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“Yes. Kill has access. Give me a minute. I’ll call you back.”

The phone call disconnects, leaving me standing there with the Hound at gunpoint. He stares at me, his expression utterly impenetrable. “What do you want?” he asks into the silence. “What’s Astrid to you?”

This could go badly if I was a man who let his feelings get the better of him, but I’m not that man and I have no feelings. Not anymore. “She’s nothing to me,” I say, giving her up and ignoring the bone-deep denial of the beast inside me. “But she has information I want.”

“Is that why you took her?” he asks.

“Yes.” I won’t give him the truth. It’s better he doesn’t know that she’s more than that to me. It’s better if I don’t acknowledge it, either.

“What information?”

“You think I’ll tell you?”

He says nothing, just gives me an up-and-down look. “You don’t need to tell me. You’re after our business, aren’t you?”

Of course he’s worked it out. He knew immediately the kind of man I was in that parking lot. That’s why he came for me, to protect her. My Tinkerbell might be naïve, but he isn’t.

I say nothing, keeping my Glock aimed at his head, but he only smiles without amusement. “So, what did she tell you? I mean, you had her for a couple of hours so she must have told you something.”

My arm stays still. The muzzle of my gun doesn’t waver.

He keeps grinning. “Oh, so she told you nothing. You really thought she would?”

I’m getting tired of this conversation and it’s very tempting to pull the trigger, put a bullet between his eyes the way I put one into his friend, Creep. But Astrid wouldn’t like it, and that matters to me.

So, I continue to stay silent as he stands at the foot of the steps, his hands in his pockets and very casual, as if the Vaccaris most lethal enforcer doesn’t have a fucking gun pointed at his head.

Then the phone in my hand buzzes. It’s Lazarus again.

“Kill ran the plates,” he says when I answer. “It’s a van registered to one of the Moretti soldiers and we got lucky. There’s a tracker on it. It’s likely the Morettis use it to monitor their vehicles, but Kill managed to hack into it. They’re heading toward an old factory on the outskirts of town. There’s nothing else out there, so that’s probably their goal.”

I don’t bother with thank-yous. I disconnect the call immediately. “They’re headed south, to an old factory on the edge of town,” I say to the Hound.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know it. Used to be for fish processing until the fishing industry died.”

“I wonder why,” I say.

He smirks. “So, you gonna kill me or are you gonna let me save her?”

Slowly, I lift the muzzle of my Glock. “Go,” I say. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He doesn’t wait, which I give him credit for. He turns and makes straight for his Harley without another word, swinging a leg over it then gunning the engine.

I don’t hesitate, either. I’m making for my own bike as he pulls away, the beast in me howling and scraping at the walls of the box I put it in. Wanting to get to her, wanting to protect her, make sure she’s safe.

She will be, I’ll make sure of it, and then I’ll kill everyone involved in her abduction. And once she’s been rescued, I’ll kill that beast, too.

I’ll put it out of its misery once and for all.

Chapter Thirty-Three

ASTRID

When I come to, everything is still dark. My head hurts and my mouth is dry and gritty, like the bottom of a birdcage. I’m sitting upright in a chair, I think, but the reason everything is still dark is because there’s a blindfold over my eyes. My wrists are tied, too, and when I try to move my legs, I can’t. My ankles have been tied to the legs of the chair.

Fear swells like an icy tide inside me. What the hell happened? Dad was giving me a hug after he told me all that stuff about how the club has been blackmailing him, and then that he’d been collecting information on them and then…

I swallow as I remember. The men wearing balaclavas. Shots firing. Dad with a gun in his hand and then… Nothing.