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It’s fucking addictive.
I press a kiss against her forehead, then wipe it away with my thumbs. “Sorry about the cuffs, princess. It’s not personal.”
Then I shake my head in disgust and make myself walk away, because that’s not really true, and I know it.
I head toward Logan’s room, then go on through it to the attached bathroom, where I can hear Maddoc’s voice.
The truth is, shit has gotten fartoopersonal with this girl, so maybe Madd was right. Fucking her that first time, at the strip club, was sheer goddamn heaven. But once she got mixed up in Reaper business?
Yeah, that might have been a mistake.
It definitely was for Maddoc.
I see the bloody bullet Logan pried out of him lying in the sink, and Logan’s just about done stitching up the hole it punched in Maddoc’s shoulder when I join them.
“…a grid search,” Madd is saying into his phone, nothing in his voice giving away the fact that Logan’s currently pushing a needle through his skin. “Call in everyone… no, that’s not… yeah. Okay… No. I don’t care, Payton,” he finally growls, “pull them off and make this a priority, right the fucknow.”
He stabs a finger at his phone, ending the call, and tosses it down with a curse.
“No luck on the security cameras?” I ask, knowing for a fact that Madd wouldn’t have held still for this shit until Logan did at least a preliminary review of the footage.
“Nothing useful,” Maddoc says tightly. “The cameras caught her leaving, of course, and we know she went east when she left the property.”
“I… shut off a few of our security feeds a while ago,” Logan adds, his face even more stone-like than usual. “I should have turned them back on, but I didn’t. So we don’t have a more clear picture than that.”
My brows jerk upward a bit, surprised to hear that. It’s not like Logan to leave anything to chance or forget something like that, and I can’t help but wonder if it has something to do with Riley. In a way, he’s been the least affected by her, out of the three of us. But at the same time, the fact that she’s affected him at all means a hell of a lot. My brother is usually completely unflappable.
“There aren’t enough nearby surveillance feeds once our cameras lose her trail,” Logan adds, and I know he’s referring to other home security systems he’s able to hack into. “Not until that house on Downing.”
I nod. That part isn’t news, but it still would’ve been nice if we were able to get an easy win here. We’re in a residential area though, so no traffic cams or convenient ATM machines to tap into if we want to see farther than our own setup, and most of our neighbors don’t have decent security. The closest one with a camera system pointed anywhere worth watching is a four-bedroom owned by a bank manager on Downing Street.
Of fucking course Riley’s little sister wouldn’t have waltzed by right in front of it, though. She’s gotta be smarter than that. It’s in her blood.
“So Payton’s organizing a street-by-street search?” I ask, picking up on the tail end of Maddoc’s phone call.
“You heard me,” he says. “I’ve pulled in every able body we have. We need to fucking find her before any of McKenna’s people do.”
I nod. “We need West Point to keep on thinking Chloe died in that drop at the warehouse.”
The drug deal McKenna’s gang was trying to initiate with Capside.
The one where we gunned everyone down to get Chloe out, then burned the place to the ground—along with a dead body we tossed in that was as close to Riley’s sister’s description as we could get on short notice—all to make sure the girl would stay off West Point’s radar once we got our hands on her.
“If they find out that shit was staged, if West Point realizes Chloe Sutton is still alive…” Maddoc says grimly.
He doesn’t have to finish. We all know that for as big of a bastard as Austin McKenna is, he’s not stupid. Chloe meant nothing to him when he accepted her as payment from her father for her father’s debts. He treated her like she was disposable. But after all the trouble we went through with this shit, he’ll be like a dog with a bone until he uncovers what she’s really worth.
He’ll wonder why someone went to so much trouble, but he’ll also know that whatever the answer is, it means she’s valuable.
Logan snaps off the end of the surgical thread and efficiently wipes down the blood dripping from the neat row of stitches in Madd’s shoulder, then quickly bandages it.
He steps back to clean up his supplies while Maddoc shrugs into a fresh shirt. “After that scene Riley made in McKenna’s club when she saw Chloe dancing there, it won’t take long for him to figure out that we’re involved,” Maddoc says.
“Ifhe finds her,” I point out, still holding out for things not to go to total shit. “So how about we don’t let him?”
Maddoc gives me a tight smile. “That’s the plan. This is a fucking war, and we can’t afford to lose the advantage Chloe will give us. We need her.”
And none of us say it, but we also need to keep her out of the hands of our enemies. We can’t afford to let them discover the same thing we did, and turn that same advantage against us.
