Chaos Bound (Sinner's Tribe Motorcycle Club #4)(80)

“But we’re not going to let you f*ck this operation up or get yourself killed when you’ve only just come back to us,” Jagger continued. “We aim to end this war and Viper is the key. We’ll take him out and you’ll have your revenge.”

Holt bristled. “Viper is mine. No one is going to stop me from going after him. It’s what I lived for in that f*cking dungeon when you gave up on me.”

“You heard what we did to find you. We didn’t give up.” Cold and distant, Zane was as intimidating as Jagger in his own way, simply because there was no line Zane wouldn’t cross for the club. And yet when Holt looked at him now, he saw a man, not a monster—a man who had his woman at the cost of Holt’s soul.

“I heard something else.” Holt turned on Zane, letting out his pain and anger in a rush. “I heard the Sinners in Viper’s house. You didn’t want to tell me you were there, but I knew. I thought my brothers would finally come for me. Did you think to look? Did you think to ask? What about Mario? You remember the restaurant owner we planted in the Jacks? Our own Black Jack rat? Did anyone talk to him? He knew I was locked in the basement of Viper’s house because he brought me food.”

The room stilled and then Tank let out a tortured groan. “Oh f*ck. Jesus f*cking Christ.”

So that was it. They truly had given up on him. No one had even bothered to ask the one person who had the information that would have saved Holt from months of torture.

“Viper kidnapped Evie’s son, Ty, and took him to his house in the mountains.” Tension—and was that a flicker of guilt?—lined Jagger’s face. “He took Mario and a handful of guards with him, and we lost contact because Mario couldn’t get a phone signal through the trees. Evie went on her own to rescue Ty. We stormed the house, and Mario knifed Viper then took off. We couldn’t find him, and I didn’t send anyone to hunt him down because he’d paid his debt to us. We couldn’t search the house until later because Viper’s guards called the Jacks and about thirty of them showed up to only six of us.”

Holt’s body shook with emotion. He’d heard the gunfight. Waited. Waited. Prayed, although he wasn’t a praying man. He didn’t know how much time had passed when the door finally opened. Hope flared for the last time and died in an instant when Viper walked into the room. And then hell began again.

Caught in a maelstrom of memory, torn by emotion, something inside Holt snapped. He loved them. He hated them. He had been through hell and back, suffered through hope and despair. He had lived to kill them and it was damn hard to throw it aside and accept they hadn’t abandoned him because if he knew one thing about himself, it was that he would never leave a man behind. He needed to finish this. He wanted the torment to end. Although part of him warned that he wasn’t thinking clearly, he reached beneath his cut and drew his weapon on Jagger. “It was easier to assume I was dead than make the effort to find me, wasn’t it?”

“No.” Tank moaned; his distress etched in the lines of his face. “No, brother. Don’t do this. It killed us. Every one.”

Zane moved swiftly, interposing his body between Holt and Jagger. He always had Jagger’s back, had risked his life countless times to save him. Jagger was untouchable unless Zane was dead.

“Whatever you do, whatever you think, you should know that Tank didn’t give up,” Zane said, drawing his own weapon. “Even after the funeral. Even after we told him to let it go because we didn’t have a shred of evidence to suggest you were alive, he looked for you. Days, nights, he was on his bike searching forests and ditches and alleys. He even f*cked a coupla Black Jack sweet butts to get information. We didn’t give up easy, T-Rex, but know that Tank didn’t give up at all.”

Nausea roiled in Holt’s stomach, and his hand wavered. Was he ready to do this? To kill the men he had called brothers? To lose the only man he’d considered a friend?

“Don’t do it,” Naiya murmured, as he pushed her to safety behind his back. “You aren’t thinking straight. You’ve been through hell, and meeting your brothers like this was a bad idea. They aren’t the enemy. I wasn’t there, but it sounds like they did everything they could do. And yeah, maybe they could have tried even harder, and maybe they f*cked up, and you suffered terribly for it, but what I saw when you walked in the door was that they were overjoyed to see you. Viper is the enemy. Viper made you suffer. He took a lot from you. Don’t let him take this, too. You all want the same thing. You want Viper dead. They just want to do it a different way.”

“So you’re with them, now?” His voice was rough, harsh. Broken.

“No. I’m with you.”

The front door creaked open. Holt glanced back over his shoulder and saw Arianne in the hallway, her gun pointed at Naiya. Jagger’s old lady was the best shot in the club thanks to her old man, Viper, who had given her a gun when she was three years old. She’d left him after years of abuse and slapped him in the face by becoming Jagger’s old lady. But she was Viper’s daughter through and through. No one f*cked with Arianne or the man she’d risked her life to have.

“T-Rex!” she shouted. “You pull that damn trigger and I’ll pull mine.”

Holt struggled to contain the tidal wave of anger that surged through his body, turning the world into a red haze. “You get that f*cking gun out of my girl’s face or I’ll shoot every damn person in this room!” Holt roared, desperate to turn, but knowing the minute he dropped his weapon, Zane would be all over him.