Chapter 15
SYVANNAH
The compound is loud during the day, but when the Royal Bastards ride out to protect all they’ve worked for, it’s too damn quiet.
Not the peaceful quiet, but the quiet that settles after a scream.
Like something is waiting, ready to strike.
I went into the garage again, sketching ideas of how the Club can rebuild, trying to settle my mind.
I give up after an hour, and the nip in the air causes my fingers to tremble.
I try to shake the forbidding feeling as I cross the lot. My arms are wrapped around myself, my jacket pulled tight against the night chill, telling my heartbeat to calm the hell down, but it doesn’t listen.
I make it halfway to the Clubhouse and safety when boots crunch behind me. A voice slices through the dark.
“Syvannah.” Pearl steps out from behind one of the trucks, and her normal put-together facade is cracked wide open for me to see who she really is underneath all the glitz and glamour.
Pearl’s mascara is smudged under her eyes, and her carefully styled blonde hair is wild like she’s run her hands through it too many times.
She looks jittery, desperate, and dangerous.
“Jesus, Pearl. What do you want?” Exhaustion claws at every word.
Pearl bites her lip hard enough to draw blood. “I… I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
I laugh under my breath. “You don’t talk to me. You talk at me or about me. You talk to Tiny.”
“This isn’t about Tiny,” Pearl snaps, then looks around, paranoid. “It’s about you.”
“What about me?” I ask. My stomach twists low.
Pearl steps closer, eyes shining with something sharp and frantic. “It’s about what happened. With the drugs,” she whispers. “The ones you used. The ones that nearly killed you.”
My breath stutters. “Pearl.”
“No, listen.” She looks around like someone might hear. “I know I messed up. I shouldn’t have given you that shit. I should’ve stopped you.” Her voice trembles. I can tell she’s acting, but fuck, she does a good job.
“I know who supplied it,” she whispers. “I know who pushed the stuff into the compound. And I can prove you didn’t go looking for it.”
My breath stutters.
She sees the crack and pounces. Pearl leans in, voice soft, almost kind. “I don’t want Tiny thinking you relapsed on purpose. Or that you’re using again. I know how much that would destroy you. And him.”
My pulse spikes.
She lowers her tone further. “Someone wants you out of the picture, Syv. Someone is using your relapse to fuck with Tiny’s head. I can show you who.”
“Why would you help me?” I whisper.
Pearl’s smile is small and broken, and fake. “Because I owe you. And because… I don’t want to be the villain in your story anymore.”
That lands heavier than I expected. She jerks her chin toward the back gate. “Come on. Five minutes down the road. I’ll explain everything there.”
My body hesitates. My heart wants to bolt. My head whispers RUN.
But Tiny thinking you did that to yourself repeats like a hammer.
It’s the kind of hurt that makes you move when you shouldn’t, trust when you know better, follow a lie wrapped in hope.
So I follow her. Not far, just a few steps into the dark, far enough that the safety of the gate is gone and the compound lights no longer reach us. Far enough that the night feels too big and too quiet. Just far enough that I don’t see the men until they’re already on me.
Something in the air shifts. I’m not sure if it’s pressure, silence, or the faint scrape of rubber on asphalt.
The world explodes. The ambush is instant. Violent. Absolute.
One second, I’m stepping beside Pearl. The next, a van door rips open with a metallic scream. Boots pound across the pavement. Gloved hands slam into my shoulders, yanking me so hard my breath crushes in my chest.
“What the? Pearl!” I choke.
She stumbles back, eyes wide, hands half-raised. But she doesn’t scream. Doesn’t reach for me. Doesn’t even flinch.
A rough hand clamps over my mouth. I thrash, kicking, clawing, but another man grabs my wrists, yanking them behind my back.
“She’s small,” one growls. “Hold her still.”
A needle flashes.
My panic surges so hard I taste blood as I bite my tongue. The first injection that hits the side of my neck is cold.
I try to scream under the hand, but it comes out as a muffled gasp. The second needle pierces deeper. My knees buckle. My vision warps.
A laugh rumbles behind me. “Boss wants her awake later. Not now.”
My head lolls forward. The world tilts sideways. “Pearl…” I manage, voice slurred.
She steps back further. Her eyes shine with something between guilt and terror and something uglier, jealousy.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t stop them. She just watches.
I’m thrown into the van, my body hitting cold steel. The door slams, sealing me inside. Then the world collapses into black.
When awareness crawls back, it comes with the sound of metal clanging, echoing, repeating in an endless loop.
My head throbs so violently I almost vomit. My limbs don’t respond at first. They’re weighted and numb. My mouth is dry like I swallowed sandpaper.
The smell hits me next. Bleach sharp enough to burn, iron heavy in the air, something rotten beneath it.
I force my eyes open. Bars resolve into something worse. Chain-link fencing so close it grazes my cheek. The kind used for dog kennels. I push up, muscles trembling, and my hand scrapes concrete.
The concrete beneath me is cold and slick, stained in a way that tells a story I don’t want to know. As my vision clears, the truth settles in with brutal clarity. I’m inside a cage. A real metal kennel built for animals, not people.
Panic spikes through me, and I scramble backward until the chain-link rattles behind me, the sharp metallic sound echoing in the cavernous room.
The space around me stretches huge and dim, shadows pooling in the corners, the air thick with the smell of bleach and old suffering.
Rows of kennels line the walls. Some are empty, others holding slumped shapes that were once women.
A few sit upright, shaking. Others lie too still.
The quiet sobbing from somewhere nearby crawls under my skin.
A chill rolls through me, sinking deep. This isn’t a warehouse. It’s an abandoned animal shelter. A twisted joke. A punishment crafted specifically for Tiny’s heart.
The drugs still cloud my head, but fear cuts through the haze with surgical precision. I push myself upright, gripping the chain-link fencing with unsteady fingers. Something on the concrete wall catches my attention. A carving, crude and deliberate.
A letter. An L, cut deep enough to break the surface, jagged edges catching the low light.
Lattimer.
My throat tightens painfully as the implications slam into me. Of course, he’d choose a cage meant for discarded creatures, a place built to hold the unwanted and the forgotten. Of course, he’d use me to send Tiny a message meant to break him open.
Tiny saves strays. Tiny protects anything small, helpless, and hurting. Putting me here is Lattimer’s way of saying he can’t save this one.
My knees nearly buckle under the weight of it. A sob rises before I can stop it, clawing up my chest, raw and aching. I fold forward, pressing my forehead against the cold chain-link as the metal digs into my skin, grounding me even as it traps me.
I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have followed her. I shouldn’t have let shame make my choices. But none of those mistakes matter as much as the truth that slices deeper than all the rest.
Tiny is going to think this is his fault. And that thought hurts worse than anything Lattimer could do to me.
I drag in a slow, uneven breath, desperate to force air into lungs that feel too tight to hold it. “This isn’t where I die,” I whisper, my voice shaking but refusing to break. “This isn’t it.”
My hands tremble so violently that the chain-link rattles again, echoing in the hollow space.
Somewhere across the room, another woman lets out a soft whimper.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, beneath the terror and the drugs, I hear the distant memory of a motorcycle engine.
Tiny’s bike, steady and familiar, the sound that always meant safety.
I close my eyes, swallowing hard against the panic and the tears burning at their edges.
“Tiny,” I breathe into the dark, voice barely more than air.
“Come find me.”