Page 41 of Diesel’s Desire

I don’t like it. I sit there a long moment not liking it, turning the whole plan over in my head, looking for a version where I get to be there when they find her, if they find her, where I don’t have to sit at a desk half a county away from whatever happens behind that gate tonight.

There isn’t one. Not if I want this to actually work.

“Fine,” I say finally. “The station. Paperwork.”

Jenson nods once, satisfied, already turning something over behind his eyes that looks like planning, logistics, a man building a job the same way he’s probably built a hundred jobs before this one.

I pick my phone back up off the table, Addison’s face disappearing into the dark screen, and I try not to think too hard about what I’ve just agreed to, or what it means that the safest place for me to be tonight is far away from the one thing I actually want to see through with my own eyes.

21

DIESEL

For the richest guy in the county, Pemberton’s home security is ridiculously easy to bypass—just a keypad with a code Sasha pried out of a contractor Sharon knows, some guy who did landscaping work out here two summers back and still remembers the numbers because Pemberton’s cheap enough to never change them. Havoc stops at the keypad and punches it in, and the gate swings wide like it’s been waiting for us.

Cloud hides the moon tonight. Fine by me.

We cut engines at the treeline and walk the rest, bikes stashed where the gravel gives way to grass, hoodies up, balaclavas rolled down over our faces the second we clear the fence. No cheap latex horns tonight. Just black wool and five men.

One guard patrols the side yard near the pool house, flashlight beam cutting lazy circles through the dark like he’s already halfway to bored out of his mind. Ryder takes him before the guy even registers movement—one arm locked around his throat, dragging him back into the shadow of a hedge before his boots finish scraping the flagstone. Thirty seconds, maybe less. The guy goes slack, and Ryder zip-ties him to a drainpipe behind the pool equipment, gag stuffed in his mouth, flashlight clicked off and tucked in his own pocket.

“One down,” Ryder murmurs into the dark. “House might have more inside.”

“We’ll handle ’em as they come,” Havoc says.

The back door’s unlocked, because rich men who own half a county apparently never think anybody’s coming for them in their own house. We move through a mudroom, then a kitchen big enough to feed the whole clubhouse, granite counters gleaming under one dim under-cabinet light nobody bothered to shut off.

No television. No voices. Just our feet on the floor.

We split up room by room—Ace and Ryder taking the east wing, Havoc and me clearing west, Riot posted near the main staircase where he can watch every direction at once. I check closets, behind curtains, under a bed the size of my whole room, and every empty room makes my gut sit heavier than the last.

A study. A library that looks untouched. A bathroom with gold fixtures that’d make Bone’s eye twitch just thinking about the waste of money. Nothing. No sign of her anywhere on the main floor or the one above it.

“She’s not here,” Havoc says low, jaw tight enough that I can hear the tension in it even through the ski mask. “Penny’s hunch was wrong, or she’s already⁠—”

Then I hear it.

Faint. Almost nothing. A whimper, high and thin, coming from somewhere below us, through the floor, muffled by God knows how many layers of expensive flooring and insulation.

Havoc goes still. I go still. Somewhere down the hall, Ace’s head turns too, like he caught it as well.

“Basement,” I say.

We find the basement door concealed behind a bookshelf in the study. Havoc yanks it open, and the stairs going down are lit soft, warm, deliberately cozy in a way that turns my stomach before I’ve even seen what’s waiting at the bottom.

We move fast now. No more stopping at every door. Whatever’s down here, we need eyes on it immediately.

The basement isn’t a wine cellar. It’s a room built to look like a little girl’s bedroom, pink walls, stuffed animals lined up on shelves, a canopy bed with lace trim, and none of it does anything to soften what’s actually happening in the middle of it.

Addison Miller stands beside the bed, frightened and silent. She doesn’t move when we come down the stairs.

Douglas Pemberton sits in a leather armchair six feet away in an open robe. The sight of us takes him by surprise.

Nobody in this room says anything for one full second, and it’s the longest second of my life.

“You sick fuck.”

The words come out of me before I even decide to say them, and Pemberton’s head snaps toward the stairs, mouth already opening on a shout that never makes it past his teeth. Ryder crosses the room in three strides and slaps a hand over his mouth, then a gag, cinching it tight enough that Pemberton’s eyes bulge with the force of trying to scream through it anyway.