Page 73 of Running on Empty

“Everything OK?” he asked.

“No…” That came out without thinking and when I admitted it, my eyes went wide.

“Hey…” He moved super slowly, like I was a skittish horse, but when my wolf let out a whine inside my head he closed the gap between us like he heard it too. “Stevie, beautiful, everything’s OK. I can take you back—”

“No.” I shook my head sharply, my eyes narrowing, my muscles tensing, preparing myself to fight him, but Jax just nodded slowly. He wasn’t happy with this, but rather than tell me how things needed to be, he offered me his hand. I grabbed it without a thought, pulling it close to my chest, like it was a lifeline to get me through this place, and in some ways it was.

I walked through the Viper Club in the company of alphas, just as I had last time, but this was completely different. The men at my side had no intention of abusing me. No, instead they were going to help me bring these fucks to justice. But as I walked past dancers, patrons, I wondered at how many of them were being coerced or doing the coercing.

“We needto bring this whole place down,” I said to Jax as we turned down a hallway to the staff area of the club. Ronan and Ash had their weapons out, as did the dads, just in case this was a set up.

“No arguments from me,” he replied.

“No, like tonight.” I glanced back behind us at the tableaus playing out. “If they’ve got that much Rush here, then there’s using it, selling it, giving it to some of the employees—”

“I know.” Jax stopped me, putting careful, gentle hands on my arms, ones I struggled to stop from shrugging off. Not because he was Jax, but because my skin felt stretched too tight, too sensitive to everything going on around me. But beneath all the trauma was this. A knowledge that Jax was my alpha, mine, and no matter what had happened before, we were done pretending otherwise. “We were trying to bring the place down, trying to get evidence against the owners but…” He sucked in a breath, then let it out slowly. “But the Spencers would just start another one, then another. Those guys have a queen’s counsel on speed dial, ready to get them out of any legal situation we might try to stitch them up in.”

“So create one they can’t get out of.”

Rusty appeared by our sides, resting his shoulder against the wall as he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a tin of roll your own tobacco. He made himself a cigarette without even looking, the movements well practised before he put it in the side of his mouth with a wink.

“If what this little weasel is saying is true and he can get us access to the stockpile of Rush they’ve got in this place, you could use that to buy yourselves some bloody powerful allies.”

“Who’ll use that to drug other people,” I snapped.

Rusty just smiled and shook his head. “No one’s saying that the fellas we run with are choirboys, but we don’t work with MCs that force anyone. Don’t fucking need to. The boys get as much pussy and arse from the hangarounds to not need to force anyone. Now, would they use Rush to have a damn fine time?” His fangs flashed as his grin widened. “Fuck yeah, they would, for those willing to pay for it.”

“I don’t want them to have it,” I said, my voice curiously steady as I stared at a man who’d been a surrogate father to me of sorts. “I don’t want anyone to have it.”

“Then we’ll torch it.” He opened his jacket to show me something that looked like a can of hairspray, but the words ‘thermite’ had been stencilled on the sides. “This shit? It’ll burn its way through a fucking tank, so it’ll make short work of a stockpile of drugs.” His eyes rolled to take in the hallway. “This whole fucking place.”

Burn it all? Fuck, the idea of it was tempting. But those people? I glanced back out into the club. Would everyone be able to get out in time?

“We’ll have to make things right with the clubs when they find out, but they know we’re not their bitches,” Rusty said with a shrug.

“Let's see if Blaine is telling the truth first,” I said. “Then we can talk about arson.”

Chapter44

One of the things that used to help me cope at school was the feeling of ‘going away.’ I wasn’t the kid that had her mother screaming at her night and day as soon as I stepped into the classroom. I hadn’t been woken up from the small moment of peace I’d managed to achieve when sleeping, dragged out of my bed by my arm, abuse spewing from her lips. That wasn’t me, it was a girl in that TV show, or on an ad about domestic violence. So when I walked down the hall, feeling the reverberations of every step all the way up my legs as I moved closer, it wasn’t Blaine, my abuser, that I saw.

He was tall, but not any taller than my mates or my family. He was muscular, but somehow he seemed weak with it, like it was a gift he didn’t deserve. His eyes flicked up and down the hallway, his hand shaking as he swiped a card through a reader by a nondescript looking door. He didn’t do it properly the first time, the light flashing red as he only partially passed the card through, and that’s when his breathing picked up. I noted the way his chest heaved and his muscles tensed, particularly as my mates clustered closer. Ronan pressed a gun against the man’s lower back, right where one of his kidneys were and said, “Get it right this time, fuckhead.”

And he did, a small flare of… something flickering inside me at the sight of it. Something hot and wild and desperate… I shook my head, stepping forward as Blaine stared, the door popping open.

“Fuck…” Blaine breathed. “I wasn’t sure if that was gonna work.” He tried to flash us a sheepish smile, but no one returned that expression. “I mean, I stole the cards from my brother and—”

“And how about we fucking get on with it?” Ronan growled, gesturing for the alpha to precede him with his gun.

“Right. Right.”

Something threatened my perfect calm as I watched the alpha stammer out the words. It reminded me of something else that I’d been forced to re-experience too much tonight. I felt like I’d sliced the part of me that had been brutalised by the Spencers away the moment I cut Rock’s throat and so all there was left was this.

Cool observant eyes that took in the office, another door with another card reader off to one side, a large desk and behind it a wall of monitors that showed live streams of different parts of the club.

“If you wanna blackmail anyone,” Blaine said, gesturing to the screens. “All of this shit is recorded and filed away. Even the private rooms.”

He pointed to several monitors, and like an idiot, I glanced at them too, but not for long. Because in them were men and women, eyes glazed over, that was apparent even in the scratchy looking footage, each one of them being ploughed— Ash walked over and turned those monitors off, one by one, before looking at me.

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