slightly steadier hands than last night. Her fingers brushed mine. There was the smallest tremor there. If you didn’t know her, you’d miss it.

I knew her.

She’d been at the compound four days. It felt like four years.

Outside the thin wall, the place was waking up.

I could hear it. Pipes groaning. Voices carrying.

Boots on boards. Smoke’s claws clicking on the porch as Ranger took him out for a run.

The sound of Brutus’s low bitching from somewhere near the kitchen.

Doc telling someone to drink water or he’d put them on a drip.

Iron Battalion, alive and moving.

And Amanda, sitting in one of our beds, wrapped in one of our blankets, in one of our shirts, eyes ringed in purple shadows, trying to sit up straight like this was just another morning.

She took a sip, grimaced. “Tastes like ass.”

“Doc put electrolytes in it.”

“Of course he did.”

She drank anyway.

I watched her, because that was what I had been doing since we pulled her. At first because Cap told me to stick close. Then when I had seen the footage, there was no fucking way I was letting her out of my sight again.

The thought of that elevator hit me, sharp and clean, like it had been carved into the inside of my skull.

I had been in the surveillance room that night.

While Amanda and I had gone undercover, the rest of the guys had built a makeshift surveillance point near the warehouse.

A place where Amanda and I could come back to after our undercover shifts and an easy access place to tap directly into their systems. With some of my tinkering and the help of Ghost, we had been able to sneak out way into their camera feed at the warehouse.

We had three monitors going at once with the logistics hub’s basement level filled on one screen.

The parking lot and loading docks filled the others.

The truck traffic looked normal, and the security guard was half asleep in his chair. Nothing pinged my radar.

Until I heard a sound.

Muffled crying. It was barely picked up by the cheap camera mic. I frowned and leaned in toward the feed on the lower left.

The freight elevator doors were open on the loading level. Two men stood inside. One had his hand wrapped around a skinny arm. The girl attached to it was maybe sixteen, seventeen at most. She was bruised and gagged. Her eyes were red and raw like she had already used every tear she had.

That had jolted me upright.

“Cap,” I had called. “You need to see this.”

He had been at the table behind me, going over schedules with Ghost. One look at the screen and the whole room had gone tight.

“Where the hell is that?” he asked.

“Freight bay. East corner.”

The view was skewed with the camera up in the ceiling, looking down on the open doors. The girl tried to dig her heels in. One of the men yanked her forward. The other checked the corridor, like he was waiting for someone.

Then we got him. On camera.

He stepped in from the hallway, smoothing his suit jacket like he was heading into a meeting, not into hell.

The Watcher.

It was the name Ariel and Cap had given him. This was the first clear image of him that we had. We had only seen him in still photos or grainy clips before. Always clean. Always calm. Expensive watch. No visible tattoos. The kind of son of a bitch who looked forgettable until you saw his eyes.

“Record this now,” Cap growled. Ghost nodded and hit the record button.

On the screen, he glanced up. It should have been at the camera. The angle was right for that.

But he wasn’t looking at the camera.

He was looking past it.

“Amanda,” Cap said under his breath.

She was in frame now, way in the background. Just a blur at first. Then the camera tracked as she walked. Her red hair pulled back. Plain clothes. A stack of printouts in her arms. Just another temp at a shitty warehouse.

She was undercover with them by her own insistence. Because of her hacking background, she could get into the systems and figure out how these people moved their money. Her being inside had been half the reason we even had any intel at all.

She heard something. I saw it hit her. Her steps slowed. Her head turned.

Her gaze landed on the elevator.

The girl saw her and tried to lurch forward. One of the men jerked her back, shoved her against the far wall. The gag muffled her scream.

The Watcher stepped into view beside her, between the elevator doors and the corridor.

He looked at Amanda. Not at the camera. Not at the doorway. Straight at her.

The air went cold in the surveillance room. I remember that. The way every hair on my arms stood up.

Amanda froze.

She stopped so fast the papers tilted in her grip. For a second, she looked like she had forgotten what to do with her own feet.

I leaned closer to the screen. “Come on,” I muttered. “Move. Red, move.”

She didn’t. Couldn’t.

The Watcher smiled. Slow. Like he had all the time in the world. He did not look alarmed at all that someone had seen him with a gagged girl shoved in a corner of a freight elevator.

He lifted his hand. Two fingers. Pressed the elevator button. Never broke eye contact.

The doors began to slide shut.

Amanda still hadn’t moved.

The last thing we saw before the doors met was the girl’s eyes. Wide. Wet. Terrified.

Then steel.

The monitor went back to a blank view of the closed doors and the empty hall.

Amanda’s papers slipped out of her hands on screen. They hit the floor. She didn’t even look down at them. Her chest was moving, quick and shallow. She backed up, one step, two, then pivoted away out of the camera’s view.

“Ghost,” Cap said, voice flat. “Get me every angle of the last five minutes. All floors. Wrecker, find her. Now.”

I didn’t bother answering. I was already moving.

It took me three minutes to get from the surveillance room into that building through the access point we had set up for extraction. Another ninety seconds to find the supply closet on Level Two, back hall.

She was there. On the floor, knees pulled up, face pressed to them. Hands locked around the back of her neck. Whole body shaking, but she wasn’t making a sound.

“Amanda,” I said, dropping to a crouch. “Red.”

Her head snapped up. Her eyes were blown wide, pupils huge, skin white as paper. She looked at me, then at the door past my shoulder.

“They took her,” she choked out. “He looked at me. I didn’t move. I couldn’t move.”

“Not your fault,” I said.

“It is. I should have done something.”

“If you had stepped in, you would be in that elevator too.”