Soulless (Lawless #2)(52)

I laughed with her as she disappeared for a moment into some memory she’d been recalling. When she came back she said, “King isn’t the kind of man you change, and I never went into this thinking I could change him. I went into this loving him. That’s all.”

“I know exactly how that feels,” I admitted.

Ray nudged my shoulder again. “The Bear I first met was a little bit different than the Bear you know now,” she said, looking out over the water. “I met him at a party, right before I met King. Such a smooth talker with his crazy deep voice. He was strong then. Confident. Then after Preppy died that all changed. He turned into a shell, then he just up and left.” The smile briefly left her face but returned when she added, “But he’s Bear 3.0, better than before…and it’s all because of you.”

“I can’t take all the credit. There was this guy who gave me a ring once,” I said, rubbing Bear’s ring between my fingers. “He made me better, too.”

I couldn’t help but think that even though Ray and I took very different paths to get to the same place, that our stories were a lot more similar than I’d initially realized. I too was learning more about family than I ever had before. “So you’re really not afraid? Because honestly,” I said, a lump forming in my throat. “I don’t know what I would do if something happened to B…” I stopped and squeezed my eyes shut, willing away the unwanted thought.

Ray put her hand on my shoulder and I opened my eyes, peering into her doll-like icy blue’s that projected nothing but sincerity and sympathy. “No,” Ray said. “I’m not.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. She’d lost so many people she’d loved, so why wasn’t she afraid of losing King too? “Why?” I asked again.

“King promised me he would be okay,” Ray said, “and he always keeps his promises.”

I wanted the same to be true for Bear, for him to promise me he’d be okay and swear to me that he’d come out of all this alive. As much as I loved the broken promise that had brought us together to begin with, it was one I really wanted him to keep.

“I just wish there was something I could do to help,” I admitted.

Ray nodded. “I feel exactly the same way, but aside from grabbing a gun and storming the compound we are S.O.L,” Ray said with a laugh, “or unless you have an army laying around they could borrow.”

I jolted upright as an idea went off in my head like I’d been struck by lightning. Circuits were connecting. An idea was taking shape. I turned to Ray. “What if I did have one?”

“One what?” Ray asked. Her lips turned to the side in confusion. I leapt to my feet.

“Stay here, I’m going to grab my phone. I’ll be right back!” I yelled.

“But one what?” she asked again. I turned around before going into the house and smiled wickedly.

“An army.”

I disappeared inside and ran to the kitchen table when I remembered that the phone was in the truck. I jogged out the front door and stuck my hand through the window, grabbing the phone off the seat. I dialed and waited but there was no answer. “Crap,” I said as I typed out a text and hoped to God he would get it and know what it meant.

I jogged back up to the house, still looking down at the phone, waiting for a reply, when I ran into something hard.

Someone.

I didn’t get a chance to see who that someone was before I was zapped by a bolt of blue lighting. Hovering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, I could still hear the crickets chirping and Ray calling out for me as I was carried away, bombarded by the sensations of both familiarity, and dread.





CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE




Bear


The only thing my old man ever gave me was the promise of the gavel and his f*cking temper.

Cocksucker.

With Preppy’s death, I reached an entirely new level of anger, a feeling so far beyond anything I’d ever experienced before, I never thought I’d be able to unclench my fists or take a deep breath again.

For a while I let it destroy me from the inside, like the cancer that took Grace, tearing apart the very foundation of who I thought I was, and leaving a fraction of the old me in its place.

By comparison, the anger I felt when Prep died was a mere blip on the f*cking radar compared to the out of body rage I experienced when Ray called to say my girl had been taken.

Ray hadn’t seen who it was, neither did Wolf or Munch who were in the back yard watching the girls. When Munch saw Ti duck inside he didn’t know she was going out the front of the house. They ran out just in time to see a van driving away.

They may not have seen who took her, but they didn’t have to see it for me to know who was behind it. If he thought for even one f*cking second that taking my girl would in any way give him the upper hand that f*cker was dead wrong. All it did was move up the war, his imminent death, and the probability of torture unlike he’d ever known before.

Go get her, Bear.

Preppy’s ghost voice was the most serious I’d ever heard him, and that filled me with even more rage, and something else I wasn’t familiar with ever feeling.

Terror.

The plan had always been to storm the MC. Take back what Chop had taken from us. Take back the club. Not once while making those plans had I feared for my own life, but now that Ti’s life was in the hands of the man who’d already caused her so much damage, and was capable of inflicting so much more, the fear within me was damn near overwhelming.