Chapter Fifteen

Tynan

M y chest felt like an inferno raged inside of it, the violent flames stoked stronger with every breath I took.

I tried to move—to ease the burning pain trapped in the hollow cage of my chest—but my left arm was frozen and my right arm, though more pliable, felt like there was a hundred-pound lead weight dangling from my wrist.

From all my limbs, really.

I’d never felt so heavy…so weak. Like I was pinned down by the weight of the ocean and trying to move. What happened—Sutton. The memory hit my brain with the force of a wrecking ball, the subsequent pain sending a long, strained groan from my lips.

“Don’t move.”

It was the voice, not the words, that made me stop. Her voice.

I pried my eyelids open, swearing I heard them creak under the effort. The room swiveled into focus slowly, like a carnival ride winding to a halt, and the familiar topography of my cabin settled into place.

We’d made it back.

She’d brought me back.

“Sutton.” My voice didn’t even sound like my own when I saw her.

She was sitting beside the bed—the gurney—in one of the recliners from the living room that she’d dragged over.

From the imprint in the dark brown leather, it looked like she’d been there for days.

And from the look in her eyes, she seemed just as enraged with me now as she was when we’d last argued right before…

“What happened?” I croaked, a fresh pain lancing the dryness in my throat.

Her legs uncurled from the seat, and she set aside my leather jacket— she was sewing my leather jacket .

“You tried to save me and got stabbed for the effort.” She stood, her tight clothing—which wasn’t hers—clung to every lithe curve.

My eyes flicked down my bare chest. The middle of it, just below my pec to the top of my abs, was wrapped in bandages like a mummy, a distinct bulge on my left side where the wound was and extra packing added underneath.

Damn . In the moment, I hadn’t thought the wound was too bad, but apparently that was the adrenaline thinking.

I looked back up, following Sutton as she went to the kitchen and grabbed a cold water from the fridge. The way she moved through my home gave me the sense she’d spent plenty of time in it already.

The idea was almost as unacceptable as the pleasure it gave me.

“Here, drink this.” She uncapped the bottle, but when she went to put it to my lips, I turned my head to the side, biting through the lance of pain.

“What…happened?”

Her lip twitched, and then she reached out and cupped the side of my face. “Don’t be stupid,” she muttered and pressed the bottle to my lips. “Drink.”

Our eyes locked, something more than water passing between us. Something heavier when I opened my mouth for her. Something hotter when she tipped the bottle to let the cool water soothe my parched throat.

“I drove us back here,” she began to answer after a second. “But you were pretty much unconscious by the time we arrived. Barely holding on…” Her voice loosened inside the memory, and for a moment, I saw the softness that came over her beautiful face. The pain. The worry. The ache she’d felt for me.

It was so…overwhelming. A sip of water ended down the wrong pipe, and I started to cough.

Each wrench of my chest felt like I was being stabbed again and again, but I gladly endured the massacre when I saw how she’d worried for me.

“Thankfully, Dr. Nilsen was here almost immediately.” She capped the bottle, and then, without thinking, brought her hand back to my face, her thumb swiping the water that beaded on my chin and bottle lip.

“You saved me,” I said, and her finger paused right in the center of my mouth, the tip of her pointed nail resting just through my lips.

It was as though she wanted to push her thumb straight into my mouth, to push the words I’d said right back to where they’d come from. But she caught herself, jerking her hand away a split second later.

“I shouldn’t have had to,” she declared; an amateur would think the anger in her voice was directed at me, but an expert would only hear self-loathing. “You got lucky. No major internal damage, so stitches. A blood transfusion. And rest for a couple of days.”

But not for her. I could practically see her determination pumping through her as if the arteries flowing with it were on the outside of her skin.

“Sutton.” I braced myself and tried to sit up straighter, sending pain ricocheting from every corner of my skin.

“What are you—stop. Don’t move—” Her body sluiced across mine, her hands finding the bare angles of my shoulders to try to keep me down.

But even wounded, she didn’t have enough leverage.

“I swear if you pop your stitches?—”

“Rorik—Dr. Nilsen will fix them,” I finished for her. Rorik had patched up each one of us more times than we could count.

“But I’ll still be blamed,” she mumbled, letting go of me when she realized it was pointless. “I’m supposed to watch you. Make sure you’re—you don’t hurt yourself.”

My head cocked and one of my brows slowly lifted, a small smile curling my lips along with it.

“How the tables have turned,” I muttered wryly.

Her scowl sent a thrum through my blood. “I’d say babysitting you is worse than babysitting me.”

“Guess it depends on how you look at it,” I grunted and let out a deep breath as I settled into my different position. Unfortunately, it didn’t help the sharp bind around my chest.

“You almost died.” She opened the water bottle again and pushed it to my mouth. “Not really another way to look at it.”

I took another long gulp, not realizing how thirsty I still was until the drink sounded like it landed inside a cavern in my stomach.

“Then I guess I’m just glad you didn’t take my bike and leave me at the house,” I retorted as a joke, but it couldn’t have fallen flatter the way hurt creased her brows and her full lips tightened. I cleared my throat. “I’m surprised Rorik left you in charge of me. Usually, he won’t leave until his patient is conscious.”

“He didn’t put me in charge,” she replied, crinkling the empty bottle and taking it to the trash. “I refused to leave, and I don’t think he appreciated the company.”

Something different—something not painful but still aching—pulled tight in my chest, knowing that she’d wanted to remain here. In my house. With me. Watching over me.

“So, you volunteered to babysit me…” I rumbled low.

Her lashes fluttered, kissing the tops of her cheeks and seeming to dust them with pink. “I’m hard, not heartless,” she murmured, her chin dipping.

“Never thought you were either, little wasp.” I reached my right arm out as though she were close enough that I could fit my fingers under her chin and lift it.

She wasn’t, yet her head lifted all the same. As though there were still an invisible string tying me to her. One that should never have been tied in the first place. One I wished I could see so I could make a clean cut.

She was my best friend’s daughter. Eighteen years younger than me. The fact that there was a legal lifetime separating our ages should’ve made it so I never wanted her in the first place.

My thoughts scattered like marbles when Sutton pulled out a phone and tapped out a message.

“Whose phone is that?” If she’d found her phone?—

“Mine. My new one.”

“Where’s my phone?”

She frowned. “I think Robyn took it.”

Rob…

“Sutton, we have to talk,” I said and let out another hiss of pain. “And I have to call Creed?—”

The door opened then, and voices filled my cabin, Robyn and Rorik appearing in the doorway, their discussion fizzling as soon as they saw me upright.

“I take it our patient didn’t follow instructions,” Rorik murmured as he moved efficiently around Sutton to check the portable monitors hooked up at the side of the bed.

“I sat up. Not signed up for a marathon,” I grumbled.

“With how much blood you lost, those are basically the equivalent,” he replied low like he didn’t want the others to hear.

I swallowed my reply, wondering just how worried Sutton had been if Rorik was trying not to advertise just how bad my injury was.

“Did I do any damage?” I asked after he looked like he was finished checking all my vitals.

“We’ll find out,” he muttered, reaching for the edge of the bandage to undo it. “I’d say you probably would’ve felt if a stitch tore, but with your pain tolerance…”

I made a low noise, watching him slide my left arm out of the sling and then start to unravel the bandage.

“Tynan, we need to talk.” Rob stepped forward and echoed my sentiments to Sutton, who now lounged with one shoulder propped against the window directly in front of my makeshift bed.

“I can explain—but first, I need to talk to Sutton.” Alone.

“No, you don’t understand?—”

Anger made my side hurt worse. “Whatever it is, Rob?—”

“It’s Mara,” Sutton interrupted, stepping forward and gripping the bottom railing on the gurney.

My eyes locked with hers, and when even Rob remained quiet to give Sutton the floor, I realized I had a new reason to worry.

“Mara was working for Robyn.”

Air hissed through my lips, the valve in my chest opening slowly as I processed the information.

“I didn’t realize you were looking for her,” Rob added. “Not until it was too late.”

My brows banded together. “You tried to call me…”

“To warn you.” She pulled out her phone and swiped to a message in an encrypted messaging app.

Protect Sutton.

“Mara had mentioned Sutton before…but when she sent this two days ago, I realized something bigger was going on. I tried to call you to warn you. I was hoping you could bring Sutton back to the garage so we could talk…”

“But they were already there,” I finished, wincing as Rorik peeled the last of the bandage away, exposing the purple-red mottled flesh, tacked together with black stitching.

“I had no idea you were looking for Mara. I would’ve told you…”

I gritted my teeth, not for the first time hating how Robyn continued to work on her own. Like a lone wolf that still belonged to a protective pack.

She thought we’d done too much. Given too much. And just like Sutton, she believed that her problems were hers alone to solve.

“How long?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“Almost a year,” she answered. “When I met her, she was on a slippery slope to a not great place. She carried a lot of guilt and anger?—”

“A lot of things you could use.”

Rob’s eyes narrowed on me like the fresh cut of a knife. “A lot of things she could better use to help herself and help others. I gave her that choice.”

I let out a breath, knowing my anger was misdirected. Rob cared about all the women she took under her wing, and Mara would’ve been no different. I just wish I would’ve fucking known that this whole time…

“Mara was working with Robyn. That was why she became Kang’s girlfriend. Why she didn’t tell me about him at first, and why she wouldn’t listen when I told her to leave him,” Sutton continued, clearly having heard this part of the story before.

“So, Kang was your target.”

Rob’s head tipped, and she grimaced. “Not exactly. Kang was supposed to be a stepping stone into the Wah Ching,” she explained, knotting her arms over her chest. “Over the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been getting reports in my network of girls disappearing. At first, I couldn’t really figure out the connection between them, aside from that they were all young and beautiful. They disappeared from different hotels or apartments throughout the city. They were different races. Different socioeconomic class. Some had families who reported them missing. Others didn’t. Some the police investigated, others they didn’t.”

“There had to be something linking them,” I interrupted. Otherwise she would have picked up on the string of missing women.

“It took a while for us to catch on to the pattern that they all disappeared without taking any of their things,” she replied. “It was a small discrepancy, but my team is trained to pick up on small things.”

“So, you started looking into it.”

“One of my cleaning women was sent to the Hill high-rise to clean up an apartment that had been abandoned by the tenant. When she got there and realized it was another one of these situations, we went in and did a deep clean of all the personal items, and that was when I found it—the business card for Wild Side.”

“You okay?” Rorik asked when I flinched, thinking it was because of something he did.

“Fine,” I clipped and nodded to Robyn. “The cam site. I’m familiar,” I grunted, my jaw pulsing heavy under Sutton’s steady gaze. “Continue.”

“It didn’t sit well when I went to the site and you needed an access code to create a profile. The code on the card I had was expired. They are one-time use. But I put out word through my network to keep an eye out for those cards.”

Robyn’s network consisted of maids and janitors and bellmen and greeters and Uber drivers—anyone who could easily be invisible but who also could observe everything.

“The reports started filing in from all over the city, which made one thing clear: not every girl who got a card went missing, but in every instance after that where a woman went missing and left all her things behind, there was one of these cards,” she said, shifting her weight. “One of my girls found a card in the Airbnb she was cleaning and asked the woman where she’d gotten it; that’s how we found the connection to the White Pearl and Kang.”

“And Mara?” I probed. “Why’d you pick her to do this? She was new.”

“She volunteered. She said she’d bought weed off Kang in the past and he’d flirted with her, so she knew he’d take the bait,” she said and added with a sigh, “I wanted to send someone else, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Said she couldn’t stand by when she could stop men from preying on women.”

“So, her task was to get close to him, get one of these cards, and figure out what was happening to the women.”

“Yeah,” Robyn continued. “It took a little bit. Kang might act like a fool, but he’s not exactly an idiot, and we both started to suspect he might be more involved with the site than just handing out cards.”

“What do you mean more involved?”

“Kang has a programming degree. Mara said some of the comments he made…it seemed like he might’ve been the one to develop the app.”

My hand fisted at my side.

“Whether he did or not wasn’t critical to me, not like finding the missing women was. Finally, Kang signed her up on the site. She had a separate cell phone that I gave her to communicate with me, and she was able to send me screenshots of the site and her profile. I had a feeling we were onto something, and I worried that passing messages would get too risky, so at our last meeting, I installed a wireless mirror trace on her phone that she could activate so I could watch everything remotely.”

“You were following her the whole time.” The whole time we were looking for her.

“She told me about Sutton, and I gave her a choice, Tynan. She never had to do any of this.”

“But she wanted to.” Sounded like someone else I knew.

“I told her she had to get Sutton out of the picture or it could put the both of them in danger.”

“That’s why she said the things she did.” Sutton’s throat bobbed. “Why she pushed the exact buttons she did.”

I grunted and then took a slow inhale.

“You want something for the pain?” Rorik asked.

“No.” I didn’t want any more of that shit that clouded my brain.

“I was tracking Mara through her phone when she went to the club that night. User923X had been messaging her, saying they would meet soon.”

“The same one who messaged me,” Sutton added, like I’d ever forget the username of the man who saw her naked.

I didn’t register the sound that came from my chest until I saw Rorik’s brow lift, intrigued.

“Where did they take her?”

“They have a secret passageway that connects through the neighboring buildings to an apartment building a couple blocks away.”

“So, you’ve known where she is this whole time?” I asked even though it wasn’t her fault. There was no way she would’ve known Sutton was stubborn and undeterred when it came to finding her best friend.

“I did,” she answered, the ripple of tension through her fingers telling me everything I needed to know.

“But not anymore…”

“I messaged and told her I’d pull her out that night at the club, but she insisted she wanted to stay. She didn’t want any more women to go missing,” Rob said. “She was moved to the apartment building, but then nothing happened. She couldn’t leave, but she was also pampered. Fed. Facials. Massages. Vitamins. But no sign of the man she’s been communicating with. She told me they kept telling her that she would be ready and presented to him soon.”

Her hand flexed and released, now at her side. I gave her a hard time about recruiting Mara because I knew how much Mara meant to Sutton…and I knew the kind of things Robyn was involved in in the city. The risks her girls took. But I also knew that Rob would gladly give her life to protect any of them when it came down to it, so the fact that Mara had stayed and was now in danger could only be crushing her from the inside out.

“Presented? Like some kind of auction?”

“Auction or sale, we think.” Rob pulled the chain out from around her neck, starting to fiddle with the ring on the end. “From what I’ve gathered, the app catalogs women, and then when someone wants them—is willing to pay—the app tracks the cell phone of the woman using it, and they abduct them right off the street and sell them for top dollar.”

To twisted men like Uzair Shazad.

“So, because Sutton signed up on her phone with one of those codes, that was how they tracked her.”

Sutton flashed me a look, but it was gone too quickly before I could decipher it.

“They would’ve come for me regardless, but because you interrupted my chat, they decided it was safer to kill us both.”

I turned to Robyn. “But you called to warn me.”

“Mara texted me to protect Sutton,” Rob responded. “I knew something was wrong. She’d sent a message a few days earlier that something had changed and the men guarding her were on edge.”

“Kang,” I croaked and flicked my eyes to Sutton; her expression didn’t change. She didn’t have any regrets about what she’d done to the man in that alley, and I didn’t blame her. Part of me still believed he deserved worse.

Rob nodded. “I knew Sutton was here—that the police brought her here.”

“Yeah,” I said, taking the water bottle that Rorik offered me with my free hand. Before I took a sip, I added, “Your brothers have surprisingly big mouths.”

“They do.” Her smirk flashed for a nanosecond. “But I knew because I was the one who made sure the police brought her here.”

“What?”

“What?” The word came out so fast from both Sutton and me, I lost track of my breath and started to cough, sending pain fizzling through my chest.

Meanwhile, Sutton glared at the other woman. Guess she hadn’t told her everything.

Welcome to the world of Robyn DuBois. One of half truths yet complete trust.

“I keep eyes on my people, Ty. I do whatever is necessary to protect them—and the choices they make,” Rob clipped, her jaw as set in stone as the tone of her voice. She looked at Sutton when she explained the rest. “Mara was worried about you—what you’d do—and my first concern was her safety, and I couldn’t let you jeopardize that.”

“You called the police when I broke into her apartment.” Sutton sounded breathless.

“No,” Rob replied with a small laugh. “That was definitely the security guard you pissed off. But I did contact Officer Daws immediately so he could intervene. I needed to make sure you were safe, too, but out of the picture, and Daws owed me a favor. Plus, it was a win for him when I told him I had a grumpy ex-Green Beret who’d be happy to babysit her.” She let out a heavy sigh. “I didn’t expect you to…continue to try to find Mara.”

“She’s my family,” Sutton said, raw emotion bleeding into the truth.

“Like I said, I didn’t know you were still looking. And I did know where Mara was, but her phone—the tracker has been off-line since she sent that last message.”

“I think we need to talk to Kang again,” Sutton declared. “He’s our only way in?—”

“He’s gone.”

“What?” Rob’s head whipped in my direction.

“Creed wanted to follow him, but Kang has disappeared?—”

“Then we have to go to that apartment building. There has to be something there to lead us to Mara?—”

“They were prepping Mara for something. If they thought she was too much of a liability, they would’ve killed her first rather than come after you. Plus, Mara could’ve turned off her phone herself to protect her cover. She knows forty-eight hours without contact is my limit.”

“Two more days—” Sutton choked.

“Is Creed here?” I interrupted, already seeing the fire of defiance brewing in Sutton’s stare, and I was in no condition to stop her this time.

“The big, silent behemoth?” Robyn jutted her chin. “No. Haven’t seen him since that first night. Why?”

“He’ll go to the apartment. He’ll look for something to locate Mara?—”

“No. If Mara thought she was in imminent danger, she would’ve told me. Instead, she only warned me about you. Give her two more days to make contact,” Rob insisted. “The men holding her are already on high alert. If he spooks them and her cover is still intact, he’ll jeopardize everything we’ve done to stop the Wah Ching from kidnapping and sex trafficking these women.”

I jerked and then let out a curse, more from my realization than the pain that snapped across my chest. “It’s not the fucking Wah Ching you need to worry about?—”

“Dammit, Tynan.” Rorik stepped up to the bed again, frustration making his temple thump like a freight train chugging along his skull. “I’ll sedate you again if I have to.”

“Come near me with another needle, and I will test the bounds of our friendship,” I warned him with a glare. I didn’t have to tell him to move aside because Rob pushed her way in front.

“What do you mean it’s not the Wah Ching?” Her lips drew in a tight line. “Kang is a Blue Lantern. The White Pearl is a known gang hotspot. The men who came after Sutton were classic?—”

“And it was Brock Carson who Kang got into a car with the night he brought Mara to the White Pearl,” I snapped.

The way Rob straightened, I was surprised the snap of her back wasn’t audible through the room.

The color drained from her face. “Carson. Are you sure?” Her voice hardly had any tenor.

I nodded. “Give me my phone.”

When she did, I opened up to the stills I’d saved from Creed and handed it to her.

“Creed got these from a security camera facing the alley the night they took Mara.”

“What?” Sutton’s eyes went wide, and she moved next to Rob so she could look at the photos, too.

Rob flipped slowly through the images, taking her time to confirm what I was saying. Her throat bobbed, and the silence in the room was the kind that accompanied a death.

“Who is he?” Sutton demanded.

I didn’t respond. Unfortunately, there was more. It wasn’t just Carson’s association with GrowTech as their new COO that would weigh on her, and I needed Rob to understand the true gravity of this situation before breaking the news to Sutton.

“It’s not just Carson, Rob. We think…I think he’s been using the site to find women for Uzair Shazad.”

I’d seen men take bullets with less pain on their faces than the kind that stained her expression now.

She blinked slowly and then finally looked up from my phone. “I see.”

Even Sutton, who clearly had a bottleneck of questions lining her throat, kept silent in the presence of Rob’s smoldering fury.

“Carson and Uzair go way back, and I think he leveraged his relationship with them to get the position at GrowTech—to be the collateral link between the two men.”

“Shazad has been wanting to break into the North American market for a long time,” she said hollowly. “If he’s working with Carson and GrowTech to bring the heroin in and distribute, the Wah Ching and other Triad gangs would be the perfect candidates to deal.”

“I know Mara could be okay—could be getting close to the truth. But the danger she could be in?—”

“Send Creed to the apartment. I’ll meet him there,” Rob said with a look that promised to raze the entire city if that was what it took to get Mara out of their clutches. “If you’ll excuse me.”

She spun and stalked from the room, no doubt to reach out to every finger of her organization to find where they could’ve taken Mara.

“Who is Uzair Shazad?” Sutton asked when Rob left.

“The son of Pakistan’s most notorious criminal organization…and a man whose sexual preferences usually end up with a body count.”

“Then he was definitely the man I was chatting with.”

I sucked in a breath. “How do you know?”

“Because it was only the promise of recalibrating my definition of pain that turned him on.”