Page 12 of Savage Cravings

Yet the memories that haunted me as a kid didn’t have such a hold on me now.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

Killian walked up to the closet door and opened it wide, turning on the light. “This.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, until I focused my eyes on the clothes hanging there.

Women’s clothes.

“Any of Hayes’ clothes hanging in there?”

“Not unless the fucker had taken up cross-dressing in secret.”

I raised an eyebrow at that, and Silas laughed. “Nah. This ain’t his style.”

“Okay. Focus. We’re getting off topic,” I said, directing my attention back to Killian once more.

Killian shook his head. “No. There’s no sign that he even sleeps here. The third bedroom across the hall seems to be his.”

I looked around the room, finally noticing some things I’d missed at first glance.

Feminine and somewhat juvenile touches were scattered about.

From the stack of romance novels on the nightstands to the pink, almost juvenile bedsheets and the white feminine furniture…

There didn’t seem to be a theme for this room.

“The girl’s room? She lives here with Hayes?”

We knew Hayes had a daughter. We knew everything there was to know about the bastard. Hell, he had been ready to serve her up on a silver platter to three monsters to save his pathetic, worthless life moments before. His old lady left him almost ten years ago. I had assumed she’d taken the kid with her.

Obviously, I assumed wrong.

The girl was twenty-four, wasn’t she? Why the fuck did her room look like it belonged to a seven-year-old?

“What the fuck? If she lives here, then where the fuck is she?” Silas commented, moving around the room.

He picked up a maroon leather journal. It looked like a diary.

Jesus-fucking-Christ. Was our intel correct? Was the girl really twenty-four, or did he have another daughter, much younger than the first? But there was no sign of the girl—of any girl.

I watched as Silas opened the diary and started reading.

“Another fucking loose end,” Killian spat.

If she didn’t have a relationship with her dad, then she wasn’t involved in club business. There wasn’t a need to hurt an innocent. But if she had been living with the bastard all this time, that was a different story.

He needed to have been secretive about the girl in order to keep this important piece of information completely out of our investigation.

My fists clenched.

How the fuck did we mess up?

“Then we’ll fix it,” I said.

This girl wasn’t the same as some club whores fucking the president, hoping to get ahead. She was his blood. And that meant she was more than just a loose end.

She could be a problem for us in the future, the way we were for Hayes now. We’d learned not to underestimate anyone. Not even a woman.