Page 48 of Wraith
Steph and I listen in silence. I’m not sure what to believe now, but I hold on to the one thing that I can. My father didn’t believe that we’d left of our own volition. And if he didn’t, then that means that Wraith must know I didn’t mean those words, too. Somehow, that gives me comfort.
Tracker continues, “It’s simple. I bring you both back to him. He gives me my money, and he’ll let me be the one to start this war. To burn down the houses of each and every member of The Riders. Best of all, he’s agreed to let me tear Steel apart with my bare hands. And his old lady? She’ll go too, she’s the reason he turned soft. Your brothers want the pleasure of tearing Edge limb from fucking limb and Steel’s daughter? She’ll be put out of her misery just like her piece of shit father. It’s all falling into place. Perfect. So fucking perfect.”
Steph tenses up and lets out a whimpering mewl, but I jam my back into her, hard. The bastard is so wrapped up in his tales of glory that he doesn’t notice. It’s my signal for her to keep silent.
Cleary this guy is fucking deranged. He’s out of his mind with his lust for both money and revenge. I have no idea why. I have no clue what Steel or his VP, Edge, could have done to this guy to bring this kind of wrath on themselves. They’re good men. They saved Wraith’s life.
Wraith.
Just thinking his name gives me courage. It gives me the fortitude I need to bite down hard on my tongue to keepfrom laughing right into this monster’s face. It gives me the courage to hold my head up high, to trust in my father.
This doesn’t sound like him at all. I know my father and I know he’d never come up with such a convoluted scheme. If he wanted The Riders out of the picture, he would have taken them down. He wouldn’t have used this bastard as a mole and then turned him over without a cent. That’s more like something my father would do. Ever ready to stab anyone in the back, especially if it saves him a dollar or two. I know that something is off, and I can only hope that my father is trying to get us back. That The Riders are with him, plotting something, anything, to keep us safe.
I have to hope that Wraith will be waiting for me at my father’s warehouse, or wherever our captor is taking us. I can only hope that I’ll see him again, if just to tell him that I could never have meant anything I wrote in that note. I know he already knows, if he and the rest of Steel Riders are looking for us, but I need to tell him. I need to wrap my arms around his neck and drink in his scent until I drown in it. I want to press my body up against his, feel every single blissful detail of the differences between our bodies, his so brutally hard and masculine, mine so soft and pliant and entirely female.
I don’t have time for any more racing thoughts, because the bastard produces two rags from his pocket. When he starts wadding one up, I already know he’s going to gag us. Still, the taste of the rags is absolutely putrid in my mouth. Steph struggles against the bindings when he rams one in hers and I know she doesn’t like it any better.
Tears well in my eyes at the pain in my body, the disgusting gag, and from the tiny flame of hope that burns so brightly in my chest. I have to hope. I have to get through this,no matter how disgusting or painful or degrading. I have to get through it and I have to get Steph through, if we have any chance of seeing the men that I know we both, surprisingly, feel so much for.
We’re cut apart from each other and manhandled into the same van from the day before.
This time, with my cheek pressed into the carpet, I dare to take deeper breaths. I dare to wriggle closer to Steph and press myself against her for comfort.
We stay that way, our backs bumped up against each other, splayed out on the itchy carpet, every bump and groove in the road rocking our bruised bodies, for hours.
***
Finally, I start to recognize some of the scenery flashing by, billboards and buildings, and I realize that this guy must truly be deranged, because he’s taking us back to our father’s warehouse.
He unloads us like cargo, and I nearly sob when we’re passed into the waiting arms of our brothers. Ivan heaves me into his arms. As he carries me inside, Andrew behind him with Steph, I turn my face into his t-shirt and even though he stinks of old sweat and stale whiskey, I sob unashamedly like a child with utter relief.
Rational finally breaks through the clouds of relief choking out my sanity and reason and I realize that even though Steph and I are back with our family, it’s far from over.
Ivan and Andrew take us to a back room in the warehouse. It’s dimly lit by overhead fluorescent lighting, but half of the tubes sputter and buzz and a few are completelyburned out. The room is filled up with square tables and beat up chairs, and it takes me all of two minutes to realize that this place is where most of the debauchery happens. The drinking. The gambling that my brothers and my father’s men do, the women, the fights over all three of the former.
Ivan isn’t gentle as he saws at the thick, rough ropes on my wrists and ankles. He’s messy and curses half the time, since he’s obviously still hungover from the night before, if the odor pouring off of him is any indication. Or maybe he just hates me. I don’t actually know, but despite his jerky movements, he never cuts me.
When the bindings are off, he helps me stand shakily to my feet. Even though my limbs scream out in protest at being fully unfolded, I take his hand and produce a few shaking baby steps on my fiery, aching feet.
“That bastard out there is the dumbest fucker I’ve ever seen,” Ivan shakes his head. He spits out a stream of dark, tobacco scented spittle from a dip I didn’t even see bulging in his lip. “Who the fuck does something like that and then trusts someone like our father to give him his due? The whole thing was the shittiest, most farfetched scheme I’ve ever heard of.”
“Me too,” I admit, agreeing with him on something for the first time in my life. “I knew that our father would never come up with something like that.”
“He’s on drugs,” Andrew offers from across the way. Shockingly enough, he’s massaging feeling back into Steph’s feet as she whimpers and cries and clutches at the table’s edges where she’s sitting. “I can fucking tell. Heroin or something strong. He’s completely bugged out. That shit makes people make bad fucking decisions.”
Even before he finishes saying the words, a gunshot echoes from deep within the warehouse. My brothers don’t flinch, but I’m young and unacquainted with violence. Before I can even think, or begin to process, I’m off and running. My feet don’t want to carry me, and my legs protest every torturous step, but I’m running, running for that door.
I’m gathered up in huge arms, steel bands that lock around my chest, before I can even make it.
“You don’t have an ounce of sense,” Ivan grinds into my ear, but he sound far more annoyed than actually angry. “Stay the fuck here. Your dickhead husband will come for you when it’s over. Oh, and the next time he tries to take a cheap shot at me, he’s not gonna come out on top, I can promise you that.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be such a fucking pig then,” I hiss. I struggle in his arms, but it’s like a gnat trying to fight off a giant.
Ivan chuckles low in my ear. “Always were so damn easy to get a rise out of.”
I try to twist and knee him in the gut or kick him between his vile legs, but before I can even start to unwind myself from his iron like hold, the door to the room flies open so hard that it bangs loudly against the wall.
Wraith is the first to rush in. He’s so beautiful that my heart breaks and soars all at once. Maybe Ivan has a brain, because he lets me go. He drops me so unceremoniously that I nearly land on my ass, which of course, he would have thought was hilarious. He probably did it on purpose, the bastard.
