“I thought you might want this.” He held out Cheeseburger.
“Cheeseburger!” She yelled and reached for the orange red highland cow stuffed animal. “How did you get him?”
“Cheeseburger?”
“Yes, because he’s orange and a cow. Get it. A cow, covered in cheese.”
“I get it baby.” He was smiling and she was taken aback by how handsome he looked with the wide grin across his face. “I saw him seat belted into your car and asked Irish to grab him.”
“Thank you! Thank you so much!” She held Cheeseburger close against her chest and buried her face into his soft fur.
“Goodnight baby. You need your rest.” Rampage turned and quietly left the room again.
Suddenly, Emily didn’t feel so bad. She had her stuffy in her arms and down the hall, just through the wall, was a man who'd driven to rescue her.
CHAPTER 4
RAMPAGE
He didn't sleep.
That wasn't unusual. Sleep hadn’t come easy since he was a kid. Too many years of training it out of himself, too many nights where closing your eyes meant missing something that would get someone killed. He'd made peace with it a long time ago. Four hours was plenty. Three was manageable. He'd run full operations on less.
But tonight he wasn't awake because of old habits.
He was awake because of the woman on the other side of his wall.
He sat at the small desk in his room with his laptop open and a cup of coffee going cold beside it, working through what Savage had sent over. Detailed photos of Emily's CR-V, close-ups of the fuel line, the brake assembly, the places where someone with enough knowledge and enough time had made subtle, patient, modifications.
Not enough to cause an accident. Enough to cause a breakdown.
Whoever had done this hadn't wanted her dead on the highway. They'd wanted her stranded.
The distinction mattered. He also didn’t think this was done during her quick trip into Grand Ridge. Someone had followed her back home. Then, after they made the modifications, made sure she came back to Grand Ridge knowing her vehicle wouldn’t make the trip back without breaking down.
He pulled up the Facebook Marketplace profile for Marcus Delling. Generic. Three months old. Sparse activity, all of it calculated to look normal. He sold a couch here, some tools there, building a history and a seller’s rating, making him look legit. The squat rack listing had been up for two weeks. Targeted toward buyers wanting to build a home gym, the algorithm would have pushed it hard. He thought about who the buyers would likely have been. He imagined there were multiple interested parties, but Marcus waited until a single young female came along. His gut told him so.
Rampage leaned back in his chair.
This wasn't a man who'd gotten lucky spotting a woman alone. This was someone who'd put out bait and waited.
He thought about Emily, sitting in that parking lot in her locked car with two men circling it. He thought about what seven minutes later would have looked like. What the statistics said about recovery rates for trafficking victims once they crossed state lines.
He shut that line of thinking down. Hard.
She's here. She's down the hall. Focus on what's in front of you.
He forwarded everything to Irish with instructions to run a deeper search on the profile, cross-reference the phone number from the listing, and flag anything that connected to known networks. Then he texted Phantom, the head of Valhalla and Tyler's cousin, their contact point for anything that needed to go higher than the club, a brief summary and told him to expect a fuller report by morning.
By the time he'd finished, it was past two.
He picked up the cold coffee anyway. Drank it standing at the window, looking out over the compound.
The thing about the life he'd built here, the MC, Grand Ridge, all of it, was that it had been a deliberate choice after a career of being pointed in a specific direction and unleashed. Delta Force didn't ask you what you wanted. It asked you what you could do, and then it used every bit of it, and when it was done with you, it handed you back to yourself and let you figure out what was left.
What was left, for Rampage, had been the need to protect something that was his. Not a mission objective. Not a target. Being a protector, a defender… that was his identity, who he was inside and out. And he needed a new mission. Something that actually mattered, that he could put his body between it and the world, and know it was worth the cost.
The club was that. His brothers were that.
