CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Diesel
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I growled as I pushed The fucking Killer up against the wall, my forearm automatically going to his neck. The club pictures hanging there rattled and a couple crashed to the ground. I didn’t let up on the pressure even though I had technically asked a question.
“Diesel!” Loch barked.
Then there was a hand on my shoulder. Slender, tan fingers dug in until my body decided to twitch away from the pain. Fucking Nadya.
“Step down, D,” Loch said in a calmer tone.
I was fuming and really wanted to punch this fuck for coming back here without Bocca. He had the damn nerve to saunter up in here like everything was alright.
I took a step back, but only because of Loch. Nadya still crowded my space, ready to take me down in the blink of an eye.
Or try to.
Fine, she might have actually been able to best me. I hadn’t ever gone up against her and honestly, had no desire to.
Silas stayed against the wall, though his stance was cool as ever. His eyes pinned me with a coldness that didn’t fit his stature at the moment.
He’d come around the club a few times since Nadya got together with Tank. I hadn’t made a point to know the guy and didn’t really care to.
“Well, I came here to fill you in since I knew Hunt wouldn’t do it,” Silas stated in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Go on, then,” Cal said as he walked up with Axe and Tank right behind.
We didn’t bother going to the office because there was no one else around. And though Nadya was there, it was something we all were willing to overlook. Truth was, we all thought of her as half-in, anyway. After she helped us out with the Savage shit, she kind of made her way in. And it wasn’t like we could stop her from inserting herself in at times. And I knew this was one of those times.
I didn’t lose my cool very often, but right now I was hanging on by a thread. I could only picture the worst happening when I thought about where Bocca was. I wasn’t dumb, I knew what kind of danger he was going into. I knew how those guys worked and if he got caught, I knew there was a limited window before they put a bullet between his eyes. The longer the minutes ticked on, the more I prepared myself that we’d be getting a body back. I couldn’t let that happen and the fact that I wasn’t out there looking for him only made it worse.
“We tracked them to a house,” Silas started, looking at Cal as he talked. So Bocca hadn’t been in the fire, thank fuck! I knew we all were secretly worried about that and in a way, none of us even entertained the idea that he had been. “He was gone. It looked like he’d managed to escape. I don’t think we missed him by much because they weren’t even aware that he’d escaped. We took out everyone in the house, but Keften wasn’t there.”
“Keften?” Axe asked.
“Keften Jugovac. Croatian. Runs one of the smaller sex trafficking rings in the lower east coast. This thing was his. The last year he’s been pushing hard to grow and he’s been gaining a lot of new ground and contacts. Best we figured, he slipped out of the house the moment he heard shit going down. I had no doubt that he was there, because he is very hands on.”
“We have a name now,” Loch said in almost a mumble.
Didn’t help us one bit right now.
I only felt like I could breathe a half sigh of relief. Bocca had got himself out. But where the fuck was he? And why hadn’t he made contact? I glanced around and I could tell that we all were asking the same questions silently. There was no point in voicing them because it wasn’t like the answers would come out of thin air.
“Hunt is still looking for him,” Silas carried on. “That’s all I know. I wasn’t needed anymore and he let me know that I was also unwanted.”
I gave him a nod. It was almost an apology, but I couldn’t quite let myself back down just yet.
“Where was this?” Cal asked.
“Charlotte. They didn’t take him far. Is there anyone there that he might know. Might feel like he could go to? I have to warn you, he’s probably in bad shape.”
Silas didn’t go into details but he didn’t need to. We knew what could be done to the human body. We knew what tactics to use to get someone to talk. My eyes dropped to the ground. I had done many of those things, and as the images of what I’d done replayed themselves in my memory, Bocca’s face suddenly replaced the ones of those that I’d done that to.
“Fuck,” I breathed out.
“Sara Ann,” Loch said and it was like a light went off in all of our heads. “I’ll call.”
“There’s one more thing,” Silas said as Loch went to step away to call Sara Ann, but paused to hear what Silas had to say. “There was a body when we got there. My only guess was that Bocca had no choice. And I have to be honest, the devil has nothing on the things that she’s done.”
My eyes almost popped out of my head. Bocca killing, that wasn’t all that surprising. But a female, that was.
“They called her The Butcher. If that gives you any indication as to how bad she actually was.”
That statement alone made me understand one hundred percent. After all, there was a time that I wanted to kill a woman, and almost had. I would have, hadn’t my woman gotten to her first. Sometimes, you just couldn’t excuse crazy.
But that didn’t mean that Bocca wasn’t going to take it hard. It didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to feel regret and shame over it. Or that he was going to be able to brush it off like all the other ones.
However, that was something to deal with another day. You know, after we found him and all.
Without a word, Loch nodded and stepped away as he raised the phone to his ear.
Done talking, Silas bent over and scooped up the pictures that fell to the ground when I had assaulted him. I did feel a bit bad about it, attacking him, that was.
“Thanks,” I said as he stood back up and reached my hand out to him as a way of saying sorry about everything.
“I get it,” he replied and shook my hand.
Then his eyes snapped to the frames he held in his opposite hand. For a long moment, we all stood frozen in place as he got lost in whatever he was looking at. Feeling awkward, I leaned over and glanced at the picture.
“That’s from her going away party,” I said, my head flashing back to the moment we all said goodbye to a woman that wasn’t just a clubwhore to us all. She was more and I hoped she knew that.
Silas had gone ghost white and if I wasn’t mistaken, the steady-handed man was actually trembling.
“Is that…?” Nadya’s question trailed off as Silas snapped his gaze up to her.
“Who is this?” he asked looking around at each one of us.
“Jessica,” Axe answered pinning Silas with a hard stare.
Though he didn’t love the woman like maybe they both wanted him to, he still cared very deeply for her and was protective over her even if she was no longer here.
“Jessica what?” he asked.
I had to scratch my head. It was kind of shitty, but I didn’t have the first fucking clue what her last name was. Damn. I wondered if any of us did. Bocca. I knew for sure he did, but only because he knew fucking everything about everyone.
And that had me thinking about how much we relied on him. How much we expected of him and maybe never really said thanks. It also made me see exactly how important he really was to this club. You better bet that once we got him back I was never going to take him for granted again.
“Sara Ann said she hasn’t seen him,” Loch said breaking in on whatever the hell was going on and not even realizing it. But this was more important than…whatever the hell it was. “She’s been at work, on the last leg of a twenty-four-hour shift. He hasn’t come to the ER or tried to contact her.”
Fuck! I really thought we would have had something there.
“Let’s ride,” Cal said. “Search around the hospital. Maybe he’s hiding out there waiting for her to get off. Check her house too.”
“I think she has a condo not far from the hospital,” Loch said as his old ass attempted to type out a text. Took him way too fucking long to do that shit. “Yeah, got the address.”
“Diesel, you’re with Loch. Axe with me. Tank…well, stay here, I know you have to get Grass in a bit.”
“It’s okay,” Nadya cut in, giving Tank a quick jerk of her chin. “I’ll get him.”
She had oddly stepped into the mother role without hesitation from the moment Grass was brought home. There was some kind of beautifully strange relationship between her and the little boy. I say that because Nadya was not the warm and fuzzy type. In fact, she was downright cold and terrifying most of the time. But there were those moments, the ones that were only for Tank and Grass when she softened a little.
I guessed Cal was still getting used to the fact that Tank wasn’t really a single parent anymore. Which he should have, Nadya had been around for a while at this point.
Without another word, we took off. Sure Hunter was still out there looking and doing his thing, but since we had somewhere to look, we weren’t going to sit around on our asses. Who knew, maybe we were way off base here but what could it hurt, right?
Besides, moving was what we needed right now. The longer we stood still and waited, the harder it was to keep our thoughts positive. And that was killing me. I couldn’t lose him. Not because he was the best at that nerd shit. Or that he could get the information that we needed and more when it came to a lot of things. Or that he was the number one member that helped spot the danger coming most of the time. It wasn’t even that he could do shit that none of the rest of us could.
It was that he was a brother, through to the soul. His blood was my blood. Same as Cal’s. Same as Tank’s. Same as everyone here. And more than that, he was one of the best ones. He’d always had my back and I sure as fuck wasn’t going to let him down when he needed me to have his.