BOOTH

The pizza tasted like cardboard. The day was finally catching up with me, and I just wanted all the hangers-on gone.

Of course, Deck’s parents weren’t in that category, but they had already left. They were staying with Jason for the night since the next day was Squirt’s fourth birthday, and they would be back for the party. I couldn’t believe my little goddaughter was going to be four. It felt like just yesterday I had her in my arms walking the floor with her, trying to settle her from a bout of colic.

This little baby brought the whole club to its knees. Former soldiers turned bikers saved by a bundle of pink. She helped bring out the softness in us all. A softness we all thought we had lost long ago in that nightmare desert.

“Booth, you might want to come see this.” Steel’s voice penetrated my mind. His voice left no room for disagreeing, so I threw the pizza I had been trying to eat back into the cardboard box and got up to follow him.

My VP never asked me to do something for just the hell of it. I just hoped it didn’t have anything to do with Rogue. I didn’t have the energy tonight to deal with his fuckery.

I followed a sombre Steel to the war room where all my senior patched brothers were standing there waiting for me.

This can’t be good.

“Okay, men, what is this about?” I asked, instinctually using my CO voice. It was a thing that I did without too much conscious thought. My role as their CO and now their president were very similar. Only the later usually didn’t include any of my men dying.

Ford stepped forward and pointed towards his beloved laptop.

“About twenty minutes ago, the silent alarm sounded for the emergency exit at the back of the laundry. About seven minutes ago, the silent alarm triggered for the back garden shed,” he explained. As he told me this, he and none of my other brothers looked too concerned about the alarms, but they did look stricken about something.

“So, by the fact that none of you have drawn your weapons and torn out of here to the garden shed, I am deducing you aren’t too concerned about these breeches.” It wasn’t a question. I knew my men, and I knew the next thing said wasn’t going to please me.

“Pres, do you know where Stella is?” Deck asked me.

What the fuck? Now that wasn’t what I thought was going to be the next thing said.

“No. She was in the laundry room before but had to leave.”

She took off like a scalded cat after she came while she ground herself down hard on my denim-covered cock, sucked my tongue into her mouth, and made me come in my own jeans like a fifteen-year-old boy. But they didn’t need to know that part. I did, and that was all that mattered.

“Check this out,” Ford said, turning the screen so I could see it. He fiddled with the mouse a bit before an image appeared. Stella. She was coming out of the exit door, and true to my earlier thought, like a scalded cat. Her face looked flushed, and from what I could see, she was talking with herself, her hands going to her lips and staying there. Her fingers rubbed back and forth over her swollen lips—I knew they were swollen because I’d caused it—but you couldn’t see it from the vision. She spent a few minutes walking around like she didn’t have a destination. Ford moved the mouse, and Stella started walking in fast-forward motion. He stopped when she reached the garden shed. Once again, it was in real time, and I watched as Stella looked back at the main building and then slipped into the shed.

“Okay, so where is she?” I asked the room at large. There had better be someone who could answer why my honey was apparently sleeping in a shed on my compound.

“Still in there, Booth,” Mannix replied quietly.

Before I could reply to that, Ford started fiddling again with the keyboard. I stood very still, waiting. Why was Stella in the garden shed? And why did Steel, Deck, Creed, Darth, and Mannix look like they were ready to start crying and then hit somebody? Because that was what I wanted to do at that moment. I reined in my temper when Ford started talking.

“Pres, when I watched this footage, it got me thinking. I have noticed the silent alarm for the garden shed has been going off a fair bit lately. Not every day, maybe once or twice a week. So I decided to pull up a few security images. You know? To see if anyone is accessing it from the outside. And I found some really disturbing shit.” Ford hit a button, and three screens came up. The quality was good, and so it should be considering the fucking price of the surveillance shit Ford bought, or should I say, I bought.

“You might want to sit for this, brother,” Creed said solemnly.

What the fuck was going on with them. I was about to say this when I noticed Stella again on camera. She was walking out from the compound to her car in the car park. She got into her car but only drove it around to the side of the building where I noticed the break in the fence.

Damn, I had meant to get to that maintenance on the fencing for a full year now. But thoughts of that disappeared as I watched my honey get out of her car and push herself through the break in the fence. Once again, she disappeared into the darkness of the night.

“Where did she go?” I asked in a hushed whisper. But somehow, I thought I already knew, and my gut clenched at the thought.

“She sleeps in there, Booth. I have gone through all of the footage and have counted ten times. Every time shows Stella driving her car around to that part of the fence,” Ford informed me. “There are also at least six times that I can find that she sleeps in her car in the car park,” he added, pointing to a screen where I saw Stella getting straight into the back seat of her small, compact car and not get out. My brain must have been failing me because I couldn’t make head or tails of what I was seeing. It was as if I had been struck dumb. Stella had a home. I knew I had seen it, even dropped her off a time or two. Never been in, but I had watched her go inside safely before taking off.

What in the fuck was she hiding? Who was she hiding from? And why was she hiding all of this from me? I knew Charlotte, Rainn, and Stella was up to something on the evening before Dundee’s funeral. Going with my gut, I looked at Ford.

“Ford, pull up the cameras to the strip club from yesterday. Go about twenty minutes before we left here to go find Charlotte. Put it up on my monitors.” I sat down in my chair and waited for Ford to do what he did. My screens were bigger than the laptop screen, and I wanted to see things very clearly.

“Okay, here is Teach. She is arriving at the front.” We watched as the beautiful Charlotte hurried into the front entrance of the strip club, carrying a bag and looking worried and upset. Not the look of a person going to teach someone dance steps. I glanced at Deck and saw him gritting his teeth. His protectiveness over his woman had no limits. I knew he hated that she took off like she did, without detail. I understood that emotion.

“Go to the back cameras,” I demanded on a hunch.

The screen switched to the back cameras, and low and behold, Stella’s car was in the back lot.

“Rewind,” I growled.

He did, and it didn’t take long for Stella to appear. He pressed play again, and I watched as she pulled into a park and just sat there for a few minutes. You could see her phone was up to her ear. Calling Charlotte? Stella stayed in the car for a few more seconds, and I was about to tell Ford to forward the footage a bit when I saw the car door being flung open. I watched as Stella practically stumbled out of the car, her arms wrapped around her waist. She looked like she was in pain, but what I saw next had my fucking blood boiling.

Her lip was split open, and there was blood coming from it and her nose. And she was sobbing as she walked stiffly to the back door and went inside.

“Someone is going to fucking die.” It wasn’t a threat or just something to say in the heat of the moment. It was a promise. Some cunt had put his hands on my honey, and I wanted his fucking blood.

“Agreed.” Steel snarled. I knew my VP had a soft spot in his heart for my Stella, and I was glad for it, glad for her to have so many people who cared and loved her. But he and I would be talking soon, for he needed to know—she’s mine.

How could anyone put their hands on such a small woman and draw blood? The thought made me want to vomit. How many times had this happened to her? Oh, shit. It then hit me. Fuck me, the bruises. The yellowing marks on her jaw and the extra bruises that had come up since the accident that took Dundee’s life. They didn’t happen then—she already had some. The doctor even mentioned that accidents worked in strange ways and that some of her injuries made no sense to him, but he brushed them off. Fuck, I brushed them off, just accepted that they had happened when she hit the window and the airbag deployed. I never even questioned the one on her jaw that was on the wrong side for it to have happened by hitting the driver’s window.

It hit me and made sense all at once. Her need to do overtime and never wanting to take money for it, simply stating it was her fault for not finishing her jobs on time. Her long-sleeved T-shirts, no matter the weather. Was she hiding more bruises? Oh, Jesus Christ, how had I been so blind? My honey was being abused, and I was just seeing it now. Fucking idiot.

“Pres.” Mannix’s voice brought me back to the moment, and his chin lift towards the screen had me looking back to where Rainn had joined Stella at her car. I watched as Rainn looked at her surroundings before lifting Stella’s top and showing Stella’s black and blue stomach with fresh red marks lining her ribs. Then Rainn helped Stella pull her arm out of her sleeve, and I fucking roared. Picking up the closest thing next to me, which happened to be my handheld GPS, I hurled it across the room. The expensive gadget shattered against the wall.

“Mother fucking fuck,” I yelled when I saw a large red welt, blistered and bleeding. Some soon-to-be-dead prick had twisted her arm so hard that they had left behind wring marks and blisters. It looked like a bad Chinese burn. This wasn’t some school-aged kid who had done this, either. By the look of the welts, it was a grown person with the strength to twist the shit out of her soft, delicate skin.

“Jesus.” Darth breathed out. He, too, looked like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. How could anyone hurt Stella?

“Pres, you want me to go down to the shed and get her?” Creed asked, but I shook my head instantly.

“No. She can’t deal with this tonight, and I don’t want her to get spooked and take off. I can’t fucking protect her if I don’t have eyes on her.” My first instinct was to go down there and pull her out of that shed and into my arms, but I couldn’t. Not yet.

“Steel, get two prospects down there. Tell them what is going on. Tell them to be fucking quiet. I don’t want her scared or aware that we are onto her. Stella feels shit deeply, and this will embarrass her. I don’t want her to run. Creed, I need Ford and you to go through this footage. Go back to the first day she started here. I want documentation of as many injuries as you can see. I want that on a memory stick on this desk by morning.” I got up as I gave my orders. Making my way to the door, I looked back at the table.

“Deck and Mannix, talk to your women before I do. And trust me, you don’t want me to.” I growled at them, ignoring Deck’s clenched jaw and fisted hands. Yeah? Well, fuck you, Deck. Bring it on, brother, because with the mood I am in right now, I could take all you bastards on and go back for seconds.

“Call Ingrid,” I barked as I left the room.

“Get fucked,” Creed yelled back at me.

Fine, I would call her my fucking self.

***

There was a soft knock at my door twenty minutes after I left the guys in the war room. I felt like a fucking dick for doing it, but they couldn’t know the real reason why I kept calling Ingrid to my room some nights. I couldn’t handle the reason myself, so how was I to expect them to understand it if I fucking couldn’t? All I knew was I needed some fucking sleep without the aid of drinking myself into a stupor. I was getting far too old for that shit. And I needed my wits about me.

Stella needed me to have my wits about me.

“Come in,” I called out quietly. The door opened, and Ingrid gave me a knowing smile. Her arms were full of everything she needed to get her through the night.

“Hey, boss,” Ingrid greeted as she set her textbooks down on the desk that she used when she studied in here.

“Thanks for coming, Ingrid.”

She waved her hand at me like she didn’t need thanks. This was a two-way street for both of us. She got to study for her law degree in peace away from the madness of her family of thirteen siblings, and I got to sleep most of the night without too many nightmares. Well, those I could cope with most of the time. I mean, yeah, they woke me in cold sweats most of the time, and they sucked shit, but it was the goddamn crying I did in my sleep that pissed me the fuck off.

I felt like half a man when it happened. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it. I was a lieutenant in the commandos, for Christ’s sake. I’d led men into battle, strategized with bloody colonels. Three tours in Afghanistan and one hellish deployment to Somalia. You would think I could manage to sleep on my own without a fucking light on.

I gave Ingrid a chin lift and then started for my room.

“Booth?” I stopped at my name, but I didn’t turn around.

“You know this is hurting her, right? She would understand if you just talked to her.”

I nodded my head once, and then left Ingrid in the room she used when she stayed here.

This wasn’t the first time Ingrid had told me this, and I knew she was right. Stella was the most kind-hearted person I knew, except for maybe Teach and Mia.

She would understand, but I couldn’t tell her, not yet. If I told her and saw pity in her eyes, that would piss me off. I didn’t want pity. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Well, yeah, I knew one thing I wanted.

I wanted Stella and more of her kisses.

But for now, I would have to settle for some sleep.