Chapter Thirty-Five
There are moments in life where everything stops.
Silence falls, and in that silence, all that exists is the panic overwhelming you.
Filling your senses. It becomes all about that breath you can’t reach, and the thundering of your heart as it reacts to the burst of adrenaline that comes from abject terror.
The terror came from a phone call, while I was on hour four of my stakeout with Danno.
First a text:
Micro: About to call. It’s urgent, so answer fast.
I glanced sideways at Danno and swallowed hard, knowing that something awful was about to happen, or maybe already had.
“The Pres is calling. I need to take this.”
Danno just nodded as the phone started ringing in my hand and I hit the answer button, lifting it with a trembling hand to my ear.
“Pres?”
“We’ve got trouble, brother. Claudia’s missing.”
Fuck. There it is. That thud of my heart that tells me I’m about to freak out. The tingling in the back of my head. The roaring in my ears. She’s missing? How can she be missing? I can’t breathe!
“What? What happened? She was supposed to be safe!”
“Shut up and I’ll fill you in, but you need to get straight here.”
Danno was watching me carefully, digging his own phone out as he listened.
“She left the compound. We don’t know why, or even when. She said she was going to the bathroom, and never came back. Caroline raised the alarm after twenty minutes or so and we searched the grounds, but she’s gone.”
“FUCK! You people had one fucking job!”
Danno tapped my arm, shaking his head slowly.
“Tell me.”
“Hang on, Pres.” I clenched my trembling fingers as I turned to him. “My old lady has disappeared. She was at the clubhouse and now she’s just gone.”
Danno’s eyes turned fierce. “The sister?”
They just fucking know everything, don’t they?
“Dunno. Pres, what do we know other than you all dropped the fucking ball?”
“Easy, brother. We can deal with blame later. Grease has checked her phone, and it was moving down the road from here at speed, but they’ve found it smashed about a mile and a half away from here, heading away from town, so we’re despatching guys right now to start looking.”
“Fuck!”
“Hang on. Grease is updating me. I’ll call back.” The phone fell silent, and dropped into my lap as I gripped my thighs and took a deep breath. Breathe, just breathe. We’ll find her. We have to. Danno’s voice pulled me from my panic.
“Boss? We’ve got a problem. Stag’s lady is missing. We’re gonna head straight there, so you’ll need cover at this location.”
Then a Bennett voice, clearly on speaker. “Gotcha, bruv. Go sort it out. I’ll get Nige to watch the cameras ‘til cover arrives. We’ll send help to the compound too. Go find her, yeah? Kill whoever you need to.”
“The fuck?”
I was staring at Danno in shock and he grinned, passing me the phone as he started the engine and put it into drive, heading down the road at a rapid pace.
“Bruv, you’re one of us. We look after our family. Do what you gotta do, shout if you need more bodies.”
The call ended, and I stared at the road ahead as we were moving.
“Might want your seatbelt on, brother. I’m not gonna go slow.”
Fuck. I locked it in place, and stared at the unfamiliar phone in my hand. My world was falling apart, and these crime lords, these guys that I’d wanted to hate, had just stepped up and given me what I needed. Hope.
“Breathe, Stag. We’ll find her, and everything will be fine.
” His face was grim, but his words landed, despite my panic, despite the turmoil filling my heart, and my head.
Despite the white noise filling my ears.
He said we’ll find her. I have to believe him.
He exuded a calmness under pressure that I really fucking needed right now to stop me freaking out.
She needed me to be my best for her right now.
“They just release you like this to help me? I don’t get it.”
Danno tutted at me, taking a left turn as my phone buzzed in my hand, and I opened it to a message from the Pres with a road to head for.
“Apparently her car was spotted on Angler Road, it’s-”
“I know where it is. I’ll make good time there, it’s only a few minutes away, heading out of town. Is it stationary?”
“Dunno. I-”
“Don’t panic, brother. This is what we do.”
I reached over and slid his phone into the cradle on his dashboard, leaning back to crack my knuckles, spoiling for a fight, for someone to hit and gift with the pain I was feeling. Trouble is, when it’s a woman, what the fuck do you do?
“I thought you guys did crime.”
Danno snorted, taking a corner at about fifty, which his fancy cage handled nicely.
“Sure, but we’re a close knit group, like your club. We’re a family. We back each other, we support each other. You’re one of our people now, so you get that support too.”
I couldn’t absorb his words, or their meaning, because my mind was already cycling through every horrific possibility that might face us when we arrived there, and I was starting to fear that us having missed her at that location might be the least terrifying of them all. What if, oh god, what if…
“Breathe, brother. We’ll find her. You need to be capable of helping her when we get there, so put your focus on that.”
I pressed the button to lower the window, needing air hitting me in the face to wake up my brain, and lift me out of panic mode. Danno was right. She’d need me at my best for her, that’s what she deserved every minute of every fucking day.
I leaned my head out a little, letting the wind smack me in the face, and that’s when a tight grip on my seatbelt tugged me back into the seat.
“Are you trying to get yourself hurt, fucker? I just said you need to put her first.”
“I ALWAYS put her first, you sanctimonious-”
The phone rang in the cradle, and Danno jabbed a finger at it.
“Yeah.”
“The vehicle was just spotted tearing down the A road out of town, sending coordinates. I’d hurry if I were you, she’s speeding up, and I don’t think the plan is to make it to the end of the road,” a crisp voice said to him.
It wasn’t one I recognised, but his words sent me into fucking overdrive.
Not being the one driving was killing me.
I wasn’t even in control of the vehicle I was in, merely a passenger in our horror, and the fact that it was a cage was even fucking worse.
“I can’t breathe!”
Danno cursed, and slammed the brakes on, pulling up by a gate on the side of the road.
“I’m doing this for your own good,” he said firmly, turning in his seat and grabbing my seatbelt to tug me toward him, a firm fist catching me right in the jaw, snapping my head back as he released me. Jesus fuck!
“Ow, motherfucker!”
He chuckled. “You’re welcome, let’s go get your girl.” He pulled back out onto the road, and floored it. We were going to find her. There was no fucking option where we’d miss her. I wouldn’t let it happen, and I was starting to realise he wouldn’t either.
“Turn left here, down that dirt track,” the disembodied voice commanded, and Danno swerved at the last second, a cloud of dust flying up behind us as he kept moving at speed.
“You got eyes on her, Nige?”
“Not as many cameras out this way, but some of the bikers are on their tail now. She’s not getting away.”
Oh god. “Fuck! What if they get in an accident?!”
Claudia
It was like something out of a movie, some kind of macho action movie, where the bad guys are roaring down the road, recklessly taking curves and bends like they just don’t want to survive, but it wasn’t a movie. It was my real life. It was possibly the last moments of my life.
Marissa was crying, I could see tears pouring down her cheeks, and I knew the only hope was to talk her down. To try. To try and make her see reason, to try and get through to her before she slammed us headlong into a tree or something, and ended our story in one violent moment.
“Mar, please. Listen to me. You don’t want this. You don’t want to die, and I don’t want to die. I don’t want you to die. I want us to stop, please. Let’s pull over somewhere and just talk. We can talk this out. It’s not too late.”
She kept glancing fearfully in her rearview and side mirrors, so I turned to look behind us, and the sight of several black clad bikers chasing us down the road was both a relief and horrifying, because their presence could send her even further into a meltdown, because this would make her feel like there’s no way out.
“They won’t hurt you, Mar. They just want us safe.
They’re good people, I promise. You can slow down, please, just do the smart thing.
We’re twins! We’re practically the same person.
You’ve done so much for me, so let me do this for you now.
I’ll help you. I… we’ll get help for you.
You’re so brave, but you’re stressed out.
You’ve had so much to worry about, but I want to help! ”
I kept glancing at the bikers behind us, their helmets making it impossible to know who’s who. Was Stag one of them? Was he riding right behind us, watching Marissa risk our lives? What if she hurt him too? What if she hurt his brothers?
One of the bikers broke away from the others, speeding up to move alongside our car, on the wrong side of the road.
He was waving his arm at us, trying to get Marissa to slow down, and the other bikers were close behind but they suddenly all started falling back, and when I turned to look ahead of us, I could see a large black vehicle blocking the road, and a man standing by the open passenger door, waving at us to stop.
Oh god! It was Stag, and she wasn’t slowing down!
“Marissa! STOP! STOP PLEASE! Don’t hurt him!”
In a panic, I grabbed the steering wheel and pulled down on it, throwing as much of my weight into it as I could, and we veered sharply across the road.
We were both probably screaming, as the car left the road, and crashed down into the ditch on the side of the road.
We landed with a bone-jarring crash, and I was thrown forward hard enough that the seatbelt locked in place, like a steel bar across my chest, and the airbag deployed on Marissa’s side, her face slamming into that instead of the steering wheel.