Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3) (13 page)

I couldn't go there again.

I was barely hanging onto my sanity as it was.

So I went on and I found my plans for escape. I found the motel in the mountains where I planned to set up camp for a few weeks before moving onto something more permanent. I hacked into the city cameras to see if my car was still where I parked it at the paid lot beside the docks. Then I searched the fastest route from Wolf's cabin to my car's location.

I did all this, cleared the history (as if Wolf was tech-savvy enough to even know what a browser history was), ate, showered, watched night fall.

Still no Wolf.

I climbed into bed with the dogs and read.

Morning came.

Wolf didn't return.

At this point, I was pretty much the Mom in every teenager's house when they stumbled home after missing curfew and got the 'dead in the ditch' speech. Worry took on a whole new meaning, bringing its close friend Paranoia to the party that had me hacking into all of the city's camera feed looking for signs of him or signs that something was amiss at The Henchmen compound in general.

After half a day and nothing to show except an alarming amount of drug hand-offs that no cop seemed to spot and business-as-usual at the compound, worry and paranoia gave way to righteous anger. If something was up with Wolf, surely there would be action at the compound. They wouldn't let their road captain go missing without at least sending someone to the cabin like they sent Cash a few days before. So... he wasn't missing. They knew where he was.

The 'worst-case-scenario-is-the-likely-scenario' part of my brain decided that he probably was
at
the compound. Most of the members had rooms there. So he must have had a room there. And that pesky negative part of my thought process also latched onto another realization: that where you found hot, dangerous biker dudes... you found hot, skanky, shameless club whores.

And, well, that made sense, didn't it?

He'd been holed up with me for a week, sharing close quarters, getting handsy with me, but getting absolutely no relief that wasn't self-induced.

Of course he would seek out sex elsewhere. How stupid of me to not consider that when I realized first thing in the morning that he was missing.

I took another walk with the dogs, I rummaged around in the closet, I ate, I showered. Then, with nothing else to do, I hit the laptop again. But this time, I couldn't resist it. I found the forum; I found the post. Then I looked over it until the memories felt as vivid as if they were happening in real time, until the helplessness, anger, pain, and horror were as much a part of me as they were eight years before, until I realized they always would be. I would never be free of them.

And on that, I threw myself into the bed, knowing the nightmares would come, but not having any other way to keep myself from flying through the woods, tracking him down, and taking aim again.

"Janie, wake up!" Wolf's voice demanded through my dream. I felt my shoulders being shaken hard and flew up in bed on a silent scream. My heart was hammering in my chest, my body broken out in a cold sweat. "Easy," Wolf said, his hand moving out and swiping my hair out of my face where it was stuck there with sweat. "You're safe."

My head whipped in his direction, his massive body, his beard that tickled, his eyes that had a depth I thought I could drown in, sitting on his knees in the middle of his giant bed secluded in the woods. And I realized his words were false, that when I had believed them myself over the past few days, that it was all an illusion.

"I'm never going to be safe," I choked out, my breath hitching on a sob that felt ripped from somewhere primal and unstoppable inside.

"With me, you are," he objected.

I felt my head shaking roughly side to side. And then it happened too fast to fight. The tears welled up and spilled over, running hot streams down my face. There was no stopping them. The dam inside broke and I realized for the first time that the well it stopped was bottomless. It was fed from somewhere deep and might never dry up. I could feel my face twisting into horror that I finally lost the fight with my emotions after all this damn time. Wolf made some sort of rumbling sound in his chest, his hands reaching out and brushing the wetness off my face. But it was just replaced a second later.

"What is it?" he asked, his face a mask of masculine ineptitude when faced with feminine tears.

"I can't," I objected, shaking my head as I dropped my face into my hands.

"I can take it," he said with so much confidence that I wanted to believe him.

"No... you can't," I objected. No one could. I barely could and I had lived through it.

"Janie..."

"Fine!" I screeched, flying off the bed, vision blurry with tears as I threw his laptop lid open and started typing. "Fine. You think you can handle it? Fine. Look!" I demanded, storming away from the laptop on the dining room table and sitting down in the center of the bed, arms crossed, not bothering to try to stop the tears because I knew it was no use. Everything about me was a challenge, daring him to go, to look, to see that he didn't have the stomach for it.

But it wasn't anger that it stemmed from; it was need. I needed someone to know, to understand, to see why I am the way I am.

He claimed he could take it. Well, I needed to see for myself if that was true.

Wolf watched me for a long moment, reading me, then slowly moved off the bed and walked to the dining table. He sat down and moved the cursor down. I knew the exact moment that it happened, the second his eyes relayed the message to his brain and he knew what he was looking at. He physically jerked backward in his chair, his entire body going ramrod straight.

I expected him to look up at me, to see disgust and horror and pity in his eyes. But he didn't. One of his hands balled into a fist on the table, the other moved the page down more.

He wasn't breaking.

He wasn't falling apart.

He was handling it.

God.

God.

On a loud sob, I flung myself back on the bed, burrowing under the blankets, curling up on my side, and letting the pain leech out of me.

The bed depressed a few minutes later and a cool draft hit me as the blanket was pulled up. The next second, I was wrapped up tight against Wolf's massive chest, his arms a familiar anchor around me.

"Took it," he murmured during a short respite in my embarrassingly loud sobs. "Doesn't change anything," he went on, his hand moving up to stroke my hair.

If I was paying attention, I would have felt the crack in my walls; I would have felt him start to slip in. But I wasn't focusing on that. I was focusing on the strange mix of grief and gratitude swirling through my system.

We stayed that way for a long time as my body wore through some of the long-buried pain, until I was too tired to do anything but sleep. And with Wolf there, wrapping me up tight, it was the first night in almost nine years that I didn't wake up screaming.

But I did wake up alone.

Wolf was gone.

But this time he left a note.

It was a message that changed everything.

J-

He can't get away with it.

- W

ELEVEN

Wolf

The second I realized what I was looking at, I wanted to slam the laptop shut, throw it across the room, and hunt down the mother fucker.

But she was watching. She was watching and searching for any tiny sign that it was sickening me, that it was too much for me to handle. And it was sickening. It
was
too much for anyone to handle. Up until that moment, I could only guess. I could only assume what happened to her. Not that it was a huge mystery. If it involved Lex Keith and someone female, well, let's just say that everyone knew what went down there.

It was one thing to know it.

It was a complete other to fucking
see
it. On the internet.

How many times had she tortured herself with the images?

How many times did she relive it?

I knew the answer to that, though. She relived it every single night of her fucking life. She relived it whenever she felt a man's hands on her. It was in every training session where she learned to make herself too strong, too fast to be a victim again. It was in the way she kept everyone from getting close enough to learn the bloody details and therefore offer her pity.

I climbed into bed and held her until she cried herself dry then fell into what seemed to be a dreamless sleep. I waited for just before dawn, left her a note, and headed out the door.

That bastard made her scream.

He made her uncomfortable in her own skin.

So now he needed to scream.

And have the luxury of his skin taken away from him.

I had to go hunting.

TWELVE

Janie

I read the note twice before it sunk in, then charged to the door to check outside for his truck. Harley and Chopper flew out the door to go hunt and sunbathe or whatever it was they did. I simply started to freak the eff out.

He couldn't go after Lex. Even with my bugging out and culling his army a bit, I was sure there were many left. It would never be a fair fight. Wolf might have been a Goliath, but he wasn't bulletproof. If he went in there all hot and irrational, he was going to die.

I couldn't let that happen.

I went back into the cabin and found Wolf had left his cell, presumably for me, on the counter in the kitchen. I snatched it up and hit the only number I could think of.

"Malcolm," he answered, sounding distracted.

"I need to talk to Cash right now," I said into the phone, my tone a little hysterical as I swatted at my cheeks. I knew, I just
knew
that my eyes would never stop leaking once the dam gave way.

"Jstorm?" he asked, immediately alert.

"Right now," I said again and I could hear him on the move.

"Everything okay?" he asked and I closed my eyes tight, shaking my head even though he couldn't see me. "It's Janie," I heard him say. "She needs to talk to Cash."

"Hey kid, what's up?" Cash's easy voice reached my ear, sounding back to his old self.

"You need to get your brother and Repo and like... everyone else at the compound and you need to go and find Wolf. Like... right now, Cash."

"Calm down," Cash said and I took a deep breath.

"What's going on?" Lo's voice asked in the background and the knife stabbed into my chest.

"Wolf is hunting Lex Keith."

There was a pause. "When?"

"I don't know. He was gone when I woke up. He left a note. That's all I got."

"Fuck. Shit. God damn it," he said, his voice low and I got the confirmation I was looking for: Wolf on the hunt was about as bad as things could get. "Be there as soon as possible," he said, sounding almost soothing suddenly. "I'm bringing Lo to sit with you," he informed me then hung up before I could object.

Having done all that I could do, I wrapped my arm so it wasn't so incriminating and climbed back into bed and waited.

"Janie?" Lo's voice reached me a while later. "You in here, babe?"

I couldn't do it. I couldn't face her. I was a mess. I burrowed deeper into the blankets.

"Honey." Her hand landed down on my shoulder. I flew up in the bed, crashing into the headboard. "It's me. Hey, it's me," she did in the 'soothing a scared animal' voice. I tilted my head up to the ceiling, taking deep breaths, willing the tears to stop flowing, trying to lock it all down. "You alright, honey?"

Oh what a loaded, loaded question.

I didn't want to lie to her, but what choice did I really have?

I tilted my head down, getting my first good look at her since I left almost nine days before. "Your face," I gasped, a spiraling feeling in my stomach. I knew she had been beat up, but it was another thing to see it. I'd seen Lo all kinds of battle-weary over the years, in various degrees of beat up. She always wore it well, like a badge of honor, never once even suggesting that it somehow made her less of a warrior for getting her ass handed to her here and there. But it wasn't the same. When it wasn't a fair fight, when it was one of her demons popping up out of nowhere and trying to drag her back down into hell.

"Back is worse," she shrugged, as was her nature. "Your arm," she said, gesturing toward the gauze. "Burn right?" she asked and I felt my head snap up. She knew. She
knew.
"Know you like a little sister. Did you really think I'd miss the Jstorm signature? No one does explosions like you, babe."

Of course she knew. What an idiot I was to think I would get away with it. I raked a hand through the bird's nest I called hair. "You knew. How long?"

"Since about the minute after I picked myself up off the ground."