Chapter Twenty-Six
Tigger
“Emergency meeting now,” Drag’s voice shouting down the hallway wakes me up in the dead of night. I look at the time and find it’s four in the morning. What the fuck could he want at this ungodly hour?
I fell asleep earlier after Summer left and I’m just now waking up.
“Shit,” I look down at my phone and find a text from Summer at ten thirty wondering what happened to me.
I scrub my hand down my face and get to my feet, not bothering with my shoes, instead padding over to my door and throwing it open.
I find chaos all around me. Members are running past me in the direction of the Chapel while Drag continues to scream. I take a step out of my room, but stop when I see Summer’s door wide open and Ryan crying in the corner next to Summer’s bed. She looks up at me helplessly, her entire face red with tears and Summer’s arm is hanging lifelessly from the edge of her bed.
I take another step in her direction, but Thunder pulling on my arm has me turning to face Drag.
“Chapel, now,” he growls and points to the door.
I don’t think, I take off running in that direction after Thunder and Dean and Drag slams the door shut behind us.
“Everyone have a seat, hurry,” Drag commands when the other members don’t move fast enough. I don’t want to be in here, I want to be out there trying to figure out what happened to Summer.
“We had another attack, this one is much more serious than the last one. We are going into immediate lockdown, those of you who don’t live here, go get your loved ones and your belongings and be back here within the next two hours. In two hours we are locking the place down. I have the girls already at the store getting supplies to last us the next couple of days. We are about to go to war,” Drag looks over at me pointedly and immediately I know Summer is the one who was attacked.
I don’t think, I fling the door open and take off running down the hall to Summer’s room.
“What happened?” I ask Ryan when I find her outside the door crying. “Ryan focus, tell me what happened to Summer.”
“She’s in the shower right now, Natalie is trying to clean her up. She was outside in her car crying and begging for help. From what I could gather, the same man who attacked Clara raped her. Her entire face is swollen, and her left eye has swelled so bad to the point that she can’t open it.”
She looks terrified, and all I feel is instant regret. If I hadn’t fallen asleep, none of this would’ve happened. If only I had told her who I was, she wouldn’t have been at that club tonight.
“What happened? I thought you were supposed to meet her at Black Lightning tonight?”
I let my head hang down helplessly, “I had a long night and fell asleep when I went to lie down earlier. God this is all my fault. I should’ve been there to protect her.”
“She was asking for you,” Ryan offers me a watery smile. A sad one, but she’s trying to smile and be brave for her friend.
“Drag, she’s asking for you,” I look up to find Natalie standing in the doorway with her head poking out of the door.
Drag can’t hear her over the commotion and tries again but no luck.
“Pres,” I shout, immediately gaining his attention when I shout in his direction.
He looks up in our direction and without hesitation runs towards us.
“She’s asking for you as well, although why I can’t imagine,” she eyes me up and down in disdain. Great, someone else who blames me for not being there tonight.
I ignore her and push past her and over to the bed where Summer is lying down on it with her back turned towards us.
“Summer?” I ask, kneeling down on the floor next to the bed.
She struggles to turn to face me, and I help her, gently guiding her around, so she’s lying facing towards me.
She looks like she’s been hit by a semi-truck and the sob she releases tells me she feels that way too.
“God Summer, I’m so sorry,” I reach forward with a shaky hand and gently caress the side of her face. She doesn’t flinch away from me which is surprising and instead a tear leaks out of her eye and tracks down the side of her face.
“I know this is hard for you, Summer, but I need you to look at some photos and tell me if you recognize any of the men I show you,” Drag is always about business. He doesn’t do well with emotional bullshit, so he sticks to business.
“What name did he give you, Summer?”
“Leo,” she whispers.
I can see she doesn’t want to talk about this and I have every intention of dropping this subject the second we are done talking about this. The last thing I want to do is have this conversation with her and have her remember what happened to her tonight.
“That name sounds awfully familiar, does it not Drag?” I glance up at him and see he has the notebook Kara gave him out and sure enough he opens to a page near the front and tosses the notebook down into my lap.
I lift it up and sure enough next to Lefty’s alias is the name, Leo. I quickly take out my phone and scroll through the photos and stop when I get to the one I want.
She squints and stares at the photo hard, but then shakes her head no. “I’ve seen that man before, but that’s not the one I saw tonight.”
I turn the phone around in confusion. If that’s not who she saw tonight, then who was it. Only when I turn around, the photo on the screen isn’t Lefty, but of Connoly.
“Summer, focus on me,” I tell her turning the phone back around to face her. I point at the screen, “when did you see this man?”
“About a week ago at Black Lightning, he was watching me from across the room. He seemed like a nice guy, he asked me if I wanted to dance, but I politely declined. It was a few minutes before the person I was meeting showed up,” I sigh and turn the phone around and hand it to Drag to have a look. “I saw him a while back at the grocery store too when Bella first got out of the hospital, but he gave me a different name, and he was in a car.
That’s why they attacked Summer, they know how much she means to me. If she met me a few minutes after Connoly asked her to dance, that means he saw me with her.
Jesus fucking Christ that means Connoly is here in town lurking around. That means we need to get everyone here on lockdown as soon as possible.
I quickly take my phone back from her, and flip to the next photo and turn it around to face her. I don’t even need to ask her if that’s who attacked her. When she flinches and tries to turn away from me, I have my answer. Fuck, if only I’d shown Clara his photo we could’ve dealt with this a long time ago. I just didn’t want to believe Lefty was back out of the streets, and worse now he has the Captains MC by his side.
I hand my phone to Drag to hold and lean forward to embrace Summer.
“That’s okay, baby, he’s not going to get you, I’m going to protect you now. The girls are going to stay with you, I have a few things I need to take care of with Drag,” I start to stand, but she weakly protests and almost falls out of the bed when she tries to keep me by her side.
“I promise I’ll be back in less than an hour, I have to help the club. If we don’t get locked down now, Lefty or Connoly might show up here.”
That seems to appease her, and she reluctantly releases me, and Ryan quickly takes my place, sitting on the bed next to her and encourages her to rest her head in her lap. She turns on the TV and strokes Summer’s hair. Summer settles in and stares across the room at the screen blankly.
“Let’s get everything taken care of, and we’ll get back here as soon as possible. I just need you to help me pack up my files and get Dorothy out of the house,” Drag leads the way out of the clubhouse, and we quickly take off down the street towards his house and away from the chaos inside of the clubhouse.
All is quiet on the street when we pull up to the front of Drag’s house, and we dismount. We check the street for threats with weapons drawn. When we don’t find any, we enter the home.
“Get the files out of my office, I’m going to grab Dorothy and some belongings. We need to be out of here within the next five minutes,” Drag orders. Seconds later a third motorcycle pulls up beside ours. I recognize the hog and cut, so I move to the office and start packing files into the boxes on the floor.
Thunder is inside and helping me carry boxes outside to the car minutes later.
“Is that the last box?” I call to Thunder when he comes out of the house with another box.
“There’s one more inside,” Thunder makes it to the truck parked at the end of the driveway and throws it inside.
“Wait here, I’ll go and get it,” I call out, jogging back towards the house.
I make it within feet of the home when there’s a loud explosion, and the entire house is engulfed in flames.
I’m thrown several feet, my leg making a loud crack when I hit the pavement. I roll around a few times and struggle to get back on my knees so I can see what happened.
“No, no, no,” I look to my side to find Thunder on his knees clutching his chest in the middle of the street and looking past me up at the house.
I struggle to turn over, but when I do, I wish I hadn’t done it. The entire house is on fire, everything is gone. Fuck, Drag and Dorothy were still inside.
I ignore the pain in my leg and pull my phone out and dial 911. The ambulance and fire truck show up minutes later, but it’s too late, the damage is already done, the entire house is gone and with it Drag and Dorothy.
I’m holstered up onto a gurney, and the paramedic wheels me around to face the house, and all I can do is cry helplessly when I see the damage that’s been done.
This is my fault. If only I’d done more to find out from Clara who she saw that night outside The Dragon, none of this would’ve happened. Drag would still be here with us and Lefty would either be dead or back in prison.
Now I have to tell my brothers our leader is gone.