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Colton gives him a cold, spine-tingling grin. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. Trust me when I tell you, I’m actually being nice here.” He gets up, cautiously eyeing each of us, waiting for a physical reaction. But we remain still. We are ready for anything, but if we kill the bastard now, we’ll never find Nadia safe. I need her unharmed and back in one piece. “So, twenty-four hours, gentlemen. And then you hand over the club and all of its assets. Otherwise, your precious Nadia gets sliced and diced and scattered across the whole of Orange County.”
He walks out as the sun bathes him in its golden light; we stay behind. Each inhale is painful, as if nails are piercing the membranes of my lungs. Every exhale burns all the way up to my throat. Fear takes hold and paralyzes me, my joints buckling as I struggle to keep myself from falling apart.
Minutes pass in unbearable silence.
“They’ve got her,” Orion finally whispers. “We weren’t careful enough.”
“We were careful enough, just not about the right people,” Drake replies harshly. “We were looking out for Black Devil minions, but this was more of an inside job. Someone betrayed us. Someone who knows enough about us to give the bastard an opportunity to get this close.”
“He said he got all the information he wanted with the clubhouse shooting,” I say, going over Colton’s words with a fine-tooth comb. “I don’t think he was talking about the actual shooting, but rather the aftermath.”
“We have a mole,” Orion concludes. “And Nadia might die because of it.”
“Not while we’re still breathing,” I remind him, the blood coursing feverishly through my veins. Once the initial horror of Nadia’s kidnapping subsides, my natural instincts kick in. “Call the Feds, Orry. Our time has just run out.”
We have twenty-four hours to do something that would normally take days, if not weeks, to prepare for; a single day to save Nadia and to destroy Colton Harrow, to bury him so deep that future generations won’t be able to find him when they’re brushing the dirt off this city’s bones. We have twenty-four hours to bring this nightmare to an end and get our woman back.
This is worse than anything we’ve dealt with during our Navy service. Emotions are involved now. The enemy wasn’t domestic before. We were dealing with insurgents, terrorists, power-hungry warlords with predictable patterns of behavior. We had an intelligence service that functioned with Swiss precision. We had information and the entire United States Navy fleet at our disposal.
This time, it’s different.
We only have ourselves and a handful of trustworthy men. Sure, there are federal agencies involved, but there are statutes and regulations that they still need to abide by. Warrants and exclusions are required. Order amidst chaos while Colton and his Devils keep moving just below the radar, threading the line as they get away with too much. Every fiber in my body screams for me to do more, but I understand our limitations.
Hell, we’re going to have to make it work.
I will let my darkest side out for this part of the game. The inner beast that slept so well until Colton’s people decided to shoot up our clubhouse, until Colton decided to kidnap Nadia. This fiend inside me is thirsting for blood as much as it is hungry for Nadia’s sweet, soft comfort.
And this fiend will stop at nothing until she is safe and, in our arms, again.
26
Orion
To our relief, the Feds are quick to mobilize.
We meet them in their Anaheim field office, where DEA and ATF agents have already joined the conversation. The upper floor bullpen is flooded with people working around the clock to get as much intel as possible on each of Colton’s followers and associates. The phones are ringing off the hook. Emails and image files keep pouring into every available computer. Dale Johnson barks orders left and right while his junior agents liaise with partner agencies to gather everything into a single, centralized system of information.
Kai, Drake, and I stand in the middle of the room, staring at a massive LCD screen that’s linked to the main computer where all this intel is being moved. We’ve got screenshots, photos, case files, criminal records, surveillance imagery from professional long-range cameras, and CCTV footage. Facial recognition software is running in the background as we slowly but surely begin to see the greater, fuller picture.
“Twenty hours left,” Dale says, loud enough for every busy bee in this place to hear. “The clock is ticking, ladies and gentlemen. Colton will likely set up a meeting spot. Twenty hours until our Blackthorn Riders here make the call and tell the fucker they agree to his terms and conditions. Let’s move!”
“Colton knows we’re working with you,” I say to Dale as he comes over. “He’ll expect a trap.”
“We won’t give him that. He may be smart, Mr. Williams, but he certainly isn’t smarter than the brilliant operatives we have working here today,” he says with a confident smirk. “The minute he grabbed Nadia, he took a risk. It’s his last gamble and his greatest one yet. He’s aware of the risks and the repercussions, but he does not have full control over the parameters.”
“It is imperative that we get Nadia back alive,” I say, reiterating our main concern. “I presume you’ll let us go out in the field with the rest of your team.”
Dale gives me a hard look. “My supervisor hasn’t agreed to that.”
“He’s going to have to agree to that,” Kai replies. “We’re going in either way, whether you like it or not. It’s better if we’re sanctioned, though.”
“Or I could just arrest you and keep you locked up until it’s over and done with,” Dale shoots back.
“Good luck getting the rest of us in line,” Drake replies. “You seem to forget the kind of people you’re dealing with. The kind of people you need to avoid a fucking blood bath with because that’s what Colton is angling for.”
“You can’t shut us out,” I tell Dale. “We’ve brought you this far. You owe us that much.”
“Where are they?” Quicksilver’s voice booms across the bullpen, and my eyes immediately start to roll as I brace myself for another round of Kessler fallout.
