Gage shrugs. “Cherri must have told them to.”
“Yes, but why?” Cash asks.
“So they can’t call for help.”
Cash shakes his head. “No. I mean, yes, but that’s not what she’d have told them.”
It dawns on me the point he’s trying to drive home. “She’d have told them to leave them behind because the Rusted Scythes could track them. When in reality, they didn’t want us to track them.”
“How does this help us exactly?” Gage interjects frustratedly.
A slow, satisfied smile spreads across Cash’s face. “Because Eli didn’t take his smartwatch off.”
Gage’s jaw drops, and his eyes light up as he grins back. “Cash, you’re a genius,” he says, clapping Cash on the back.
I feel like a dinosaur. I’m not particularly tech-savvy, and whatever conclusion they’ve drawn is evading me. I look between them in confusion before exasperatedly asking, “Does one of you care to tell me what the fuck’s going on?”
“We can track Eli’s smartwatch. As long as he’s still wearing it and hasn’t turned off tracking, we can find them.”
There are so many things that could go wrong. Eli might have taken his watch off or turned off the tracking. But right now, this is our only hope. Finding Cherri and hoping she would lead us to them will take too long. We don’t even know how long they’ve been gone for. Hours, I suspect. I’ve no doubt now that the Rusted Scythes attacked the clubhouse to distract us. Cherri knew we’d leave Naomi and Eli behind for their safety. It all makes perfect sense now.
Cash is the most tech-savvy one out of the three of us, so he gets to work seeing if he can locate Eli’s watch. I indulge in some quiet seething, planning on how I’m gonna get my revengeagainst Cherri and the Rusted Scythes. It’s easier to focus on revenge than on the gnawing worry in my heart that we’re already too late.
Chapter 22
Naomi
They took us into a small, windowless room with two chairs and tied us tightly to them. Chopper said they’d get us to talk, one way or another.
They tortured Eli first, forcing me to watch helplessly while they tried to extract information from him, first with their fists and then with a bat. My screams and cries to stop fell on deaf ears. Unless I knew where Eli had hidden the information, I was useless to them. When the bat slammed into his bad knee with a sickening crunch, dislocating it and tearing a primal scream from Eli, more animal than man, something inside me snapped.
“I know where it is, I’ll tell you,” I’d lied. But when I gave a hiding spot in our house, they’d known that I was lying. “We’ve already searched there, you lying bitch,” Chopper sneered. The force of his backhand hitting me was enough to send my neck cracking to the side, and the chair and I went careening to the floor. My head hit the concrete floor, and everything went black.
When I wake, I’m still on the cold ground. My hair is stuck to my face with crusted blood. My head is pounding, and my mouth is dry. I groan, the sound coming out as a rasp. Thirst consumes me, overriding the pain, gnawing at my insides. My throat burns with every painful, dry swallow. I blink, wincing in the harsh fluorescent light as I open my eyes. My unfocused gaze scrambles to make sense of what I’m seeing, and my muddled mind tries to remember where I am.
“Mouse?” Eli moans, his words thick and slurred, as if his tongue grew two sizes too big. I crane my neck painfully, glimpsing my brother off to the side. He sags with relief. “Oh, thank god. I thought you were… I thought…” He can’t finish his sentence. His voice cracks, and he breaks into sobs.
From my distorted angle, I can see the damage they wreaked upon Eli while I was unconscious. His face is swollen, making him almost unrecognizable, and a line of dried blood trails down his chin. At my horrified expression, Eli tries to make light of it. “I needed to go to the dentist anyway.” It’s then that I realize with horror that they’ve pulled some of his teeth out. My eye lands on one of them, glinting like a pearl on the dirty floor.
We’re going to die here.
Out loud, I ask, “How long was I out?” It’s too painful trying to meet his eye, and I finally give up, resting my head back down.
“Too long,” Eli says, his words filled with concern. I don’t need to see him to know he’s giving me that same look he always does when he’s worrying about me. Only this time he’s right to.
“Where did they go?” I croak, each word a razor in my throat.
“I sent them on a wild goose chase to buy us time. They’ll be back soon, though, and they’ll be pissed.” I can hear the conflict in his tone. He doesn’t know if he made the right choice.
Buying us time was precisely the right choice. If Eli tells them where it really is, they’ll kill us once they have it. The longer we can hold them off, the longer we live. Surely the guyswill notice we’re gone and come looking for us? “I wish there was a window in here, or some other way to tell the time,” I say.
“I’m wearing my watch, but I can’t see it. My hands are tied behind my back,” Eli explains.
I suddenly have a thought as I realize the implications. “Wait, did you say you’re wearing your watch? You didn’t leave it at home? They didn’t confiscate it?”
“No, I’m still wearing it.”
I grasp on for dear life to this new hope, a life raft, thrown seconds before drowning. “It’s a smartwatch! The guys can track it. Can’t they?”
