But, by them going without me, there wouldn’t be any barrier.
There wouldn’t be any second chance, no backup.
The door to Cole’s clubhouse room flew open, the shock of it tearing through my troubled thoughts.
In rushed another person just as panicked as me.
“Lucy,” I breathed. “What are you—”
“Can you believe those overprotective, caveman fuckups did this to us?”
“Tell me,” I urged, trying to cut through her obvious rage. “What do you know?”
“More than either of them think.” She ran her hand through her purple waves and sucked in a breath clearly trying to calm herself. Her gaze was intense as it shot straight to mine. “I wasn’t willing to take the risk even if they were. I took precautions.”
I stepped forward, my urgency taking me over. “What precautions?”
She reached back and pulled a phone from her back pocket. After a few seconds of swiping, she flipped it so I could see the screen. “This.”
I studied the display.
A red flashing circle was traveling rapidly across a map of the neighboring city and towns surrounding Warlow.
“I tagged Mason,” she told me.
I cocked an eyebrow. “You did what?”
She shrugged like it was no big deal. “He thinks I don’t know that he tagged me with the thing a while back so he could watch my back in that sweet, yet also infuriating way all these MC boys have got going for them. I knew, but I pretended I didn’t and kept it on me just so he could have the peace of mind he needed. Then, when he started disappearing to cloak and dagger meetings in the middle of the night, I figured he was planning to do something I wouldn’t like. You know, like getting himself fucking killed? So, yeah, I put the tracer thingy on him, attached it to his cut before we went to bed tonight.” She rolled her eyes. “Good thing I did, huh, because look at what the idiots have done. They’re riding headlong into major danger.”
“They think they can handle it.”
“Yeah, well, desperation can make people assume a lot of things.”
Guilt lanced through me. “It’s my fault.” I rubbed my hand over my bump. “Cole wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for me, meaning Mason wouldn’t be endangering himself right now either.”
“No, Nat,” she said. “This was always slated to happen. This whole thing with Nik Stone was going to come to a head at some point. You were actually the one thing that offered up a way for them to hit him without it leading to their certain deaths. A distraction. Nik’s weakness.” She winced. “But now, they’ve gone without you and—”
“They’re in trouble,” I finished for her.
Worry clouded her blue eyes. “Yeah. Big time.”
Talking all of this out with somebody instead of letting the panic build by keeping it to myself had actually helped to clear my head. Logic had prevailed, squashing my emotion.
And, now, I knew what I had to do.
I stepped back from Lucy and rushed as fast as I could to Cole’s bedside table. I hastily opened the top drawer of the unit. Relief coursed through me as I found what I’d hoped I would, what he’d shown me the first time I’d ever been in his clubhouse room years ago.
A quick-access pistol safe.
I hauled it out and deposited it on the bed.
“Is that what I think it is?” Lucy asked, coming over.
“Yeah,” I confirmed.
“Do you really think there’s actually anything in there? He would’ve taken his gun with him.”
“He has two. This one always stays here. Always.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“Because I know Cole, the parts of him that he doesn’t show anyone. He’s still in survival mode. All these years after your parents’ deaths and living on the run, he hasn’t been able to put it in the past. He’s always on high-alert, hyper-vigilant. He doesn’t feel safe. He doesn’t feel like he can ever really let his guard down and rest. This is his last line of defense if everything went to hell and the club was attacked at its stronghold without any prior warning.”
“Shit, that’s some heavy paranoia.”
I shook my head sadly. “Not in the world he and I live in really. Maybe his is a little… enhanced. But it’s for good reason.”
I could see her taking my words in and the sadness that crept over her features cut at me. It didn’t surprise me that she hadn’t been aware of how deeply scarred and broken Cole was. He kept her at a distance, kept her out of club business, out of all of it. It was what he thought he needed to do to protect her and safeguard the remnants of her innocence. He wanted light for his little sister not a life surrounded by suffocating dark. He bore the burden for her. As admirable and noble as his intentions were it’d had the unintentional effect of severely straining their relationship, of causing extreme tension between them.
“Well, maybe once Nik and the Strikers are put down he can finally rest,” she said. “And you and the baby will help a lot too.”
“I agree. But for that to happen he needs to live through this. They both do.”
She bit her lip, fighting to reign in her emotion with knowing the two people she cared about most in the world were in very real danger. And then, impressing me, she sucked in a deep breath, folded her arms across her chest and asked me, suddenly all business, “What’s your plan?”
I returned my focus to the safe and punched in the six-digit code. I heard it unlock, then whipped it open and pulled out Cole’s Glock. I double-checked the magazine, ensuring it was fully loaded, then snapped it back into place.
“We’re going to do the saving this time.”
23
~Cole~
“HOLD POSITION.”
I gritted my teeth at Slade’s command coming in loud and clear via my earpiece. That rumbling bark of his sounded more aggravating than I’d ever known
