Page 70 of Chaos Bound
“You’re trying to protect your club,” she said. “And he’s not alone. He has me, and I want revenge, too. For both of us.” She felt the truth of her words as they dropped from her lips. She wanted Viper to pay for what he’d done to her and her mother, and locking him away wouldn’t be enough. Most of the Jacks had been in jail at some point in their lives, and except for the fact they couldn’t go beyond the prison walls, life for them continued as it had before: they ran their illicit operations, enforced their dominance, enjoyed their vices, and expanded their territory.
“And you’ll have it,” Holt said from behind her. “By my hand.”
Naiya’s eyes widened as she looked over her shoulder and met his cool, dark gaze. How long had he been there? How much had he heard?
***
It had been a mistake coming back to the club.
Holt reached out and clasped Naiya’s hand, drawing her to his side. Far from being reassured after hearing the efforts his brothers had made to find him, he still thought they hadn’t done enough. Why had no one made an effort to check for identifying marks? What about the tat on his arm? And leaving a body behind? Was that a story Sparky and Gunner made up because they didn’t want anyone to know all they cared about was saving their own skins? He gritted his teeth, squeezed Naiya’s hand.
“You okay?” she whispered.
“We’re outta here.” He’d heard enough. The brothers were set to betray him again. But Naiya—his Naiya—had refused to help them.
Even if he could have accepted that they did everything to find him, he couldn’t accept what happened in Viper’s house in the forest. He’d caught that look between Tank and Jagger. There was something they didn’t want him to hear. But he had a secret, too. He’d heard them from the dungeon. Chained to the wall, his body bruised and broken, hope had flared in his chest, burned so bright he found the strength to bang his fists, rattle the chains, scream and shout, “I’m here. I’m here. Brothers, save me.”
But they didn’t come.
Nothing Viper had done to him had hurt as much as the moment his last hope fizzled and died.
And now, not only had his brothers left him to rot in Viper’s dungeon, but they also planned to take away the only thing that had kept him alive. Revenge.
“We want the same thing, brother.” Jagger and Zane shared a glance, and Zane slid his hand beneath his cut. Holt’s skin prickled in warning. So they thought he was a threat. Well, he’d make sure they understood just how dangerous he could be if they tried to stand in his way.
“Then we’ll do it my way.”
“Come to the meeting and hear us out,” Tank pleaded, shooting a desperate look at Naiya. “We’ve been setting this up for months, paying off the locals, planting bugs in the hotels. We haven’t left anything to chance.”
“Except me,” Holt snapped.
“And we’re glad to have you back.” Jagger leaned against the wall. Outwardly, his posture was casual, relaxed, but Holt could feel the tension rolling off him, see the anger pulse in the veins of his neck. Once, he would have been cowed by Jagger’s anger, but nothing scared him anymore. There wasn’t anything Jagger could do to him that Viper hadn’t already done.
“But we’re not going to let you fuck this operation up or get yourself killed when you’ve only just come back to us,” Jagger continued. “We aim to end this war and Viper is the key. We’ll take him out and you’ll have your revenge.”
Holt bristled. “Viper is mine. No one is going to stop me from going after him. It’s what I lived for in that fucking dungeon when you gave up on me.”
“You heard what we did to find you. We didn’t give up.” Cold and distant, Zane was as intimidating as Jagger in his own way, simply because there was no line Zane wouldn’t cross for the club. And yet when Holt looked at him now, he saw a man, not a monster—a man who had his woman at the cost of Holt’s soul.
“I heard something else.” Holt turned on Zane, letting out his pain and anger in a rush. “I heard the Sinners in Viper’s house. You didn’t want to tell me you were there, but I knew. I thought my brothers would finally come for me. Did you think to look? Did you think to ask? What about Mario? You remember the restaurant owner we planted in the Jacks? Our own Black Jack rat? Did anyone talk to him? He knew I was locked in the basement of Viper’s house because he brought me food.”
The room stilled and then Tank let out a tortured groan. “Oh fuck. Jesus fucking Christ.”
So that was it. They truly had given up on him. No one had even bothered to ask the one person who had the information that would have saved Holt from months of torture.
“Viper kidnapped Evie’s son, Ty, and took him to his house in the mountains.” Tension—and was that a flicker of guilt?—lined Jagger’s face. “He took Mario and a handful of guards with him, and we lost contact because Mario couldn’t get a phone signal through the trees. Evie went on her own to rescue Ty. We stormed the house, and Mario knifed Viper then took off. We couldn’t find him, and I didn’t send anyone to hunt him down because he’d paid his debt to us. We couldn’t search the house until later because Viper’s guards called the Jacks and about thirty of them showed up to only six of us.”
Holt’s body shook with emotion. He’d heard the gunfight. Waited. Waited. Prayed, although he wasn’t a praying man. He didn’t know how much time had passed when the door finally opened. Hope flared for the last time and died in an instant when Viper walked into the room. And then hell began again.
Caught in a maelstrom of memory, torn by emotion, something inside Holt snapped. He loved them. He hated them. He had been through hell and back, suffered through hope and despair. He had lived to kill them and it was damn hard to throw it aside and accept they hadn’t abandoned him because if he knew one thing about himself, it was that he would never leave a man behind. He needed to finish this. He wanted the torment to end. Although part of him warned that he wasn’t thinking clearly, he reached beneath his cut and drew his weapon on Jagger. “It was easier to assume I was dead than make the effort to find me, wasn’t it?”
“No.” Tank moaned; his distress etched in the lines of his face. “No, brother. Don’t do this. It killed us. Every one.”
Zane moved swiftly, interposing his body between Holt and Jagger. He always had Jagger’s back, had risked his life countless times to save him. Jagger was untouchable unless Zane was dead.
“Whatever you do, whatever you think, you should know that Tank didn’t give up,” Zane said, drawing his own weapon. “Even after the funeral. Even after we told him to let it go because we didn’t have a shred of evidence to suggest you were alive, he looked for you. Days, nights, he was on his bike searching forests and ditches and alleys. He even fucked a coupla Black Jack sweet butts to get information. We didn’t give up easy, T-Rex, but know that Tank didn’t give up at all.”
Nausea roiled in Holt’s stomach, and his hand wavered. Was he ready to do this? To kill the men he had called brothers? To lose the only man he’d considered a friend?
