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Why the hell hadn’t I kept my eyes on her all day?What if Max had been wrong and Winston had circled back?
Nothing was more important to me than Lexie. Yet I’d gotten up in my head after coming clean to the guys about her this morning, and let myself get distracted with a thousand useless tasks. I should have stuck to her like glue, instead. She would have hated feeling like I was babysitting her, but at least I’d know where the hell she was right now.
I flicked on a light switch, not giving a fuck about letting the light escape with the door open right now. I was five seconds away from waking the whole damn farm up.
I spun around the room. The denim overalls and white t-shirt she had been wearing earlier had been flung over a chair, and her white sneakers were lying on the floor nearby. But there were no signs of a struggle and if anyone had taken Lexie, my girl would have put up one hell of a fight.
She had clearly come back here and gotten changed at some point. I turned again, trying to think. I went to check the outdoor shower before I completely lost my shit.Maybe she was just drying off?Maybe she has headphones on?
I was grasping at straws and I knew it. When I spied a note on the kitchen bench as I passed, I snapped it up.
Dio, I got an emergency alert from my safe room in town. One of my girls is in trouble. I’ve gone to get her. Be back in a few hours. Lexie xx
My body turned to ice and my heart kicked into overdrive as I read the note and realized Lexie was on her own, outside the gates, while a psycho alpha was on the loose and gunning for her.
Oh fuck, no.I was running before I’d even finished reading.
twenty-one
Ieasedontothebrakes on my dirt bike as the trees thinned out and I saw the outline of buildings rising out of the gloom in the distance. I angled the bike off the road and into one of the last stands of trees.
I was lucky the moon was so bright tonight. Riding the fire trails through the forest into town at night was normally a thrill. Without using headlights, it was a crazy, wild ride that had my stomach sitting up in my throat.
It wasn’t the only risk I was taking tonight. My bike had modifications to make it as quiet as possible, but it was still a gas powered dirt bike so I couldn’t avoid noise completely. In the new stillness of our dark world, sound carried even further.
I’d looked into electric dirt bikes when they came out a while ago. They were sleek and silent, but I kept mine in a lean-to shelter in the woods, with no power. I only used it when I needed to sneak out without my brother and his mates tracking my every movement. So an electric one wouldn’t work.
I cursed that now. Before the Crash, hearing a dirt bike in the distance hadn’t been unusual. Even at night. We were a semi-rural community surrounded by forest. Most of our neighbors had at least one.
But post-Crash, you couldn’t pump fuel without some kind of alternate power and the sound of cars and bikes had all but disappeared. I had briefly considered taking one of our electric carts. I would have had to take it out one of our main gates, though. Which would have led to a lot of questions and probably a call to my brother or Damon.
I understood their need to protect me. It was their instinct and sweet, but annoying as fuck at times. I was a grown woman and had been doing this for a long time. I took risks, yes, but that was my decision and my choice.
With half the team out on the supply run right now, and the rest on high-alert back at the farm, I wasn’t pulling anyone away from their duties to come with me.
All of that meant I’d had to use the secret tunnel out of the farm, making Bear wait at the entrance when he’d wanted to come with me, then park and leave my bike an annoying distance outside of town, to walk the rest of the way in.
Being alone, on foot, was a whole other risk these days. I kinda wished I’d let Bear come. I glanced around, trying to note any landmarks in the dark. I wanted to make sure I could find my bike again in a hurry if I needed to.
The walk into town at least gave me time to plan my next movements. I hadn’t had time to plan since I’d walked into the security office to take Nick some dinner and noticed a code on one screen. It was one Max had set up for me and came from the safe house I had created in an apartment in town.
I had an informal network of contacts that I trusted, that worked in places like local gyms, coffee shops and in schools. They each had a card with a code on it that would unlock the door. The safe house was for any woman they had vetted that was fleeing a domestic violence situation.
Lucky for me, Max had set the safe house up with an independent solar battery system for power. So no-one could cut the power supply from the outside. It was off-grid, the same as the farm.
I wasn’t affiliated with any official groups or the government and I funded the safe house setup myself. There were many support groups in place for women that were doing amazing work and I donated to them too, but my safe house was for women who fell through the cracks.
The women who needed urgent help and couldn’t go elsewhere, for reasons usually out of their control. Women who needed to disappear and do it quickly. The ones no-one else could help and too often ended up dead. If someone had entered the safe house, it meant their situation was desperate. It wasn’t a weekend retreat.
The code on the door not only let them in, it also sent an alert to my phone. If I didn’t acknowledge within two hours, it then went to Max’s security system as a fail-safe. The women were told to lie low inside and someone would come to get them within twenty-four hours.
That someone was me. Leif and his mates knew about the setup and had made me promise I would ask for their back-up if I ever needed it, no questions asked. I started this work while they were away in the military, though, and I knew what I was doing. They tried to respect that.
I asked for their help occasionally. I wasn’t stupid, and I didn’t have a death wish. But only when necessary. A big, scary military looking dude walking through the door rarely helped the situation.
The guys always pitched in, regardless, when I brought the women back to the farm. The traumatized women often took some time to feel safe around strange men. Max and Hunter usually eased the way and the other women I’d rescued always closed ranks around the new women, too.
Nick hadn’t seemed to know what the alarm meant and had asked me if I knew. I’d just told him, “Yeah, it’s not about the farm. I’ll take care of it. When did the code appear?”
