He hadn't thought there'd be more. As he watched his brothers pair off starting with Lucky finding Trinity, Irish and Mak, Savage and Savannah… and several others, one at a time, find their girls. Their little girls. They were all Daddies, something else to bond them together. But, Rampage hadn’t found his yet. Not until Emily came to town. It was one meeting, only one, and he knew.
On the other side of the wall, he heard a noise. It wasn’t crying, just movement, the restless shift of someone who couldn't sleep. A creak of the mattress. A pause. Another creak. She was tossing and turning in there.
He'd put her in the guest room next to his apartment. All the rooms were safe up here. Solid doors, good locks, and there were many men sleeping there in the building tonight. The guest room had only one window, with a clear sightline to the gate. Tactical decision. They had men at the gate at all times.
He was no longer pretending that was the only reason.
He thought about her hands locked around his waist on the bike. The way she'd pressed herself flat against his back. Most first-time passengers fought the lean, went stiff on the curves, made the ride harder than it needed to be. Emily had melted into it about two miles in. She’d stopped fighting and justfollowed, trusted the machine, trusted him, let the road do what it was going to do. She submitted to him and felt comfortable enough to let go.
It was a small thing. He'd catalogued it anyway.
He thought about the way she'd looked at him in the parking lot when he crouched outside her window. Not with the desperate gratitude of someone who needed rescued. But with something more specific. Recognition, almost, and not from having a meal together at The Rusty Crab. No, this recognition was like some part of her had already known the shape of what she needed and was surprised to find it had a face. A little who needed her Daddy and recognized deep inside she’d found him, even if she wasn’t ready to say it out loud.
You're projecting, said the rational part of his brain, the part that had kept him alive through multiple deployments by refusing to get sentimental.
He considered that.
Dismissed it.
He'd spent fifteen years reading people in environments where being wrong meant bodies on the ground. He knew how to separate what he wanted to see from what was actually there. What he'd seen in Emily Carter's eyes tonight, in that parking lot and in the kitchen and in the doorway of the guest apartment, was not something he'd put there.
She was a little. She might not have the language for it, might never have lived it outside the pages of whatever books her friend group traded around, but it was as much a part of her as the color of her eyes. The way she'd softened undersimple, direct care and responded to clear instructions. How her independent spine bent, just slightly, just enough, when he told her what she needed to do and said it like he expected her to do it… and then she obeyed.
She wasn't weak. That wasn't what this was.
She was someone who'd been carrying everything herself for long enough that her arms were tired, and she didn't know yet that putting it down wasn't the same as losing it. Or better yet, handing it to someone physically stronger to carry it for her. Someone who wanted to carry it. No, demanded to carry it.
Rampage set down his now empty coffee mug.
He didn't make decisions dramatically. Never had. Life was a series of facts, and you dealt with the facts in front of you, and you didn't waste energy on the noise around them. He cataloged, weighed decisions, and hadn’t been impulsive since his teenage years.
The fact in front of him was this: Emily Carter was his. The same certainty he'd felt when he'd claimed responsibility for her safety had settled deeper now, past tactical, past instinct, into something bone-level and permanent. She was next door in bed, in his space, wearing a shirt that belonged to the women of his club, and she was not sleeping, and she was scared, and she was his to take care of whether she knew it yet or not.
He'd wait. He was good at waiting. He'd built a career on waiting. The patience to hold a position until the right moment, to not move too soon and ruin what was possible.
He'd wait, and he'd keep her safe, and he'd let her come to understand what she needed in her own time. She needed him.
And he wasn't going to pretend he didn't know what that was.
His phone buzzed on the desk.
Irish.
Delling's profile is fake. Number traces to a burner bought in Denver three months ago. This isn't local. Running the listing against two open cases. Think this is bigger.
Rampage stared at the message for a long moment.
Then he typed back:Keep digging. Wake me at five if you have to.
He set the phone down and looked at the wall between his room and hers.
Bigger.
Whatever Emily had stumbled into, it wasn't one man with bad intentions and a Facebook account. It was organized. Patient. They’d built a listing, placed the bait, and waited for the right buyer.
Which meant someone had looked at Emily Carter and decided she was worth the effort.
Rampage's jaw set.
