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“T-two men t-took me,” she said in answer. She worried the bracelet with her fingers, rotating it around her wrist. “One was really mean. He kept telling me to shut up, and cursing at me, keeping me scared. The other…he told the other man he’d take me into the swamp and leave me. The mean man wanted him to…throw me in the water. So the alligators…”
She paused, a shudder gripping her.
“You really don’t have to do this, honey.” Though Tiger murmured it gently, Skye saw the brief flash of murderous furyin his dark blue eyes. He’d pulled a chair close and leaned forward to clasp Aubrey’s hand. “You’ve been brave enough for one day.”
Lawrence and Neil’s expressions were fixed and cold. All of them feeling the same surge of emotions.
Aubrey just shook her head. “The mean man stayed in the car. The other man put me in a boat they had. He took me to the shed. Said he hunted there. Said he’d come back in a day or two to make sure I got home to Daddy. But then the storm came up, and I was too scared to stay quiet, like he told me to do.”
“You did just what you should have,” Tiger told her.
Her chin wobbled, but she looked at Skye. “I need to go to the bathroom. I’m a big girl, and can do it myself, but…”
“I’d be happy to go with you.” Skye typed it one-handed. She used her Angela Lansbury voice, the most reassuring one on her phone. “Grown-up girls go to the bathroom together all the time.” She winked at Aubrey. “It’s where we talk about how silly boys are.”
After they disappeared into the bathroom, Tiger turned his attention to Neil and Lawrence.
“Most MC guys don’t have an appetite for killing kids outright. They do it indirectly. Sell drugs to the guys who sell it to kids, or form alliances with gangs into sex trafficking, turning a blind eye to what they do in favor of the money. But killing a kid straight up—that’s not in their repertoire.”
He didn’t have any warm feelings toward the man who’d put Aubrey in the shed, but he would get more of a description from Aubrey and tell Colt. Colt could decide if he’d earned a measure of mercy. At least a quicker death.
He picked up his phone. Time to give Colt that more detailed update. And do what he was resolved to do. But first, he glanced at Neil for one more reassurance on a different topic. “So she doesn’t need a hospital?”
“No. Vitals are good, she’s eating and drinking normally. Communicating clearly. It wouldn’t hurt, but it would raise a lot of questions, and you said that could cause problems.”
“Yeah.”
The two SEALs exchanged a look. They’d taken a seat at the kitchenette table. Lawrence and Skye had both sent communications to Ros, letting her know their status. “What do you want to do next?” Neil said to Tiger.
“It’s not what I want to do. It’s what I’m going to do.” He met their somber looks. “You mind being my backup for one more meeting? A family one.”
“Family meetings are more dangerous than insurgents,” Lawrence observed. “But throw in the promise of a good bottle of whiskey and we’re your guys.”
Tiger nodded. “I’ll make it two.”
Tiger told Colt to meet him at a rest area outside New Orleans, off the interstate heading for Florida. Though that was a good enough reason for the location, Tiger chose it as a not-obvious place to those who’d taken her in the first place.
On the way, they stopped at a Family Dollar to get Aubrey colorful and soft kid clothes. Skye helped her pick out a blue shirt with an ice-skating penguin and sequins on it, paired with a ruffled white cotton skirt. Tiger found a pack of little girl underwear, plus socks and generic white sneakers.
When he revealed there were blue sneakers, too, he was immediately dispatched by his niece to switch out the white sneakers for ones that matched the penguin shirt. It choked him up in a way he had to hide. Then Skye mouthed “Domme’d by a six-year-old,” and tears he hadn’t spilled in two decades nearlyescaped. Fuck, at some point in the near future, he was going to do some serious drinking.
Skye bought her a stuffed elephant, which Aubrey clutched when she was back in Skye’s lap, both of them occupying the passenger seat of Tiger’s truck.
“When are we going home, Uncle Tiger?”
“Soon, baby. You hungry again?”
She shrugged, but her eyes were deep set in her pale face. Though he knew that was more the emotional toll of the day, they still rolled around a drive-thru to get her a Happy Meal. She ate a little but then fell asleep, her head against Skye’s soft bosom again. When she adjusted in her slumber, her legs ended up over the truck console, feet resting on Tiger’s thigh. He kept his hand over them, thumb passing over the tops of the sneakers. He drove one-handed as the rain cleared up and road conditions improved.
Skye dozed a little herself, but as she roused and noted the difference between Tiger’s large hand and Aubrey’s small feet, her throat got thick and tears threatened. The same reaction she knew Tiger had experienced, doing something as normal as picking out shoes for his niece.
But that moment had passed. From his profile, Skye could see he had too many things left to handle to let anything else in. Like recapping what had happened, or what could have happened. She didn’t want her mind to go there, either. Not until thinking about it wouldn’t make her whole body shake hard enough to rattle her teeth.
She remembered Tiger putting the blanket around her shoulders. Taking the time to care for both of his girls. She reached out and stroked his shoulder. He glanced her way and nodded. A reinforcement that they were okay, and the things that weren’t okay, he was going to fix.
She knew the misguided theory that submissive men were just looking for someone to take care of them. No question, there was that subset, in male and female submissives, just as there were the matching Dominants who wanted to provide that care, because it satisfied their topping needs.
But there were men who had an unshakable stance on what being a man meant, no matter the situation. She thought of what his father had said, that it was his job to teach his sons that. Tiger would probably say that was the job of any parent. So would she. But if they did their job right, teaching him to stand on his own two feet and think and care for himself, ultimately the son himself decided what being a man meant.
