Page 29 of Cutter's Hope

“Where the hell did you get that thing?” I asked Radar, he shrugged.

“It’s my oldest kid’s,” he grated. His oldest kid was his 17 year old daughter. Dude was forty-three.

“Good to know, now where aremyclothes?” Hope asked sweetly but her expression was sour as all get out.

“Moved your shit from The Nautilus to our safe house, it’ll all be there when you get there,” Pyro said. Hope’s expression darkened but then turned thoughtful.

“My, how heavy handed of you. I thought I wasn’t a prisoner.”

“You’re not, but as of now, I guess you’re our guest,” Marlin supplied.

“You touch my bike?” she asked.

“It’s at the safe house too, took it there myself. Nice little pasta rocket you got there,” Radar said. Hope looked positively mutinous at that.

“Hey,” I said and she turned back to me. “What’d I tell you?” I meant last night and she knew it, she didn’t blush but the memory of it slid behind her eyes. She looked at me thoughtfully.

“You’ve told me a lot of things, but I guess I’m picking up what you’re putting down. So what happens now?” she shifted on her feet, nerves putting her into a bit of a fighter’s stance. I smiled at her.

“We take you to the safe house, and then I go deal with some shit,” I said. She searched my face and nodded slowly.

“It’s going to have to do for now. I need to come up with a game plan on what to do, where to go from here,” she said.

I felt like telling her she wasn’t going anywhere without me, but it wasn’t my place to say, not yet anyways. I’d remind her that I’d promised I was going to help her find her sister after I dealt with cleaning house.

“Right this way, Darlin’,” Pyro said and held out his arm, he and I traded a look and I gritted my teeth. Bastard was doing it just to get my damned goat. Hope looked from one to the other of us.

“I think I got it,” she said and leapt lightly to the dock, “Which one of you jokers has my phone?” she asked.

Nope. She wasn’t going to give any quarter and the emotional storm of last night was over as far as I could tell. I smiled on the inside, a self-indulgent little smile. The chase was still on, and the carefully considering look she was giving me said she wanted me to chase her. Game on, Sweetheart. Game fucking on.

13

Hope…

“You know this is kind of bullshit,” I was sulking, but only mildly. Cutter’s chuckle thrummed through his back and into my chest where I was pressed tight against him. He pulled up in front of a modern looking house, a real nice place that looked like it belonged on the front cover of Better Homes & Gardens.

“I won’t be too long, Sweetheart. You and I have some things to talk about.”

Wasn’t that the ever loving truth? He shut off the bike and I got off of it, hiking the bag made out of old fishing net higher onto my shoulder. It had my shorts and tank from last night in it. Cutter slipped my phone out of his vest’s inside pocket and handed it to me. I palmed it and looked over the driveway.

My baby was indeed parked in the shade of a couple of palms in the front of the house, off to the side. The place was a two story monstrosity with wide stone steps out front and by the looks of things, sat right on the beach. We were a bit far out from town for a normal person to walk it but I wasn’t your average Joe, plus I had my bike. They didn’t know about the hidden key.

“So you leaving me here by myself?” I asked, not quite believing that I wasn’t some kind of prisoner or something. Not like they could hold me if they wanted to. I was pretty sure out of all of them that Cutter was the only one that could give me a run for my money. The rest could probably hold their own against anyone else, I was just far too trained for them to handle me one on one… Two on one might even be a stretch for them to be honest. It took Cutter to bring me down the night before and I was still deliciously sore from how that’d turned out. I still had some mixed feelings about that, but for now the good outweighed the bad.

“Sweetheart, look at me?” he said softly and I did because he asked and because he was treating me with more respect than I probably deserved. His eyes were a brown with deeper flecks of bronze to them. Lighter than mine but no less deep. He invaded my personal space so beautifully and brought his forehead down to mine while his boys looked on from a short distance away.

“You’re not a prisoner, not like we could hold you if you got determined anyways and I don’t want to see any of my guys hurt. Likewise, I don’t want to see you hurt either but things have gotta happen in a certain order here, you feel me?” he asked. I nodded, mouth suddenly inoperable due to his proximity. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to disappear into Cutter’s arms and never come up for air again. I wanted to forget, briefly, like he’d made me forget last night.

Faith…

I closed my eyes and breathed out and somehow knew that he knew. He wrapped me up in his embrace and hugged me as I nodded my understanding even though I didn’t get it, I understood protocol and apparently his merry band of misfits had protocols in spades.

“Gimme a few hours, I’ll come back here and we’ll talk, figure out our next move. Okay?”

Our next move…I liked the sound of that. It was the sound of not being alone anymore and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I was tired. Really tired of carrying this fucked up burden all by myself. But it was my cross to bear, no one else’s.

“Why are you helping me?” I asked and leveled him with a steady gaze.

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