Chapter Thirty-Three
I PUT MY fist through the cabin door on the way out.
Didn’t feel it either. There was blood running over my knuckles by the time I hit the clubhouse, but that wasn’t the blood I was thinking about.
I came through the door hard enough to make every head turn.
One look at me and the room stopped.
“She’s gone.”
Devil was already on his feet.
“Bed’s cold. Boots gone. Jacket gone. No note. She’s not anywhere on the property.”
Nobody moved for maybe half a second.
Then everything moved.
Devil started calling orders before I finished breathing. Bolt took the perimeter. Gearhead headed for the cameras. Somebody ran for the gate, somebody else for the back fence, and the club turned over around me the way it always did when something went bad.
“How.” Devil had me by the cut. “Rune. Look at me. How’d she get off a locked-down compound, how — ”
“I don’t know.”
“The gate never — ”
“She didn’t use the gate.” It was Gearhead, coming back fast from the yard. “Fence is peeled up down behind the old bike shed. Ground’s scuffed. She went under it. She went under it herself, on her belly, in the dark — ” He stopped. “Nobody took her. She left.”
And that was worse. God, that was so much worse, because a girl who’s taken is fighting, a girl who’s taken didn’t choose it.
But a girl who crawls out under a fence in the dark and leaves no note is a girl who was made to go, made to be silent, made to do it alone, and I knew in my gut, cold and total, that there was only one thing on this earth that could have made Amy do that.
Him.
“He got to her,” I said. “Somehow. He got to her, made her come to him and threatened her somehow.” I was already moving toward the armory. “He’s had eyes on this place the whole time. He — ”
That’s when the horn started.
* * *
The horn came up the county road before the car did, one long blast getting louder and closer until Sawyer’s little hatchback tore around the bend and came in too fast, the horn still laid on hard.
Every man in the yard turned.
Hands went toward guns out of habit, then stopped when the car bounced half into Brenda’s flowerbed and the driver’s door flew open.
Sawyer came out sideways.
“He’s got her! He’s got Amy, you have to — she came, she came for me, oh God, she traded herself, you have to go, you have to go right now! — ”
I caught him by both arms before he went down.
“Where.”
“House off Sumter Highway. Past the old feed store. Dirt road, no sign, only house back there.” He was crying hard enough the words kept breaking, but he forced them out anyway. “He called her from my phone. Made me talk so she’d know he had me. Said if she didn’t come alone he’d—”
His face folded.
“She came.”
I tightened my grip. “Sawyer. Stay with me.”
“She made him look at her so I could get loose. She stepped in front of him and screamed at me to run, and I left her there.”
“You came here.”
“I left her.”
“You came here.”
His good eye found mine.
“That’s what she needed you to do. She sent you for us, and you made it. You didn’t leave her. You brought help.”
His mouth shook.
I gave him one hard shake. “Now help me finish it. House. Front door?”
“Yeah.”
“Back?”
“Kitchen, I think. I saw one when he dragged me through.”
“Anybody else there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Car?”
“His truck. Dark. Old.”
Sawyer grabbed the front of my cut with both hands, his wrists rubbed raw where the rope had been.
“He hit her.”
Everything in me stopped.
“When she yelled at me to go. He hit her and she went down, I heard it and I kept running because she told me to.” His voice broke completely. “I’ll hear that for the rest of my life.”
I was already turning.
“Please, Rune. He is going to hurt her.”
I looked back.
Sawyer’s face was a mess, but his voice came out clear. “You have to be faster than I was brave.”
That one stayed with me.
I didn’t answer.
I ran.