Chapter 42 Max
MAX
“I don’t care if the guy was a theater geek in high school. Just get me his fucking address, Hunter. Now,” Logan barks into the phone, getting a little quieter when he sees how Mochi’s ears perk up.
“I don’t think you’ll need it,” Charlie snaps back. “He’s Lily’s uncle. Ex-step-uncle, hence why it took two minutes to find out instead of one. Going out on a limb here, but what if she contacted him to take care of Brady’s mess? I mean, he is a criminal defense attorney, so it would add up.”
“No way she’d do anything for Brady,” I mumble, hoping that I am right. “But why the fuck didn’t she tell us anything?”
“Yeah, and why does your wife support her doing shit behind our backs?” Logan adds, glaring over at Sam.
“Leave my wife out of this. Ruby is gone too, isn’t she?
So stop throwing around accusations and start fucking reading, you goddamn idiots.
Here.” Sam snatches Lily’s phone away from me and scrolls through the messages until he points at the word divorce, holding the phone so close to my face that it’s almost touching my nose.
“Put Hunter on speaker, I think I know where they went.”
He opens up the navigation app on Ruby’s phone and tells Charlie the address of the coffee shop where the girls had planned to meet Lily’s uncle.
“Check if they’ve got cameras,” I add once he’s done.
“What do you think I’m doing right now?” Cady sounds a tiny bit annoyed about me giving her instructions, but I’m too agitated to even mumble an apology.
“Did they make it to the meeting?” I ask after ten seconds have passed.
“On it,” Cady says sternly.
The sound of a clicking keyboard fills the anxiety-riddled air between us. The only safe place to look at is the wall in front of us because I’m pretty sure we’ve reached a point where looks are so loaded with hatred they could, in fact, kill.
“Got ‘em,” Charlie finally says, and I exhale in relief. “They were at the coffee shop around two hours ago.”
“Adds up with the text messages,” Logan says, letting his head fall back against the wall.
“Everything looks normal. Lily, Ruby, and Dario are sitting at a table in the back… Wait, Cady, replay this part. Shit, I was right.”
“Right about what, Charlie?” I’m impressed by how Logan can yell without actually yelling.
“There’s a guy sitting outside at one of the patio tables. He’s wearing sunglasses, but he keeps glancing over to the girls and then back to a guy standing on the other side of the street. Shortly after Lily and Ruby leave, he gets up, walks over to the other guy, and they both follow the girls.”
I’m not sure what I expected to hear. There is no good explanation for the situation, no way this ends in a way we’ll laugh about in a few years. But every piece of information paints a clearer picture, a picture I’m fucking scared to look at.
“The girls got back to the car safely, they drove off–there’s a car following them. A man is driving it; a second one in the passenger seat.”
Sam stands up, pacing through the small room. “Well, then check the damn plates.”
“Stolen.”
“Great. Fucking great,” he mutters. “Can your little friend at least access our security system?”
“I need the actual terminal,” Cady says. “SD card and everything.”
Sam doesn’t need to be told twice. He leaves the panic room with Mochi in tow, and when I hear loud banging coming from the hallway, Logan and I exchange a look.
“We’ll meet you back on base in around–”
“No,” Cady says, and I raise my eyebrows. “Charlie’s gonna send you guys my address. Call him when you arrive, my doorbell doesn’t work.”
She ends the call before I can ask any more questions, and after getting up, Logan holds his hand out to me. We join Sam in the hallway, mostly to make sure he doesn’t take half of the wall out together with the terminal.
His hands are covered in a mix of blood and plaster, and it’s only when I take a closer look that I see how shaky they are. Logan gently takes the terminal from Sam to make sure it’s still in one piece when it reaches Cady.
“Can you call Dom?” Sam asks, leaning against the kitchen counter, running his hands over his face. “He needs to take care of Mochi while we settle this. Tell him to meet us somewhere, or maybe he can come here, pick Mochi up, I don’t know. I can’t fucking think–”
“It’s okay. I’ll call him,” I say, patting Sam’s arm before I walk out on the terrace, trying to reach Dom.
When Dom shows up thirty minutes later, his face is full of worry. Even more so when he sees the huge mass of rage that had been Sam at some point. Sam gets himself together just long enough to get Mochi’s stuff ready and give her some more head scratches before we send her off with Dom.
By the time he leaves the driveway, we’re already in Ruby’s garage. Throughout the drive to Cady, I repeatedly have to remind Sam that we won’t be able to help our girls when we’re all fucking dead in a ditch just because he chooses to ignore every single traffic rule known to mankind.
Charlie is nervously walking up and down the street as we arrive in front of the apartment complex Cady lives in. We don’t bother to waste any more time, practically bolting up the stairs until we enter Cady’s apartment.
Wordlessly, she takes the terminal from Logan, and we follow her into her tiny office, the room almost bursting at the seams as all six of us struggle to find a place to sit or stand.
No one wants to speak up while Cady examines the terminal. The silence is only broken up by the occasional sigh and Sam nervously tapping his foot.
The moment the recording from the security cameras pops up on Cady’s screens, we all scramble to stand up, crowding the poor woman until she can barely move her arm enough to reach for the computer mouse.
Clearing her throat, she nudges both Sam and Logan in the stomach with her elbows until they take a step back.
Logan’s grip on the back of Cady’s chair tightens as the video shows four men entering the house through the patio doors.
Sam holds his breath while we watch how two of them lead Mochi to the master bedroom.
Sam always complains that Mochi isn’t the tiniest bit territorial, but I think it’s the only reason nothing happened to her.
Cady speeds up the video, only slowing it back down when our girls arrive at the house.
The taste of blood spreads in my mouth, but I barely notice the stinging pain shooting through the inside of my cheek.
My eyes are glued to the screen, forcing me to watch how some fucking disgusting bastard puts his hand on our girl, sliding Lily’s hair to the side while she shakes like a leaf.
I could never understand where Logan’s need not to just kill but to eradicate stemmed from. Now I do, because as I watch him smile while he shoves Lily back inside the house, all I want to do is rip the skin off of his bones until he’s nothing more than a useless mass of sinew and blood.
“Logan, no,” Cady tsks when he starts stalking through the room, ready to smash something to pieces.
“I need a fucking cigarette,” Sam says, so angry he almost crushes the cigarette package in his hand while Cady points at the window.
Rockwell, Charlie, and I decide not to direct Sam’s attention back to the screen as we witness how one of the men pushes Ruby so hard she falls. After she broke his nose, but I don’t think this would have made a difference for Sam.
One cigarette turns into four as both Logan and Sam lean out of the window, their conversation consisting of curse words and groans.
My entire body is so tense I’m sure I’ll feel every goddamn muscle tomorrow, bile rising in my throat as the video ends with our girls being thrown into the back of a gray sedan.
Leaning against Cady’s desk, Rockwell somehow looks as if the past few days have turned him into a shell of his former self.
I have never seen him like this. We could be in a life or death situation–actually, have been in one quite a few times already–but one look at our captain was always enough to know everything would be okay.
And now, as I watch the strongest people I know crumble down, anything resembling hope runs through my fingers like sand.
Turning her chair around, Cady speaks up.
“I was able to follow them through traffic surveillance cameras, but I lost track of them once they left the city. Plates are stolen, like I said, and the car is too old to hack into any form of GPS. I tried locating some phones of known 203 members that were already in the system, but–”
“We need to talk to Brady,” Logan interrupts her, rejoining the conversation together with Sam, who closes the window a bit too aggressively for Cady’s liking.
“I almost had him last night,” Rockwell says, knocking over a figurine as he stands up straight. “He just needs a little push.”
“Oh, and what a fucking push this is going to be,” Logan snarls, pulling me after him and out of Cady’s apartment.
Rockwell doesn’t protest. I wish he would because the absence of a discussion means he doesn’t have a better plan than letting us smash answers out of Brady like he’s a fucking punching bag.
The short drive back to base is overshadowed by Logan, who starts listing how exactly he plans to get information out of Brady. Even as we reach the garage of our building, he still isn’t done, but my thoughts are so loud I can barely hear his voice.
“Max?” Logan calls out for me as we make our way down to the cell block, and I shake my head as if it would help to get the chaos inside of it under control.
“You said something.”
“No?”
“Max, I'm one hundred percent sure you said something,” Logan says, pulling me aside while Rockwell holds his card to the keypad.
“Everything is going to be okay,” he says, taking my hand in his. “We’re going to bring her back. I promise we’ll find her, and we’re going to kill every single one of those bastards.”
I don’t know if he’s talking to me or trying to calm himself down because when I look into Logan’s eyes, there’s a storm brewing behind them.
“We’ll bring her back,” I say, squeezing his hand one last time before we enter the cell block.
Deeper down the hallway, Sam bangs his fists against Mr. Holton’s cell door, obviously unhappy he has to wait for the lock to release.
The moment it does, both Sam and Logan scramble to be the first ones in the cell.
Still, it’s Logan who loses the rest of his composure when Brady doesn’t even have the decency to turn around, lying on the thin mattress with his face turned to the wall.
“You’re gonna start fucking talking now, asshole,” Logan barks, grabbing Brady’s collar to yank him up like a ragdoll.
And Brady–Brady just stares at him, his eyes lifeless like those of a taxidermied animal, and it’s Charlie who voices what all of us seem to ignore.
“I think we should call a medic,” he stammers as Rockwell pushes Logan aside.
The moment Logan lets go of Brady, he slumps over, and I don’t know why Rockwell even bothers checking his neck for a pulse.
“Shit,” he mumbles to himself, shoved out of the way by Sam, who starts some form of CPR that is only a thinly veiled excuse to break Brady’s ribs.
“You’re not fucking dying before you tell me where my wife is,” Sam screams so loud it covers the sound of bones breaking.
Charlie runs out of the cell, and gagging echoes through the empty hallway while I’m frozen in place. It’s just when Rockwell yells into my face to help Logan get Sam off of Brady that I’m pulled back to the present.
We maneuver Sam out of the cell, slamming the door shut to prevent him from running back in there, and I can see the exact moment his rage subsides, making way for something much worse: despair.
Sam sinks down against the wall until he’s sitting on the dirty floor, burrowing his face in his hands.
Logan stays by his side, and Rockwell wraps his hand around my arm, urging me to take a few steps with him.
“Rigor mortis hasn’t even set in yet,” he says.
“This is anything but a fucking coincidence,” I murmur, glancing over at Logan, who tries his best to console Sam.
“I’d bet a good amount of money Sanders will be to first to get his fucking hands on the autopsy report.”
“We should hide the damn corpse somewhere–”
“Max, we can only fight one war at once,” Rockwell says, putting his hand on my shoulder. “So let’s raid the fucking armory, and then we’ll drive back to Cady to come up with a plan to get the girls back.”