28. Stone
Church gets called without ceremony. No speeches. No theatrics. Just the heavy thud of the doors closing and the room shifting into something jagged and lethal.
I don’t just take my seat; I drop into it like a predator waiting to strike. My hands are flat on the table, my knuckles white, the wood grooving under the pressure of my grip. Bruiser is on my right, his jaw locked so tight I can hear the bone grind. Riot is on the left, his eyes like flint. The rest file in, the silence so thick it’s suffocating.
They don’t ask why. They saw the bag on the sidewalk. They saw the empty space where she should have been.
“Start,” I say. The word isn’t a command; it’s a snarl.
Cyber doesn’t look up. His fingers are a blur across the keys. “The pickup wasn’t federal. No overlap with any agency routing. Whoever grabbed her after campus wasn’t wearing a badge, Stone. They were ghosts.”
The air in my lungs feels like acid. Ghosts. If they don’t exist, I can’t find them. If I can’t find them, I can’t stop what they’re doing to her.
“They used the feds to flush her,” Riot says, his voice low. “Pushed her right into the kill zone.”
“Yes,” Cyber replies. “Pressure first. Removal second.”
Bruiser leans forward, his shadow falling over the table. “So let’s talk about the pressure. Who triggered the clock?”
Cyber taps a key, and a file flashes onto the wall. “The agents weren’t acting on a sweep. They were responding to a tip. Filed clean. Framed boring. The line that triggered it reads: Overstayed visa.”
“She didn’t,” I bark, the sound echoing off the concrete walls.
“No,” Cyber agrees, his voice steady despite the vibration of the room. “She didn’t. Someone lied with high-level paperwork access. Someone who knew exactly how to phrase it so it wouldn’t cause a scene—just a knock and hands on her.”
Whitmore’s face flashes in my mind. The smug, entitled grin of a man who thinks he can buy anything—or anyone.
“Whitmore,” I say, the name tasting like copper in my mouth. “He told her deportation would be easy. Told her she couldn’t afford to fight him.”
“So when fear didn’t work, he escalated,” Riot finishes.
Cyber nods, pulling up the footage. My heart stutters, a painful, frantic beat. There she is. Alexandra on the sidewalk. I watch the van slide into frame. I watch the struggle—the way she fights with every ounce of her soul, the way she never lets go until they force her. The bag hits the ground, spilling her life onto the pavement.
“She fought,” I whisper, my voice breaking for a fraction of a second before I catch it.
I see her in my head—not as a victim, but as the woman who survived a monster once already. But fighting means they’ll have to break her. Every second we sit here talking, someone is putting their hands on her. Someone is making her bleed.
The thought is a physical pain, a clawing desperation in my gut that I can’t suppress.
“Where is she?” I demand, leaning so far over the table I’m almost in Cyber’s face. “Give me a coordinate. Give me a fucking name.”
“Still close,” Cyber says, not flinching. “No highway cameras, no toll reads. They didn’t take her out of the city. Local holding. Temporary.”
I stand. The chair doesn’t just scrape back; it flips, clattering against the floor.
“They wanted her scared,” I say, my voice trembling with a rage so cold it’s hollow. “They wanted her to think she was alone. That I couldn’t reach her.”
I plant my hands on the table and lean in until I’m looking at every man in the room. They see it now—the cracks in the President. The desperation of a man whose heart is being ripped out of his chest in real-time.
“She isn’t alone,” Ink says, his voice a steady anchor.
“No,” I agree, the word a promise of blood. “She isn’t.”
Cyber’s fingers slow. “I’ve got overlap. The burner used to file the tip pinged a network associated with Whitmore’s startup offices. It’s not a confession, but it’s a trail.”
I lean down, my face inches from his. “You don’t stop. You don’t sleep. You don’t even blink until I have a visual on her. If you lose her, I’ll lose my goddamn mind, Cyber. Do you understand me?”
Cyber nods once, his expression hardening. “I’m not losing her, Prez.”
The room hums—lethal, focused, but underneath it all, the air is vibrating with my own panic. I’m the leader of this club, but right now, I’m just a man who can’t breathe because his world is in the back of a van.
I look around the table. At my brothers. My army.
“Whoever took her is about to find out that I will burn this city to the ground to get her back.”
Church breaks without another word. No one lingers. The room explodes into a blur of weapons being checked and engines roaring to life outside.
I don’t move. I stay staring at the screen, at the frozen image of her bag on the sidewalk, my hand shaking as I reach out to touch the image of her.
Hold on, Lex, I think, a silent, desperate prayer. Just hold on. I’m coming for you.
I leave the room and walk the familiar hallway back toward our space, my steps slower than they should be. The clubhouse hums around me, but it feels distant, like I’m underwater.
Our door is still shut.
I stop in front of it, hand hovering for a second before I push it open.
The room smells like her.
Her jacket’s slung over the chair where she left it. A book sits open on the nightstand, spine cracked like she meant to come back to it.
I didn’t plan this.
That’s the part that keeps knocking the air out of my lungs. She didn’t slide into my life slow. She didn’t test the edges or ask permission. One day she was just… there. Asking questions. Standing her ground. Looking at me like she saw the man instead of the cut.
Somewhere along the line, she stopped being someone I protected and started being everything I orbit.
My bed feels wrong without her in it.
I sit on the edge for half a second—just long enough for the weight to hit. Just long enough to imagine her here instead of wherever they took her. Scared or furious or bleeding or all three.
I don’t let that spiral finish.
That way lies mistakes.
I stand, grab her jacket, and hold it once—brief, controlled. Like a promise instead of a prayer.
Footsteps pound down the hall.
“Stone.”
Cyber’s voice. Different this time. Certain. I’m moving before he finishes speaking, back through the clubhouse, through the knot of anxious faces that turn the second they hear his tone.
Cyber’s standing, laptop forgotten, phone in his hand.
“I’ve got her,” he says.
The room explodes into motion.
Bruiser moves first. Too fast. Too sharp. Like he’s trying to outrun something already chewing at him. Guilt sits on him heavy—I can see it in the set of his shoulders, the way his eyes won’t stop scanning, like vigilance might make up for the mistake. He knows this traces back to him. To letting her walk. To thinking instead of knowing. When I’m gone, the club is his. Every decision, every consequence. And that includes her. Especially her. Keeping my woman safe when I can’t is part of the weight that comes with standing second. Part of me wants to shove that weight off his back. Part of me doesn’t. Watching her was his job. He failed it. I failed it too, the second I believed she’d be safe without me in the room.
“Where?” Bruiser demands.
Cyber turns the screen so we can all see it—coordinates, a building outline, a grainy overhead image. “Warehouse. East side. Private lease under a shell company. No cameras on the exterior. Power draw spiked an hour ago.”
Riot cracks his neck. “Local muscle?”
“Two confirmed,” Cyber says. “Possibly more inside. They didn’t expect company.”
They will get it anyway.
I pull on my jacket as I walk.
“Let’s go,” I say.
No cheers. No bravado.
Just engines roaring to life and men moving with purpose.
I don’t look back at the room.
I don’t slow down.
They took my world.
Now I take her back.