Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Bash
I glanced at the clock on my computer screen for what had to be the hundredth time.
An hour and fifty-three minutes.
Hattie had left for the diner almost two hours ago to have lunch with her drummer.
That was almost two hours ago.
I’d texted her forty minutes in.
Nothing.
I called her twenty minutes after that.
It went straight to her voicemail.
I told myself she was fine, that she probably just lost track of time the way she always did when she got to talking. Lord knew that Hattie Lynn could talk the ears off a brass monkey when she got going.
But I couldn’t shake this sinking feeling in my gut that something was wrong.
“Fuck this,” I muttered, snatching my phone off the desk and scrolling to Cyber’s name.
He answered on the first ring. “Talk to me.”
“I need you to tap into the security cameras at Dottie’s Diner,” I said, already up and moving, grabbing my cut off the back of my chair. “Hattie went there almost two hours ago to meet her drummer for lunch. She’s not answering her phone.”
There was no hesitation. “Give me five,” he said. “I’ll call you right back.”
I disconnected and shoved my phone in my pocket, my heart hammering against my ribs like a war drum as I stalked out of my office and through the main room of the club, barely registering the music or the girls or Gator calling my name behind me.
“She’s fine,” I said to myself. I’m probably just overreacting. That’s what it had to be.
My phone rang before I made it to my bike.
“Talk to me,” I answered.
“Bash.” Cyber’s voice was tight. “We’ve got a problem, brother. You need to get to the clubhouse. Now.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
“Is she—”
“Just get here.”
The line went dead.
I don’t remember the ride to the compound. I know I made it because I came back to myself as I was blowing through the front gate, gravel spraying as I gunned it past the clubhouse to the squat concrete building tucked behind it. The security building was Cyber’s kingdom.
I was off my bike before it finished rocking on its stand.
The vault buzzer sounded, the heavy steel door unlocking, and I shoved through it into the cold darkness of the control room. Monitors covered every wall, glowing blue and white, and the AC was cranked so low it was a wonder you couldn’t see your own breath.
Frankie was at her desk across from Cyber, her fingers flying over her keyboard.
If you didn’t know better, you’d look at Frankie and think she was a kindergarten teacher.
You’d be dead wrong, though. Frankie was a master hacker who’d once cracked into Bane’s offshore accounts and cleaned him out to the last cent.
My VP had kidnapped her to get his money back.
Although, thinking about it, I don’t think he ever did get any of it back.
But the crazy bastard got his girl in the end, and I was pretty damn sure he would trade every last dollar he’d ever made for her without blinking.
“Where is she?” I demanded.
“Working on it,” Cyber said, not looking up from his keyboard.
The door buzzed behind me and Gator and Bane came in, cutting into my spiraling thoughts.
“What’s going on?” Gator asked, his eyes bouncing between me and the screens.
“Show him,” Frankie said quietly.
That quiet scared me more than anything.
Cyber pulled up a video on the big center monitor, and my whole world narrowed down to that screen.
It was the alley beside Dottie’s Diner. Hattie walked into frame with her phone in her hand, then a man appeared around the side of the building.
“No,” I shook my head, rage building inside me as he came up behind her fast.
One arm banded around her middle as his hand held a cloth over her mouth and nose.
She fought. God, my girl fought—clawing and kicking and twisting—and every second of it carved something out of my chest with a rusty spoon.
Then her legs buckled.
She dropped like her strings had been cut, and the son of a bitch caught her, dragged her out of frame. Cyber switched cameras. The next angle showed a black Dodge Charger backed up to the alley with the trunk open.
He put my woman in a fucking trunk and closed the lid.
“Plates,” I bit out.
“Already running them,” Frankie said, her fingers flying. Three seconds later, a driver’s license bloomed across her screen. “Rodney Storm,” she read.
“Rodney,” I growled, and the name came out sounding like a death sentence. “That’s her drummer. She went to the diner to meet him for lunch.”
Except he wasn’t just her drummer, was he? He’d been on that tour. In those venues. Backstage, past all her security with access to her schedule, her dressing room, her whole goddamn life.
The notes. The calls.
It had been him the entire time.
“I’m gonna kill him,” I snarled. You could bet your goddamn life on that one.
“Can you track the car?” Bane asked.
“On it.” Cyber’s screens multiplied, town CCTV feeds tiling across the monitors—the bank, the intersection at Main, Lucky’s Market. He followed the Charger camera to camera. “Got him heading east on Shoreline... turning onto Pier Road...” He froze. “The fuck? He’s got her at the boardwalk.”
Our boardwalk? The one Gator and the prospects had been fixing up all winter?
The stupid son of a bitch had my woman on Kings’ property.
“He’s in the old T-shirt hut on the north end,” Cyber said, zooming a feed. The Charger sat crooked behind the shuttered ice cream parlor, driver’s door hanging open. “Car’s been parked twenty-two minutes.”
Twenty-two minutes he’d had her alone.
I was already moving.
“Bash!” Bane’s voice cracked like a whip. I stopped, my hand on the door. “Wait. You kick down that door half-cocked and he panics? She’s the one who pays for it.”
Every cell in my body was screaming at me to go to her, but he was right.
“Then let’s fucking ride,” I said.
We killed the engines two blocks out and came in on foot, moving through the skeleton of the boardwalk.
Gator and Bane flanked the hut with me coming straight up the middle, because there wasn’t a force on God’s green earth that was keeping me from that door.
The T-shirt hut sat at the north end, plywood over one window, the other cracked open an inch.
And through that inch, I heard her.
“Rodney, please. You don’t have to do this,” she pleaded, her voice shaking.
“Don’t have to?” the man I assumed was Rodney answered. “I’ve been patient, Angel. Two years I’ve been patient. I wrote you letters. I told you how I felt, and you couldn’t even see me.”
I eased up to the door. Through the gap in the plywood, I could see her zip-tied to a folding chair, hair stuck to her tear-streaked face, blue eyes huge and terrified.
And Rodney Storm was pacing in front of her with a pistol in his hand.
Bane’s hand landed on my right shoulder. It was time.
I held up my hand and counted it down.
Three. Two. One. Go!
Lifting my booted foot, I kicked the door in.
It exploded off its hinges and Rodney spun, the gun swinging toward me, and the whole world went crystal clear and slow.
“Easy,” I said, hands out, palms open, stepping inside. “Easy, Rodney.”
“Stay back!” he shrieked, the barrel wavering between Hattie and me. “Stay back or I’ll—”
“Weston,” Hattie whimpered.
“I’m here, baby,” I said, never taking my eyes off Rodney. “I’m right here.”
I took a slow step to the left. Then another. Every step putting me a little closer to her, a little more between her and that gun. Rodney’s eyes were blown wide and wild, sweat pouring down his face. He was unraveling right in front of me.
“You,” he spat at me. “You’re the one. She comes back to this nothing town, and suddenly she’s got a biker following her around. She was supposed to come to me. When Shawn cheated, when she was scared, she was supposed to need ME. You don’t deserve her!”
Every escalation was designed to frighten her into someone’s arms. He’d just never imagined it wouldn’t be his.
“You’re right,” I said, easing another half step closer. “I don’t deserve her. Never did. But Rodney, listen to me, brother. She’s the most important thing in this world to both of us, yeah? So let’s not do anything that puts her in danger.”
For a split second something human flickered in his eyes, but just as quickly it was gone.
“No,” he whispered, shaking his head faster and faster. “No, no, no. I see what this is. I see it now.” His knuckles went white around the grip. “If I can’t have her, nobody can.”
He swung the gun towards my baby, and I didn’t even think, because nothing else mattered but her.
I dove.
Three shots—crack, crack, crack—and I came down over her, wrapping my body around hers, the chair going over sideways with both of us tangled together. Something punched into my back. Then my side.
There was more gunfire as Bane and Gator came through the door like the wrath of God, and I heard Rodney’s body hit the floor.
Then everything went quiet.
“Weston?” Hattie’s voice was muffled against my chest. “Weston, get up. Get—” Her hands found the wet heat spreading across my back, and she started screaming. “NO! No, no, no—BANE! HE’S SHOT! HE’S SHOT!”
I lifted my hand and pushed the hair out of her face. There she was. Alive. Whole. Those blue eyes I’d been in love with since the fifth grade.
“Hey, Songbird,” I slurred. “Don’t cry, baby. You know it kills me when you cry.”
“Don’t you dare,” she sobbed, holding my face in both hands. “Don’t you dare leave me, Weston Basham. You promised. You PROMISED—”
I promised, I tried to say.
But the darkness swallowed me whole.