T-Rex met Jagger’s gaze head on, and there was no mistaking the challenge. “Then I won’t be at any meeting, and if you or Gunner want to kick my ass for missing the meeting, I’ll tell you right now I got enough ass-kickings in that dungeon to last me a lifetime. The marks on my body go through to my soul. So don’t waste your fucking time.”
A wave of panic flooded Tank’s system. What was going on? T-Rex didn’t cause trouble. He didn’t challenge the rules. He was a mediator, and the person everyone went to when they had an irreconcilable dispute. He diffused tension; he didn’t create it. Had he made a mistake bringing T-Rex here so soon? Should he have given his brother more time?
“You go with them to the meeting,” Naiya said gently. “I’ll be fine. I’ll wait out here.”
“You’re coming with me. Wherever I go.” T-Rex didn’t even look at her. He didn’t look at Gunner. Nor did he look at Tank. He fixed his unwavering gaze on Jagger and stood his ground.
Sweat beaded on Tank’s brow. This wasn’t the T-Rex he knew. He respected Jagger. Admired him. Hell, the night T-Rex thought Jagger had been caught by the Jacks, he’d been so distraught he hadn’t even seen Jagger sitting at the boardroom table. But his quick thinking had saved Arianne’s life.
Tank caught movement behind T-Rex and Naiya, but he paid it no mind. The other brothers would have to wait. Right now he had to sort out this misunderstanding. Get things back on track.
“Viper is after Naiya.” Tank addressed his comments to Jagger and Gun. “The Jacks have been chasing after them. He’s concerned about her safety so he doesn’t want her out of his sight.”
Jagger’s shoulders dropped the tiniest bit. At least Tank hoped they dropped. And was that a slight softening of Gunner’s face? They just had to understand that T-Rex needed more time. He’d been away from the brothers, tortured, lost. And all he had was Naiya. She had brought him home. Of course T-Rex was protective of her and would want to keep her close. But soon he would realize he had Tank and the brothers to stand by his side. Everything would go back to normal.
“It’s okay, Gun.” Jagger made a placating gesture with his hand. “T-Rex only just walked in the door. We shouldn’t expect him to just jump into the politics again. Hell, I wouldn’t mind a break from the politics myself. Let’s give him some time to meet with all the brothers, find his feet again. We’ll keep his seat at the table. He can join us when he feels ready.”
Tank’s heart swelled with pride. This is why everyone loved Jagger, why he was such a good leader. He always knew the right thing to say, the right thing to do. He understood. T-Rex wasn’t ready yet.
But he would be.
* * *
Dammit. What were they thinking?
Naiya dried her hands in the tiny washroom behind the clubhouse kitchen. She was certain the hand towel was supposed to be white, and not dark gray, and likely had never seen the inside of a washing machine, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Holt was waiting for her outside. After that fiasco of a reunion he’d declared their visit over and he was impatient to leave.
Poor Holt. He hadn’t wanted to come to the clubhouse, and now she knew why. Although his brothers had been genuinely pleased to see him, there had been an unmistakable tension in the air. What had Jagger been thinking when he suggested Holt sit in on their meeting the day he returned? And would Gunner really have threatened to kick his ass after what he’d been through? And the whole damn fiasco with the cut? Sensitivity was clearly not a requirement for the Sinner’s Tribe MC. The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. Holt needed support and understanding. Instead he got … bikers. Acting as bikers did.
Tank, Jagger, and Zane, the dark, brooding VP, were talking in the hallway outside the restroom, but their conversation stopped when she tried to slip past to get to the front door.
“Did he tell you what happened to him?” Tank asked.
“I saw what happened to him.” Naiya bit out her words. “I was in the dungeon. They had him chained to the wall. He could barely walk or talk. He was starved and dehydrated, and his lips were cracked from thirst. After we got out, I called my friend Ally to come and look after him. She’s a nurse. She’d never seen anyone treated so badly. You name a weapon, and he’d been beaten with it: whips, chains, canes, blades. There wasn’t a part of him unmarked. She thought he’d had bones broken that had healed on their own. He had infected wounds, and some that needed stitches.” She drew in a ragged breath. “But that was just outside. Inside … I don’t know because I didn’t know him before, but he’s changed since we first escaped. He’s … harder now.”
“Tank says he has his cut, but he won’t wear it,” Jagger said, clearly inviting her to explain.
“No.” Naiya pressed her lips together. Although she was willing to share the details about Holt’s injuries so the Sinners would understand some of what he’d been through, she didn’t feel it was her right to share Holt’s reasons for not wearing the cut. She didn’t owe anything to the Sinners, and after the way they’d treated him, she was even less inclined to be forthcoming.
Jagger lifted an eyebrow in censure, and Tank rushed in with an explanation she didn’t need.
“Until he puts on the cut, he’s not really back.”
“He may never be back,” Jagger said quietly. “I know men in the army who went through what he went through. They never got over it. And if they did, they weren’t the same.”
“What’s your role in all this?” Dark and dangerous looking, Zane scowled. “Why is Viper after you?”
Naiya twisted her ring around her finger. “My mother owed him a debt. He decided to collect it from me. He kidnapped me from my mother’s funeral and took me to his clubhouse. He—” Her throat tightened and she clenched her hand into a fist. “He dragged me to his room and I stabbed him in the chest with a pen knife to fight him off. He threw me in the dungeon to teach me a lesson. At first, I thought if I helped Holt, he would take me to you, and you would owe me a debt and protect me from Viper. I didn’t know he was going to go after you for abandoning him. When I got to know him better though, I realized his heart wasn’t in it. Revenge was a crutch, at least as regards the Sinners. But now that he knows the truth, he’s got only revenge against Viper to keep him going.”
“He can’t go after Viper on his own,” Jagger said. “Viper knows we’ve got a mark on him. He’s tightened his security. He never goes anywhere without at least eight bodyguards. The bike rally coming up is our best chance to get close to him, but we need to work as a team.”
Naiya shook her head. “Holt needs his revenge.”
“He’ll have it, but not alone.” Jagger gave her a measured look. “I don’t want to lose him again, and we’ve put a lot of time and planning into the hit on Viper at the rally. We need you to keep an eye on him. Let us know what he has planned so we can stop him if we need to.”
Betray Holt? After he’d spent three months feeling betrayed? When he felt like he had no one to trust? Take away the one thing he had lived for all those months? The one thing Naiya secretly desired but had never been able to admit, not even to herself?
She stared at Jagger, stiffened her spine. Aside from Viper, he was probably the most intimidating man she’d ever met, and only a few weeks ago she would have agreed to his demands, desperate to get away and hide, afraid to stand up for what or who she believed in.
“I won’t betray him. He needs this. And he needs to do it his way.”
Jagger’s eyes narrowed. “I’m trying to protect him, Naiya.”
“You’re trying to protect your club,” she said. “And he’s not alone. He has me, and I want revenge, too. For both of us.” She felt the truth of her words as they dropped from her lips. She wanted Viper to pay for what he’d done to her and her mother, and locking him away wouldn’t be enough. Most of the Jacks had been in jail at some point in their lives, and except for the fact they couldn’t go beyond the prison walls, life for them continued as it had before: they ran their illicit operations, enforced their dominance, enjoyed their vices, and expanded their territory.
“And you’ll have it,” Holt said from behind her. “By my hand.”
Naiya’s eyes widened as she looked over her shoulder and met his cool, dark gaze. How long had he been there? How much had he heard?
* * *
It had been a mistake coming back to the club.
Holt reached out and clasped Naiya’s hand, drawing her to his side. Far from being reassured after hearing the efforts his brothers had made to find him, he still thought they hadn’t done enough. Why had no one made an effort to check for identifying marks? What about the tat on his arm? And leaving a body behind? Was that a story Sparky and Gunner made up because they didn’t want anyone to know all they cared about was saving their own skins? He gritted his teeth, squeezed Naiya’s hand.
“You okay?” she whispered.
“We’re outta here.” He’d heard enough. The brothers were set to betray him again. But Naiya—his Naiya—had refused to help them.
Even if he could have accepted that they did everything to find him, he couldn’t accept what happened in Viper’s house in the forest. He’d caught that look between Tank and Jagger. There was something they didn’t want him to hear. But he had a secret, too. He’d heard them from the dungeon. Chained to the wall, his body bruised and broken, hope had flared in his chest, burned so bright he found the strength to bang his fists, rattle the chains, scream and shout, “I’m here. I’m here. Brothers, save me.”
But they didn’t come.
Nothing Viper had done to him had hurt as much as the moment his last hope fizzled and died.
And now, not only had his brothers left him to rot in Viper’s dungeon, but they also planned to take away the only thing that had kept him alive. Revenge.
“We want the same thing, brother.” Jagger and Zane shared a glance, and Zane slid his hand beneath his cut. Holt’s skin prickled in warning. So they thought he was a threat. Well, he’d make sure they understood just how dangerous he could be if they tried to stand in his way.
“Then we’ll do it my way.”
“Come to the meeting and hear us out,” Tank pleaded, shooting a desperate look at Naiya. “We’ve been setting this up for months, paying off the locals, planting bugs in the hotels. We haven’t left anything to chance.”
“Except me,” Holt snapped.
“And we’re glad to have you back.” Jagger leaned against the wall. Outwardly, his posture was casual, relaxed, but Holt could feel the tension rolling off him, see the anger pulse in the veins of his neck. Once, he would have been cowed by Jagger’s anger, but nothing scared him anymore. There wasn’t anything Jagger could do to him that Viper hadn’t already done.
“But we’re not going to let you fuck this operation up or get yourself killed when you’ve only just come back to us,” Jagger continued. “We aim to end this war and Viper is the key. We’ll take him out and you’ll have your revenge.”
Holt bristled. “Viper is mine. No one is going to stop me from going after him. It’s what I lived for in that fucking dungeon when you gave up on me.”
“You heard what we did to find you. We didn’t give up.” Cold and distant, Zane was as intimidating as Jagger in his own way, simply because there was no line Zane wouldn’t cross for the club. And yet when Holt looked at him now, he saw a man, not a monster—a man who had his woman at the cost of Holt’s soul.
“I heard something else.” Holt turned on Zane, letting out his pain and anger in a rush. “I heard the Sinners in Viper’s house. You didn’t want to tell me you were there, but I knew. I thought my brothers would finally come for me. Did you think to look? Did you think to ask? What about Mario? You remember the restaurant owner we planted in the Jacks? Our own Black Jack rat? Did anyone talk to him? He knew I was locked in the basement of Viper’s house because he brought me food.”
The room stilled and then Tank let out a tortured groan. “Oh fuck. Jesus fucking Christ.”
So that was it. They truly had given up on him. No one had even bothered to ask the one person who had the information that would have saved Holt from months of torture.
“Viper kidnapped Evie’s son, Ty, and took him to his house in the mountains.” Tension—and was that a flicker of guilt?—lined Jagger’s face. “He took Mario and a handful of guards with him, and we lost contact because Mario couldn’t get a phone signal through the trees. Evie went on her own to rescue Ty. We stormed the house, and Mario knifed Viper then took off. We couldn’t find him, and I didn’t send anyone to hunt him down because he’d paid his debt to us. We couldn’t search the house until later because Viper’s guards called the Jacks and about thirty of them showed up to only six of us.”
Holt’s body shook with emotion. He’d heard the gunfight. Waited. Waited. Prayed, although he wasn’t a praying man. He didn’t know how much time had passed when the door finally opened. Hope flared for the last time and died in an instant when Viper walked into the room. And then hell began again.
Caught in a maelstrom of memory, torn by emotion, something inside Holt snapped. He loved them. He hated them. He had been through hell and back, suffered through hope and despair. He had lived to kill them and it was damn hard to throw it aside and accept they hadn’t abandoned him because if he knew one thing about himself, it was that he would never leave a man behind. He needed to finish this. He wanted the torment to end. Although part of him warned that he wasn’t thinking clearly, he reached beneath his cut and drew his weapon on Jagger. “It was easier to assume I was dead than make the effort to find me, wasn’t it?”
“No.” Tank moaned; his distress etched in the lines of his face. “No, brother. Don’t do this. It killed us. Every one.”
Zane moved swiftly, interposing his body between Holt and Jagger. He always had Jagger’s back, had risked his life countless times to save him. Jagger was untouchable unless Zane was dead.
“Whatever you do, whatever you think, you should know that Tank didn’t give up,” Zane said, drawing his own weapon. “Even after the funeral. Even after we told him to let it go because we didn’t have a shred of evidence to suggest you were alive, he looked for you. Days, nights, he was on his bike searching forests and ditches and alleys. He even fucked a coupla Black Jack sweet butts to get information. We didn’t give up easy, T-Rex, but know that Tank didn’t give up at all.”