“Get in the fucking truck!” I yelled, running around the vehicle to where Jess and Skins were loading the groceries in. While Jess looked at me in shock, Skins being the levelheaded man I liked, hooked his hand through all the grocery bags and tossed them all into the back seat. Loaves of bread, milk, cheese, beer, went scattering all over the seats and the floor, but there was no time to fuck around.
Once Jess found her head, she just shoved the shopping cart across the lot in the general direction of the cart return and dived in the backseat with the explosion of shopping items, just as I started the engine.
My foot was flat on the accelerator, and we were roaring for the exit within seconds.
The call from Hadley wasn’t good, and I already felt the angry haze settling over me. Some bastard was going to pay. Today, tomorrow, preferably fucking yesterday. Hell was going to rain down around them. Fucking ironic, given that these people are so scared of ending up in that place. I’ll happily bring it to them.
“What’s the situation?” Skins asked, looking at me with complete seriousness. We all braced ourselves as we bounced out and onto the street, Jess cursing when her head smacked the window.
I gripped the steering wheel, pushing Op’s truck as fast as fucking possible without getting us killed. I quickly informed them about what was waiting for us when we got back. The club had the clubhouse in lockdown basically, and there was a little girl, another of Sky’s sisters, standing in the street crying.
Jess paled instantly. “They aren’t going to…” she couldn’t say it, and I didn’t know what else to tell her, so I just let the words hang in the thick air of the cab. “What do we do?”
My phone started to vibrate, and I pulled it from my pocket, passing it to Skins. “Read,” I ordered, sharply.
“They want us to try and snatch her off the street as we drive past,” Skins relayed, his eyes scanning the message. “Leo plus two are out trying to hunt down whoever is out there, but so far they haven’t made a move to do anything.”
“Snatch her off the street?” Jess exclaimed, her eyes meeting mine in the rear vision mirror. “We pull up, I drag her in on top of the Wheaties, and then we run to the clubhouse before Sky’s brother and his friends can fill the car full of bullets.”
“Basically,” I responded, only really half listening to what she was rambling on about, but even then realizing that it sounded fucking ridiculous.
Then things changed.
“They shot her,” Skins whispered.
“What?” I asked in shock.
Jess wasn’t moving, sitting in the backseat staring straight ahead, her chest rising and falling steadily. My eyes flicked from the road, to Skins, to her, trying to figure out if what I was hearing was real.
“They shot her in the leg,” he finally corrected, not making my heart slow down any, but at least giving us something. She wasn’t dead, but we had to try and get to her before they decided that she was worthless to them and did the unthinkable.
“These people need to be put down,” Jess said with absolute rage in her voice. “They need to be removed from this world.”
“How are we gonna get the girl?” Skins asked as he reached over and took Jess’s hand, giving it a squeeze. “I’ve got all my medical shit back at the clubhouse, there’s a chance she can come out of this if I can get to her quickly enough.”
My foot pressed harder against the accelerator, and we jolted forward.
I was running through all the scenarios in my head—what we knew, what we didn’t know, what the risks were and how we could avoid them.
“You think these guys are that stupid that they assumed we would let Skylar or Emerald run out the door to her sister without thinking… oh hey, this is kinda weir—” I stopped mid-sentence and Skins eyes widened.
“What?” he prompted as I went through things once more, trying to convince myself that I must have been wrong. “Eagle, man, we’re just about there, we need to—”
“It’s a distraction.”
Skins mouth dropped open for a brief second, but soon he was fumbling with the phone, pressing call at least ten times in his rush.
“I don’t like what you just said,” Jess pointed out, sitting forward and placing her hand on my shoulder. “Please tell me you don’t mean what you mean.”
Skins voice cut her off before I could tell her that I meant exactly what I meant.
“Op, Eagle said it’s a distraction, you need to watch your back,” Skins relayed into the phone.
I could hear my president curse and start screaming orders at my brothers.
“Jess, you better dig the gun out from underneath your seat and hope like hell those lessons you’ve been having with Hadley have paid off,” I told her. I was trying to keep my cool even though, in that moment, I wanted to be a selfish bastard and drive straight through the compound gates and find Skylar. On the other hand, I had Jess sitting behind me, her hand still on my shoulder and her body shaking as we drove foot flat to the floor, toward danger and guns and bullets. “Jess…now’s the time where I could really appreciate that smart mouth and cocky attitude.”
“I’m s-scared, Eagle,” she whispered, her voice cracking.