8. Taken
TAKEN
They took him on the one errand he'd sworn he could do alone.
It was a small thing — Deb needed limes and the truck was in for an oil change, and the store sat only a half mile up the Ord Highway, a walk Wes had made a dozen times without a second thought.
He'd almost laughed when Torch offered to send Half-Pint along instead.
"I'm not a prisoner," he'd said, gentler than it sounded, because he understood exactly what fear was driving the offer and loved him a little more for it even while he turned it down.
"I need to be able to walk to a store, Torch. I need that back."
Torch had looked at him a long moment, then nodded, once, the way he did when he'd decided something cost accepting. "Fifteen minutes. You're not back in twenty, I'm coming."
He didn't make it back at all.
Dell Krauss was waiting in the scrub past the last stretch of shoulder, unremarkable in every way that mattered — a man built for forgettable, gray at the temples, a windbreaker that could have belonged to anyone.
Wes clocked him a half-second too late, the old instinct dulled by two weeks of feeling safe, and by the time his body remembered how to run, a second man had already closed the distance from the other side.
He fought. That mattered to him, after, more than almost anything else that happened that night — he was not passive furniture waiting to be handled.
He got an elbow into someone's ribs, heard a grunt of real pain, twisted hard enough to tear his shirt trying to break the grip on his arm.
It bought him nothing but a bruise to match the old ones and a hand clamped hard over his mouth, but he'd fought, and some new stubborn part of him — the part that had learned to hand back the right wrench instead of an apology — filed that away like a small, fierce victory even as they folded him into the back of a car.
Grant was waiting at the end of a dirt road twenty minutes out, at a rented house that smelled like nobody lived there, sitting in an armchair with his legs crossed like he was waiting for a car service, not a kidnapping.
"Weston." He said it the way he always had — patient, pleasant, the particular gentleness of a man who has never once doubted he would get exactly what he wanted eventually. "You look well. Better than I expected, honestly."
"Grant." Wes's voice came out steadier than he felt.
"Sit. Please." Grant gestured at the couch across from him like a host. "I'm not going to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you, that was never — you have to understand, none of this needed to happen. You just needed to talk to me instead of running."
"You put a bruise on my ribs the last time I tried to talk to you."
Something flickered behind Grant's calm — not anger, not exactly, more like mild irritation at being reminded of an inconvenient detail.
"You know I'm not well when I get like that.
You know that's not really me." He smoothed his hair back, exactly the gesture Wes remembered from a hundred evenings that had ended badly.
"This whole town has been manipulated, do you understand that?
A biker gang. Weston. They've convinced you they're your family because you're vulnerable and they saw an opportunity. "
"They are my family."
"They're strangers who found a scared, confused man and told him what he wanted to hear.
" Grant's voice never once rose. That was the horror of him — he could say the cruelest things in the gentlest register, and for two years Wes had mistaken the gentleness for love.
"We're going home tonight. I've already made the arrangements.
This will all just be a bad chapter, and we'll get past it, like we always do. "
Wes felt the old fear trying to climb up his throat — and then, underneath it, something colder and steadier rose to meet it.
He was not the man who'd walked into The Roadrunner eleven days into running, flinching at a door bell, rehearsing a fake name.
He'd been handed a wrench and given back the right one instead of an apology.
He'd stood in a room and let a man claim him out loud and hadn't run.
He was not going home tonight. And somewhere in his jacket pocket, forgotten by everyone but him, was the one thing Grant Massey didn't know he still had.
"You kept saying I'd never leave," Wes said, quiet, almost thoughtful. "You used to say it like a promise. You'll always come back, Weston, you always do."
"Because it's true."
"It was true," Wes said. "Past tense."
Grant's composure slipped, just a fraction — a tightening around the eyes, the first honest thing Wes had seen on his face all night.
He leaned forward like he meant to press the point further, and that was when Wes heard it: distant, low, growing, a sound Grant had clearly never once had to reckon with in his whole controlled, cushioned life.
Engines. A lot of them. Coming down the Ord Highway at once, closer by the second, a sound like the desert itself deciding to answer back.
Grant went still, listening, and for the first time all night his careful composure cracked into something Wes recognized with a fierce, private satisfaction: fear.
"See," Grant said, smoothing his hair back again, his voice thinner now, reaching for the calm and not quite finding it. "No one's coming."
The sound kept growing. Wes smiled — small, cold, entirely his own — and said nothing at all, and let Grant listen to the whole club of engines rolling toward the one thing he'd never once believed anyone would come for.
---