Rosie

They kept me in that house for twenty-four hours.

Fernandez was true to his word. No one touched me. They fed me. Gave me water. Bathroom breaks.

Very polite kidnappers, all in all.

But then again, they didn’t need to starve me or beat me. Physical violence only went so far. They landed the deepest of blows without touching a hair on my head. Those photos worked better than anything else would have.

I got snatches of sleep, for handfuls of minutes. Then I saw Belle’s beautiful locks, matted in blood. Gwen’s sightless stare. Bex enduring more horrors. Bull meeting the Devil truly, without anything to bring him back.

But when Fernandez came back in, I was wide awake, ready.

“Ah, I’m glad to see you’re looking so refreshed,” he greeted warmly.

I glared at him.

“So you’ve considered my proposition?” he asked pleasantly.

“What do you want?” I hissed. “You went to all the trouble to kidnap me, surveil my family, threaten them. You’ve shown me how large your dick is, I get it. What’s with the theatrics?”

“I hear you are a rather… unpredictable young woman,” he said.

I snorted.

“I just need assurances that, on your next holiday, you do not choose to come to my country,” he said smoothly.

“Ah, so you want to make sure your business isn’t disrupted again,” I spat.

He nodded once. “We are in understanding.”

“Yeah, asshole. Congratu-fucking-lations.”

He shook his head, smiling. “Unpredictable, brave, or stupid? I’m not sure which.”

“Well you think on that real hard. Till your head explodes, even,” I invited.

“Brave, I think,” he surmised. “But brave or not, it’s not you I kill if I hear of you being unpredictable again. I’ll kill all of them.” He nodded to the photos.

“I get it, Hannibal Lecter,” I seethed.

He glanced at his hundred-thousand-dollar watch, bought with stolen innocence. “Ah, they should arrive soon.”

I didn’t answer.

“Your family is quite effective,” he continued. “I didn’t expect them to discover this location until later.” His eyes moved over me with the first show of real interest since this thing began. It made me sick to my stomach. “Pity,” he said. “But oh well. It has been a pleasure knowing you, Rosie. May we never meet again.”

The sound of gunshots and frenzied yells echoed in the distance.

I glanced toward the closed door where the two men guarding it, lifted their semiautomatics, preparing to use them on whatever the source of the noise was.

I looked back to the monster in front of me, feigning disinterest. “That’ll be my brother and my boyfriend here to pick me up. It’s the strangest thing, they don’t approve of me going on unscheduled playdates with human traffickers.” I shrugged in a ‘what can you do’ gesture. “I hope you’re not too fond of your frontline men. I’d say most of them are already dead or at least maimed right now. But I’m sure you post them that way, least liked to most, for these very situations, no?”

His gaze didn’t move to the door, didn’t even flicker from where it was focused. On me. “You are a very strange woman,” he observed, tilting his head in a way I didn’t like. The way a cat regarded a mouse, deciding whether to play with it for a time or just not bother with the façade and eat it whole.

I didn’t let my unease show. “Fuck you,” I said with a smile.

The doors burst open, both Cade and Luke running point, side by side. Their eyes found me and their guns found the man in front of me. In any other situation, it would’ve been comical, among other things. My brother and his once archnemesis teaming up and pointing their guns at a common enemy instead of each other.

Brought together by me.

That was what I’d always wanted, wasn’t it? Granted, the situation was a lot more fucked up than I’d planned.

But if it wasn’t a major Fuck-Up, it wasn’t Rosie.

Bull, Lucky, Gage, Asher, Dwayne, Brock, and Steg came in after them. Bull took care of one guard with the butt of his gun in a practiced and effortless jab. Gage, grinning and somehow covered in blood that I both guessed and hoped wasn’t his own, plowed his fist through the face of the second guard. The crunching of bone traveled through the air.

I turned so my back was to Fernandez, a gesture of trust that I hoped wasn’t another Fuck-Up that would land me in the grave. I made sure I stood in front of him, which meant in front of the guns pointed at him.

Both my brother’s and Luke’s eyes bulged in panic and fury.

“Rosie, get the fuck out of the way and over here. Right now,” Cade barked.

I shook my head.

“Baby,” Luke said. The softness of his voice was louder than Cade’s furious yell.

It hit me every place it could. Every ounce of my being wanted to go to him. But that was selfishness. That would get some of my family killed, if I was lucky. All of them if I wasn’t.

I wouldn’t let one of them get hurt because of me.

Luke was right, I was their shield.

But I wouldn’t let him die being mine, either.

“You’ve come to save me, I guess?” I asked with a false lightness that took everything in me to conjure. “The men riding in to rescue the damsel. You know, I love fairy tales as much as the next girl, but you also know I leave them where they belong. In the book. The one I never do things by. I don’t need saving. I got this.”

I didn’t add that I was the one saving them. Both because I didn’t think alpha males much appreciated such things being said to them at any moment. In ones such as this, I guessed it was much worse. Also because I was only saving them because I was the one who’d put them in this situation in the first place. Kind of a double negative.

“Rosie, this isn’t the time. Get out of the fuckin’ way,” Cade clipped, losing patience. Not that he had much to lose anyway.

Luke was somewhat different. He regarded the situation with a lot more than the blind rage of my brother. I could see it, taste it, simmering around amongst the other, its particular brand more familiar to me than that of my own blood. Something else was working there, other than anger. He was putting it together.

You can take the cop out of the man….

“Fuck,” he breathed. Then he lowered his gun, as if it weighed a thousand pounds.

His eyes never left mine.

“Crawford. What in the fuck are you doing?” Cade all but roared.

“I’m not pointing a gun at the woman I love,” Luke said quietly. “And she said she’s got this.”

Cade gaped at Luke like he’d grown another head. “She’s fucking Rosie. She ain’t got shit but a boatload of trouble.”

Luke’s eye twitched. “I trust her. You should too.” The words were forced out of him, just like his stationary stance. I could tell, more than anything, that he wanted to stride over, yank me behind his back and shield me from this. From everything.

But he knew he couldn’t.

Seeing that on his face was worse than anything that could’ve been dished out in that room. So, like a coward, I stopped looking at his face and instead took the easy route, taking the wrath of my brother.

“Trust me, Cade, I know what I’m doing. For the club. For my family.”

He glared at me, and continued to do so when, with an exaggerated sigh, Gage, of all people, was the first to lower his gun. Then Lucky, of course with a wink. Then Bull, with no expression because he was Bull. Brock shook his head with a shadow of a smile at the corner of his lips. Dwayne and Asher did it expressionless, and Steg was regarding me with twinkling eyes.

All of them, apart from Gage and Dwayne, had experience raising and using their weapons when their own women were in this exact situation. Or something very close. I knew they didn’t lose a wink of sleep at night over those expelled bullets or lost lives. I knew they didn’t because they had it. Their fairy tale. Or their violent, bloody, and painful version. The one they took out of the books.

This man had the power to take that away from them. I had the power to make sure that didn’t happen. If I first swallowed my pride.

It went down easily when I thought of all of those happy ever afters that would stay intact. My beautiful nephew and niece who wouldn’t have a family torn apart.

“Cade,” I whispered, my voice little more than a plead.

He didn’t move for a second, suspended in time almost. I knew it went against everything in him to lower his weapon. He considered himself my shield too. It was his job to protect me, and he took it seriously.

But I wouldn’t let that mean he had to die for me like he would.

So I let out the breath I’d been holding when he lowered the gun.

The silence after that was toxic, suffocating.

A clap, harsh and ugly, cut through the air, and I turned to see the source of it.

“Wonderful. I see that one beautiful lady is all that is needed to stop any more bloodshed,” Fernandez said, menace haunting his harsh accent. “So good, so good we do not have to engage in hostilities. It would have been… most unpleasant.”

“We’re going to go our separate ways now, aren’t we?” I said, the words painful for me to utter.

“What the fuck?” both Cade and Luke growled almost simultaneously.

I glanced their way, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge them. “No hard feelings now that we understand each other, right?” I asked Fernandez.

He smiled. Or stretched his facial muscles, showing teeth in the mimic of a smile. “Of course, my dear, we are understood. You keep your business and I keep my own and we… how you Americans say it? We cool?”

I did my own mime smile, all the while tasting battery acid climbing up my throat. “Yeah, we cool.”

He nodded. “Well, I’ll be going, then.”

Cade’s jaw twitched.

“Cade, let him through,” I said.

“Are you fuckin’ joking, Rosie?”

Luke looked at me, then Cade. “Do as she says.”

“I’m not listenin’ to a fuckin’ cop when he tells me to let go of the man who pointed a weapon at my four-year-old daughter’s head in front of my fuckin’ wife,” he spat.

“But your family are all alive, are they not? Surely you would like them to stay that way,” Fernandez said blandly.

Luke caught Cade just before he lunged, Brock helping him to stop Cade from charging. He struggled with both of them, all logic gone from his eyes. Fernandez had just openly threatened his family. Cade’s reaction was kneejerk and deadly.

“You’re not listening to a cop because I ain’t one,” Luke hissed. “You’re not even listening to me. You’re listening to your sister who you need to fucking trust at this point in time. You know she loves your family with everything she has. You think she’d be making this call for anyone but them?” He had to yell over top of Cade’s struggles.

Cade breathed heavily, wild eyes focused on Fernandez with a predator’s determination. Then he moved to me, communicating a lot of things with that look. I tried to communicate back. Tried to tell him this was just a battle, that the war was ours.

He slackened in Luke’s and Brock’s grip, shaking them off. He focused on Fernandez. “This shit isn’t over,” he promised.

Fernandez smiled. “Oh, once you chat with your sister, I think you’ll find that it is.”

And then he walked forward. An uneasy moment passed when I thought that Cade might not move, might change his mind and blow them all away right there.

He stood to the side with a granite jaw. The rest of the men followed suit.

The second Fernandez was out the door, Luke was on me, shoving his gun into the back of his jeans and framing my face with his hands. I thought he’d talk first but he didn’t, just plastered his mouth to mine. Not closed mouth. Not short. It was like he was sucking every part of me out to make sure it was all still there.

“He hurt you?” he demanded when he pulled back, eyes running over every part of my wrinkled but still intact outfit.

“No,” I whispered.

His eyes met mine, fear, death, and love shimmering within them. “He had you for twenty-four hours, Rosie. Twenty-four fucking hours.” He took my hand and placed it on his chest. “First time my heart’s beat in twenty-four hours,” he murmured.

“Rosie?” Cade’s gruff voice demanded, breaking our moment.

Luke didn’t move at first. His eyes roved over every inch of me, as if he had been away from me for years, decades, and he was trying to catalogue the changes that’d happened in his absence. Like a man deprived of water for almost long enough to kill him and then presented with a whole glistening lake of it. He pressed his lips to mine again, like before, hard and intense and most likely not appropriate for an audience.

I kissed him back. Fuck the audience.

I’d been deprived of water too. Of everything, really.

Then he let me go to reveal everyone standing around, like they didn’t quite not know what to do with themselves since they weren’t surrounded by bodies.

Cade’s eyes went to Luke’s firm hold around my shoulders. “Let her go, Crawford.”

The grip tightened. “Not a fuckin’ chance in hell.”

I savored the feel of my safety for a second longer, inhaling deeply. Then I reached up to graze Luke’s fingertips. “Luke,” I whispered.

He glared down at me. “This is the first time I’ve had you in my arms in twenty-four hours,” he growled. “During those hours, I was forced to entertain the idea that I might never fucking do this again. Or I’d have to hold the broken pieces of you, with nothing to put you back together with.” His eyes went to Cade. “I’m sure with Cade’s experience, he knows what the fuck he’s asking and if the situation were reversed, he’d have the same response as me, which is fuck right off.”

My mind whirled at the deep of the emotion in Luke’s voice, how it shook just a little, noticeably. He didn’t care about showing these men that emotion. Mostly because he knew they’d all felt it before.

I squeezed his fingers. “Yeah, and I get it. I’m pretty darn pissed at my brother right now, but I owe him an explanation,” I murmured.

Luke didn’t move. “You can explain from here.”

I touched his jaw. He gazed down at me. “I’ll be two feet away.”

He frowned as if the two feet were as wide as the distance between us months before.

Then he let me go with a tight face.

I kissed his jaw.

Then I stepped forward, expecting a lecture, a lot of swearing and yelling from my brother.

Instead, he yanked me roughly and tightly into his arms.

“Don’t you ever fucking do that to me again,” he murmured into my hair, kissing it.

I sank into his hold, clutching at the sides of his cut. “Don’t really plan on it.”

He kept a hold of me for a while longer, not seeming worried about time or witnesses. Then he let me go slightly, his hands going to my neck so I met his icy gray eyes. “Been scared a lot of times in my life,” he growled. “Man enough to admit it. That’s when the irreplaceable things in my life are taken from me. When I have to do nothing but think about how easy it is for fuckers to destroy me without touching me. You can take care of yourself. I know that.” His eyes went behind me. “You’ve got a man who would die to make sure I don’t live a nightmare of having a big fuckin’ hole in my heart. That the club doesn’t live with a big gaping hole where the soul of it was.”

Tears ran down my face. “You’re not going to yell at me?”

He smiled. “Maybe later. But Luke was right. You would give your life in a fucking second just so I could go to sleep with my family every single night. But you ain’t doing that because if you do, I’m not sleeping easy for the rest of my days. I know that decision wasn’t something you had a choice in. Hate it, but I know you’re not givin’ up. That’s not my Roe.” His eyes twinkled.

“Yeah, now that we’re done with the sappy shit, you’re gonna tell us we can kill them all, right?” Gage interjected, scratching an itch at the top of his head with the barrel of his gun.

I made eye contact with Gage and the three other personalities inside him, all anxious for blood.

“Eventually.”

* * *

It was safe to say the men were furious when they saw the photos and therefore the reason that deadly force was not what they could use to protect the people in said photos.

There was swearing, anger and a lot of “he’s fucking dead.” But then there was a reasonably rapid exit as the respective men went back to their families, to make sure a murderer was true to his words.

Death and revenge didn’t mean shit if you were going home to an empty house with an empty heart. So we went home without revenge, but without any more holes in our family.

“Never been more scared in my life,” Luke murmured against my head.

We were naked on the sofa. We hadn’t even made it to the bedroom, our desperation to find peace in each other too chaotic to make things like proper horizontal surfaces seem important.

Nothing was really important but each other right then.

“Me either,” I admitted.

He stroked my hair. “You went willingly, with him. Knowing you might never come back. Never be right here with me again.” His voice wasn’t hard or angry. It was soft, proud.

“You know I had no other choice,” I whispered.

“I know, Rosie. You were protecting everyone, just like you always do. “That’s what scared me the most, still fucking does. You have a choice like that, there’s no hesitation, even though I know how hard it is to make. I’m not gonna beg you to not to make a choice that will take you from this world, take my world from me, ’cause I know that’s never gonna happen. You’re a warrior first, and you’ll always fight. Just askin’ you to let me be by your side while you fight.”

That right there was what made us us.

He knew that my life was never going to be normal, that I wasn’t normal. I needed action and I needed a man by my side, not in front of me, trying to protect me. I needed him to know that I could protect myself and not want to change me into something that made him feel more like a man and me less like a woman I was proud to be.

He was proud of the fact that I was strong, and he was man enough that it didn’t make him look weak.

“I’ve got a strong woman. She can fight not just for herself but for everyone in her life, including me.” He paused. “Me shooting Kevin that day, it wasn’t me damning myself and saving you. It was you saving me. From the fucking bars I’d trapped myself in. You’re so fucking strong, and that doesn’t make me weak. It makes me into the best man I could ever be. Any man who would think different ain’t a man at all.” He kissed me hard and deep. “Plannin’ on being a man, your man, till this world is done and the next one begins. After that too.”

“And I’ll be right next to you, fighting,” I promised.

* * *

Sometimes in real life, the good guys didn’t win, love didn’t conquer all. Mostly because in real life, it wasn’t as simple as creating good guys and bad guys. Sometimes the bad guys were the ones who did the most good. Or the good created the most evil. Most of it, the world—me included—was gray.

Love did a lot. Destroyed a lot. Put some of it back together.

But it didn’t conquer all.

Four-point-five million people are trapped in forced sexual exploitation globally.

The shadow of Fernandez’s threat still hung over our heads. We hadn’t given up. That wasn’t our style. We were playing the long game, which wasn’t exactly our style either, but we were adapting.

We settled into routine, slowly gathering intel, slowly figuring out how to bring the operation down without a single drop of Templar blood hitting the ground.

It was going to take a while. A long while. Because Wire told us that he’d dropped off the face of the earth again, but he would almost certainly be watching us.

So we had to appear like things had gone back to normal while we looked for ways to end it.

Our version of normal wasn’t exactly normal.

“You want to shoot him, babe, or should I?” I asked Luke.

Luke grinned. “Well, it is Valentine’s Day. Consider it my gift to you.” He gestured with his gun.

I smiled. “You get me the best gifts.”

The boom of the gunshot ricocheted through the empty warehouse, the bullet finding its home just above the kneecap.

The man screamed.

“Remember that pain, my friend, the next time you think about breaking the restraining order your wife has against you and beating her so bad she can’t walk for three weeks,” Luke said. “If you do, maybe we won’t be back to do the other one.”

The man continued to scream.

I wandered up to Luke and kissed him while I waited for him to stop. “Love you,” I whispered against his mouth.

His arms went around me. “And I love you, babe.”

There was a lot of shit that stopped my life from being completely perfect, but those three words meant it didn’t matter if it was or not.

* * *

Luke

One Week Later

“Rosie know you’re here?”

“What do you think?” Luke sat down at the table that he’d thought he wanted to destroy. Strangely, it felt right, easy, slipping into the seat and looking around at the men of the Sons of Templar. “I value my fuckin’ balls, so yes, she knows,” he continued. “Told me she was ‘sick of chattering like a bunch of women’ and we were to call her ‘when the action started.’”

Cade shook his head, grinning. “She never really was one for patience.”

“Don’t I know it,” Luke murmured.

She was chaos, and he knew it. And he wouldn’t have it any other way. There used to be days when he lived for order, structure. He thought that was him, that was right.

Fuck was he glad she proved him wrong.

“Might be a good thing she’s not here,” Luke continued. “Been talking to my contact at the state department. They’re building a case against Fernandez. A case that’s almost airtight. They just need some more info.” He glanced to Wire.

“You honestly telling us you expect us to fucking snitch?” Lucky spat.

Luke regarded him. “Yeah, I know it goes against everything you stand for. Want to ride in with bullets and blood. But that leads directly back here. To your home. To your women. Make no doubt about it, we need to do this another way. A way that would never trace back to us, and the strong arm of the law would never lead back to men who would rather die than help out the law,” Luke said.

“Damn fucking right,” Gage muttered.

Brock eyed him. “I’m hoping you’ve got a plan once he’s arrested? You’re not asking us to be happy that he’s getting three square meals a day and a warm bed behind bars?”

Luke regarded him. Then the table. “Of fucking course not. It’s after that that the blood comes. We take the whole fucking operation down.”

Cade smiled.

“Then maybe we can work something out.”

And Luke knew they could.

They fucking had to. Because no way would he sleep easy knowing that fucker was sleeping, eating, breathing, fucking on the same planet as Rosie.

They’d get him.

And he’d die.

And Luke couldn’t fucking wait for that day.