Tread: Biker Romance (Ronin MC Series Book 1) (30 page)

“I need to know everything right fucking now,” I said in a low voice, stern and sincere.

“All right. Since your little fucking rampage, we sat back and used our fucking heads. Stevie-the-hacker pulled some numbers off the phone the girls collected from the stiff.”

“Why the hell were the women collecting a damn phone? Start making some damn sense!”

“They were out cleaning the trailer when some mules snuck through the fence. Lola called Harvey and he told them to grab their wares and send them back. One of them got froggy and Tatum put him down. They got the phone off the body. The next morning, yesterday morning, they were taken from the saloon.”

“What the epic fuck is going on around here? Ladies taking up arms against mulers?” Alt interjected in the background.

“Shut up, Alt. You can bet your ass we’ll deal with that later.” Royal shot a look back then turned to me. “Tatum and Grace were taken. The number confirms what Derrick told us about drug cartel families in the area.” He looked in my eyes to see if I was comprehending. Concussion or not, I got what he was saying, so I met his stare with my own. “Now. We think the cartel just wants their drugs back, and we have it stashed. We’re going to call the number that we think belongs to the cartel and see if we can cut a deal.”

My mind wasn’t as absorbent as I thought. It was clouded with the images from my nightmare, hatred for Harvey, resentment toward Lola and Mac. I eyed around the room wildly. “Are y’all gonna just stand there or let me loose?”

Royal took a step back to survey me. I didn’t know what he was looking at me for. Right then, I was a demon of hate and discontent. I wouldn’t blame him if he kept me bound.

“Are you gonna be good?” Royal asked.

My gaze fell to the ground to conceal my thoughts as I nodded.

Alt came forward and cut the flex cuffs that held my arms and legs. I slowly stood, all eyes on me were worried about what I might do. All but Mac’s. He seemed prepared to put me down if I jumped the wrong way.

“Sorry about your nose, Mac,” I mumbled, rubbing the sting out of my wrists.

“I’ll heal. Are you gonna cut the shit or what?”

“Are we sure this isn’t what happened to Kit? They could be grabbing our women right under our fucking noses,” I said, watching Royal’s eyes get tight and his jaw clench.

“No. We talked to Veesa and Marley. Kit has nothing to do with this. She was never a part of anything dangerous before she left,” he ground out. “Are you gonna get your head in the game? You’re the tracker. I need you to table your crazy and think like one.”

I paced in a tight circle, brushing my hands through my hair, and forced my breaths to even out. Just this morning, I couldn’t wait to get home to my woman, and it turns out she had been gone for twenty-four hours. I wasn’t going to be Royal searching for dead ends months later.

“Think, Tread. Live up to your name, brother,” Alt rumbled in his low tone.

Tread. Tire tracks. If only there was a way to track them, but the roads were all paved. Roads. Maps.

My arms fell and my head came up to meet his eyes. “Yeah, I think I’m good. And I may I have an idea.” I pulled out my phone and fired up an app. This app was linked to my wrist Garmins—both of them—but it was the same one I had shown Grace on my iPad. One Garmin was missing.

I clicked on the serial number that belonged to the wrist Garmin from home. After loading, a flag was planted on the map. I placed two fingers on the screen and spread them apart, zooming the view outward then looked up.

“I found the girls.”

“What?” Mac and Royal said in unison.

“Holy shit,” Alt said in awe.

I turned the phone around and showed them. The flag was placed south of the border, maybe fifty miles from the saloon as the crow flies. The app even gave me the nearest known address. I walked behind the bar and grabbed a pen from the cup near the register. Jotting down the address on a napkin, I opened my Maps app on my phone. I entered the address, it loaded then dropped a pin near the previous location.

“I got an address. What’s the play, Royal?” I asked.

“Not guns-blazing. That’ll probably do more harm than good. Last resort. Let’s call them and see what it is they want from the dead guy’s phone. Last thing we need is a full out war with a cartel full of drug money. Give me an hour and then meet me upstairs at the table.”

“Where is fucking Harvey?” I finally asked.

“I talked him into taking a shift at the hospital where the boys are recovering. Far away from you. He’s done enough,” Royal responded as he turned for the stairs.

“Fine with me. He’ll bleed another day,” I threatened as I walked outside.

Mac followed me out and lit a cigarette. I followed his lead, needing it badly. We were eyeing each other. I assumed he was waiting to see if we were going to finish our scrap.

Not feeling up to it as my adrenaline crashed, I just looked at him and kept my space. He spread his arms out wide and came towards me, and I met him the same.

A hug and pats on the back was how two brothers squashed their beef. We stepped back and silently finished our smokes without a word. I wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation even if he wanted one.

I was taking stock of what I needed from the house. Guns and Ammo. A new set of clothes that didn’t smell of hops would probably be fine as well. I tossed my butt towards the can and blew smoke out of my nose. Demons. These fucking cartel assholes were gonna die.

I went back to my house and saw it with whole new eyes. The possibility of not getting my girl back threatened to make me want to toss the couch into the TV. Instead, I made sure everything was how she left it. It seemed important right then to leave the clean clothes in the basket on the couch so that she could put them where she liked. Instead, I packed from the dresser.

Back at the saloon, I took my seat at the poker table upstairs. Royal sat at the head. Booker and Alt followed behind me. The rest of the available boys lined the table on either side. Hendrix sat silently, his foot bouncing under the table, shaking it like an earthquake tremor every few seconds.

“Let’s make the call,” Royal said calmly as he typed on a laptop in front of him. He picked up the phone. “Should be a head honcho answering, the peon that answered earlier was supposed to be getting his boss.”

We waited in silence for the.

“Hello? Yeah, this is the Ronin MC.” He put the phone on speaker and placed it on the table. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Dante Montago, Vice Presidente of La Familia Diablo, Chihuahua chapter.” All eyes flew around the room. The same fucking guys we just stole from and got back from killing. Fuck!

Royal cleared his throat and continued calmly as I choked on every breath to keep from screaming. “Awesome. Now you got some things of ours, and we have some of yours. What are we going to do with that?”

“Not a clue, blanco puto For starters, I think I’m going to have my men taste your women. Then once they’re used up, I imagine we’ll dispose of them. I hope you enjoy snorting my coke.”

My eyes bulged and I sprung forward, violently jostling the table. Coke? Harvey had our women steal coke from a cartel?! Royal eyed me and held a finger to his lips, not wanting to let this guy know he was on speaker.

“Yeah, about that. See, I think that’ll actually cost you everything if you do that.”

“Oh? How do you suppose? Which one do you like better? I think I will take her for myself,” the man said, completely confident in his position.

“Well, you could do that. I guess you don’t mind a hundred blood crazed lunatics knocking at your door neither, huh? We have chapters all over this country.”

“Please! There is no way you will be finding these women, or me for that matter. As for your men, I will enjoy seeking vengeance for the men you killed.”

“Is that so? Well, you see the thing is, technology is amazing these days. I mean, you can trace almost anything, anywhere.”

What the hell was Royal doing? He was going to get them killed.

“You cannot trace this phone, burro. We have the best cyber security money can buy.”

“You could believe that. However, I know the best
hacker
money can buy, and guess what I’m looking at right now.”

“What is that, pinche gringo”

“A nice mansion in Chihuahua.”

“One of many, no doubt.”

Royal pushed the laptop so that the screen was facing away from him to show the table. “One with a pool, manicured lawn, helicopter pad. Is that a race track in the back? What do you crazies race? Burros?”

I shook my head. Please don’t tell this asshole about the GPS. I met his eyes and he shook his head with a smirk.

“I do not know what the fuck you’re playing at, blanco, but you’re about to piss me off. When I’m pissed off, I enjoy bathing in the blood of white women. Won’t be good for you, since I have one at my disposal.”

“I don’t think you’re going to be doing that. Not unless you want me to wipe your chapter off the face of the earth. I will destroy you. I’m talking scorched earth, motherfucker!” Royal yelled, leaning closer to the phone, the tendons in his neck popping.

Dante chuckled dryly. “Oh. You want to play Tom Cruise? Very well, let us play. There is a mesa you know well. The one my men died at, si? Meet me there. Four hours is enough time, yes? We’ll discuss how you’ve fucked with us for the last time.”

“Oh, we’ll come play.”

“Your disrespect is working my patience. First, you take our skinny comadreja. Then you kill my men. Then you steal my drugs. THEN! Then you kill a poor, innocent immigrant working to better his family! We are La Familia Diablo! For this you will pay dearly. With your lives, Dios willing.” With that, the man hung up the phone. Royal was angry, you could read it plain as day on his face. Good.

Royal put a finger very carefully down onto the table, like it was a point on a map, before meeting our eyes. “This is war. Tread, I want you to constantly monitor that signal you found and map out every rock of that mesa. Mac, I want you to gather anyone who isn’t here already and tell them to prep for war. Prospects, everyone but Harvey. Alt, I need the deuce and a half ready as well as the war machine. Meet back here in two hours.”

THE FIRST THOUGHT IN MY
head was that I had died.

I moved my head to the side as my temples throbbed, my neck ached, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. My stomach made itself known by rolling violently, making me gag.

“Gah,” I croaked, smacking my lips together as my throat tried to stick together when I swallowed. I coughed, jarring my hands. The rattling sound that followed startled me so much I tried to roll onto my stomach to get away from it.

That’s when I realized that my hands were bound above my head. My eyes flew open and I craned my neck back to see that I was handcuffed to a wrought-iron bedframe.

It took me two seconds to go from ‘what in the world’ to ‘oh my fucking God, I’m gonna die’. Kicking my legs, I tried to sit up as I looked around wildly. I was in a nondescript bedroom. There wasn’t much to it, just a bed, some windows that had drapes covering them, and two doors that were firmly shut.

As I got my butt under me, my hands had more room to reach out to the sides. One hand touched what felt like hair and I screamed. In the waning light, it took me a few seconds to make out the face next to my hip.

“Tatum?” I whispered, my voice trembling. She didn’t move. I couldn’t even tell if she was breathing. Barely breathing myself, I leaned down and asked again, “Tatum?”

When she didn’t move a second time, I had to resist the urge to scream for help. I may have been working off my naïveté, but I wasn’t stupid. The fact that we were taken flashed through my head, and the words of the Mexican man made me shudder. We were in deep shit if they were after us for killing the mule and didn’t know where the drugs were being held.

I looked to the window again. The light was fading, not growing, so the sun was going down. We had been at the saloon right before lunch time. The guys should be pulling in around now, if we were in the same time zone still.

I closed my eyes and rested my head against the unforgiving metal holding me captive. Tread was going to lose his mind. Just picturing him pulling into town and finding me gone had me gritting my teeth and fighting tears.

It was interesting how a few months ago I was slated to marry someone and had never thought about what happened after I disappeared. But with Tread, a man that I had fewer ties to, I felt more of a connection, and that was all I could think about.

Tread would find us. He would tear into Harvey and Veesa wouldn’t rest until we were rescued. His nightmares would be worse than ever, if he allowed himself to sleep. That fact brought a pain to my chest that wouldn’t fade away. Poor Tread had enough things to haunt him. I never wanted to be one of them.

Tatum’s lack of movement was starting to freak me out. I raised a hand and hesitantly hovered it over her face until it was shaking an inch from her nose. I closed my eyes when my panicked breathing threatened to shut out my other senses.

Finally. There. I felt a small puff of air hit my fingers and dropped the shackled hand to her shoulder, giving her a strong squeeze. She was alive. What was taking her so long to wake up, though? I remembered the cloth going over my nose. I remembered the sweet smell and light-headedness. Then nothing for sixish hours. Another thought occurred to me.

What if it was the next day? Had we lost more time than I thought? My Vet Tech training kicked in and I started thinking about how dangerous it was to keep someone sedated for long periods on inhalant anesthetics. It caused liver damage, and even death, because the tongue could easily block the airway. And Tatum was on her back.

Shit. Was her breathing weak because she couldn’t take a full breath? I pushed at Tatum’s shoulder, trying to roll her to the side, but the angle was bad and her body was so limp that even when I got her shoulder off the bed her hips and legs didn’t budge. Moving my knee into her back, I tried to force her right leg over the left with my foot. Everything was floppy and almost always went back to the way it was before I started.

Finally, I moved my whole body against her so that I was a wedge between her back and the bed. Her weight was on me, but she wouldn’t choke on her spit, or suffocate on her own tongue. As I panted against her neck, I closed my eyes in exhaustion. Something so simple shouldn’t have taken so much out of me.

I opened my eyes, Tatum’s skin inches in front of me. It was too close to focus on, but I was too tired to move. I let my mind wander as the light slowly drained from the room, hoping that she would stir awake. At least I could feel her breathing as her ribs expanded against my stomach. My eyes were so heavy, I couldn’t keep them open anymore.

Just before they closed, I noticed a black mark on Tatum’s all white shirt. It stood out because I specifically remember her telling me many times she couldn’t come in the garage because she was wearing it. It was a peasant blouse that had a wide neck and flowing arms.

Images flashed through my head of other black dots I had seen recently, mainly the ones splattered on my face. I wondered if the stain on her shirt was blood. Lifting my head, my own neck twinged with the strain as I grabbed the material with my mouth and pulled it away from her skin.

The light was barely filling the room anymore and my eyes were playing tricks on me, showing dots everywhere the more I tried to focus. Sighing, I let my head fall back and tried to find a more comfortable spot with a woman on top of me and my hands stretched out above my head.

Despite my discomfort, my eyelids quickly became too heavy.