Chapter Twenty-One
Dylan
He wasn’t dead.
He couldn’t be dead.
Not like this.
Not before I got to tell him that the shivery feeling I was getting around him—I was pretty sure that was something a lot like love.
I could barely even focus on the hands grabbing me, bruising into me, as I was dragged into the clubhouse.
All I could see was Colter with a belt around his throat, the way his face had gone red, how his eyes were huge and bloodshot. How he (the giant, hulking, strong-as-fuck man he was) got dragged backward by someone else.
He couldn’t be dead.
I wouldn’t accept that possible reality.
I was so focused on him that I barely even clocked the clubhouse as I was dragged through it.
It was the same as I remembered.
Dark.
Furnished in leather.
It had that same funk I remembered from my childhood: old liquor, unwashed bodies, the stink of a garbage pail that was several days past needing to be taken out.
But there wasn’t much time to take it in as I was pulled through.
Not to a basement.
The building was slab-on-grade because, I imagined, costs and the worries about the risk of basements with earthquakes.
But there was a small room attached to the back.
Small.
Windowless.
Reinforced with cinderblock walls.
A prison of sorts.
I knew from hearing the screams of men locked inside and desperate for escape that there was no way out of it but through the door.
So as I was pulled through, my fight came back with a fury.
Because I wasn’t one of those men.
Who were beaten, sure. Killed eventually.
I was a woman.
And there were far worse things these men would do to me before they killed me.
If that door closed with me inside it, even with the knife scratching down my leg, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I was begging for death.
If it came to that, I’d take Colter’s knife and take myself out first.
If they wanted to gang-rape me, they’d have to do it with my corpse.
I managed to get an arm free, throwing out my arm, and clawing my nails down one of the guy’s faces.
He snarled.
But as my thumb found his eye and scooped, he screamed and dropped me, stumbling back as he clutched his face, blood seeping between his fingers.
“Fucking bitch,” the man carrying me snarled, dropping me without warning.
My whole body cracked against the cement floor, a million points of pain ricocheting up my body at once.
He leaned down, grabbing the front of my shirt, yanking me up, then landing a blow so hard to my cheek that my vision flashed.
But I managed to stay awake and scramble back as he grabbed his friend and rushed out of the room.
He might live.
But he’d have an empty socket where his eye used to be.
That fact brought me a sick kind of pleasure.
At least if I had to die, I made some of these bastards hurt first.
The door swung closed but didn’t latch.
I pushed up to my knees, my stomach leaping at my luck.
It burst open again a second later, though, knocking hard against the wall.
Then there he was.
Roach.
With his beady-ass eyes and disgusting dirty hair.
What was with these guys and not bathing?
“Well, well, well. She returns home after all,” Roach said, shooting me a slimy smile.
He didn’t bother to close the door behind him.
And I saw her move into the doorway, her big, blocky head tilted to the side, confused by my appearance inside the clubhouse instead of in the bushes where she knew she could find me and some much-needed food.
Her nose sniffed the air, likely scenting the chicken treats that were still shoved in my back pocket.
“Not for the first time,” I told Roach, pleased at the flicker of uncertainty across his face. “We’ve been watching you for weeks. Sad that you didn’t notice all the cameras. There are like a dozen of them. Stupid fucks.”
Another shadow moved in behind him.
The male dog, equally interested.
They both stepped forward, spreading out to either side of Roach.
Roach felt them at his sides, and a wicked smile pulled at his lips, likely thinking that the dogs would scare me.
He might be their owner.
But I’d been the one feeding them, giving them treats, and doing endless belly rubs for the past several nights. I was probably the only kindness they’d ever known in his life.
I slowly moved to stand, feeling pain in all my joints from the drop, from the fight before then. But I’d be damned if he saw how much I was hurting. If he knew how much my heart was breaking. Because if Colter was alive, he’d be in here by now.
He was gone.
So were Saint and Syn if I was here alone.
My heart cracked straight in two even as I panicked about Sugar. Alone in a hotel room. No one to take care of her.
I bit the inside of my lip to keep it from quivering.
This wasn’t over yet, dammit.
I didn’t have to kill all of them.
I just had to get past Roach, get out the front door, and fucking run for my life.
“Stay the fuck down,” Roach snapped, making the female dog jump, like a strike usually followed a tone like that.
If I needed more reasons to want to kill the bastard.
I stood straight and patted my leg.
Then felt my own lips twitch as the dogs both moved to my side, making Roach’s brows pinch in confusion.
“Yeah, they love me more than you,” I said, reaching for a strip of chicken jerky and splitting it in two for them. “Imagine that.”
“You fucking—” Roach started, taking a step toward me.
Until the female dog let out a low, threatening rumble.
His step faltered.
“Seems like they don’t like you threatening me. Wanna see which one wants to rip your throat out more? My money’s on the girl.”
There was a crash somewhere toward the front of the clubhouse, but the rumbling of the angry dog beside me made it hard for me to tell what it could be.
“I’ll put a bullet in each of their heads while you watch,” Roach said. “Then I’ll fuck you on top of their dead bodies.”
His draw was fast.
The gun was out before I even noticed him reaching for his waistband.
Maybe my first thought should have been self-preservation. But I stepped forward toward the gun, trying to wedge my body between it and the dogs.
Because there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he would be as heartless as to shoot them. Then follow through with his plan afterward.
Somewhere in the clubhouse, there was more crashing, cursing, and I vaguely wondered if they were trying to tend to their wounded. Including the guy whose eye I’d fucked up. I could still feel the blood and fluid sticky on my thumb.
No matter what happened to me, I hoped he and everyone in the club thought of me when they looked at that bastard’s face.
“Go ahead. Shoot,” I invited when I felt the dogs’ fluffy bodies behind me.
“No,” he said, his hand falling back to his side. “I’m not putting you out of your misery until you’re begging and crying for it. Even then… I might keep you around for a few weeks. Maybe keep you drugged up like all your girls. I’ve had my fun with them over the past year. So has everyone else.”
He was trying to provoke me.
It worked.
I cocked back and swung, putting every bit of force in my body into the swing.
His jaw was like hitting concrete. The pain shot from my knuckles all the way up my arm. But I noticed it in a distant kind of way, because I was too busy enjoying the way his head whipped to the side, how blood and a chunk of something white—a tooth?—flew out of his mouth.
A roar burst from him.
And when he looked back, my hand was already reaching for the blade shoved down my pant leg.
But there was no time.
No use.
Because, suddenly, the back of Roach’s head was grabbed in one hand and his chin in another, and I watched in fascinated horror as his head was twisted, cracked, severed from his spinal cord.
The giant hands released him.
His body fell, lifeless, to the ground.
And there was Colter.
Panting for breath.
Bloodied. Bloody. Vibrating with rage.
I didn’t think.
I just… flew at him, wrapped him up, held on tight.
Somewhere off in the clubhouse, there were four loud pops.
Then complete and utter silence.