Rogue (Real #4)(78)
The words wrap around me like some sort of blanket, heating me. At the same time, an oddly primitive warning sounds in my brain. I punch Derek’s number. “Where the f*ck are you?”
“On my way back from dropping your queen. Why?”
“Get your ass to the airport and bring her back to me. Bring her back to me RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”
All my protective instincts have kick-started with a vengeance, mingled with the wild, primal excitement of what I just read on my phone.
She’s coming to me.
She’s coming back to me.
Twenty minutes of pacing later, I get Derek’s call.
“She’s gone. Taxi dispatcher saw her leave with a guy in a checkered shirt and boots.”
My stomach roils, and suddenly it all clicks, and my blood turns to ice in my veins.
Wyatt.
Eric’s familiar voice rings behind me. “Son, your father wants you . . .”
I’d been waiting outside his hospital room, waiting to talk to him, my checkbook handy, ready to settle things for Melanie, now I glance at Eric and grind my molars in rage.
“Tell him I’m gone. Tell him I’ll be back!” I run down the hall and pull out the keys to my rental, punching C.C.’s number. “Wyatt’s got her. Go to the south of the city, I’ll take the north, spread Derek on the east, get the rest of the team on it. FIND WYATT, HELP ME FUCKING FIND HER!”
Thirteen years I’ve looked for my mother.
Thirteen.
If Melanie disappears for longer than a day, I’m going to become a monster, a full-on monster on a rampage with one mission and one mission only.
Find her, protect her, keep her, mate her. NEVER LET HER GO AGAIN.
I’ve never prayed but I throw myself up to a god I’ve never believed in and yell at him to take anything, anything of mine he wants, but not her.
TWENTY-FOUR
* * *
REVELATION
Melanie
“So where is she? Where has she been all this time?” I ask curiously from the backseat.
Greyson’s brother just smiles and keeps driving deeper into the bad neighborhoods on the outskirts of Denver. He’s a shorter guy, with a manner of dress that says I-wanted-to-be-a-cowboy.
I don’t know if it’s the sixth sense they say women have, or the chilling look in his eyes, or the way my heart speeds up in my chest, but something is very, very wrong here.
And suddenly I know—I know—that Wyatt is not taking me to Greyson’s mother, like he’d said he would.
“Take me back,” I say softly.
He laughs. “Seriously? You give orders now?” He clucks and meets my gaze. “Let’s just make him come to you, hmm? Don’t all girls like that? Being rescued? My brother’s definitely going to want to rescue his ‘princess.’?”
“Listen, he doesn’t care about me right now. He and I are over . . .”
When I reach over to open the door, he pulls out a gun. “Sit down and shut up.”
The shock of having a gun trained on me makes me slam back against the seat, instantly silent. My heart is hammering now, my breathing ragged. I don’t want him to know I’m afraid, but I feel a shudder of fear as I remember hands pulling me . . . taking me away . . .
It was him.
“Oh, trust me, he cares. Hell, I’ve made studying him a religion. My f*cking father wanted me to be just like him.” He sneers. “He’s in love with you. He’s had your name on that list for ages and he worked his way from number forty-eight downward, instead of upward, all to postpone the time he’d have to collect from you. In the meantime he’d disappear and I saw him watching you through the cameras of the Underground. All those fights you’ve come to? Greyson has been watching you. He pauses you, rewinds you, replays you. Oh, he f*cking cares more than he has about anything else in his life—and I wanted his mind f*cked?! I wanted him to think he’d lost you too. So f*cked he can’t finish the list—and then the Underground would be where it belongs. In my hands.”
He laughs to himself, a laugh that conveys some unnamable fury in him. “He even made my father promise no one would touch his marks . . . all because the bastard couldn’t have anyone getting close to you.”
He gives me a sideways glance and his smile is the fakest thing I’ve ever seen. “You trust me, princess, he gives a thousand shits about you, more than he’s given about anything. It used to be impossible to bargain with him. His mother was gone, nowhere to be found. He doesn’t give two shits about our father. He didn’t even give a shit about being alive. Until you . . .”
That laugh again, making every alarm bell in my system ring even when I have nowhere to go—and I’m trapped, trapped, in broad daylight, in the backseat of this car.
“Greyson’s smart, methodical,” his half brother says, his eyes narrowing on my face. “But he doesn’t have what it takes. He wants to keep it too clean, too nice, gentlemen doing business. This is my world. He doesn’t even want it. He’s just doing all this to find out where his mom is.”
He smiles again, laughs again.
I hate that smile.
I hate that laugh.
“Yeah, pretty boy Grey thinking Dad is a bad guy. Always saving people. Kills for the wrong reasons. It’s a dirty world, the Underground. When my dad’s gone, Zero’s going to turn it into a legit enterprise. What? Are we going to sit down at a committee table and f*cking negotiate?” He laughs. “That’s not the way the Underground runs—as long as I live, it ain’t running like that. Now I have you, so I got him. Now I’m the one taking the woman out of his life.”