Page 22 of Tracked By Hound

I stand up, eyes wide with excitement as her words sink in. “Ransom? He’s here?”

She nods. “Yeah. Saint asked me to get you.” Scarlett offers a small smile. “I’ll go tell them you’ll be a few minutes if you want a chance to wash up, but your brother seems anxious to see you.”

I’m practically vibrating with excitement at the prospect of seeing my brother after a week. It’s the longest we’ve ever been apart, and we haven’t been talking much as I found myself distracted by Hound. We text daily, but I imagine that the lack of calls might have worried him enough to come all the way here.

Christ, I’ve missed both him and my grandmother.

I turn to the other girls, who smile at me and motion for me to go ahead. I take enough time to wash my hands, but there’s little I can do about the mud sticking to my jeans and shirt.

Saint’s office is on the first floor, so we don’t have to go far. My heart is racing when the door is pushed open and I walk in. I spot Hound first, his stony face something I’ve come to find comforting. There are three other men in the room, and I recognize the blue-eyed man seated behind the massive desk as Saint, the president and Jade’s husband. The other two I don’t recognize, but the patches on their leather jackets let me know they are club members. Scarlett walks to the dark-haired man and takes his hand, so I assume he must be Gray.

“CJ!”

Before I can turn, I am quickly engulfed in familiar arms, and I choke back a sob as I hug my brother back. “Ransom!”

“Are you okay?” He pushes back from the embrace to look at me, and he must see something because his eyes flare with fury before he turns accusingly to Hound. “Where the hell have you been keeping my sister, you psycho? She looks like she crawled out of a hole. You promised you would take care of her.”

I look down at my clothes and realize that I do look like I crawled out of a hole. I bet my face and hair weren’t spared from the mess of the garden. I grab my brother’s arm before he can get into Hound’s face and get himself killed. There is restrained fury on Hound’s face that tells me he might not stop at simply punching my brother.

The tension in the room is palpable.

“I was gardening,” I tell my brother in an attempt to alleviate some of it. “I’m fine, Ransom. Some girls and I were gardening. For fun.” I quickly add the last bit before he can make an assumption.

Someone clears their throat, and all attention shifts to the man seated behind the massive desk. “Well, now that you’ve seen your sister, where’s the rest of our money?”

My head whips to my brother. “You have it? The money?”

Ransom looks uncomfortable as he shuffles his feet nervously. “Not all of it,” he says, and if possible, the room’s temperature falls a few degrees. I shudder at the chill, shifting protectively next to my brother even as my eyes search Hound’s. I know he’s the club’s tracker and an enforcer, but he promised he wouldn’t kill Ransom.

He promised!

“Do we look like a joke to you?” Saint’s voice is hard as steel and dangerously low. “How dare you come here making demands without fulfilling your end of the bargain.”

Ransom’s eyes widen slightly as he turns to me, and I see the dark circles under his eyes. He looks bone tired, like he hasn’t had a wink of sleep in days, and my heart breaks at the thought. “You still have three weeks. I have some savings from working at the shop—” I start.

“No,” Ransom cuts in, placing an arm protectively around me. “Chelsea doesn’t deserve to pay for something I did. My sister has suffered enough. Let her leave. Please. Take me instead.”

The room falls into a tense quiet, and I turn to find Hound watching me. His eyes are unreadable, and something painful twists in my stomach. A part of me wants to go to him, beg him to fix this, but even I understand that it’s beyond his control. My brother stole money from the club; it’s not Hound’s fault.

“How did you steal the money?” Saint asks, his hard blue eyes trained on my brother. “What exactly do you do?”

“I’m a hacker,” Ransom responds, his voice surprisingly firm. I know he’s nervous, but only someone who knows him as well as I do would be able to tell. “I’m a genius with numbers andcomputers. I can follow any online trail, especially money, but I do a lot of other things too.”

“So how did you know to stealourmoney? Did you hack the bank?”

“When the president of the Chrome Vipers disappeared and their clubhouse was attacked, I figured it would be a while before anyone tried to access the accounts, so I thought there was no harm in taking some,” he says, managing to sound sorry and a little sheepish. “I tracked down an account used by the Vipers that had been inactive for a while, and I emptied it. I didn’t know the money actually belonged to the Rebels.”

“Would that have stopped you?” Ransom’s silence is apparently all the answer Saint needs. “You’re surprisingly honest. I’ll give you that. And I have to say I’m impressed that you’ve managed to come up with over half your debt in one week. Did you steal it from someone else to get it?”

“No,” Ransom responds. “I hacked into some rich guy’s emails until I came across some insider news about an aerospace company on the verge of a big announcement. I invested in the company’s stock just before the press release, then sold at a profit a few days later. I guess you could call it insider trading, but I bounced the money around enough that it’s untraceable now.”

Saint leans back in his chair and studies my brother for a long time before his eyes shift to the quiet man I’ve spent the better part of a week loving, waking up to, and sharing meals with. I’ve told him secrets I’ve never shared with anyone before, not even Ransom. Saint must see something in his face that I don’t because he nods in understanding.

“We’ll let you both go.”Both?“Under the condition that you work for the club until the full debt is repaid plus one year.”

Ransom gapes at the man. “You want me to work for the Rebels?”

Saint’s eyes harden. “You have a problem with that?”

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