Mars
Ilean against the door, my back to its surface, and try to breathe around the furious beating of my heart.
It doesn’t help that I can practically hear her doing the same thing on the other side of the door, though, and for a moment I have a vivid picture of her standing behind me, her hand to the door right between my shoulder blades.
Right where she’d be touching me if this door wasn’t between us.
Shocked and more than a little horrified at the thought, I shove off the door and stalk toward the stairs, trying to get my mind to think about literally anything other than the girl I just brought home and installed in my best guest bedroom.
Arden Rossi.
Arden fucking Rossi.
But it doesn’t matter how many times I repeat her name, because this doesn’t make any fucking sense.
I saw the girl at Thanksgiving and she was entering her last year at NYU and full of dreams about what she was going to do with a business degree.
She’d talked my ear off about her plans, and I had the idea then that she was desperate for someone to actually listen to.
I’d watched as her father approached us mid-conversation, his expression one of barely contained rage.
And then I’d watched as Arden shrunk further into herself with every one of his steps, disappearing piece by piece, her voice growing quieter and more tentative.
By the time he drew to an impatient stop in front of us and told us dinner was ready, she was nothing more than a blank slate.
Nothing that anyone would pay attention to–and, I suspected, nothing her father could get angry about.
And now here she is in Hawke’s Wood, brought by what can only be a kidnapping plot, with only one guard and a suspiciously deserted clubhouse that’s generally full of bikers.
I don’t know how long they’ve had her or what they’ve tried to do with her, but I know who her father is, and the girl is worth money. She should have been held for ransom, at worst, while he was given a set of numbers.
She shouldn’t have been taken out of the city at all.
But this fragile, hollow-eyed girl isn’t the one I saw in November, and it’s not a reach to guess that they’ve had her for more than a couple days.
Which means Roberto Rossi either didn’t get a ransom note... or didn’t pay the amount they were asking for.
My hands clench in anger at the thought, and I nearly stop and put my fist through the fucking wall.
How the fuck could that be? How could you have someone like Arden in your life–your fucking daughter!
–and refuse to do everything in your power to get her back if someone took her?
How could you receive a ransom demand and just not act on it?
But there’s no other answer.
Well, there is. But I refuse to look at it. Because it would mean picturing Arden in a situation that no girl or boy should ever be put in, and I don’t know if my heart could stand it.
I don’t know if my heart can stand her presence at all.
Because the kidnapping is only the first piece of the puzzle. The second is the effect she’s already having on me. The girl has always been beautiful in a vague, sunshiny way, her features matching the pixies I’ve always imagined in the forest.
But she’s also always been tethered to my sister, and her family, and I’ve only ever seen her in that environment.
Now she’s suddenly in my house, no parents attached, and she’s...
Otherworldly in her beauty. Delicate and tiny and fine-boned and in need of a hero. She looks haunted and traumatized, but I can see strength there, too–a strength I’ve never noticed in her before.
And ye gods, the change in her is doing something to me.
I clench my hands again, but this time it’s not out of anger. It’s the memory of her skin under my fingers when I put her on my bike. The pressure of her legs around me. The heat of her pressed against my back as we rode home.
I gasp out loud at the shock that runs through my body, and then turn and rush down the stairs. I have to get outside into the air, where I can fucking breathe. Get to a quiet space where I can think with a clear head.
Get out of the house where Arden is even now getting undressed to climb into a bed that I made up this morning with my own hands.
“What’s the deal with the girl?” Orion asks the moment I get to the main floor.
Gods, I do not want this conversation right now, when the girl in question has me unsteady on my feet and questioning my whole moral code. But I know Orion.
If he has a question, he won’t rest until he gets an answer.
“She’s going to sleep,” I say, sidestepping his question. “Had a long day, and I’m guessing an even longer couple of months.”
He presses his lips together like he’s rethinking his original opinion, and I nearly step past him, anxious to be done with this. But he puts his hand out and stops me when I try.
“She’s not going to be safe here.”
I want to scoff at this, but I know he’s right. Still, I can’t give in to him. “You don’t know that.”
When he meets my eyes, his are nearly black with concern.
“I do, and so do you. She’s obviously in some kind of trouble.
She was locked up in one of the cottages on the Saints’ property, with a guard.
And I’m guessing she didn’t rent the place out for a vacation.
Someone brought her here and locked her up, and when they figure out she’s gone, they’re gonna have a problem with it. ”
“They won’t know we’re the ones who took her.”
He snorts at that. “Mars, we live in a town with five hundred people in it. It’ll take them about five minutes to figure it out. We need to send her back to where she came from.”
He’s right.
I know he’s right.
But I also know that she’s under my roof and I’ve promised her that she’ll be safe.
I never make promises I don’t mean. And I’m never wrong.
I glance at his hand on my arm and then up at his face, and take in the handsome, nearly gaunt look of it.
Orion’s grown into a big man, but he’s never lost the haunted, underfed look in his face.
It comes, I suspect, from having been hungry for a very long time before I found him and forced him to come back to Wood with me.
I’ve never asked him where he came from or how he got into that junkyard.
He has secrets, and I let him keep them.
It’s part of the contract we never discussed.
But now I wonder how much he’s actually seen in his short life.
He knew Arden was in that cottage, and that’s suspicious.
And he’s not reacting to a kidnapping victim the way any normal citizen would react.
I’ve never thought he was a normal citizen. Always assumed he’s lived much of his life on the wrong side of the law. But there’s more knowledge in his eyes right now than I expected, and as much as I hate it, I take the next mental step.
He knows more than he should about where she came from, and the knowledge is eating him up.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to give in to his wishes here, though.
I lean closer to him and drop my voice. “I told her she’ll be safe here. I told her she can stay as long as she wants to. And that makes it our job–both of us–to make sure that even when they find out, they can’t do anything about it.”
I leave before he can reply, rushing out the door and into the driveway with a desperation I’ve never felt before. I need to get away from the room where Arden is getting in bed, with all of her confusing background.
And I don’t want to have to defend my decisions against Orion’s direct logic.
I’m afraid he’ll make me admit that I’m making this decision based on emotion rather than rational thought.
And that would be the end of our relationship.
I stalk into the deep dark of the driveway, pause, and force myself to take three deep breaths. I don’t lose my temper often–I try very hard not to–but when I do, it comes with such a rush of adrenaline that it can be hard to recover.
I’ve spent my life keeping my anger tamped down for that very reason. People count on me to be steady and dependable. To fix their problems and show up when they need someone.
Letting myself get emotional destroys that.
Once I’m under control, I stroll out toward the street in front of my house, my eyes on the stars above.
It’s mid-April now and the days are starting to get longer, but the blackness of a midnight sky is the same no matter the season, and I let the solitude of it sink under my skin and slow my breathing.
I sweep my eyes across the stars, cataloging the ones I know and taking comfort in the fact that they don’t change.
They move through the sky, sure, but when it comes down to it, they’re always up there somewhere.
Watching.
Guarding.
I turn my eyes down to the street, and then glance to the right when movement catches my attention. My own garage sits here, right next to the house, but it’s dark and deserted now.
The movement is coming from the other garage in town. The one the Saints started when they abruptly moved in and made themselves at home several months ago. Wood is a small town that hosts less than five hundred people, and we’ve never had more than one motorcycle club.
We don’t need more than one garage.
But the Saints came here like they had a personal invitation and settled in without asking anyone. Not our small city council or my cousin, the de facto leader of the town. Not the sheriff or the people.
It’s been rubbing me the wrong way for months, now. Even worse, I’m starting to suspect they’re intentionally pulling my customers away from me.
And right now, there are men crawling all over their garage.
At least twenty of them, moving in and out of the garage like fucking ants, all of them carrying something.
I glance at the town around us, wondering, but see exactly what I expect: No one else is open.
The buildings are all dark, but for the streetlights. Businesses are all closed.
Because it’s the middle of the fucking night.
And yet the Saints are operating like it’s daylight hours, moving in some sort of coordinated ballet as they do whatever they’re doing.
Or maybe, I amend, they’re moving like it’s the middle of the night and they need to finish whatever they’re doing before the sun breaks over the tops of the trees and floods the town with its light.
I thought it was convenient when they weren’t at their clubhouse earlier. Made the rescue operation easier when we didn’t have to deal with them.
But now I’m wondering why the hell they weren’t at home asleep, and what the fuck they’re doing under cover of darkness.
I also wonder, after what Orion said, what it has to do with Arden–and if I can keep her safe the way I promised when the men who were keeping her prisoner are just down the road from my house.