I reached over and clasped his hand, giving it a squeeze. I had to believe they were okay, and we were just being paranoid, but I’d learned the hard way that my hope was often misplaced.
Bat’s eyes twitched as he pulled out his phone and dialled a number, obviously trying Amelia again.
When there was no answer, he slammed the phone onto the bar top so hard, the screen cracked.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said, but there was no gumption in my tone.
Worrying was threading itself through every molecule, intuition screaming at me to find them as fast as we could.
I knew Amelia was religious where Bat was not. I knew she’d attended my grandpa’s service for years, and I wondered if the fucking “Prophet” could have lured her in.
Cleo went to Mass with me sometimes, but she wasn’t extremely devout. The only thing I could think of was…
“She started seeing someone. At first I thought maybe it was one of the brothers or Eric because she was so secretive, but now…” I trailed off, feeling my heart fill with lead and drop to the pit of my stomach.
“Get Z,” Bat barked at Carson behind the bar, then to Priest and Axe-Man. “Let’s roll out. Check their normal haunts. Call in if you find anythin’.”
I tugged on Priest’s hand before he broke free to follow the orders. He gazed down at me with cold eyes, mind already tuned into the problem. I gave his hand another squeeze, and warmth started to seep back into the green.
“Tell me we’re overreacting, and everything is going to be okay?” I whispered as terror cycled through me like the ocean’s vicious undertow.
His eyes shuttered as he pulled me close to stamp a kiss to my mouth. “Not gonna lie to you, Little Shadow, not ever. You promise me right now you’ll stay here so I can focus on findin’ ’em, yeah? You stay here where no one can get you.”
“I promise,” I swore, tears in my throat because I couldn’t shake the awful sense that the tragedies would just keep coming. “I’ll pray for them.”
“You don’t need prayers when you got me,” he said matter-of-factly. “But if it makes you feel better, you kneel, and you pray for them until I can get to them.”
I watched as the partygoers parted for the men like the Red Sea, and then I went to get my biker babes to hold a vigil. Unfortunately, over the years, we’d gotten all too good at those.
Priest
Kodiak and I found them the next morning after a night of the entire club and the T-Squad rolling out to search for them.
The killer left a fairly obvious calling card.
In the middle of one of Brian Potter’s wheat fields gone to mud in the winter season, a massive, crudely carved cross had been planted in the ground. Beneath it, crusted with dirt and dried blood lay Amelia Stephens and Cleo Axelsen.
“Fuck,” Kodiak grunted from behind me as he drew close enough to see the bodies laid out in the mud. He hastened forward, dropping his big body between the two women to check their vitals. There was panic in every tense line of his body, a surprise given he was normally so stoic. When he looked up from Amelia, I knew from the obsidian sharpness of his gaze that she was dead.
I ignored him to kneel beside Cleo. I saw the faint flutter instantly, as slight as a butterfly’s wing beneath the skin of her neck.
“Get the truck,” I ordered my brother in a cold, calm voice. “Drive it into the field and bring it here.”
“Why?” he asked, hunched over Amelia with an anguished expression on his face. “Fuck, man, she’s gone. Look what they did to her.”
“Cleo’s not,” I told him without looking up, searching Cleo for wounds, finding seven, eight…eleven stab wounds. There was also no doubt from the way they’d torn her clothes to ribbons and the blood caked over her groin that they had abused her sexually too. “Get the truck now.”
Kodiak stared at Cleo for a fractured moment, something shattering in his expression. Before I could order him to get his arse in gear, he leaned over Cleo to brush her matted hair back from her face tenderly, then shoved to his feet and began to loop across the field. He was swift, faster than any other man in the club, yet I still wanted to urge him faster.
Cleo was dying in my arms.
My girl’s best friend was bleeding out into the earth, so close to earning a spot beneath it. I shucked my cut, then my sweater, cutting the latter into rough strips with the edge of my hunting knife so I could craft a tourniquet for her right thigh above the three stab wounds gaping open there. The wink of white bone was visible through the harshly torn flesh, the broken edge of her femur sharper than my blade.