I heard Kelli moving around in our room as I stepped out of the shower, but as I wrapped a towel around my hips and walked into the bedroom, the door was closing behind her. A glance at the clock beside the bed told me it was only ten thirty. Gritting my teeth, I threw on clothes and grabbed my cut.
Out in the main room, I asked my brothers where Kelli was.
“Said something about going to work,” Uncle Ox told me with a shrug.
“Fuck’s sake. We went through this last night.” Scrubbing my hands over my face, I headed out the front door where I’d parked my bike earlier.
She must have hauled ass, because I didn’t catch up to her the entire drive out to Paradise City. Parking beside the club, I walked around back. The bouncer standing there frowned at me when he saw me coming. “She’s not here.”
I stopped and glanced over my shoulder at the other dancers’ vehicles, only then noticing that Kelli’s car wasn’t there. “What the fuck?” I growled to myself. “Where the fuck did she go, then?”
“No clue, man, but she’s not here.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, heading back to my bike. Pulling out my phone, I called her. It rang twice before going to voice mail, meaning she had sent me there on purpose. Biting back a curse, I drove back toward the clubhouse, retracing my steps. I stopped by her house, but it was dark, and there weren’t any cars in the driveway. Stopping at my own only yielded the same results.
If she hadn’t gone toward Paradise City, then she m
ust have gone in the other direction, because there hadn’t been a single sign of her car. There wasn’t much out that way, though. I tried calling her again. This time, it went straight to voice mail, telling me her phone was off.
The farther out I drove, the more my instincts were screaming at me that something was off. She wouldn’t come this way. There wasn’t a single damn reason for her to come out here. It was mostly just dirt lanes and old abandoned houses and a trailer park that hadn’t been inhabited in years.
The trailer park was on one of the back roads, completely out of sight of the main street. Something told me to check it out, though.
As I drove past, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. It was dark, too dark to see anything past the first few trailers near the road. I drove a little ways farther, then turned around and went back, deciding to go into the actual park itself.
All I could see was what was right in front of my bike’s headlight, and the farther I went, the more pissed I got at myself. Why was I even suspicious of her being out here? It was cold as fuck, and this place looked like it belonged on the set of some slasher thriller movie. There was no way Kelli would have come out this way, let alone to this spooky-ass place.
Shaking my head at my own idiocy, I began to turn my bike around.
The scream that suddenly filled the air, however, had my stomach turning to lead. I paused, holding my breath as I listened again. It was just some wild animal, pissed I’d disturbed its home, I tried to tell myself. Then the scream came again, and I knew it wasn’t an animal but a woman.
From the sounds of it, she was screaming for her life.
I drove toward the sound of the screams that were only getting more desperate. In the last trailer at the back of the park, I saw three vehicles and weak light coming from inside the run-down old mobile home. Two of the cars I recognized as soon as I was close enough to make them out.
Raven’s Challenger was the last car, parked behind a smaller car I didn’t recognize, blocking it in. The one in front of the unknown car was Kelli’s.
“What the fuck?” I muttered as I parked my bike and ran up the rotting steps to the tiny porch and kicked my way through the locked trailer door.
Three heads snapped around, a mixture of fear and fierceness on their faces at being startled. Raven, Flick, and Kelli all stood over a groaning body on the nasty living room floor. Lord knew what was on that dank-smelling carpet, but none of it was good. Raven was breathing hard, her face flushed with exertion. Her green eyes were wild, and she glared at me like she was debating making me her next victim.
Because whoever that was on the floor was most definitely her first. All I could see was a plethora of hair, chunks of which hung from my baby sister’s fists. Fists that were cut and bleeding. The screams had obviously come from the girl on the floor, but I didn’t know who the fuck she was.
“What are you doing here?” Kelli demanded, stepping closer to my sister as if she thought Raven needed protecting from me.
“I was worried about you and came to find you. What the fuck are you three doing?” I stepped into the living room, taking up what little room had been left by the four women. Looking down, I still couldn’t tell who my sister had been beating the shit out of. “Who the fuck is this?”
Raven made a growling noise in the back of her throat, but otherwise reminded silent. When the girl sobbed something unintelligible, Raven kicked her in the back so hard it knocked the breath out of the girl.
“You should just go,” Flick advised, blocking my way when I would have bent to turn the girl over. “We have this under control.”
“What the fuck do you have under control?” I yelled at them. “You’re beating some girl to death and won’t tell me shit. Who is she?”
“You know who she is,” Kelli assured me, her eyes emotionless. “Now let us finish this.”
That gave me pause. Who was the girl…?
Fuck.