“The same kind?”
“No,” I gritted my teeth again. “Women.”
“Her?” he said, quietly but no less deadly. He meant Waverley. I didn’t know yet. If she was in there, no one would fucking stop me. Not even King. I would kill Andrew Reinhart and I wouldn’t care what happened after.
“Not from what I’ve seen so far,” I answered tightly.
“Give me twenty,” he said and hung up. Connor’s place wasn’t that far from the compound. I didn’t like the thought of War heading back here on his own, but the fucker had gone without telling anyone. He’d be in his truck at least. Connor didn’t ride on the back of War’s bike.
I glanced at my phone screen before I locked it. It was just before five am. This was turning into the longest night of my goddamn life. After pacing for a while, I dropped into a seat and glared at the folders. There was a knock at the door, which I’d closed after kicking Omen out. It wasn’t War, I’d been watching the gate cameras, and he wasn’t back yet. It opened and Ballistic walked in.
“Rosa sent me. She’s upset. What’s going on?”
Waverley wanted to keep everything quiet, and I could do that. He didn’t need to know this started with her, but I wasn’t convinced Rosa hadn’t told him, despite telling me she’d been loyal to Wave. When Ballistic looked at the camera, the laptop, then back to me, I knew I was right. He grabbed a chair and wheeled it over, sitting down next to me. I glanced up and saw a truck pulling in on the cameras.
“War?” Ballistic asked, and I nodded. “We’ll wait.”
I suddenly felt exhausted. The adrenalin of the night’s events was finally waning. And the night was far from over. War came in looking dishevelled and as tired as I felt. Ballistic gave him a quick look but didn’t comment.
“Ok, what have you got?” he asked.
“A camera. There was a memory card.”
I explained what Rosa told me. I figured I could trust Ballistic, so held nothing back. I told them about the couple of pictures I’d already looked at.
“Rosa’s had it all this time?” War asked, hands anchored at his hips.
“She didn’t know what was on it,” Ballistic said, giving War a look that would make lesser men’s balls shrivel. “And at this point, I’d say it was a good job she did.”
War nodded, letting him know he wasn’t pissed at Rosa.
“Open it.”
The pictures were of women and girls, some I recognised from school, in what looked like a hotel room, a few of them were inside a car. In some, they were handcuffed to the bed or tied up in the back seat. All of them looked out of it. There were things done to them, things which they were unaware of happening. As I clicked through them, it was making my stomach turn increasingly. You couldn’t see who was conducting the assaults, just the occasional bare arm, a hand, the edge of a knee.
Motherfucker knew what he was doing when he took these pictures.
We went through all five folders, Ballistic quiet and stoic, War getting paler and me just trying to keep it together. Hoping and praying to a God, I don’t believe in that we wouldn’t find a picture of Waverley. Overall, there were six different girls in the pictures. And when we got to the end of them, I was relieved there were no photographs of Wave.
“Not sure how we prove it’s him,” Ballistic broke the silence. “You can’t see his face, and this has been in our house for five years. You’ve touched it, my wife touched it. That is tainted evidence.”
“Since when do we need evidence?” I snarl. “We’ve taken people into the Shed with far less information than this.”
“As I understand it, there is a plan. And if you want to use these pictures, there needs to be something that ties it back to him.”
“Wave told Rosa,” I fill War in when he scowls at Ballistic. “It’s on her. We didn’t break her rules. And for the record, I don’t agree with the plan.”
“Shut the fuck up, Hudson,” War crossed the room and sat down in a chair, his legs spread wide as he leaned back, resting his head against thewall and closing his eyes. “Sick fuck,” he muttered. “I’ve sat in meetings with that guy. It’s bad enough what he did to my sister but…fuck,” he trailed off. “I recognise some of those girls,” he tilted his chin down and looked at me for confirmation.
“Yeah,” I agree. “And some of them were in lower grades than us. Age of consent is sixteen.”
War’s head whipped to me, realisation dawning that these pictures were taken when Reinhart was eighteen, which meant some of these were underage girls. I glanced at Ballistic, surprised when he pulled a pair of glasses out of the top pocket of his cut. He leaned closer to the screen and clicked through a few pictures.
“Son of a bitch. Why can’t I kill him?” I jumped to my feet and moved towards War. “We just need to grab him with no one knowing and bring him to the Shed.”
War thought for a moment and when he looked up, I could see the conflict there. King said we do it Waverley’s way, but that was before we knew what a filthy, depraved asshole he is. He didn’t deserve the drawn-out legal route Waverley wanted to take. It was in War’s eyes too. He wanted to take Andrew Reinhart and hurt him just as much as me. There are a lot of things this club got into, questionable and downright illegal things. Never anything to do with women, and definitely nothing to do with kids, not even King could argue with this.
“Holdup,” Ballistic interrupted our stare off. “Look at this.”
