Page 39 of Everlasting

“Don’t even think about it like that, bitch. I wouldn’t go near your dirty, used up snatch, even if I was drugged and held hostage.”

“Funny, that’s exactly what got me like this.” She had the nerve to look down at her belly and then smirk back up at him, telling us what we’d already figured out. The idiot didn’t realize she was digging her own grave even slower. She just admitted to raping a brother in order to get pregnant by him.

“We don’t need the hassle of dealing with her right now. Get her back home, lock her down in the pit, and I don’t want anyone else to know she’s there until we get back.” I’d given the order to Tank, the sitting President of the Charleston Chapter of Aces High MC. If we had our way, he wouldn’t be president for long, but I had definitely overstepped by giving him a direct order in front of the men. He simply winked at me, since she couldn’t see the gesture, to let me know all was good.

“I’ll escort her back myself, and don’t worry, I know her punishment gets doled out by family. We’ll keep her healthy-ish until you get back.”

“What does that mean?” The dumb bitch asked.

“What?”

“Healthy-ish!” She screeched. “He said, healthy-ish. What the hell does that mean?”

“It means whatever the fuck he wants it to mean. Now shut your fucking pie-hole or we’ll shut it for you. The men don’t want to deal with a headache from you for hours on end.”

I turned my back on her and pretended she wasn’t there. Jay was practically coming out of his skin in front of me. “Calm, easy, take some deep breaths, brother. As soon as Keys calls back with the info we need, we have to be steady to ride out and go get him.” If only life worked the way we wanted it to.

Two hours, that was the amount of time it took for Keys to get back to us with the news that the trail went cold. She was trying to pick it up again, but thought that maybe they had pulled a switcheroo in a blind spot that she wasn’t able to track because the car itself disappeared never to be seen again until the third day when the local news agency reported a massive car fire about an hour from where we were posted up waiting.

“What do we do now? Are we sending everyone home?”

“Is your brother with us yet?” I asked Jay. He didn’t bother responding. “We’re too close, and I am not going home empty handed again. If you need to get back to your family, I understand. We have plenty of guys who have the time, or don’t have anyone to fuss over them for the holidays anyway.”

“I already talked to Christina. Pike won’t know the difference if we have Christmas two days or two months from now. He’s still too young. She doesn’t mind waiting.”

“All right then,” let’s put feet to the ground and go find some heads we can knock in for information. The sooner we get home, the better.”

It took two more weeks of dead ends, bruised fists, and yanking rats out of holes and we still had nothing until Ever called me that day. “I’m sending you an address. You need to get there now and bring my man home!”

“What the hell? What address and where did you get it? We can’t just go without planning and it needs to be verified.”

“Sending you everything you need. Verify en route if you need to, but if you don’t move now, we run the risk of losing him again.”

“We’re going to have a talk when I get back about where your information has been coming from.”

“You don’t have time for this,” she fussed once again. “Check your texts. I sent the same info to Jay too.” She hung up so no further discussion could be had.

It made sense that she’d sent the address and info to her brother-in-law too because Jay was already on his bike and headed out. “Let’s go,” I yelled as I hopped in the truck we had brought with us. There was no telling what shape we would be bringing back Deck in and I honestly couldn’t even chance leaving him to a prospect or a lower level club member. We were having to take a deeper look at all of our members these days, because there was an obvious leak in the system considering they had stayed two steps ahead of us this whole time. The woman, she wasn’t that fucking smart from what I’d seen. There was no way she was managing it on her own considering all the fuck ups she’d made.

Plus, there was Durbin. We had tracked him down and managed to get the information from him before. We weren’t in time to extract Deck that time, but Durbin was the first to tell us that the information pipeline was leaking like a sieve. Jay and I were the only ones to get the address this time, which made it easier to get there in time, for once.

We stopped just a ways up the road and hid our bikes while some of the men, including Jay, got a head start on foot toward the house, the rest jumped into the truck bed and we rode out. “Please be there,” I kept chanting under my breath. Merc, who had come up just yesterday to relieve his son and send him home to his wife and kid, was watching me, but not saying a word as I drove.

“I know you’re doing this for your daughter and our grandbabies but thank you for never giving up on my son.”

Even without them in the picture, Deck has always been family to me too,” I reminded him.

“I know, it’s just that not being able to be the one out looking has been eating me up with guilt.”

“You have your own burdens that couldn’t be put off,” I reminded him. It was a fuck of a thing that life never seemed to let up for us. If it wasn’t one thing happening it was a handful of others. Deck missing, losing Lucy, and then Tiger Lily’s breast cancer diagnosis. It all stacked up. Judging from the sickly pallor of my best friend, I had a sneaking suspicion his wife wasn’t the only one whose health was in question.

“Are you doing okay?” I finally asked him.

“I will be once we bring my boy home,” he answered and then went back to quietly ignoring me as we pulled in and blocked off the front exit with the truck.

“Okay, let’s do this. Stay close. I have it on good authority that they’ll send a decoy out the back and run from the front.”

“How the hell would you know that?”

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