Page 39 of The Saviors: Part Two

“I have a niece named Amber.” My stomach drops out, and Sean’s head snaps up from his phone, where he was relaying everything to Kai.

“Do you have a picture?” I ask.

She picks up her phone and scrolls until she finds what she’s looking for. She slides it to us, and Sean looks closely at it. “It’s an old picture.”

“I don’t know if that’s her. Can I forward this to myself?” She nods in answer, and Sean sends it to his phone. “What can you tell us about her?”

“She’s my brother’s oldest daughter. He moved to Alabama for a job right after she was born.” Alabama runs right through the bible belt. “She’s about twenty-four or twenty-five now. They don’t have social media. He sent that to me years ago.”

I watch Axel take everything in and can tell he’s thinking the same thing as me. It’s the perfect match for Amber or just one hell of a coincidence. I’m hoping for the latter because this news would kill Chelsea. Amber’s the first person she had before we came along. Two years is a long time to play that sort of game, and Nolan said everything checks out about her, so I’m hoping, for Chelsea’s sake, we’re just a bunch of paranoid assholes.

“You don’t know where they are now?” Sean asks.

“No. That’s the last time that we had contact. Do you think this is related?”

Axel shrugs, keeping his expression neutral. “Probably not, but anything helps right now. What’s the last name?”

“Carter. My brother’s name is Henry.”

We thank her for her time and grab Kai from outside to head back home. We hit the main road, and Axel starts grumbling about the way Sean and Kai ride the bikes.

I pull out my phone and do a quick social media search for Amber. It’s full of pictures of her, but none of Chelsea, which I’m sure is Chelsea’s doing. “Unless she had one hell of a plastic surgeon, there’s no way this is the same girl.”

“We need to bring Chelsea in on this. The girl’s name is Amber, she’s connected to the Stinsons, they’re the same age, and she’s from Alabama. That’s a lot of coincidences, Cole. We’ll have Nolan do a comparison of the pics and search for her with the new name we have. We can’t leave any of this to chance.”

“I know, but fuck, this is going to break her heart.”

“I’d rather pick up the pieces than risk losing her again. Send all that to Nolan so he can start running it.”

I shoot Nolan a message with everything that we have. He answers back that he’s on it, and I settle in for the ride back to the house. The thoughts of who could be betraying us swirl in my head on repeat, and the more I think about it, the more pissed I get. “Do you think Ari could be fucking us over?”

“At this point, Cole, I have no damn idea. We need to think about pulling them from guarding Gavin. No way we can put them at risk.”

“Yeah, but if we’re wrong, that leaves them unprotected.”

“I don’t have all the answers, Cole!” Axel slaps the steering wheel, showing his frustrations. “Sorry. But I just don’t know what to do right now, and that’s never fucking happened to me.”

“You don’t have to make the decisions on your own, man. You have all of us, and we’ll figure this out. Just like we always do. Maybe we can move Gavin closer to us and pull Ari’s crew until they check out.”

“Ghost is never going to go for that, and he’s not going to leave his family. We need to figure it out fast and go from there.”

“If Gavin becomes a Savior, then he’ll be away from them anyway. I say you leave it up to Gavin.”

Axel nods. “We can do that.”

The rest of the drive to the house is silent, and when we get back to the house, we, minus Kai, go straight to the office to find Nolan in front of his computer. “Where’s Chels?” I ask.

“She went to bed.”

“Sean, send him the old picture of Amber, and Cole, send him the new one,” Axel says, sitting beside Nolan. “We need a comparison. Did you find anything on the names?”

“Yeah, hold on. Let me start this first.” Nolan gets everything running on his computer and pulls up another folder. “Amber Carter died in a car accident almost three years ago with her brother Milo.” He pulls up a newspaper article talking about the wreck. “They say he was drunk and hit a tree, killing them both instantly. Henry Carter still lives on their farm with the youngest son.”

“The accident could have been set up,” I admit quietly.

“I’m searching records from the coroner’s office, hospital, and funeral home.” His computer dings, and he switches back to the pictures. “This says not a match. Bone structure is all off, and that sounds like an awful lot of work just to help Charlie or Brady.”

“Okay. We move on from Amber for now. What about the other stuff?” Axel asks.