Page 63 of Silent as Sin
“Ashen!” Jewel’s voice tore open the room. She shoved through the others and hit me with it. “She’s gone.”
My gut dropped like the floor had been pulled out. Sound narrowed to my heartbeat. Air went thin.
“What the fuck do you mean gone?” I snapped. Fury came out hot and sharp.
“We thought she was on the couch reading.” Jewel was a machine of breath, clipped and fast. “Dusty found the back door open. He went after her—”
“All I remember is getting hit,” Dusty interrupted her. He kept pressing at the blood in his hair like maybe he could rub the memory away. “Didn’t see who did it. Came to, she was gone.”
The words draped over me like an insult. My fists closed until knuckles gleamed white. Time thickened like someone winding a clock toward a blade.
“Bones,” Warden said behind me, flat and hard, no surprise in it, only the cold math of what he knew. “This reeks of him.”
I spun before my head cleared. Muscle memory got me to Dusty, and everything snapped loose. “You’re telling mesomeone found the one weak spot in our perimeter, and you didn’t see a damn thing?”
Dusty folded. “I failed her. I’m sorry, brother.”
“Sorry.” The word tasted like bile. The image of her — warm breath, that stupid whisper — flared and went black. Whatever warmth had been calcified into something harder in my chest. “Sorry don’t get her fucking back.”
Jewel grabbed my arm like she could hold me. I shook her off. Her fingers left a sting so clean it felt like a lesson.
I went to the back door. Rain had stopped but the dirt was soft and clotted. Tire tracks plunged toward the scrub: one set hard east, another east-south. A skid where something heavy had been dragged. Boot prints. I crouched, brushed the dirt with two fingers; crushed grass clung to a print. Something small flashed in the mud — the glass bird, wing snapped, Wren’s charm.
She thought it would protect her.
When I stood the world went red at the edges. Everything focused into one center: she was gone and someone had taken her.
“We find him,” I said. The voice that came out was low and animal, quiet and dangerous. “We find Bones and we put him down. Proper.”
Warden’s hand landed on my shoulder, heavy and sure. “We will. Smart first, then brutal.”
“Smart?” I barked a laugh that had no humor. “You want me to sit on my hands while he toys with her?”
“No.” Warden’s stare went cold, the look of a man who’s already done the sums and picked the straightest road to payback. “You ride with your brothers and bring her back. Don’t run off on your temper. That’s exactly what he wants.”
The brothers closed up around us. We weren’t just a crew; we were a wall of leather and scars and iron will. The patch wasn’tjust cloth, it was a promise and a debt. I should’ve felt steadied by it. Instead I felt everything I loved wrapped in someone else’s hands.
My fingers found the glass bird at my hip, the weight of it was a promise and a prayer. For one stupid, soft second I heard her voice again from that night: I choose you. It flared like a flare and I let it harden into something else, a tool.
“We split,” I said flat, blade-quiet. “Warden, take Maul and Scyth north along the ridge, cut their exits. Throttle, Rex, sweep the south roads. Dusty, you ride point out here. Don’t let anyone slip back in. Call contacts. Trackers. Dogs. No lone wolves. No fireworks until we’re set.”
Warden nodded. “We move in an hour. Quiet until then. Hit hard when we do.”
I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and downed it. It tasted thin. Rage cooled into a working heat, the kind that plans and kills and keeps a club alive.
“Bones’s capable of sick shit,” Throttle said low in the kitchen. “He’s not human in what he does.”
“I’ll make him human,” I said through my teeth. “If he touches her —if he hurts her— I’ll make him beg to die.”
Outside the lot the desert swallowed the sound of men gearing up. Engines choked and coughed to life. Leather rang on steel. The day narrowed until only the hunt existed. Every man in that clubhouse felt it: the world tilted, and we would tilt back.
I would tear the world open for her. I would dig every truth out until it bled answers. If I had to, I’d pull Bones up from wherever he hid and watch him rot in the sun.
We rode for war.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
METAL, SLICK ANDunforgiving, kissed my cheek.Rust and old rain coated my tongue. When I shifted, steel answered steel, a sharp, ringing note that belonged to cages and locks.
