Page 99 of Captive Souls

Joey was right to be afraid. He was just the messenger, and he was helping me, but that didn’t make much difference to theurge inside of me to smash his head against the dash until his skull cracked and his brain was leaking out of his ears.

I’d never had so much blind, violent rage inside me before. I didn’t lust for blood, gore. Didn’t find the need to drag out a death for some kind of thrill. The snuffing out of life, quick, clean, painless—that satisfied me plenty.

But right then, with Piper gone, her fate undetermined, her mental and physical state unknown, there would be no satisfaction until every person who’d had a hand in this was drenched in their own blood. I would tear them apart limb from limb with my bare fucking hands if they took her from me. If they broke her. They were dead, for merely laying hands on her, but the nature of their deaths was to be determined.

Joey was still watching me. I knew he was on guard, waiting for me to strike. He wasn’t exactly a genius, but at least he was smart enough to understand that he had been seconds away from death since he’d made his presence known.

I held it together only because he had helped me.

He’d informed me—after taking the gun from my head but still unarming me because he’d rightly deduced I’d kill him on sight—that he was ordered to kill me if he found me.

It was clear that they’d thought that I was long gone, leaving Joey with the shitty job because he was likely suspected of being a weak link. I didn’t doubt Stone had seen his real feelings for Daisy and was biding his time to end him. Fuck, he might’ve been counting on me coming back and killing Joey on sight, doing his dirty work for him, ensuring that the blind loyalty his henchmen had for him in the name of ‘family’ remained intact.

Joey had quickly said that he was going against Stone, that he didn’t give a fuck about his orders. He wasin lovewith Daisy. A twist I hadn’t seen coming. I’d been sure she was nothing but a quick fuck to him, and he was a loyal solider of Stone’s, since he was a kid. That’s how Stone made his soldiers, after all. Hepreyed upon the young men malleable enough to be romanced by the life he promised them. The wealth, the brotherhood, the riches. He got his hooks in them then stole another piece of their humanity with each act of violence he ordered them to commit. He coaxed out a cruelty that was latent in most men.

Joey was softer than the rest, not that I’d paid much attention to him beyond subtly learning him like I had everyone, lest I need to take them down.

Just because he was softer, didn’t mean he was weak. He’d killed on command, he’d never once disobeyed Stone’s orders, viewing him as the father he didn’t have.

But apparently, having your mentor threaten to have your girlfriend killed so he could forcibly marry her sister took the shine off the relationship.

He explained how they’d found me—not from Daisy’s trip there. Thankfully, even Joey didn’t know about that.

Stone was smarter than I’d imagined. He’d been tracking me since the moment I left the city. Or tried to. I’d dropped off the face of the earth because I was good at what I did. They never would’ve found me if not for that day. What might’ve been classed as the best day of my miserable existence. When Piper had been unafraid to expect something more of me, deceiving me by running into that store, knowing my cock was hard, and I couldn’t immediately chase her. I’d been off kilter. Aware of too many male eyes on my woman. Hungry eyes as if they had the right to look at her.

I’d been so clouded by fury I’d used the wrong credit card. Such a pedestrian mistake that could be the difference between Piper’s life and death.Mylife and death. The card was one issued to one of my aliases, so it should’ve been safe, but it was easier for Stone to track. The one I’d been using for supplies would never have shown up on his radar. Simply grabbing the wrong card was my crime. Evidence of just how dangerous thisweakness was. How the simplest error had turned our world to fucking ruins.

Joey explained all of this, and how they’d taken Daisy from him two days prior, after they found me and watched us.

Watched us.

He’d flinched when he said that, eyes averted so I understood just what they’d watched. I’d dig their fucking intestines out, whoever had laid their eyes on my fucking woman.

Joey didn’t give the information to me up front, smart enough to know I’d kill him the second the words left his lips. I could get the location out of him with a few swipes of a knife, but I didn’t have the time for that. Every minute counted when Stone’s men had Piper. Every second once Joey informed me Groves was one of the men tasked with taking her. That sick fuck.

I’d stoked the fire within her, the spark of survival, of fight. She wasn’t one to go down quietly. Fuck, she might’ve been brave—and stupid—enough to refuse Stone only to get raped…

“Our life is like living in Alaska,” Joey interrupted the thought that had me gripping the steering wheel so hard, I was surprised I didn’t pry it off.

I had no fucking clue how our life was anything like living in Alaska, but no way was I going to inquire into his reasoning. Hopefully, he’d shut the fuck up so I could think. Every instinct I had was screaming to run into the motel in case Piper was in there, but I needed to scout the area a little longer, to ensure it wasn’t a trap.

“You know, living in perpetual darkness.”

I wanted to shake my head. I didn’t bother to do that or tell him that was only in specific regions of Alaska, and the darkness wasn’t perpetual, it was seasonal. But there was no point.

He was a fucking idiot.

“That’s what it is,” he murmured. “Not even shadows. True darkness. And I was so accustomed to it that I didn’t realize how dark it was until I saw Daisy.” He paused, a slack-jawed, dumb look on his face. “Until I saw sunshine.”

I didn’t respond to him, which I doubt he expected in the first place. I didn’t speak superfluously or discuss overly romantic shit.

Though his stupid fucking words struck me somewhere vital. That’s what it was. The feeling over my skin that I’d been unable to pinpoint. It was sunshine. After living in darkness for so long.

“We need to go in,” I said, taking out my gun then checking the clip and screwing on the silencer.

I didn’t need to feel right now. We were going into a situation where I needed to be emotionless, cold. I needed to rip apart anyone and everyone keeping me from my woman. I needed to wear the blood of anyone who had touched her.

It was unbelievably easy to find out where Piper was. The proprietor of the motel had informed us that one room had been rented by, “your buddies,” after taking one look at our suits and making a correct assumption.

---