Chapter 38
By the time I hit the clubhouse lot again, I’m running on something meaner than adrenaline.
Adrenaline burns hot. Fast. Chaotic.
This is colder than that.
This is the kind of focus that happens when panic has already chewed through everything useless and left only the parts of you that know how to hunt, protect, and kill if it comes to it.
Blaze’s bike is right behind me.
Joker’s bike cuts in after him.
We come in hard, gravel spitting under the tires, engines loud enough to pull heads toward the lot before any of us even have the doors fully open.
I’m out of the truck before it settles.
The clubhouse is already in motion. Because nothing in this place stays still when blood’s in the water.
The main room door flies open just as I hit the bottom step, and Landon comes through it like he’s already halfway to violence and looking for somewhere to land it.
“Mom?” he barks, eyes cutting past me toward the drive. “Allie?”
“Tracie is okay. Allie...she’s gone,” I say.
No easing into it. No softening. No room left for anybody to pretend this is something smaller than what it is.
Landon’s whole face changes. Not shock. We burned through that twenty minutes ago.
This is worse.
This is a man hearing the thing he already knew in his gut and hating it anyway.
Behind him, the movement inside the house shifts. I catch Mom in the hallway, Emma and Raven trying to hold the shape of the room together while Kya, Mac, and Brooke hover in that impossible place pregnant women somehow manage, half furious, half scared, all protective.
Dad. Cain. Shadow. Cobra. Hammer.
Every man in the building has gone hard at the edges.
I don’t stop moving. “Dom?” I ask.
Landon pivots instantly and falls into step beside me. “Surveillance room.”
I head for the side hall at a dead run, boots hammering against old floors, Landon at my shoulder and Blaze, Joker, and Logan closing fast behind us.
“He got her in a dark SUV,” I say as we move. “If Dom’s got anything, plate, traffic cam, gas station footage, I don’t care—”
“He’s been digging since you called,” Logan says behind me. “Nothing solid yet.”
That doesn’t help. Not even a little.
We hit the little room off the back hallway that Dom uses as his cave, surveillance feeds, laptops, hard drives, enough screens and wires to make a normal man break out in hives.
Dom’s already in front of three monitors at once, fingers moving over a keyboard so fast it looks automatic, Carter posted behind him, Cain and Shadow over his shoulders, all of them with the same wired, ugly tension in their bodies.
Dom doesn’t look up when we come in. “Dark SUV, probably midsize, maybe a Tahoe or Explorer variant, but the feed from the gas station up on county line was shit and half the street cams in town haven’t updated in twelve minutes because apparently the city pays for garbage.
” His voice is clipped, fast, furious. “I’ve got his work address, his apartment, his mama’s house, two gym memberships, a storage unit, and every place he’s stupid enough to have used a card in the last six months, but I still don’t have eyes on the fucking car. ”
“Try the light at—” I start.
“Already did.”
“The intersection by—”
“Did that too.” He slams one key harder than necessary and finally looks at me. His face is pale under the fluorescent light. Focused. Furious. “I’m trying, Jimmy.”
I swallow the rest of whatever I was going to say because the truth is, I know he is.
Everybody is. It still doesn’t feel fast enough. Not when all I can picture is Allison tied up in some car with Drew’s hand on her and nobody close enough to stop it.
Landon braces one hand against the back of Dom’s chair and asks, “What about county traffic cams?”
“Low refresh rate. Pulled what I could.”
“Private feeds?”
“Working them.”
The room hums with electronics and rage.
Every screen looks wrong. Every blank stretch of road feels like a personal insult. Every second that passes without her face showing up somewhere I can actually get to feels like it’s peeling something raw in my chest.
Then my phone rings.
Not Allison. Not Dom’s system. Not one of the brothers already spread out over half the county.
Wyatt. The prospect assigned to the gate today.
I answer before the second ring finishes. “What?”
His voice comes through hard and fast and already halfway gone. “You guys need to get the fuck out here now—”
I’m already moving. Already turning for the door before he can say another word. “Why?”
And then I hear it. Faint through the phone first. Then from outside.
A scream. Raw. Hoarse. Torn open from the center of her.
My name.
“Jimmy!”
Everything in me stops and detonates at the same time.
Not a thought. Not a plan. Just motion.
I’m through the doorway before the echo dies, the whole room spilling out behind me in a blur of bodies and boots and curses.
The clubhouse erupts around us. Men pouring from every room. Doors slamming. Voices shouting. Weapons coming free like second nature because at this point, they are.
We hit the lot at a dead sprint, blowing past the porch, past the bikes, past the line where gravel meets packed dirt near the gate.
I see Wyatt first, posted by the open gate with his piece half-drawn and his face gone white.
Then I see her.
Allison.
She’s staggering up the drive straight toward the clubhouse, bloody and filthy and limping hard enough that every step looks like it costs her.
One shoe is gone. Her hair’s half ripped loose and wild around her face.
There’s dirt all over her legs, blood at her temple, more smeared along one arm, and for one impossible second all I know is that she’s here and upright and alive and—
My blood runs cold.
Because before I can even call her name, before I can reach her, before I can do a damn thing but see her—
Drew comes out of the tree line behind her and catches her by the neck.
It happens so fast it barely reads as movement.
One second she’s free.
The next his arm is around her throat, yanking her back into him, his other hand shoving a gun against her temple so hard her head jerks sideways.
She screams.
The sound tears straight through me.
Every man around me stops and draws in the same breath.
Guns come up instantly.
Mine’s in my hand before I consciously think about grabbing it. So is Logan’s. Cain’s. Blaze’s. Shadow’s. Landon’s.
Six pieces up and aimed. Six men lined hard across the lot with the same thought burning under their skin.
Let her go.
Drew’s breathing hard enough I can see it from here.
Blood runs down the side of his face from whatever she did to him or both. There’s dirt and pine needles stuck to his shirt. His eyes are bright in that fucked-up, fevered way I’ve come to hate even from a distance.
And Allie is trying not to choke.
His forearm is high under her chin, hand clamped against the side of her neck, the gun crushed to her temple while she struggles against him with what looks like her hands bound behind her back.
The sight of her wrists bound behind her back while she’s standing there bleeding just outside my lot with his arm around her throat makes something animal and ancient rip loose inside me.
“Let her the fuck go,” I say.
My voice doesn’t sound like mine. Too low. Too raw. Too close to the edge of something I can’t pull back once it starts.
Drew laughs. Actually laughs. A wet, ugly little sound that has no business existing in the same air as her fear.
“Six against one,” Blaze says, voice cold enough to freeze blood. “You’re not walking out of this.”
Drew jerks Allison tighter against him.
She makes another sound, small this time, involuntary, strangled by the pressure at her throat.
My finger tightens on the trigger.
No shot. Not clean. Not with the angle. Not with her body shielding every place I’d need open to put him down without risking her.
He knows it.
That’s the worst part.
He fucking knows it. “Don’t care if I walk,” Drew says, eyes locked on me. “If I can’t have her, nobody can.”
The words hit the lot like rot.
Torch, a few paces behind me now with Dad and Carter, goes completely still.
Tracie’s muffled sob breaks from the porch where Mom and Emma are holding her back.
Kya says something vicious from somewhere behind the line of men, Mac tells somebody not to move, Brooke makes a strangled, horrified sound.
The whole world narrows down to Drew’s hand on Allison’s throat.
Nothing else matters.
Not the lot. Not the brothers. Not even the gun in my hand.
Just that hand.
“Jimmy,” Logan says low without looking at me.
Warning. Command. Keep your head.
I know.
I fucking know.
But every second I stand here and watch him breathe against her neck and squeeze her just enough to make her body shake is one more second I have to fight the urge to throw my own life away if it gives me one shot at getting to her.
“Allie,” I say.
Her eyes find mine. They’re glassy with pain and adrenaline and fear, but they find me.
Good.
Stay with me.
Stay here.
Stay alive.
“I’ve got you,” I say.
Maybe it’s for her. Maybe it’s for me. Maybe it’s the only thing I know for sure in a world that’s gone insane in under a minute.
Drew grins. “You got shit.” That’s when he squeezes harder. Not enough to cut off everything.
Enough that Allison chokes and jerks against him, her knees buckling just slightly before he hauls her back up by the neck. The sound that comes out of her is small. Broken. The kind of sound I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life if I survive the next five minutes.
I take one step forward.
Every gun beside me shifts too.
Logan snaps, “Jimmy—”
Drew jams the gun harder against her temple. “Another step and I paint the dirt with her.”
I stop.
I have to.
Every muscle in my body shakes with it.
Powerless.
That’s what this is. Not fear. Not even rage.
Powerless.