A dead body down at the docks again, a missing woman tied to Skull Island, and another woman with a concussion sleeping twenty feet away from me.
And somehow, despite all the chaos, all I could think about was the way McKayla kept looking at me like she didn’t know whether to trust me or run from me.
Hell, maybe she didn’t know.Maybe I didn’t either.
All I knew was that the second she hit that ground tonight, something in my chest locked up hard enough to scare the shit out of me.And that was a problem I definitely didn’t need right now.
Chapter Four
McKayla
Birds chirping was not how I expected to wake up in a motorcycle clubhouse.I didn’t know how I expected to wake up after last night.
Chained to a radiator maybe?Locked in a creepy underground bunker?Buried in the woods?
Instead, I was wrapped in a ridiculously soft blanket staring up at a ceiling fan lazily spinning above me while morning sunlight filtered through the curtains.For a solid minute, I just lay there blinking.
My body felt heavy in that warm, comfortable way that came after actually sleeping.Real sleep.Not the half-awake kind where your brain kept jerking you upright every twenty minutes because it was too busy replaying worst-case scenarios.
It took me a second to realize I’d slept through the entire night.
No nightmares, no waking up panicked because my phone hadn’t rung, and no lying there staring at motel ceiling stains while wondering if my sister was dead somewhere.
Just sleep.
Who would’ve thought the best sleep I’d had since Erin disappeared would happen inside a biker clubhouse on a haunted island after witnessing a dead body?
I groaned softly and dragged my hands over my face before immediately regretting it when pain throbbed through the back of my skull.
“Oh my God,” I muttered.Yep, still concussed.
That explained why my brain felt like someone had replaced it with microwaved mashed potatoes.I stayed there another minute listening to the birds outside the window and trying to mentally sort through the last twenty-four hours.
Because wow, what a train wreck.
I’d gone from angry sister determined to shake answers out of a motorcycle club to accidental clubhouse hostage in record time.
Not exactly my finest work as a private investigator.
Still, even though the headache and lingering panic, one thing kept replaying in my head.The Kings of Anarchy weren’t acting like killers.
That was the piece I kept circling back to.
Everything about the situation screamed bad.Secret tunnels.Dead bodies.Men who looked like they could snap people in half for fun, but none of them felt wrong.
I’d spent years reading people for a living.Most of the time, liars gave themselves away eventually.Some did it with their words.Others with body language with tiny cracks in behavior.
The club didn’t have cracks.
Not when it came to the bodies.
They looked frustrated, exhausted and protective, but not guilty.
Which meant one thing.Whoever was doing this was either very good at hiding or genuinely wasn’t one of them.
And honestly?That was worse because if the Kings of Anarchy didn’t know who was dumping bodies on their island, then whoever was behind this was smart enough to stay hidden from an entire motorcycle club that clearly took protecting their people seriously.
Still, if they really didn’t know anything about Erin, maybe they knew enough about everything else for me to figure something out.Most people focused on the obvious first.Sometimes the answer wasn’t in the information somebody gave you.Sometimes it was buried in the details around it.
