“Keep her close, Tomcat,” King ordered. “And watch your six. This kind of cover-up doesn’t stay buried unless someone really fucking powerful wants it hidden.”
“I know.” I straightened, determination burning through me. “I’ll keep her safe.”
King held my gaze steadily, his silence stretching for a moment as he considered everything I'd laid out. Behind those sharp eyes, I could practically see the wheels turning. Blaze noticed it, too. He glanced over at King, catching some unspokencue, and gave a slight nod, clearly already aligned with whatever our prez was thinking.
“Tomcat.” King’s deep voice finally broke the heavy silence. “You thought about the other options we have available to keep her safe?”
I felt my jaw tighten, suspicion pricking the back of my neck. “Meaning?”
Blaze leaned against the bookshelf again, folding his arms casually as he chimed in, “Meaning, the Hounds could step in and handle it with what we do best.”
I knew exactly what Blaze was referring to.
The Hounds of Hellfire had several legitimate businesses, and our treasurer, Ace, was a fucking genius when it came to money. His mad skills in the stock market and investments helped to keep the club flush.
But our core income stream was making people disappear. We weren’t contract killers, but we absolutely “killed” identities. And we were fucking rock stars at it. WITSEC was child’s play compared to our identity erasure and relocation network, especially since we weren’t hampered by government shit.
We had a reputation—earned and whispered in shadowed corners. Our hands reached into every sphere. Some legal, others dipping into a deep, dark gray. Justice, for us, wasn't dictated by broken bureaucracies. The lines drawn by flawed legal systems never meant much to us, especially when they were the only thing keeping innocent people in danger.
We gave new lives to those who needed an escape. It began as a few favors, grew into lucrative operations, and became a significant portion of the club’s income. Not everyone was required to pay. Sometimes circumstances made it necessary to intervene for free, but we never advertised that fact. It stayed hidden, a guarded secret so we wouldn’t have unscrupulous assholes trying to screw us over.
Many of the patches in the club had unique skills that lent themselves perfectly to our operation. King had been a CIA operative before the MC and was a master forger. He gave us clean document trails. Ace took care of financial ghosting. Our club lawyer, Ash, handled legal insulation. Our resident tech genius, Wizard, could create or scrub anything digital. And the list went on.
Within the operation, my role was precision movement and risk architecture. I ensured physical relocations left no trace. Airspace, radar patterns, flight tracking systems, and security protocols—I navigated complexities that most people couldn’t fathom existed. My expertise wasn’t flashy midnight runs; it was designing routes invisible to audits, establishing plausible travel histories, and knowing precisely when air travel was the safest option or a dangerous risk. I specialized in extracting targets under surveillance, even internationally, without leaving a whisper of our involvement.
But my contributions went beyond mere transportation. Along with a few of the other guys, I was a risk modeler and a contingency architect. We predicted how investigations unfolded, anticipated how military and federal agencies cross-referenced their data, and identified pressure points months before they emerged. If any of our disappearances risked unraveling under scrutiny, we saw it first and built redundancy after redundancy to ensure that never happened.
Blaze wasn’t talking about simple protection. He was suggesting we make Linden disappear.
At that realization, a wave of instinctive fury surged through me. “No fucking way, I’m not putting her on the other side of the fucking planet and crossing my fingers. She’s not going anywhere out of my sight.”
Blaze lifted his hands in a placating gesture, one eyebrow arched. “Just putting it out there, brother. If it’s as serious asit sounds, maybe taking her off grid completely is the smartest play.”
I clenched my fists at my sides, a possessive growl rumbling from my chest. “She stays with me. End of discussion.”
King remained silent, studying me with the kind of calm intensity that would’ve made a lesser man squirm. His gaze cut straight through me, assessing everything—my reaction, my conviction, and exactly how far I’d go to protect the woman who’d gotten under my skin. Slowly, he raised a single brow, the only question I needed.
I took a step forward, my stance wide and unwavering. “She’s mine.”
Blaze chuckled softly, amusement glinting in his dark eyes despite the seriousness of the situation. “Well, well, brother. Looks like you just stepped right off the flight deck into the eye of the hurricane.”
I shot him a glare. “Glad you’re amused.”
“It’s always fun to watch a brother fall.” Blaze’s mouth twitched. “When one of ours goes down this hard, it means trouble. And you just strapped yourself into the catapult. There’s no punching out now.”
I grunted, refusing to give him the satisfaction from admitting how right he was.
I left the office, closing the door firmly behind me. The hallway felt lighter somehow, the weight of uncertainty lessened now that the club had my back. Linden wasn’t just under my protection—she was under the Hounds’ protection.
But the rage simmering beneath my skin hadn’t cooled. Whoever thought it was a good idea to go after Linden Holbrook would learn exactly what kind of hell the Hounds of Hellfire could unleash.
7
LINDEN
I’d slept better than I had in more than a year, but I still woke up groggy. And wondering why the mattress was so warm, hard, and uneven in the strangest places.
Then it all came rushing back, and my eyes flew open.
