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CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT
RIFF
“Do we call in Brent?” I ask as I look over to Prez.
He arches a brow, then shakes his head once. “Not yet. No jail cells, brother.”
I agree. But at the same time, I feel like I should tell him that she’s gone, that she’s been kidnapped. That something could have happened to her. Fucking hell, I don’t know what the right thing to do here is.
Then, it doesn’t matter what it is, because my phone rings. Looking down, I flick my attention back up to meet Prez’s. “It’s a Louisiana number,” I state as I hear some motorcycles pull up to the clubhouse.
“Answer it. I’m going to see who the hell is here. We’re on lockdown. Nobody should have been allowed to go through those gates,” he growls. “Fucking hell.”
I watch as he walks away, sliding my thumb across the screen as I lift my phone to my ear. “Riff.”
“Missing something?” a raspy voice asks. “Or should I say, someone?”
I don’t even have to know the voice on the other end to recognize exactly who he is. Instead of responding, I don’t say a fucking thing. I wait, because I’m sure he has something that he wants to say to me. If I react, if I lose my shit, then he has even more of the upper hand, and I think that he’s already got enough of that.
“You wanna tell me what the fuck is going on?” I finally ask when silence continues.
He clears his throat before I hear him speak again. “Do you think that you can come in, take over my club, take my property, and not have to pay for any of that shit?”
“We didn’t take over your club. You fucking became part of us. Which means you agreed to our fucking rules to do that,” I point out. “And you kidnapped my woman, who is completely fucking innocent, for what purpose?”
“Yeah, we became part of you, but I didn’t think that you people were going to demand so fucking much from us. Too much. Giving me a list of my men who need to die and for something that you don’t understand.”
I almost completely lose my shit, but I rein myself in, just slightly. Instead of screaming at him, I try to stay as calm as possible. I need to know where the fuck he is, where he took my woman. If she’s okay and how the fuck he got to her.
Reasoning with him, it goes against everything that I am. It goes against me as a fucking man, especially as Tanner’s fucking man. She’s knocked up with my kid and I’m here trying to reason with a fucking baby rapist.
“Prez gave you a list of fucking perverts,” I explain. “Your club was failing, you needed saving, but we’re not putting our name on that shit, and you knew it. So don’t act like we did anything to you, to your fucking people.”
“Where’s my daughter?”
“Why? So you can sell her again? It doesn’t matter where she is. You won’t get her and if you touch one hair on my woman’s head, the entire Nasty Bastards MC will find you and fucking end you.”
There is a moment of silence, complete and total quiet, and I think that maybe, just maybe this fucking idiot got his head out of his ass, but then he snorts before he ends the call.
“Fuck,” I shout just as Luella walks into the room. She stops where she is, and I hear her suck in a breath. She looks up at me, her eyes wide, in what I can only guess is shock at my outburst. I don’t blame her. I was a bit fucking over the top.
“Sorry, I just needed to get away for a second.”
Turning to her, I lift my hand and wrap my fingers around the back of my neck. “Lockdown already getting to you?” I ask with a laugh.
Inside, my entire body is screaming to do something, but I can’t take anything out on her, and at the same time, screaming would do no goddamn good right now.
Luella shrugs a shoulder. “I fucked up and I don’t know how to fix it and being in that room just keeps reminding me that I fucked up.”
My brows lift as I watch her for a long moment. Luella and I see one another at work. We’re cordial, but she is definitely Bowie’s woman, and I don’t necessarily go out of my way to chat with her. Meaning, this shit is completely out of my comfort zone and wheelhouse.
“I shouldn’t even say anything. You’ve got enough going on,” she whispers.
“Take my mind off of my own shit, yeah?” I ask.
Luella slides her tongue along her bottom lip, then lets out another sigh. “I’ve been a bitch to Marilyn since the moment I met her and I really, really, regret it. She’s nothing like I thought she would be. But I don’t know how to not be a bitch anymore.”
Marilyn is technically her stepmother, even though they’re around the same age. Luella is Prez’s estranged daughter, he didn’t raise her, but she showed up here a few years ago with nothing except her daughter Magnolia on her hip.
