Page 46 of Wraith
I breathe out hard, shaky at the end, trying to find courage for my sister, if not for myself. I don’t want to give her false hope. I don’t offer her words, because I know I won’t find the right ones. Instead I lean back and rest my head against hers in a gesture of solidarity. I close my eyes and I very nearly smile the smallest of smiles, when her neck tilts, bringing us cheek to cheek.
Chapter 24
Wraith
“They didn’t just leave.” I slam the soggy, crumbled piece of paper with the tiny, neat writing onto the solid table as evidence.
My fist glances painfully off the wooden surface, but I use the tremors tracing their way up my knuckles, the sting and burn of pain, as a way to keep myself grounded, centered, to keep myself there, my feet rooted to the floor.
What I really want to do is tear through my skin, tear out of myself and fucking fly, fly out of that fucking room at the clubhouse where my brothers are assembled, Steel and Edge presiding at the head of the table, fucking soar through the air like a mass of molecules and find her. I want to reassemble myself, the opposite of shattering, a coming together, when I find her, and destroy whoever dared to lay a finger on her.
On my woman.
Mine.
“She was taken,” I insist, when the entire room remains silent. All my brothers assembled and not one says a word. I catch the furtive glances. The looks under lowered lids. The veins throbbing in temples and the tick of clenched jaws, but not one. Fucking. Word. “I came home and the counter was littered with baking ingredients. She had everything set out. Do you think she’d just fucking up and leave and write a note in the middle of it all?”
“Her sister came for her. Convinced her,” Wing grinds out, pain clenching up his jaw and dripping from every word. He looks like a wounded animal, a shell of himself, his eyes glazed over with grief and shame.
He was the one left behind. Of course he feels fucking shame.
Shame that he couldn’t do better. Shame that he couldn’t be enough. I felt that same fucking shame well up inside of me when I read that note. Shame for not being a better man. For having a shit past. For being disgusting and weak. Shame that I let someone in on my innermost secrets, and they listened to it and found me wanting and dropped an arsenal of explosives into my life that tore me to shreds.
Then I turned that note over and I knew. I knew there was no fucking way she left on her own. That she meant any of it. That she was forced to write those things.
“No.” I shake my head hard, slamming my fist into the table again. The sound cracks through the room and some of the brothers assembled shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other as the vibrations travel from my bruised knuckles up to my elbow, through my shoulder, and into my aching chest. “No. She didn’t leave. She wastaken.” I point at the rumpled piece of paper. I feel like that page, torn, crumpled, fucking nearly ruined, but holding together through some fucking miracle, through sheer force of will. “She wouldn’t have written this otherwise. She left me a message. Not on the front, but on the back.”
“It’s not possible,” Wing groans. “I was at the house the whole time. She couldn’t have been taken while I was there.”
“She could have,” I insist. “If you were sleeping. Showering. In the other room. You have no idea. Whoever took them is capable of anything. Getting in unseen and unheard. They knew what they were doing. They knew about us. Cased our homes. Our lives. They’d only been with us for a couple of days, so the guy is either well-trained, a psycho, or—”
“Or he’s an insider.” Edge looks like he wants to plant his fist into the table as well. He’d probably break a knuckle or two, he’s so pissed off. Since that morning when I left him at the clubhouse, his eyes have grown far more bloodshot. He’s past needing a shave and even though he’s obviously showered, he still reeks like soot.
“Someone wants this arrangement we have with Viking sabotaged,” I continue. “The warehouse went up in flames and all of a sudden Leena is missing. It was a diversion. Wing didn’t end up leaving and that probably wasn’t part of the plan, but whoever took Stephanie was skilled enough to get in without being heard.”
“I was up early worrying about the warehouse,” Wing admits slowly. He glances down at the table, his head bent in a different kind of mortification when my words finally sink in. “I was sleeping. I woke up and she was gone.”
“It’s not your fault.” Edge’s strange copper hued eyes trace their way from Wing back to me. His lips thin out into a nearly invisible line and there is the start of a murderous fire burning in his gaze. “Either of you. We’ve been betrayed before, and you’re likely right. All of this has just been a giant fucking clusterfuck. I wouldn’t put it past any of those bastards to try and sabotage their own deal to justify a war.”
Steel slowly shakes his head. He looks even more exhausted than when I saw him this morning, but his features harden into a deadly mask of rage.
“It hurt to find out that Tracker had betrayed us. You saying we have another traitor in our midst?” His strained voice and controlled words echo through the room like someone just shot off a cannon next to my face.
Tracker.My former brother. A guy who had no fucking problem giving us up to Viking and his dickface sons. Viking gave him to us as part of the deal and offered to take out the trash. I last saw him that night in the warehouse. To think that another brother was a snake in the grass cut me to the bone. But I suddenly had a thought.
“Viking gave him a dirt nap, right?”
Steel and Edge look at one another.
“Right?” I ask.
“I guess so. We’ve had a lot on since then, the new chapter, the weddings, Leah’s pregnancy…” he lets out a long sigh. “After Viking offered to take him off our hands I put him out of my mind.”
“Why would he take them?” Wing’s head shoots up and his face is just haunted.
Edge lets out a strangled sounding noise that should be a damn full on yell of rage. It’s the same sound that I feel clawing its way from my chest up to my throat. I want to let it out. To fucking rage and tear the fucking clubhouse down around us and keep raging until I find Leena, destroying everything in my path like a fucking tornado, blazing like an out of control fire, until she’s back safe with me.
“Because he was promised something by Viking and the bastard didn’t deliver. He turned him over to us. Obviously, he hates us. Steel, maybe me, maybe fucking all of us. He wanted to betray us. He wanted us squashed under Viking’s boot. Instead, he got nothing. He wants this war. He wants to pit us against each other,” Edge says.
