Chapter 4
RAMPAGE
He didn't sleep.
That wasn't unusual. Sleep hadn’t come easy since he was a kid.
Too many years of training it out of himself, too many nights where closing your eyes meant missing something that would get someone killed.
He'd made peace with it a long time ago.
Four hours was plenty. Three was manageable. He'd run full operations on less.
But tonight he wasn't awake because of old habits.
He was awake because of the woman on the other side of his wall.
He sat at the small desk in his room with his laptop open and a cup of coffee going cold beside it, working through what Savage had sent over.
Detailed photos of Emily's CR-V, close-ups of the fuel line, the brake assembly, the places where someone with enough knowledge and enough time had made subtle, patient, modifications.
Not enough to cause an accident. Enough to cause a breakdown.
Whoever had done this hadn't wanted her dead on the highway. They'd wanted her stranded.
The distinction mattered. He also didn’t think this was done during her quick trip into Grand Ridge. Someone had followed her back home. Then, after they made the modifications, made sure she came back to Grand Ridge knowing her vehicle wouldn’t make the trip back without breaking down.
He pulled up the Facebook Marketplace profile for Marcus Delling.
Generic. Three months old. Sparse activity, all of it calculated to look normal.
He sold a couch here, some tools there, building a history and a seller’s rating, making him look legit.
The squat rack listing had been up for two weeks.
Targeted toward buyers wanting to build a home gym, the algorithm would have pushed it hard.
He thought about who the buyers would likely have been.
He imagined there were multiple interested parties, but Marcus waited until a single young female came along. His gut told him so.
Rampage leaned back in his chair.
This wasn't a man who'd gotten lucky spotting a woman alone. This was someone who'd put out bait and waited.
He thought about Emily, sitting in that parking lot in her locked car with two men circling it. He thought about what seven minutes later would have looked like. What the statistics said about recovery rates for trafficking victims once they crossed state lines.
He shut that line of thinking down. Hard.
She's here. She's down the hall. Focus on what's in front of you.
He forwarded everything to Irish with instructions to run a deeper search on the profile, cross-reference the phone number from the listing, and flag anything that connected to known networks.
Then he texted Phantom, the head of Valhalla and Tyler's cousin, their contact point for anything that needed to go higher than the club, a brief summary and told him to expect a fuller report by morning.
By the time he'd finished, it was past two.
He picked up the cold coffee anyway. Drank it standing at the window, looking out over the compound.
The thing about the life he'd built here, the MC, Grand Ridge, all of it, was that it had been a deliberate choice after a career of being pointed in a specific direction and unleashed.
Delta Force didn't ask you what you wanted.
It asked you what you could do, and then it used every bit of it, and when it was done with you, it handed you back to yourself and let you figure out what was left.
What was left, for Rampage, had been the need to protect something that was his.
Not a mission objective. Not a target. Being a protector, a defender…
that was his identity, who he was inside and out.
And he needed a new mission. Something that actually mattered, that he could put his body between it and the world, and know it was worth the cost.
The club was that. His brothers were that.
He hadn't thought there'd be more. As he watched his brothers pair off starting with Lucky finding Trinity, Irish and Mak, Savage and Savannah… and several others, one at a time, find their girls. Their little girls. They were all Daddies, something else to bond them together. But, Rampage hadn’t found his yet.
Not until Emily came to town. It was one meeting, only one, and he knew.
On the other side of the wall, he heard a noise. It wasn’t crying, just movement, the restless shift of someone who couldn't sleep. A creak of the mattress. A pause. Another creak. She was tossing and turning in there.
He'd put her in the guest room next to his apartment.
All the rooms were safe up here. Solid doors, good locks, and there were many men sleeping there in the building tonight.
The guest room had only one window, with a clear sightline to the gate.
Tactical decision. They had men at the gate at all times.
He was no longer pretending that was the only reason.
He thought about her hands locked around his waist on the bike.
The way she'd pressed herself flat against his back. Most first-time passengers fought the lean, went stiff on the curves, made the ride harder than it needed to be. Emily had melted into it about two miles in. She’d stopped fighting and just followed, trusted the machine, trusted him, let the road do what it was going to do.
She submitted to him and felt comfortable enough to let go.
It was a small thing. He'd catalogued it anyway.
He thought about the way she'd looked at him in the parking lot when he crouched outside her window. Not with the desperate gratitude of someone who needed rescued. But with something more specific. Recognition, almost, and not from having a meal together at The Rusty Crab. No, this recognition was like some part of her had already known the shape of what she needed and was surprised to find it had a face. A little who needed her Daddy and recognized deep inside she’d found him, even if she wasn’t ready to say it out loud.
You're projecting, said the rational part of his brain, the part that had kept him alive through multiple deployments by refusing to get sentimental.
He considered that.
Dismissed it.
He'd spent fifteen years reading people in environments where being wrong meant bodies on the ground.
He knew how to separate what he wanted to see from what was actually there.
What he'd seen in Emily Carter's eyes tonight, in that parking lot and in the kitchen and in the doorway of the guest apartment, was not something he'd put there.
She was a little. She might not have the language for it, might never have lived it outside the pages of whatever books her friend group traded around, but it was as much a part of her as the color of her eyes.
The way she'd softened under simple, direct care and responded to clear instructions.
How her independent spine bent, just slightly, just enough, when he told her what she needed to do and said it like he expected her to do it… and then she obeyed.
She wasn't weak. That wasn't what this was.
She was someone who'd been carrying everything herself for long enough that her arms were tired, and she didn't know yet that putting it down wasn't the same as losing it.
Or better yet, handing it to someone physically stronger to carry it for her.
Someone who wanted to carry it. No, demanded to carry it.
Rampage set down his now empty coffee mug.
He didn't make decisions dramatically. Never had. Life was a series of facts, and you dealt with the facts in front of you, and you didn't waste energy on the noise around them. He cataloged, weighed decisions, and hadn’t been impulsive since his teenage years.
The fact in front of him was this: Emily Carter was his.
The same certainty he'd felt when he'd claimed responsibility for her safety had settled deeper now, past tactical, past instinct, into something bone-level and permanent.
She was next door in bed, in his space, wearing a shirt that belonged to the women of his club, and she was not sleeping, and she was scared, and she was his to take care of whether she knew it yet or not.
He'd wait. He was good at waiting. He'd built a career on waiting. The patience to hold a position until the right moment, to not move too soon and ruin what was possible.
He'd wait, and he'd keep her safe, and he'd let her come to understand what she needed in her own time. She needed him.
And he wasn't going to pretend he didn't know what that was.
His phone buzzed on the desk.
Irish.
Delling's profile is fake. Number traces to a burner bought in Denver three months ago. This isn't local. Running the listing against two open cases. Think this is bigger.
Rampage stared at the message for a long moment.
Then he typed back: Keep digging. Wake me at five if you have to.
He set the phone down and looked at the wall between his room and hers.
Bigger.
Whatever Emily had stumbled into, it wasn't one man with bad intentions and a Facebook account. It was organized. Patient. They’d built a listing, placed the bait, and waited for the right buyer.
Which meant someone had looked at Emily Carter and decided she was worth the effort.
Rampage's jaw set.
They'd made a mistake.
You didn’t touch what was his. Not one damn hair on her head. They made a big mistake and he’d be the one to rectify it.