Alexei:Where are you?
Saint replied with a location pin and I was outside before my phone had dissected it.
I left the Rebel Kings’ compound as unseen as I’d arrived. My bike was hidden in bushes. I retrieved it and straddled the seat, gunning the powerful engine, absorbing the shock waves through my spread thighs as I studied the map on my phone screen.
The location Saint had sent me was an hour away.Fuck. My fingers tightened around the screen, fury filling me, merging with the rage I’d carried my whole life. And there was fear too. Cam was something to me I couldn’t describe and I’d already seen him hurt. Had pressed my hands over his black-and-blue flesh as he’d grimaced in pain. I couldn’t let that happen again. If it didn’t kill him, it would kill me.
I memorised the route and pocketed my phone, then I revved the engine on my bike and peeled away, zipping through the night, eating up the miles with my cracked little heart beating a panicked tattoo in my chest.
At the Cornish border, my phone buzzed again, a blank message from Saint that did nothing to ease the tension banded around my gut. A pocket dial or a cry for help? Either made sense.
I followed the map to the location Saint had sent me: another abandoned campsite. It was deserted, but as I killed the engine and lifted the visor on my helmet, it was clear that I’d missed a messy fight. Blood stained the churned-up grass, and nearby, a wrecked refrigerator truck lay on its side, crude stinger wire caught in its tyres.
They hit the transportation run and took the cargo.It was the most positive outcome I could think of, and I weighed it against the odds that the Rebel Kings had come up against an enemy they hadn’t prepared for.
I did not like where my imagination took me, and I fought the images that flooded my brain.No.Cam is smarter than this. He would not lead his brothers into a massacre.
In my head, I knew it to be true, but my heart told me there was something else that led Cam when it came to trafficking sex workers. I’d seen it in him when he’d caught me at my weakest—the pain, the empathy. Our stories from the past were different, but the beast that had made us men was the same.
I turned my back on the refrigerator truck. It was still hissing, the crumpled bonnet cracked open and heat seeping from it. The unpleasant kind of heat that made my skin itch. Crouching on the ground, I eyed a stray hammer, congealed blood and grass stuck to the claw. There were other weapons too, carelessly left behind. Foolishly. The location was remote enough that the noise from the crash and the brawl would not been heard, but someone would come across this place eventually, and it was crawling with evidence.
Clean it up. For Cam, yes. But what if it was his blood on the hammer?Then I will find who wielded it and burn them alive.
If Cam had been hurt, it was not much comfort, but I let the thought settle anyway. It fed the devil I’d once been, and I would need that one day.
I left the hammer where it was and returned to my bike, already planning the tracking software I would plant on Saint when I saw him again.
Ifyou see him again.The blood on the hammer could be his.
Another band of fear wrapped around my chest. Cam had become everything to me, but I was oddly fond of the man who already owned a piece of his heart. Saint was intriguing. Alluring. More than that, he loved Cam, and Cam needed that—to be loved. And perhaps so did Saint.
Why do you care about Saint?
Cam’s voice in my head was distracting, dulling the scrape of the urgency. I liked his voice. It was rough and gravelly, with a soft Irish twang that made me go weak at the knees when I let it—when I was already naked and vulnerable with nothing to lose. Did he know how deep he’d flayed me open? Sometimes he stared at me so hard I knew he had no idea.
Others, his soulful brown gaze saw every facet of me, even the parts I’d long forgotten about—
A twig snapped, crushed by a heavy, careless tread. I whipped around, high alert activated, and scanned my surroundings, already reaching for a weapon.
My fingers wrapped around a knife Cam’s enforcer would have liked as three figures loomed out of the darkness.
Bikers.
Crows.
Amused, I let the knife go—the grass was messy enough—and faced them.
They sneered, sensing a weakness that was not there, and I let them surround me, taking note of the rudimentary pipes and bats they carried, no blades or guns.
A man I recognised as their sergeant-at-arms stepped forward, twice the man of Saint Malone in nothing but the size of his gut. “What do we have here? A Rebel bitch? Or a nosy motherfucker who’s just made the worst mistake of his life?”
I leaned against my bike, one ankle crossed over the other, arms at my sides. I did not speak. Not yet. I had learned many years ago that silence was often the greatest weapon of all.
The sergeant ventured closer, his clothes and skin already marked and messy from another fight. A fight, as I stared him down, I was almost certain that had been lost.They are seeking consolation.Amusement and relief rippled through me. There were no guarantees that Cam and Saint were safe and unhurt, but these men had not fought them and won.
These men did not traffic those women across Europe either.
Like a cursed spell, my anxiety returned. My good humour faded and I stepped up to meet the fool about to invade my space.
