Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 63763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
“I know you would, Dad.” I hugged him again. “Love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He gave Corbin one last look before storming out of the conference room. I dropped back down on the seat next to Corbin and asked, “What didn’t you want to tell him?”
“Nomad followed the man to a public turnout overlooking the road leading toward the house. He was checking in with me before grabbing him.”
I was so glad this was one of the rare times when he could share information with me. “Do you think it’ll take long?”
“Nope, Nomad is damn good. He’ll have the guy soon.”
He was proved right when his phone rang again a few minutes later. This time, he put it on speaker since there was nobody else in the conference room anymore.
“He wasn’t on club-controlled land yet, but I caught him concealing a cellular trail camera and portable plate reader in the roadside brush. The equipment was aimed at the only approach to your property.”
Corbin reached for my hand. “If you hadn’t followed, they would’ve been able to identify which vehicles carried Bex, when she left, and whether she had protection with her.”
“Yup,” Nomad confirmed. “It gets worse, though. In the case he had on him, I found a fresh magnetic tracker, Bex’s vehicle description, her license plate number, and photographs of the roads between Raines’s house, the sheriff’s department, and your property.”
I knew I was safe, but this situation had just gotten a whole lot scarier. They hadn’t just been watching the road. They’d been building a plan to get to me.
When he finally looked at me, the man who had made me breakfast that morning was gone. What stared back at me was colder and far more dangerous—a Black Crowns enforcer.
“Nomad is taking him to a secure location.”
I swallowed. “You’re going to question him.”
“Yes.”
Whatever happened next with the man they’d just caught wasn’t going to be clean. Otherwise, they would’ve involved my dad.
Even though my stomach was in knots, I murmured, “Okay.”
Relief at my easy acceptance flashed in his eyes. “I’m taking you home first. Property gets locked down hard. Then I deal with this.”
He stood, and I put my hand in his. The controlled violence under his skin was impossible to miss, but it didn’t scare me.
I was quiet on the way home, gathering my courage to ask something I knew he’d hate. But I didn’t ask until he’d turned the place into a fortress and was headed for the front door. “Let me come with you.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Being with me doesn’t mean you watch when I need to do ugly shit.”
Although I wouldn’t see him any differently, I understood. And really, that wasn’t what I needed anyway. “I want to be there when it’s over.”
He reached up and cupped the side of my neck. “You will be. Right here when I come home to you.”
Dipping his head, he claimed my mouth in a deep kiss. When he pulled back, he murmured, “Stay inside. I’ll call when I’m on my way back.”
Then he was out the door, on his way to do whatever the Black Crowns version of justice required.
And I’d be right here waiting for him to come home.
18
CIPHER
Wraith stood beneath the porch light when I stepped outside, his arms crossed over his cut while Smoke moved somewhere along the dark tree line behind him. Bex remained on the other side of the locked door, protected by hardened glass, internal steel, and enough surveillance to identify a field mouse before it crossed the lower retaining wall, but none of that made leaving her easier. Her taste still clung to my mouth from the kiss I’d given her after refusing to let her come with me, and my cock remained hard beneath my jeans from the way she’d pressed against me while promising to wait where I came home to her.
“If she gets one foot onto that porch and the alarm tells me before you do, even Reaper won’t be able to put you back together,” I warned.
Wraith’s expression remained flat, but the slightest line appeared beside his mouth. “Good to know you’re handling the separation well.”
“I’m handling it better than you will if she gets outside.”
“Understood.” He tipped his chin toward the door, his humor disappearing beneath the job. “Nothing reaches her.”
I took the private road toward the compound with the Harley’s engine ripping through the canyon. The night air cooled the heat Bex had left across my skin without touching the cold pressure sitting deeper, where every photograph of her routes and each piece of surveillance equipment from that case had lodged.
Pike had paid a man to find the holes in my protection, identify when Bex moved, and put another tracker close enough to my woman that the impulse to tear both men apart had become physical.