Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
SONNY
Ella fucking Doyle .
My jaw dropped as I looked at the beautiful woman curled into a ball on the floor of a Mac Corp shipping container. She lifted her head to glance at me, mascara streaking down her cheeks, knees bent into her chest.
I entered the container, expecting to see cartons of AK-47s—not the daughter of my uncle’s enemy.
My enemy.
Ella broke Aiden’s heart when she moved to Ireland without saying goodbye. For the rest of the year, I watched him fall to pieces. Throughout lunch, he stared at their old table as if she would magically appear. Aiden simply existed until he left for RISD with his sister. And by the time we said goodbye that August, he looked relieved to escape Devil’s Creek.
Losing Ella fucked him up because… he loved her. All the while, I secretly loved him, hating we were just friends when all we wanted to do was fuck.
I hunched before Ella, sliding my fingers beneath her chin, grinning like a maniac. “Miss me, El?”
She wrapped her arms around her middle and sat back so my hand slipped away. “What do you want, Sonny?”
I shook my head and laughed. “Really? That’s the first question you ask me. How about we start with why you’re in my shipping container when there’s supposed to be AK-47s?”
“What?” Ella choked out. “I don’t fucking know.”
“Your pussy is tight, and I love fucking you, but it’s not worth thirty million dollars.” I pressed my forehead against hers, and her body trembled. “Where are my guns? And don’t play games with me. I know your piece of shit father put you up to this.”
“He didn’t,” she whispered, a tear streaming down her cheek.
“Tell me who did.”
She stared at her feet and sighed. “I don’t know.”
Cian Doyle was one of two Irish Mob bosses from Beacon Bay and a competitor to the O’Sheas. My mother was born an O’Shea and the only sister of my uncle Declan. Ella and I never had a future, which ruined my chance with Aiden. Eight years later, I still thought about the night we fucked.
I wanted that again.
I wanted him.
Before I could question Ella, my cell phone rang. I reached into my pocket and rose to my full height, holding the phone to my ear. “What’s up, Cole?”
Cole Marshall was the youngest of The Devil’s Knights at only twenty-two. He lived down the street from Aiden and me on Founders Way on a big-ass compound everyone called Fort Marshall.
“Sonny,” he shouted into the phone, breathing so hard it sounded like he’d run a hundred miles. “Drake… He’s gone.”
A chill spread down my arms and back. For months, Drake Battle had warned us that The Lucaya Group wanted his tech. Drake developed an artificial software that could deploy weapons from anywhere in the world. The U.S. and foreign governments wanted to get their hands on his AI. But so did terrorist groups and criminal empires.
“What do you mean he’s gone?” I bit out, the blood boiling in my veins.
“They fucking took him!” Cole sounded frantic, barely able to catch his breath. “Drake initiated Battle King protocol. It put all of his homes and offices on lockdown. He told me if he ever had to activate it, he was probably dead or would be soon.”
Drake was the most intelligent person I’d ever known. We were the same age but didn’t spend much time together until after he graduated college. Drake was already at MIT when I was still in high school. He was a certified genius with a 189 IQ and a brain the size of a supercomputer.
Cole and Drake were cousins on their mother’s side of the family. And now that Cole was working at Battle Industries, he had insider knowledge we would need to find Drake.
“Motherfuckers!” I rushed out of the container, slamming the door behind me. “I found Cian Doyle’s daughter in one of my shipping containers. It’s pretty fucking convenient timing, don’t you think?”
“Fuck,” he groaned. “Are you kidding me?”
“Nope. The AK-47s I’m supposed to hand over to my uncle are gone. I got her instead.”
“Jesus.” He blew air into the receiver. “Look, we’ll deal with the girl and the guns later. We have to find Drake before The Lucaya Group kills him and Tate.”
Tate Maxwell was Drake’s head of security and best friend. If they got Tate, they were fucked until we found them. But would they be alive? A knife twisted in my gut at the thought.
Drake was like a brother to Marcello and me. The three of us took classes together until second grade. After the teachers realized he was a genius, Drake went to a gifted school and graduated college at nineteen.
I held onto the hope his brilliant mind would find a solution. Drake was usually our eyes and ears. Thankfully, he’d been teaching Marcello how to hack for years. I needed Marcello back on U.S. soil to help me track him.
I could make anyone or anything disappear. Using my shipping knowledge and shady tactics, I got guns past customs for the Knights’ less legitimate customers. But finding people was not my specialty. It wasn’t Cole’s either. He was an engineer. If we needed to build something, he was our guy.
“Can you call Luca and let him know?” Cole asked since he hated dealing with Luca and his mood swings.
The Salvatore brothers and Alex were in Italy for a delayed honeymoon. With all the shit we’d been dealing with over the past two years, the five of them hadn’t had a chance to celebrate their nuptials.
Luca instructed the Knights not to call him unless someone died. Well, Drake’s kidnapping sure as fuck qualified.
“I’ll call him,” I told Cole.
“Thanks, man.” He let out a sigh of relief. “Grace just delivered Hale. I need to focus on my wife and son until I leave with Alpha Command to look for Drake.”
The women in our lives understood being a Knight would always come first. We swore an oath and bled for each other. But blood didn’t have to unite us because we had a code. This was a brotherhood.
What binds us will destroy us, and what will destroy us unites us. That was the motto of The Devil’s Knights, which we took seriously. Losing one of our own, especially Drake, would destroy all of us, but we would always be united.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “And congrats, man. I can’t believe you’re a father before me.”
He laughed. “I didn’t plan to be a dad this young. But you know, shit happens. I didn’t see Grace coming. She fucking snuck up on me and never let go.”
After all the shit Cole had been through in the past year with Grace, they deserved to be happy. He’d lost his mom and nearly lost Grace to another man.
“Spend time with your wife and son. I’ll handle everything on my end.”
I hung up and pulled open the door to the container. As I did, a whirl of long, dirty blonde hair smacked my cheek. Ella shoved her palms into my chest, almost knocking me over as she darted across the cargo ship. I stood and waited, hands on my hips, pushing my suit jacket to the side. She ran until she hit the end of the ship, which was packed with nothing but containers full of cargo and a few vehicles.
I laughed. “Where are you going, El?”
My family owned Mac Corp, one of the largest shipping companies in the world. Most of the shit on the vessel was legit. That made it easier to sneak in a few containers full of illegal shit once a month.
She gave me the finger. “Fuck you, Sonny.”
“Aww, baby. You already did that.” I raised my hand and beckoned her. “Get over here.”
She shook her head. “No, you’re going to kill me.”
“What makes you think that?” I walked toward her, still a good fifteen feet apart. “Hmmm? Tell me, my little slut, what did you do this time?”
She was the daughter of a mob boss but not the typical Mafia princess. Her dad was mean-as-fuck and treated her like shit. I hadn’t heard a word about her in years. It was like she died the day she left. Over the years, I thought about her, mostly because her leaving fucked up my relationship with Aiden.
The few times he let me kiss him ended badly, nearly destroying our friendship. Aiden couldn’t separate Ella from what he had with me. Because of that, we would never be together. Not unless he could have her, too.
But I didn’t trust her.
Her daddy probably put her up to this. But how did she know about the guns? How did Cian? She was hiding something, and I would get to the bottom of it.
Ella slid her hands to her hips, blonde hair hanging in front of her blue eyes. Even filthy and sweaty, she still looked hot in ripped jeans shorts and a white tank top with a black bra underneath. She had even more curves than I remembered. Her tits spilled out of the top, her long, sexy legs toned in all the right places.
Fuck. Me.
“I might have been stupid enough to sit on your dick, but I’m not riding in that rodeo again,” Ella shot back. “So whatever shit you got planned for me, fuck you, Sonny.” She pushed out her hands and cracked her knuckles, ready for a fight. “You want me? Come fucking get me, Pretty Boy.”
She had to go there and use Aiden’s name for me.
“You wanna play games, baby?” As I inched forward, she headed to my left. “If you make me chase you, El, I will spank your ass until my name is imprinted on your skin.”
She flipped her hair over her shoulder and snickered. “Game on, motherfucker!”
This fucking girl.
She liked to test my patience.
I followed her, knowing she would eventually realize she had nowhere to run. It was a waste of time. She was lucky I hadn’t called the guards to seize her. One phone call was all it would have taken. But I liked the chase, the blood pumping faster through my veins with each step I took toward her.
Ella ran in circles until she hit a dead end. And when she tried to rush past me, I backed her up against a red container.
“Game on, huh?” I fisted her hair and yanked her toward me. “Looks like I won, baby.” Pressing her back into the cold metal, I parted her legs with my knee. “You gonna be a good girl and take your punishment?”
“A deal is a deal.” Ella shrugged, defeated but not deflated by the loss, like she wanted me to follow through on my threat. “I’ve been a bad girl, Sonny.” She licked her lips. “Spank me.”
This was why I liked her so much. Ella was feisty and sexy and didn’t give many fucks about anything. She rolled with the punches, took whatever life threw at her, and didn’t cower to anyone. Even if she feared me, she didn’t show it.
Aiden still talked about her sometimes. Six months ago, we were sitting on my yacht drinking craft beer, and he said, “Do you think wherever Ella ended up that she’s happy?”
“I don’t think she’ll ever be happy,” I said truthfully, “not as long as her father controls her life.”
He bobbed his head and drank his beer.
That was the end of our conversation, and he hadn’t mentioned her again. His question had come so out of the blue it shocked me. For whatever fucked up reason, Aiden could not let her go.
The idea of sharing her again sent a ripple of excitement straight through my body, hardening my cock. I loved fucking both of them. Aiden tried to pretend he didn’t like me. But he wanted my dick and was too much of a masochist to let himself feel anything for anyone ever again.
“You want to get spanked?” I waggled my eyebrows at Ella and smirked. “Do you think you deserve it?”
She spun around, so her cheek smashed into the container. “Go ahead. You won, asshole.”
I held her down with my chest and let my lips trace the length of her ear. “But do you want it, my little slut?”
She shivered at my nickname for her. “I don’t care anymore. Just fucking do it.”
“You don’t care about what?”
She glanced over her shoulder at me. “Anything.”
Just like that, my boner deflated.
Until she told me who stole the guns, I would keep her as collateral. Something was off about the timing of my finding her.
Drake was gone.
And I got her back.
It didn’t compute.
Was her dad in bed with The Lucaya Group? They could get to anyone in the world, and a notorious crime boss like Cian was well-known in most countries.
“I don’t have time for games.” I bit her earlobe and sucked it into my mouth, trailing my hand over her fat ass. “Let’s go.” I cupped her ass with both hands and squeezed. “I got shit to do that doesn’t involve fucking around with your crazy ass.”
Her eyes widened. “Where are we going?”
“To one of the Knights’ safe houses.” I snapped my fingers and started walking, knowing she would follow.
She was at my side in seconds. “You can’t send me back to Ireland. He’ll kill me.”
“I can do whatever the fuck I want with you.” I grinned like the villain in every horror film. “No one knows I have you. And it will stay that way until I figure out what shit you’ve gotten yourself into this time.”