Rampage (Spartan Watchmen MC #7)

Chapter 1

EMILY

The thing about bad feelings was Emily Carter had learned, over the course of twenty-six years, to talk herself out of them.

It's fine. You're being dramatic. Nobody's that creepy on purpose.

That voice inside of her head, the reasonable one, the logical one, the one that sounded suspiciously like her mother’s, had gotten her into trouble more times than she could count.

It was the voice that said he probably just forgot the hardware bag when Marcus Delling texted her back after their Facebook Marketplace transaction to let her know he'd accidentally left out the mounting nails and brackets for the squat rack she'd bought.

Which was how Emily found herself, at nearly nine o'clock on a Tuesday night, pulling her silver CR-V back up the long gravel driveway of a house on the edge of Grand Ridge she'd already been to once before.

She hadn't told Chloe where she was going.

She hadn't told anyone. She didn’t want to be a bother. An inconvenience.

It's fine. Stop being crazy. I really need to stop watching True Crime.

The house looked different at night. That was the first thing she noticed.

The way the porch light threw everything into harsh yellow shadow and the way the trees on either side of the driveway pressed in close gave her chills.

It had looked ordinary enough in the afternoon, just a mid-century ranch with a detached garage full of exercise equipment.

A guy who'd outgrown his home gym, the listing had said.

Emily had been building her own setup piece by piece for six months. The squat rack was going to be the centerpiece.

She parked and killed the engine. Then sat there for a second.

See? Normal. There's his truck. Lights are on.

She grabbed her purse and got out.

Marcus answered on the first knock, which should have been fine, except that the way he smiled was just slightly too wide, slightly too slow, like a man who had been waiting rather than a man who had been surprised by a knock at the door.

"Emily." He said her name in a way that made her insides clench with warning. "Glad you came back. Come on in, I'll grab that bag."

"Oh, that's okay." She stayed on the porch. "I can just wait here."

Something flickered across his face. Gone before she could name it.

"Suit yourself." He disappeared inside.

Emily stood on the porch and breathed in the cold Colorado night air and told herself she was being paranoid. The Naughty Girls Book Club had been reading entirely too many dark romance novels lately and now Emily saw danger in every male smile.

Marcus came back with a small brown paper bag. Handed it over. Their fingers didn't touch, she made extra sure of that, and she smiled her polite customer smile and said thank you and turned around.

She was three steps down the driveway when she heard him say, behind her, very quietly, "Drive safe."

Not have a good night. Not thanks again.

Drive safe.

Emily got in her car, locked the doors, and sat there for exactly two seconds before she made herself start the engine and back out of the driveway like a normal person who had not just felt every single hair on the back of her neck stand at attention.

She was two miles down Highway 285, headed back toward town, when the CR-V started coughing.

It started as a shudder, just a little tremor beneath her hands on the wheel, and she made a mental note to get it checked, she probably just needed new spark plugs.

She'd make an appointment tomorrow. Then it became something worse.

A grinding reluctance, the engine losing power in stutters.

The dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree.

"No," Emily said. Softly, then louder. "No, no, no, come on—"

She quickly tapped on her phone and found the nearest gas station.

She was in the middle of nowhere, but luckily one was on her maps.

She made it to a gas station. Barely. Coasted in on momentum and a prayer and the sheer force of her refusal to accept that this was happening, pulled into the lot, and felt the car shudder once, deeply, and die.

The gas station was closed.

Of course it was.

Emily sat there in the sudden terrible silence and looked at the dark windows, the unlit pump signs, the empty parking lot, and felt something inside her go very, very still.

It’s okay. Everything’s okay.

She had her phone. She would call… who would she call? She would call AAA, or she'd call Chloe, or she'd figure it out, because she was a grown woman who had been handling her own problems for years without anyone's help and she was fine.

Then she saw the truck.

It had pulled off the highway and parked at the far edge of the lot.

Just sitting there. No one getting out. No one checking a phone or looking at a map.

Just a big black truck with its engine running, and she couldn't see the driver through the dark windshield, and she told herself it was nothing, it was coincidence, there were a million reasons why—

It had been behind her on the highway. She remembered it now with a cold, lurching certainty.

She'd noticed it without really noticing it, the way you clock things without cataloguing them, but now her brain was pulling it up like evidence: the truck had been there when she turned out of Marcus's driveway.

Had slowed when she slowed at the station entrance. Had pulled in after her.

Emily picked up her phone.

Her hands were shaking. Not a little. A lot.

She stared at her contacts, and something happened.

It wasn’t a thought, not exactly, but a shift, a sliding sensation behind her breastbone, like a door swinging quietly open.

It happened sometimes, when she was scared enough, or tired enough, or when the world pressed in from too many directions at once.

The edges of her got soft. The part of her that always had a plan and a backup plan and a contingency for the backup plan went very quiet, and what was left was just Emily — younger, smaller, the one who needed someone to answer the phone and say I've got you.

She called Chloe.

It rang twice. Three times. Pick up. Pick up. Pick up. She chanted to herself. Please, pick up! Emily was already starting to breathe wrong, too fast, not enough air, when—

"Hey, what's up?"

"Chloe." Her voice cracked right down the middle. "I need help."

"What's wrong? Where are you?" She heard the concern in her best friend’s voice.

"I'm on Highway 285. About twenty miles outside Grand Ridge.

My car died and there's a truck that's been following me for the last ten minutes.

" She pressed her back against the seat.

Her voice dropped to something small, something she didn't mean to let out.

"They kept slowing down when I slowed down.” She paused before she said her feelings outloud. “Chloe, I'm scared."

"Are you somewhere safe?"

"I pulled over at a gas station, but it's closed. Empty. And this truck just pulled in behind me and—" Her throat seized up. "There are two guys getting out. Chloe, what do I do?"

"Stay in your car." Chloe's voice was steady and firm and it was the most beautiful sound in the world. "Lock the doors. DO NOT, open your door for anyone."

Emily hit the locks. Both hands on the door now, watching the two men cross the lot toward her with that unhurried, certain walk that made her stomach drop.

"They're coming toward me—"

She could hear Tyler's voice in the background. Low. Urgent. Then Chloe's, murmuring something she couldn't quite make out. Then: "Help is coming. Rampage is mobilizing the club. They're seven minutes out."

Seven minutes. That might as well be eternity.

Emily watched the men stop about ten feet from her car. They looked at each other. Looked at her. One of them, the heavy-set one with a ball cap pulled low, smiled at her. She felt nauseated.

"Hang on, baby," Chloe said, and Emily didn't know if she meant it as anything other than reassurance, but it hit her square in the chest anyway, warm and grounding. Baby. She held onto that.

"Emily, listen to me. Rampage is coming. He's bringing help. You need to stay in your car with the doors locked. Do you understand?"

"They're knocking on my window." The heavy-set one had come around to her side. His knuckles rapped against the glass. He knocked, not hard, almost friendly, which was worse somehow. "One of them is trying the door handle—"

"Breathe, Emily. Focus on my voice. Help is coming. Seven minutes."

"I don't have seven minutes—"

"Yes, you do." Chloe's voice didn't waver. "Keep your doors locked. If they break a window, you lay on the horn. Make as much noise as possible."

Emily pressed herself against the center console, as far from the door as she could get, and she breathed, counted, held Chloe's voice in her mind like something to grip.

Seven minutes. Seven minutes. Seven minutes.

The second man had circled around to the passenger side. She could feel them, a pressure around the car, testing it the way you test a door to see if it'll open, looking for the weak point.

She was the weak point.

She was very small, right now, in this car, with the dark all around it and the two men moving around it like water finding a crack, and the little voice inside her; the soft one, the one nobody knew about except the characters in the books she loved, said somebody please come.

Then she heard them.

The bikes.

Three of them, the sound rolling in off the highway like thunder given direction and purpose, headlights sweeping across the lot in a wide arc. Big. Loud. The kind of sound that meant something.

"Emily, that's Rampage's men." Chloe's voice. "They’ve come to help."

The motorcycles pulled into the lot and positioned themselves with a practiced ease that said this was not new territory. Then there were three bikes between her car and the truck, engines idling, headlights on the two men who had gone completely still.

"Step away from the vehicle." The voice was deep enough to feel in her chest through the closed windows. "Both of you back the fuck away from that car and explain what you're doing."

Emily pressed her hand flat against the glass.

The men made excuses. She barely heard them.

Because then there was a fourth bike pulling around her side of the car, and a man got off it, and even through the dark and the distance she could feel the weight of him, the controlled deliberate way he moved, like someone who'd never once needed to hurry because the world already understood it needed to make room. It was him. The man who’d been so polite when she’d come into town the first time to pick up the equipment.

Chloe’s Daddy’s friend. The incredibly sexy, unbelievably masculine man who’d been way out of her league…

so she’d never returned his text messages or calls.

No way a man like him could be interested in her.

And now, here he was. Coming to rescue her.

He crouched down outside her window. If they hadn’t already met, she’d have been terrified. His jaw was ticking and his forehead was drawn tight. He was not happy.

"Emily." His voice was different from the other men giving orders outside her car. Still deep, but quieter. She felt a controlled anger behind it, but it wasn’t at her. She just knew it wasn’t.

"Emily, Can you roll down your window about an inch, baby girl?

Just enough so we can talk? I know you're terrified. "

Baby girl.

Something in her chest cracked open like a window letting in air.

"Is it really you?" Her voice was embarrassingly small.

"It's really me."

She rolled the window down.

He had dark eyes that didn't look away from her face, and a scar along his jaw, and an expression that was somehow both entirely calm and completely certain, like a man who had been in worse situations than this one and had already decided how it would end. He looked like a stubborn man who wouldn’t take no for an answer from anyone.

"Good girl," he said. "You did everything right. Staying in the car, calling for help. You're safe now."

Emily started crying. She hadn't meant to, after all she was a grown woman, she had a budget spreadsheet for her yoga business and a skincare routine and an opinion about geopolitical policy for God’s sake, but her eyes filled up anyway, and she couldn't stop it, and she didn't even try.

She was safe.

She believed him completely, without evidence, without reason, the way you believe something you've been waiting your whole life to hear.

She was safe, and he'd said so, and that was enough.