TWO
Reign
The car - sleek, black, long, flawless, the kind of car Repo would have wet dreams about, came to a screeching halt after pressing into the gates enough to bend the metal slightly inward, making me think a thought I would later chasten myself for.
They don't make them like they used to.
I mean, what the fuck kind of thought was that to have? Especially now. Especially with Ferryn pulling another fucking rebellion, sneaking out of school with her friends.
Yeah, it was her birthday.
And, yeah, I got it.
I got her better than she got herself. I guess because she had a lot of me in her.
She was independent, brave, free-thinking, and stubborn as a goddamn bulldog.
Somedays, when she was railing against me or Summer for some rule we laid down, that she objected to, I had to work to keep from smiling. And, if it weren't for Summer sending me that Don't you dare look in my direction, I likely would have smiled too.
Because Ferryn and I, we were cut from the same cloth. And, what's more, I liked it. I liked hearing her argue and bitch and refuse to back down.
I liked when she took a stand, and followed through, even if she didn't have permission.
I might not have liked it when she came home with a hole through her nose, but I found myself respecting her balls.
I mean, even my men wouldn't pierce something if I expressly told them not to.
And here was my daughter, this black-haired, gray-eyed, tall, and slight thing, coming in with her chin jacked up so high you'd swear she was fucking royalty, telling you that you can punish her all you want, but she has a right to "bodily autonomy," and that no one could make her take it out.
I'd wanted to laugh, but held it in until I got into the bedroom with Summer later, after having doled out a punishment of three months cleaning the entire goddamn clubhouse top to bottom on the weekends when I knew she wanted to hang with her friends, but she hadn't objected, hadn't begged or bargained for a lesser sentence. She took her punishment without complaint.
"Bodily fucking autonomy," I had chuckled as a smile finally split Summer's face too.
"That sounds a lot like Alex, don't you think?" she'd asked as I dropped down next to her on the bed.
"Can't decide if she's a good, or a bad, influence," I agreed about the smartass, loudmouth, opinionated wife of Breaker. Not technically part of our strange, varied family, but Alex and Janie were buds and coworkers on their cyber vigilante missions, so that meant she was part of the girls club. And if she was part of the girls club, that meant she had a hand in helping raise our kids. Most especially our daughter.
"I think she is going to show Ferryn how to unapologetically speak her mind," Summer decided, nodding a bit.
"Even if she's speaking unapologetically to her parents."
"Oh, you love it, and you know it."
"Yeah, guess I do," I had agreed before, well, we stopped talking, finding not-talking a lot more fun, as we often did. Even after all these years. I'd never get enough of the woman. I swear on my deathbed, I'd be begging the universe for one last time with her.
So, yeah, Ferryn was a mini me, with a better vocabulary and therefore sharper arguments. Much like the one she'd given us about her sixteenth birthday.
And, yeah, she'd had a point.
It wasn't fair that she got locked up on her birthday instead of celebrating with her friends.
Summer, especially, felt guilt in this particular situation.
Because it was her raging bitch of a mother who was preventing her children from being allowed to have a normal life.
Not that it was anyone's fault that she'd gotten free.
Well, except for Abruzzo.
Who'd paid with a lot of bloodshed before he hopped on board on the mission to track down the elusive V.
He'd been about as effective as we had, as Hailstorm had. Meaning not at all.
The kids were all getting stir crazy.
Ferryn, as always, more so than anyone else. Because she was older.
She was missing out on more.
Really, it was my own fucking fault for not seeing that this would be a stunt she would pull.
I'd have done the exact same thing in her position.
Had I thought of it, I would have made sure there were extra guards outside the school.
Summer was a wreck, sitting up at Hailstorm saying how she never should have let her go back to school.
I'd assured her that she was just being, well, Ferryn, and that we'd find her, punish her, then wait for her to pull something like this again. As we both knew she would.
Hell, Mina had pulled me aside once to tell me that I should prepare myself for Ferryn's teens, that she'd be a lot to handle.
And she was.
Clearly.
But I had calls out to her friends' parents, and people trolling all over Navesink Bank to find them and bring them home, kicking and screaming if need be. Which it would likely be.
She'd come home.
So, the car thought crossed my mind in that moment between trying to figure out more of Ferryn's hotspots, and calling her deliberately turned off phone.
"Fucking kids," Virgin muttered at the car as the one who'd been driving threw open the door, climbing out so fast he stumbled, making the guards by the gate readjust their guns, the ones that Lo's guys could wear with no concern of the cops for reasons she refused to disclose.
It was right about then that I recognized this particular kid. Though, he could hardly be called that, closing in on twenty.
Which I knew because I knew his sister.
Because Ferryn was friends with her.
Because this guy would drive Ferryn home some nights, leaving Summer to press her lips together to keep from smiling.
"What?" I'd asked one night, watching out the window as Ferryn prattled on, and the guy just kept staring forward.
"She's madly in love with him," Summer had informed me.
"I'm gonna need you to repeat that."
"I overheard her on the phone with Iggy one night. Madly in love with Vance."
"And the reason we're letting her sit out in the car with him..."
"Oh, please. Look at him. He won't even look at her. He knows he can't even do that."
"She's a baby," I'd insisted.
"She's a young woman, and you know it," Summer had insisted, putting an arm around my lower back, leaning her head into my arm.
"Don't gotta like it," I'd grumbled, knowing I would likely never be able to see her as anything other than the little girl in the Chucks and tutu, giving me sloppy kid kisses on the cheek, smearing jam on my face, and telling me that my scruff tickled.
"No," she'd agreed. "I don't think you ever will. But let her have her crush. She'll have a thousand of them. And this one is the most harmless."
"How do you figure?"
"Because he's too old for her. Because he clearly knows and respects that. Because if you shut this down, and she crushed on a boy her own age, she wouldn't be sitting in the front seat in the driveway right now; she'd be in the back, parked in some lot somewhere, doing things that you never want your little girl to do in the back of a car."
"Or fuckin' anywhere," I'd added.
"Yes, yes, of course. She will never do any of that... ever ... anywhere," she'd placated me, patting my stomach.
"Damn straight."
So I knew this guy from countless stops in my driveway, each time, his gaze not even drifting to my daughter, no matter how much she was clearly trying to get it.
I also knew that look on his face.
Eyes huge.
Muscle ticking in his jaw.
Fucking frantic.
His eye was blackened, too. And his lip split and still bleeding down his chin onto his shirt.
"They got Ferryn," his voice rose up out of him, roaring across the field between us. And since I'd had a talk with the kid once, and knew his voice for low and raspy, I knew his voice was matching his face. Fucking freaked.
"The fuck'd he just say?" I heard myself asking Virgin, sure I misheard him.
"Someone got Ferryn," he repeated, taking off across the field even as Lo's guys worked to open the gates to let him in.
It was then that my feet carried me over to him. How? I don't know. Because everything felt numb right then.
"What?" I hissed as I came up almost nose-to-nose with him.
"Two men. Black Cadillac. Old. No plates," he rambled off as one of Lo's guys picked up his phone to call it in. "Outside the pizza place in Farehold," he added. "Both white. Tall. Wide. I tried," he added, voice begging me to believe him. "I tried to get her back," he added.
That was why his eye was black, why his lip was bleeding. Trying to save my daughter.
Save my daughter.
"From the fucking beginning," I growled, trying to keep the panic from welling up, knowing it would do me no good.
"They snuck out of school. Convinced me to bring them to my show tonight. But I dropped them off to go to the bookstore and eat. I had just come to pick them up. She was getting up to walk to my car, but someone behind her grabbed her purse. I was getting out, thinking some asshole was just trying to mug her. But then he was dragging her. He was grabbing her and pulling her to a car. And shoving her into the trunk. I tried," he repeated, sounding frustratingly helpless.
"I see you did," I agreed, giving the kid a bit of comfort I didn't even have for myself as my mind raced.
Words crossed my mind that I never wanted to think.
Kidnapping.
Rape.
Trafficking.
Or V.
"Tell them everything," I demanded, motioning to Lo's guys as I flew across the yard toward the compound, screaming out the news as soon as I was inside the door, making everyone's face match the kid outside - and likely my own - frantic.
"Oh, my God," Peyton hissed as she jumped off of Sugar's lap, knowing I needed him.
I needed everyone.
I needed fucking everyone, but even that was no guarantee of anything.
"I'm calling the Mallicks," Sugar announced.
"I got the Grassis," Duke added.
"Breaker and Alex," Edison added, going for his phone.
"Sawyer and Barrett," Reeve jumped in.
"Anyone else?" I asked, not seeming able to think straight, not ready to break this news to poor fucking Summer.
"Luce," Wolf growled, pointing to the phone at his ear.
"I'll call Baird too," Cyrus added. "Longshot, but anything is better than nothing."
"Yo," Cash said at my side, voice calmer than it should have been, but that fuck always had a knack for staying calm in the worst of situations. "Abruzzo."
"That motherfucker," I agreed, storming out of the compound toward my bike, finding Lo's guys had forced the T-bird out of the way, and had Vance, Iggy, and Heather out, getting stories from the frantic guy and hysterical girls.
"Call Lloyd," I demanded of Roderick who had followed at my heels, stopping beside me while I got on my bike. If there was ever a time to get the law involved in my business, it was when my little girl was in the fucking trunk of a car, waiting for me to save her.
I had to fucking save her.
I couldn't let them hurt her.
I couldn't let them put marks on her like Summer had, like Janie had, and Lo, and countless other women who knew the angry touch of men using their power in a way the world never intended.
Not my daughter, damnit, not my fucking daughter too.
She knows how to fight, I reminded myself.
Unlike Summer, unlike Janie, when they got caught by people meaning to hurt them. She knew how to fight, to defend herself, to give it all she got.
I don't want my daughter to ever feel as helpless as I was made to.
That was what Summer had told me one night when Ferryn had gotten a pretty bad shiner, prompting me to suggest that maybe we should dial it back a bit with the training.
Thank fucking God that my woman was stubborn about somethings.
Ferryn had eleven years of martial arts under her belt, even at times besting Lo, Janie, and even some of the men - Cy, Edison, Pagan, and Laz - who she'd trained with to learn different fighting styles and how to work against them.
Though, if this was V, there would be an army. She'd had one once upon a time. She'd had men in her pockets to kidnap and torture Reeve a bit back.
Sure, she'd went into hiding after.
But while V was an elusive creature, evil to a degree that it made it hard to even understand what her motivators were anymore, there wasn't a single doubt in my mind that she was rebuilding her army. From what Marco Abruzzo said, she still had contacts, she had plans to utilize them, rebuild her inhuman trafficking operation, building stacks of money made on the foundations of slavery and rape.
The word made a pit shoot out of my stomach and lodge in my throat.
Rape.
There had been rules when she'd had Summer - orders for her men not to step over that line.
But, well, when you employed the lowest human specimens the world had to offer, they often got twisted little ideas in their heads. The kind of ideas that had Summer on her knees contemplating suicide to avoid the seemingly inevitable since she knew there was no way out even if she took down one attacker; there were dozens more. Who knew what fate could have been worse than suicide inside the walls of V's compound?
And with Summer's escape, then years inside a cell to mull things over, she had likely found ways to ensure a repeat could never happen again.
Which didn't fare well for Ferryn.
She was a smart girl, though.
It was something you knew about her even as a toddler - those eyes of hers were always watching, taking things in. Her mouth always asking questions, demanding answers.
If there was any possible way to escape, she would find it.
If there wasn't, well, I would just have to find her. Whatever it took. However many people needed to be tortured, no matter how much blood had to stain my hands, no matter how many doors I had to knock down, deals I had to make.
Whatever it took, I would see my daughter again. Sitting at the dinner table, animatedly telling us about some school drama, on the couch, nose buried in a book about ancient torture, the Salem Witch Trials, the Vikings, Romans, Greeks, philosophy, poetry, in the doorway of her room as she folded her arms and unleashed her own version of hell on me or Summer for some thing or another, at Christmas, beaming when she realized we had paid attention, had gotten her what she wanted, hell, even in the goddamn front seat of that kid's car in the driveway.
I'd see her again.
Come hell or motherfucking high water.