“Look,” she snatched up a phone and handed it to me, taking me out of the vile thoughts filtering through my head.
“Don’t,” Mace said but then shook his head. He had no power here and knew it.
I opened the message app. There were hundreds of them. He had over forty missed calls too. Some of the shit they were saying was prettyfucking graphic. Wave was right, if I let him walk out of here now and his MC caught up with him, well, they’d likely do to him what we were doing to Omen, or much worse. I noticed a couple of messages from War’s number and clicked into them. My heart clutched at the last one. It just said, ‘I need to know she’s alive.’ It hadn’t been opened, so he was ignoring him.
There was a voice message from Ranger too. I dialed and put it on speaker.
“Mace, have you lost your damn mind?” the raspy voice snapped then he let out a stream of curses.
Mace’s head came up and his eyes narrowed, this was affecting him.
“I hope you have gotten far away from here, Mace. Look, I hate that I somehow got you tangled up in this, giving info to Ballistic and that kid, but shit. You’ve really fucking done it, man. They’re gonna kill you. Don’t ask me how I know but shit…if you need anything, money, a ride, anything, let me know. I can get it to you, but you need to get as far away from Jersey as you can. If you are still holding on to this phone, throw it away.
“Nytro is too stupid to figure out how to trace a phone but someone else might not be. Get rid of it. I can only step in so far though, if I don’t hear from you tonight, I’ll assume you don’t want or need my help. Good luck, Mace. I really hope you fucking make it.”
We were all silent when the message ended. He knew about us visiting Ranger then. I turned the phone over and took out the battery and Sim card, then dropped the phone on the floor and stamped on it. Mace hissed but didn’t say anything. I pocketed the sim card.
“What exactly is the plan here?” I asked her. “You know what your dad will do when he finds out we have him.”
“That’s why I called you, I need your help to convince him.”
“Convince him of what?” I asked incredulously.
“That we need him. That he has information we can use,” she cast a glance at Mace and a fleeting look of regret passed over her face which had me narrowing my eyes. She got to her feet and stepped in front of me. “Hudson, my Mo… Danica is alive. She’s the one behind all of this. Dad thinks she’s dead, he said someone killed her two months ago.”
What the fuck? “He had proof, photographs of her body.”
“Well, what can I say, she’s a devious bitch. She’s been pulling strings, getting her nephew into the position she wanted him,” she held her hands up and let them drop. “She’s alive and well and it was her who had me kidnapped. Lily… I mean Kristy, is her daughter.”
“Okay, you’re dropping some weird shit here, Wave. Her daughter… So she’s your..”
“Half-sister,” she spat. “Yeah.”
She scrubbed both hands over her face and I suddenly realized how tired she looked. She’d been through so much and here she was begging me to help this asshole. How she thought I would convince her dad to give this guy a chance I didn’t know. But Ballistic had listened to Ranger and said this guy was our way in.
I looked at him now with renewed interest. He wasn’t just a way in, we had him, and we had Waverley. If we had him, we had everything in his head, all the inner workings of the Kingsmen, all their plans, their reasoning behind what they were doing.
But if we hurt him, Waverley would not forgive us. Shit.
“I need to call War.”
“Hudson, please?” Waverley came over to me, clutched my shirt.
“Let me call War, Wave, he can help. Things are going on,” I didn’t want to talk in front of him. “With King. Things, I can explain when we’re alone okay, but War will listen to me. You said you needed to call me to help you convince them, let me talk to War. If he sees you’re alive and hears this, he’ll be on your side….”
I hesitated but looking at her beautiful face, I knew there was one solid reason why she was standing here in front of me.
Him.
“On his side,” it was said through gritted teeth, but I said it. “I need War to make King listen.”
Mace and I locked eyes as Waverley thanked me, hugging me close. We kept eye contact as she continued talking. He knew there was a chance he was being taken to his death and I knew it was going to be pretty fucking hard to get him to tell us anything. Both of us were doing it for her and that just pushed more rage to the forefront.
I wanted to hit him so bad. I wanted to beat the shit out of him for holding her prisoner, for taking her from me. Reconciling that with him saving her was too hard.
“We need to get away from here,” she was saying as she started gathering things up, not that they had a whole lot of stuff to pack. “We drove for a while from where they were holding me but we need to go somewhere safer where we can talk. Not the compound,” she added. “Hudson?”
“Yeah, I know a place,” I muttered. It was a good job I hung on to dad’s place. “Let me go call War. I’ll tell him to bring a van.”
