“And how’s our guest enjoying his stay?” Comes a voice from the doorway pulling me back to the present. I look up but he’s standing with the sun at his back, so I can’t make out his features. The only thing I can clearly see is the short fuck fromthe bar is standing behind him wearing my cut and twirling my knife.
I’m going to have fun ending that motherfucker.
“Something happen to the prison?” I ask once he’s close enough that I can see he’s wearing a badge.
“Well, we have something of a two-tiered system around here,” he says around a shit eating grin as he unlocks the front panel. “This one’s for special guests. Cuts down on the paperwork.”
Staying toward the back so one of the three men in front of me will have to join me in order to get me out, I sit there without saying another word.Now would be a great time to make an entrance, Thunder,I think, quietly wishing my brother was storming the building right about now.
“Come on out of there, Rage,” he orders, drawing out my road name. “We just want to have a little chat, then you can be on your way.”
Bullshit. Does he think he’s talking to a child?
“Mills said he’d come looking for him,” the blonde-haired man behind the faux sheriff comments. “Kept us waiting, though didn’t he, Davis?”
“Shut it,” the man I now have a name for snaps out, while the sheriff shakes his head like he knows he’s working with two imbeciles.
“Davis,” I say, not bothering to look at him. “You look like a kid playing dress-up. Why don’t you take my cut off before you trip over it?”
My first mistake was ignoring him, I learned that the moment he jabbed my knife past the bars and sliced my arm. My second mistake was taking my eyes off the two in front of me, the blondefucker tased me and with my skin as damp as it was, that son-of-a-bitch lit up my whole body.
I was still twitching when they were pulling me out and even catching the gate with my left hand, I was barely strong enough to hold it—not that I could once blondie stomped on my hand.
They dragged me another ten feet or so before attaching chains to each of my wrists, and that’s when the shit really hit the fan.
I was in a BDSM club once and one of the dommes had caning as an option on her menu. It didn’t sound fun to me then and it sure as fuck wasn’t when the man masquerading as a sheriff started walloping the backs of my legs, slowly moving upward.
Thankfully, I passed out. For a while at least.
My arms were still stretched as far out as they could reach, except they had lowered my burning backside onto a chair. A slap across my face got my attention.
“That’s it, open your eyes,” a deep voice coaxed me back to consciousness. “There we go!”
Too late, my groggy mind realized he needed my eyes open to access my phone.
“Perfect,” he drawls out the word. “I’m looking forward to catching up with Eddie and that brother of his.”
Once he releases my hair, my head lolls forward, my neck doesn’t feel strong enough to hold it up. Eddie? Does he mean Gravedigger? Bull’s dad has been gone for years, and his Uncle Damien’s been dead at least a decade. Where the hell did this guy come from?
“I hope you understand that explosion you set off yesterday is going to cost you more than a simple caning,” he says, as he scrolls through my phone barely sparing me a glance even before he turns to walk away. “But why don’t you just sit tight for now?”
Was it only yesterday?
After I saw the van out at Mills’ place, I hit the faint outline of a dirt road on his ATV and followed it back to what looked like an old mine. The entrance had been reinforced with fresh beams and there were boxes stacked immediately inside the opening.
Considering the region is dotted with abandoned mines, my first thought was that someone found a live vein and wanted to keep the government out of it. That idea would also track with needing Mills off his land, which he would never willingly do.
I shot a text to Bronco since Thunder was out on a job and I didn’t want to bother Bull, on account of him being out with the Tucker girl.
Entering the mine solo was stupid as fuck, but I did and using the flashlight on my phone, I got about a half mile in before the narrow path opened into a large chamber. Thankfully, the man in the room had his back to me, the handful of seconds that I had before he realized he wasn’t alone saved my skin.
Hell, even if he made it to the gun he looked at, I’m sure I would have been buried alive with the report it would have made. Not having time to reach for the knife in my boot, I grabbed a crowbar that was sitting on top of a nearby crate and threw it at him, catching him upside the head.
He went down like a whore in Tijuana, but some people have zero luck. When I went to check on whether he was still going to be a problem, he had cut his head open on a rock when he landed and based on the flow of blood seeping out of the wound, I was fairly certain he wasn’t getting back up.
I paused in the two entryways that led to other tunnels but couldn’t make out any other sounds so I decided not to follow the paths further into the mine. Instead, I retrieved the crowbar and started digging around the crates.
They were an assortment of drugs and weapons. The boxes and bags all had some sort of Asian language stamped on them, so I took a small sample to see if Bull or any of the guys had seen anything like this before, and that was around the time I heard some yelling coming from one of the passageways.
