Page 67 of Tusk's Fury

Siege tells them both, “Thank you. The second we hear from you, we’ll send out brothers to pick her up.”

Clara’s expression takes on a worried edge, but she nods. Tex hustles them both out of the room, and we get back to it.

Turning to Zen, Siege says, “Meanwhile, we’ll try to track her credit card purchases and such.”

“Already on it, Prez,” Zen says, as his fingers fly over the keyboard.

I start calling everyone I know, trying to find out the last time they saw my ex. Between calls, my phone jingles. It’s a notification that the card I put the boys’ child support on has been swiped. “I got a hit on the card I put child support on.”

Zen jerks his chin for me to let him see. He scrolls through my phone and grins. “She used it at Gnarly John’s Gas and Go.”

“Fucking hell, I know exactly where that is. Good thing she didn’t use it at a chain gas station. It might have been hard to figure out which one she stopped at.”

Siege announces, “Prospects, back to your regular duties. Tusk, Dutch, Tank, and Rigs, you’re with me. Let’s ride out to Gnarly John’s and see if we can figure out which direction they took when they left his place.”

I’m happy to be out there tracking my woman down. Waiting around, talking, and doing shit makes me panic inside. I’m just hoping those two idiots didn’t do something terrible to Brittany. Images of them rolling her dead body into a ditch along the side of the road rise unbidden in my mind. I try and calm myself down, Gina is crazy, but she’s not a murderer.

***

It doesn’t take us long to gear up and hit the road. We take our bikes. I’m more stressed than I can ever remember being. The last time she went missing, I knew she had run from me. This time, Someone has taken her.

I know naked fear for the first time in my life. But I know that my fear can’t be anything close to the terror that Brittany is experiencing. Gina and I have a long history of toxicity, but I never thought she was capable of something like this. I’m not about to let her or Silver off the hook for hurting and terrifying the woman I love. I vow to make them both pay, even if they are women. I don’t care about that anymore.

Chapter 24

Brittany

When I wake again, it takes me a minute to realize I’m in a trunk. I can smell gas and feel the gentle sway of the vehicle as it speeds away from the clubhouse. I don’t know how long I’ve been out, so I can’t work out how far away I am from Tusk and my baby. They must have dumped me into the trunk, and the prospects just waved them through the gate, not realizing that I was trapped inside.

I grope around for the emergency handle to pop the trunk open. These two didn’t even bother to tie me up. I don’t find anything except the rough edge of sheared metal. Hope dies a little in my chest when I realize it must have been torn or cut off. Neither Gina, nor Silver, look like the detail-oriented type who would do something like that. It must have been Silas Harper and his followers helping them.

The more I think about the situation, the more my head hurts. I reach around to the back of my head and feel something wet. I don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know it’s likely blood from being hit twice. When I lie still, pressing my hand to the back of my head, I hear murmuring. The voices sound female, but I can’t make out what they’re saying.

The smooth road turns into a gravel road and then what sounds like a dirt road with tons of potholes. During this time, they’ve been driving, and I’ve turned the situation over in my mind a bunch of times. I get why Tusk’s pregnant ex wants to get rid of me, but how does Silver fit into all this? It doesn’t make any sense. The club girl in me might suspect Silver wants to get close to Tusk herself, but it’s pretty damn clear that Gina plans to lay claim to him again once I’m out of the way. But what does Silver get out of this? And why did their plan involve getting their hands on my baby too?

Truth be told, my head feels like it’s splitting open, making it hard to hold a train of thought. When the bleeding stops, I pull my hand away and wipe it on my jeans. Then I start searching every corner of the trunk for something to use as a weapon. I even resort to pulling up the padding and reaching down to where the spare tire is kept, thinking I might find a lug wrench. Disappointment churns in my gut because they thought of everything and removed it.

I reach for my back pocket to find the space where I carry my phone is empty. A vague memory of texting with Tusk earlier in the evening rises in my mind. I recall laying the phone on the table between texts. Damn, that’s bad luck. If I had my phone with me, at least he could track me with the location-sharing app.

Just as it hits me how very screwed I am, the car comes to a rolling stop. Fear spikes in my gut for a second, but I muscle it down. This is Silas Harper. I’ll just refuse to comply or work out a deal to play along until he gets whatever it is he wants. I need to keep my wits about me, so things don’t go flying off the rails.

I get ready to face whoever is standing there when the trunk opens, hoping it’s the two women who abducted me. Now I’ve got my wits about me I think I might be able to fight them off. Silver might think she’s got one up on me, but I had years as a club girl and many fights under my belt. For once I’m pleased I refused to put up with any shit. As for Tusk’s ex-wife, given how pregnant she looks she should be easy to overpower. I should have been more wary of them. I just never in a million years expected them to do what they did. The clubhouse was always my safe space, but we’ve never been attacked from within before.

When the trunk pops open, all I see is male faces. They’re all wearing the dark clothing I remember from when I was a Mormon. Not all Mormons wear dark clothing, but my old fundamentalist sect does. Rough hands reach down and pull me out of the trunk. It takes me a minute to get my feet under me.

A deep voice says, “You look like a mess.”

My head turns to look at Silas. The years haven’t been kind to him, he always looked dangerous, but now there’s a different kind of hardness in his face. Staring him in the eyes I say, “You’d best throw me back and bait your hook for a better catch.”

“You’re mine. I own you,” Silas says flatly.

“No,” I tell him firmly. “I belong to myself.”

“She’s wearing a biker’s property cut,” Gina says in a gleeful tone. Tusk’s ex is doing her best to throw gasoline onto the flames of my burning life.

Silas responds harshly, “Hold your tongue, woman. We had a deal. You were to bring me my Eve and her baby.”

Silver tries to explain. “We tried to wait until she took her kid to the restroom to change her, but she ended up coming alone.”

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