Chapter Thirty-Three Spock
Chloe slams into my chest, and I lock both arms around her.
For one precious second, the rest of the world disappears. I don’t see the three men standing behind her. Don’t hear the furious women shouting questions. Don’t feel the hard bite of my gun against my palm.
All I feel is Chloe alive in my arms.
She’s shaking so hard her teeth chatter, but she clings to me with enough strength to bruise my ribs. I bury my face in her hair and drag air into lungs that haven’t worked right since I learned she was missing.
“I’ve got you,” I murmur. “You’re safe now, baby. I’ve got you.”
Behind us, Dice, Wildcard, Rush, and Hawk keep their guns trained on the three men. The big bastard who grabbed Chloe has both hands raised, his expression caught somewhere between pissed and confused.
“Easy,” he says. “We weren’t hurting her.”
“You put your fucking hand on her,” I growl.
“She was running toward five armed men,” one of the others points out. “We didn’t know who the hell you were.”
I’m not in the mood to appreciate his logic.
Keeping one arm locked around Chloe, I lower my weapon and shove it into the waistband of my jeans. Then I pull back far enough to look at her.
Rage floods every vein in my body.
One side of her face is swollen. Angry red marks streak across her cheek, and dried blood crusts beneath her nose. Her lower lip is split. Bruises circle her wrists, the skin scraped raw where she fought against whatever Blackwood used to restrain her.
My vision goes red.
I touch her cheek with the backs of my fingers, barely making contact. “Did Blackwood do this?”
She swallows and nods.
A promise of violence settles deep in my bones. Steven Blackwood is going to learn exactly what happens to a man who puts his hands on a Demon Dawgs’ woman. My woman.
I look toward the rundown house. “You’re going back to the clubhouse.”
Her fingers tighten in my kutte. “No.”
“Chloe—”
“No.” Her voice trembles, but her gaze doesn’t. “I’m not leaving.”
I force myself to breathe. “Blackwood could be inside. If he isn’t, he could come back any minute. I need you somewhere safe while my brothers and I take care of him. I’ll see you back at the clubhouse when it’s done.”
“We’ll take her,” one of the women says immediately.
The others close ranks around Chloe without hesitation.
“She can ride with us,” another adds. “We’ll make sure nobody touches her.”
Gratitude cuts through my fury, but Chloe shakes her head.
“I’m not going back to the clubhouse.” She looks up at me, and beneath the fear in her eyes, I see something harder. Something Blackwood didn’t manage to break. “I want to see you take him down.”
My jaw clenches. “Baby—”
“I need to see him scared, Spock.” Her voice cracks, but she keeps going. “I need to see him realize that he isn’t in control. If I leave now, I’ll spend the rest of my life remembering how he looked when he hurt me. I don’t want that to be the last image I have of him.”
Jesus Christ.
This woman.
She escaped a fucking psychopath, ran barefoot through a neighborhood she didn’t know, faced down three strangers, and she still refuses to let fear make her decisions.
Something inside me gives way.
I cup the uninjured side of her face and stare into her eyes. The words come out before I can question them, but they feel more certain than anything I’ve ever said.
“I love you.”
Her lips part.
The noise around us goes silent in my head.
“I fucking love you, Chloe,” I say again. “And I understand why you need this. But you do exactly what I tell you. You stay out of sight until we have Blackwood under control. No matter what you hear, you don’t come out until I call for you. Understood?”
Her eyes fill with tears, but she blinks them back and nods.
I lower my forehead to hers, careful not to hurt her. For one heartbeat, I let myself have this. Then I straighten and turn to the women.
“Can you keep her hidden?”
The woman in front plants her hands on her hips. “Honey, we’ll protect her like she’s one of ours.”
The others agree, moving closer until a wall of furious women surrounds Chloe.
I look back at Chloe. “Stay with them.”
“I will.”
The three men begin lowering their hands.
“Keep them up,” Dice snaps.
The man who grabbed Chloe rolls his eyes but raises them again. “Look, we told you, we thought she was in trouble. If this Blackwood guy is the one who did that to her, we’ll help you deal with him.”
“Yeah,” another says. “Nobody comes into our neighborhood and does that shit.”
I study them for a moment. They could have killed Chloe when they thought she was spying on them. They then stood between her and five armed bikers.
I finally nod at my brothers.
Dice and the others lower their weapons, though none of them put their guns away.
“You want to help?” I ask.
All three men nod.
“Good.” I glance toward Blackwood’s house as a plan forms in my head. “Because I’ve got a job for you.”
I lay out my plan before turning away and stalking toward Blackwood’s house.
Every instinct I have demands that I hunt the bastard down, drag him back here, and make him answer for every bruise on Chloe’s body. But running blind risks giving him a chance to slip away. I need to be patient.
Even if patience feels like broken glass scraping through my veins.
The front door is locked, but that doesn’t stop me.
I step inside, my hand resting near the gun tucked into my waistband.
Inside, I find the shoes I gave Chloe that morning, with the socks tucked inside.
I step back outside and whistle. One of the women runs over to grab them before jogging back to Chloe’s side.
I continue my search of the house. The living room is neat and tidy, although a little dusty. I move into the kitchen. It’s small and cluttered, but nothing looks disturbed. A tray sits on the counter beside a bag of potato chips and a bottle of soda.
I keep moving down a short hallway. There are three doors. I focus on the one with a lock on the outside. I know what I expect to find before I cross the threshold, but knowing doesn’t prepare me for seeing.
Frayed ropes hang from the bed frame. Blood stains the fibers. More blood is on the single sheet twisted and bunched on the dirty mattress.
My hands curl into fists.
Then I see the open window.
The screen lies on the ground outside, and the blinds sway in the breeze. Chloe crawled through that window, weak and hurting. She had no idea what waited for her outside. She only knew she had to get away from the monster who brought her here.
Red creeps into the edges of my vision.
I want to destroy this room. My hands itch to tear the bed into pieces. But I don’t want to stop there. I want to put my fist through every wall and tear the room down to its studs.
Instead of violence. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. I have to gain control. Chloe needs me to be in control.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out and answer without taking my eyes off the ropes.
“Yeah?”
“Everyone’s in position,” Wildcard says. “Hawk’s covering the north end of the street. Rush has the alley. Dice is watching the main road, and I’m behind the house. Our three new friends are spread out, too. Nobody comes into this neighborhood without us seeing them.”
I disconnect, close the bedroom door, and sit on the edge of the mattress. The springs groan beneath my weight. I have to turn my back away from the bloodied ropes before I lose it again.
Each passing second feeds the thing raging inside me. I picture Chloe tied to this bed. I picture Blackwood standing over her, talking to her as if she belongs to him. I see the marks on her face and imagine the moment he put them there.
My hand drifts toward my gun before I stop myself. Shooting him would be quick. Too quick. I want him to suffer. I’ll enjoy making him suffer.
The phone vibrates again.
“Visual,” Dice says as soon as I answer. “Blackwood just turned onto the street. Gray pickup. He’s alone.”
“Let him through.”
“Copy that.”
I put the phone away and rise from the bed. I consider meeting him at the front door, but I decide to let him come in here. He’ll believe Chloe is still tied to the bed, frightened and helpless. I’ll let him enjoy that feeling for a few seconds before I show him the error of his ways.
An engine rumbles outside, followed by the squeal of worn brakes. A truck door slams. Keys jingle near the front entrance.
“Honey, I’m home,” Blackwood calls in a cheerful singsong voice.
My jaw clenches so hard that pain shoots through my teeth.
Footsteps move into the kitchen. Cabinet doors open and close. Something rattles against a plate.
“I brought you dinner,” he calls. “I know you must be hungry after your little tantrum.”
A refrigerator door opens, and then slams shut.
“If you’re a good girl and eat everything, I might even let you have dessert.”
Rage boils through me, hot and vicious.
Good girl.
Like Chloe is a child who needs discipline. Like tying her down and beating her when she’s unable to fight back are acts of affection?
The bedroom doorknob turns.
I stand.
The door swings inward, and Blackwood backs into the room carrying a tray. There’s a sandwich on a plate, a bag of chips, and a bottle of soda with a straw sticking from the top.
“I got your favorite—” he says as he turns.
The tray slips from his hands when his eyes lock with mine.
I cross the space before it hits the floor. My fist closes around the front of his shirt, and I drive him backward into the wall hard enough to rattle the picture frames in the hallway.
Blackwood’s breath explodes from his lungs.
“What the fuck—”
I slam him into the wall again.
His head snaps back as fear floods his eyes when he sees the rage burning in mine.
“This isn’t what it looks like.”
I drive my fist into his kidney.
Blackwood screams and folds sideways, but I keep him pinned against the wall by his shirt.
“Did Chloe scream like that when you hit her?”
“I didn’t—”
I hit the same spot again.
His knees buckle.
The bedroom door flies open.
I twist, ready to draw my gun, but stop when I see Chloe standing in the doorway.
The five women crowd the hall behind her. Hawk appears farther back, his weapon lowered but ready.
Chloe’s gaze locks on Blackwood.
He goes still.
Chloe steps into the room. Her face is pale, and her hands shake, but she doesn’t look away. She studies him as he sags against the wall, held upright only by my grip.
Blackwood tries to straighten.
“Chloe, baby, tell him—”
“Don’t call me that.” Her voice is quiet but sharp enough to cut. “You don’t get to call me anything.”
His mouth opens, but no words come out.
She takes another step forward. For several long seconds, she stares at the man who tied her to a bed, beat her, and tried to convince her that his obsession was love.
Then she dismisses him.
Just like that.
Her gaze shifts from Blackwood to me, and the fear in her eyes softens into something that hits me harder than any fist ever could.
“I love you, too,” she says.
The rage inside me doesn’t disappear, but it changes. It becomes colder, sharper, and controlled.
Blackwood is going to pay for what he did. He didn’t break her or take her away from me, but he’s still going to pay. And when Chloe walks out of this house, she won’t carry the memory of him standing over her while she lies helpless on a bed.
She’ll remember him exactly as he is now.
Trapped against the wall and completely at our mercy.