Page 24 of Biker's Hostage

It was three minutes I had to wait, and they were the longest three minutes of my entire life. I tapped on the floor, drumming my fingers against the familiar tile as I waited for it to come up.

Come on, come on...

And then, the small box flashed up with two pink lines.

Positive. That meant positive, didn’t it? I flipped the box over in my shaking hands, double-checking, making sure I had gotten it right, and sure enough...

That’s exactly what it meant. I stared down at the test for a long moment, my ears ringing with the pure shock of it all. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It had to be some kind of mistake...

I grabbed the other test out of the box and took it as well, just needing to make sure I had actually seen the right answer because I felt like this must have been some kind of mistake. No way could this be real. It was a false positive, something like that. I just refused to believe it could be...

But the second test came back positive, too. And I knew the chances of that happening were pretty slim. Next to zero. If both of these tests said I was pregnant...

Then chances were I was actually pregnant.

I slumped back against the bath, sickness stirring in my guts again. Could this be real? It felt like a dream, like a nightmare, like some overlap of the two, and I didn’t know where reality ended and this began.

But before I could linger on it too long, I heard the door to the apartment open. I quickly scrabbled to gather all of the evidence of what I had just been doing and stuffed it down the back of the toilet, vowing to myself that I would get rid of it just as soon as I got the chance.

Pushing open the door, I found my father standing in the hallway, his jacket over one arm, his eyes gleaming with a look I hadn’t seen before.

“What happened?” I asked him, hardly sure I wanted to hear the answer.

“What are you doing up?” he replied, frowning.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I lied. “I... what happened, Dad?”

He grinned, his face lighting up.

“We got him, Chelsea. We got him.”

And I had to bite back tears as I tried to figure out just what that meant. Not just for me—but for our baby, too.

Chapter Eighteen – Zane

My head lolled back in the seat as I stared up at the ceiling, my ears still ringing, my heart still pounding, adrenaline doing its best to handle the pain that was coursing through every inch of my body right now.

I was lucky to be alive, and I knew it. After the Dogs had forced me back to the compound, I fully expected them to kill me right then and there. But the moment that man got me alone, it was clear he intended to make the most of having me right where he wanted me.

Ian, that was his name. Once they had caught me, he’d shoved his face close to mine, hands on my collar.

“You know who I am?”

I shook my head.

“Chelsea’s father,” he snarled at me. “Ian. You remember that fucking name, boy. You put some respect on it.”

He had just walked out after slamming his fist into my jaw and my chin, sending my head flying in each direction. My hands were tied behind me, and there was nothing I could do to fight back. Even if I managed to break out of this room, I knew they would come find me. It wouldn’t take much for them to track me down again, and when they did, I had no doubt that my punishment was going to be even more brutal.

My days were numbered. This was what I got for trying to put right my brother’s death. I should have known when I’d first come here that it was a stupid choice, but I had never been good at keeping my head. After all the shit Liam had been involved in, he must have known that he would meet his end at the hands of someone like the Dogs, and I doubted he would have expected me to try and take revenge.

He wouldn’t have done the same for me. I hated to admit that, but I knew it was true. My brother had always been out for himself. He had left me behind a long time ago, and I was the one who hadn’t been able to let go of that family connection that we still shared, even though I knew I should have. He didn’t care about me. If he had, he would have stayed close to me, but he had left because he wanted to pursue his own life, his own success, his own involvement with the dark shit that people like Lombardi carried out in this town.

But I hadn’t been able to let him go. Even after all this time, even after everything I had been through, I hadn’t been able to let him go, and that killed me. I was so fucking alone in the world that my shithead brother was the one thing I had left, and I decided to risk my life getting revenge for his loss, like it would bring him back—like it would serve to hold up the ties I had to my family.

My fucking family. My family, who had failed me at every turn. My parents, who had left me to fend for myself when I was barely older than a child and then dropped dead, drinking themselves into this sick, useless pit of addiction—my big brother, leaving when I was still a kid, letting me live with them alone when he knew he was the only one I could rely on. Nobody had cared about me. I had fooled myself into thinking they did, but they never had.

Not in my family, at least. Because there was one person who might have actually given a damn about me, and she was the reason I was in the mess in the first place. Chelsea.

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