Give Me Grace (47 page)

“Give me the keys,” I ordered Travis when we hit the car park.

“No,” he replied, beeping the locks of his mean looking Subaru. It was gleaming black with barely legal tinted windows and a modified turbo, making it one of the quickest cars I’d ever handled. After having rendered control to Mitch and Gabriella these past few hours, I needed to take it back, and that started now, with driving Travis’s car.

“Give me the motherfucking keys,” I growled.

With what sounded like a deep sigh of regret, he tossed them my way. I caught them easily and we both slid in the car at the same time. I turned the key and the car rumbled to life.

Travis was still shutting the passenger door when I hit the gas hard. I tore out of the police carpark, passing uniformed officers and ignoring their glares. Barely pausing to check if the road was clear, I fishtailed onto the street, heading straight for Morgan’s house.

“How did it go with Henry?” Travis asked.

I gunned the engine, shooting through an orange light. “He punched it out of his system,” I replied, running a tongue over the split in my lip. It was a throbbing reminder of Henry’s aggression.

“And the test for the roofies?”

“Positive.”

“Bitch,” Travis snarled.

The tyres spun when I took a hard left. “I backed Morgan into a corner but I never expected her to retaliate with something like this.”

“Finding out about your parents and what happened with Kelly has been a long time coming,” he replied, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Being so close and getting nothing? What choice did you have?”

“Getting nothing is better than losing Grace over this,” I
replied, for the first time realising just how much falling in love had changed my priorities. It wasn’t until the idea of being with Grace and building a future together was snatched away that I realised how desperately I wanted it to happen.

“You’re not losing Grace over this,” Travis vowed. “We’ll find her.”

“It’s not just about finding her,” I said, glancing across at my friend. “Grace has cancer.”

Travis muttered a quiet, “Fuck,” before tipping his head back against the seat. “How bad is it?” he asked, squeezing his eyes shut
, bracing for my response.

“I don’t know,” I replied, feeling my control start to slip just thinking about it. “
I found out last night and fucking lost it. You saw me. What would you do if you found out Quinn had cancer?”

His eyes opened and he paled, looking like the idea made him want to puke. “I’d lose it.”

“Exactly,” I replied as I spun the wheel, careening into the street that would lead us to Morgan’s house. “So I can’t talk about it right now. I can’t even think about it. I need to focus on the now and getting Grace.”

I slowed down, taking in the surroundings as we passed by
her house. It would be dusk soon, yet the interior was dark, not lit up like the neighbouring houses. She could’ve been lying low, but I didn’t believe it. The house was empty. An unmarked police car sat further down, keeping watch for her return.

“Call Seth. Get him to put Beck out here on surveillance again,” I told Travis. “He’ll do a better job than these clowns,” I added when we drove by the unmarked car.

Travis began dialling and I hit the gas, roaring away from Morgan’s house with satisfying speed. Travis glanced behind us before turning his gaze to me. “Where are we going? We could at least search her house and see if we find anything.”

“
Gabriella’s arranging a search warrant. I don’t want to compromise any evidence they might find. Besides,” I told him as I planted my foot, barely scraping through another orange light as we left her house behind. “I’ve got another idea.”

Sunday afternoon traffic was full of nine to fivers—all returning home at the same time from their weekend escapes. Dusk had truly arrived by the time we hit our destination. Parking the car a street away, we walked along the back of the reserve until we reached the yard of Graham Bennett’s house. Unlike Morgan’s, the back half of his house was lit up, highlighting the kitchen and dining area clearly to the backyard.

Travis handed me another Glock. I checked the sight and safety before taking another peek at the house through the car-wide gap in the fence.

“What do you see?” he asked from behind me.

“No one yet.”

“Wait here,” he told me, palming his own gun. “I’ll go around the front, see if Morgan’s car is in the drive.”

I set my jaw stubbornly. “You wait here.
I’ll
go.”

Travis sighed, exasperated. We did a quick rock
-paper-scissors. Knowing Travis always chose rock, I went with paper. When he decided to switch it up and came out with scissors, I hissed quietly. “Sonofabitch.”

With narrow-eyed satisfaction, he threw a quick, “cover me,” my way, and crouched low, running for the back of the house.

He returned five minutes later. “Morgan’s car is in the garage. I saw it through a side window. I did a scope of the entire house from the outside. Didn’t see Grace,” he told me before I could ask.

I huffed with indecision. “What do we do? Storm the place or follow Morgan when she leaves?”

“If we storm the place and Grace isn’t there, then we’ve played our hand. Morgan will know we’re on to her and then following her when she leaves will be a crapshoot.”

“Hell,” I muttered, rubbing a hand over
the back of my head.

“My gut’s telli
ng me Grace isn’t here,” he said, shifting his gaze from the house to meet my eyes. “I vote we wait and follow Morgan when she leaves.”

“I can work with that.” I trusted Travis. His gut had never steered us wrong. “But if she leaves and then just returns home? What the fuck then?”

“Then we’re screwed, because the unmarked car the police have out the front of her house will pick her up, beating us to her.”

“
Fuck it, Travis. I vote we storm the place.”

We both turned to stare at the house and as if I’d just said
abracadabra,
the garage door magically began to rise, the loud clunk alerting us to the activity. My pulse rose right along with it and we turned and began running for the Subaru. I beeped the locks from ten yards away and had the engine growling and the wheels spinning before we’d even shut the doors.

We shot out of the side street at the back of the reserve, just in time to catch the
tail lights of Morgan’s car turning the corner. I inched off the gas, not wanting to alert her to our presence.

“Speed the fuck up. You’ll lose her.”

“I’m not going to lose her,” I snapped, speeding up a fraction because he was right.

When she hit the intersection up ahead she turned left instead of the
right which would’ve taken her home. I followed carefully, keeping behind other cars, and hanging back when traffic around us eased. Travis rang Mitch for the second time since we left, updating him with our progress. In turn, he kept Gabriella in the loop. Travis had the phone on speaker and she was barking at us to stand down.

When she realised she’d have better luck pushing a snowball up a lava-spewing volcano, she told us they were on their way and to wait.

My response was firm and distinct. “No.”

Reaching across Travis, I hit the end button, cutting off her rant.

“Gabriella is a hard-ass,” Travis noted as we drove further towards the mountains.

“No shit,” was my reply as my gut began to churn, engaging its warning system the further out we drove.

“They’ve got a helluva history, those two.”

“Which two?” I glanced at him, confused. “What?”

“Mitch and Gabriella. You don’t remember her? They were tight at uni.”

I thought she looked familiar. Mitch had been two yea
rs ahead of us at Charles Sturt. They’d been tight for a long time. She’d changed, gotten taller, or grown her hair long. Or something. Whatever. I shrugged his question off because we just started down a familiar street in Blackheath. And screw my gut’s early warning system, it was full on screaming by the time Morgan pulled up outside the house where Janie Berg had been abducted.

I pulled to the kerb at the end of the street, both of us seeming to hold our breath as Morgan got out of the car.

Moments later, a Harley thundered down the street, driving straight past us. It pulled up next to Morgan’s car and the man swung his leg over and dragged the helmet from his head as he stood, and stood, and fucking stood. He was wearing a Sentinels MC vest and a beard so wild and woolly it was a wonder it didn’t smother him in his sleep.

“That is one big motherfuc
king bastard,” Travis breathed.

“Ring Mitch,” I ordered
, but Travis was already dialling and giving out the address a second later.

“Holy motherfucking shit!” Mitch shouted when it clicked a second later where we were. Gabriella’s wild Spanish was ripping someone a new one in the background so he kept yelling over the top of her into the phone. “Don’t either of you dare touch this one or I swear to God, I’ll—”

“You’ll what, tell Dad?” Travis snorted as our eyes fastened on the argument in progress between Morgan and the big-ass biker dude. They started inside, the man roaring at her the entire way. I squinted at the back of his vest, catching the letters BIN on the back of his vest. He turned, eyes scanning the street before I could make out the rest of the letters. “Damn,” I hissed, ignoring the bickering between Travis and his older brother over the phone.

Reaching over, I hit the end button for the second time, cutting off Mitch’s rant.

I eyeballed Travis. “I’ll take the front, you take the back.”

Travis narrowed his eyes. “I’ll take the front,
you
take the back.”

“Fuck you,
Trav,” I declared, both of us knowing the front would be more dangerous. “I called it. It’s mine.” He opened his mouth to argue and I knew exactly how to shut it. “You’ve got a little boy who needs you.”

Knowing I had him, I swallowed around the huge lump in my throat and held up a fist. “Let’s do this.”

He met my eyes as he bumped it with his. Then he grinned, his smile feral. “Let’s do this.”

We got out of the car and I popped the boot. Travis reached in, lifting the false flooring to reveal an entire arsenal. As he handed over a bulletproof vest, I strapped it on quickly. While Travis did his, I allowed myself the luxury of thinking about Grace for a brief moment, of her scent and her laugh, of the
wild abandon on her face whenever I fucked her hard, of how much I adored every single hair on her head. My chest tightened and my hands shook. She could be just metres away right now, breathing in the same air, hurt, scared, bleeding out.

“Hey,” Travis muttered, eyeing me. “You with me?”

“A hundred per cent,” I told him, willing it to be true.

“Okay, then.”

We both tucked a spare handgun in the back of our jeans, keeping one each in our hands. My breath puffed in and out as we approached the house. The air was cooler near the Blue Mountains, seeping into your bones. I shivered. I hated the cold. It reminded me of hiding in the yard when my father was in one of his rages. Sometimes I would fall asleep, my body pressed up between the fence and the tall eucalypt tree that always smelled good in the summer. When I eventually woke, my fingers and toes would be numb from the frost.

We reached the house
and I wiped my mind of the memories. Travis peeled off, heading around the back while I approached the front screen door. It was one of those old kinds. The one that was there simply as a flyscreen, not a security screen. The hinges were flaking with paint and thick with rust, telling me that if I jerked too quickly, they would protest loud and clear.

Surprisingly
, it was unlocked, making me pause. They couldn’t have seen us coming. Maybe it was missed during the argument the two were having as they headed inside?

With a slowness that made me itchy, I eased the door open, gun cocked and ready, and stepped inside the house.

A quick scan in front of me gave nothing. I took another two steps, opening up the living room to my gaze, and my heart punched to my throat. Grace was bound to a chair. Silver duct tape held her arms and legs in place and a single strip covered her mouth. Her eyes filled the second I appeared.