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Damn it. My heart sank when I saw it was just Brooks. I picked up, and before I could even get a hello out, Brooks’ frantic voice came through.

“Court, someone took Whitney. I don’t—he cut the power, so the alarms were shut off, but Vincent and I were too far away to do anything, and he⁠—”

Panic shot through me, and Cade, who noticed the immediate change in my demeanor, was at my side in two seconds. “What? What the fuck do you mean someone took her⁠—”

“He cut the fucking power and she was gone by the time we got home! Fuck, okay. I just sent you a still of the guy, do you recognize him?”

My phone vibrated, and I opened the image Brooks sent me. Ice raced through my veins as I looked at the image of Whitney hanging limply over a man’s shoulder.

No, not just any man.

Cade cursed under his breath. “That’s fucking Kyle.” He grabbed the phone from my hand and told Brooks to meet us at Frank’s, then hung up and handed me the phone back.

Rage erupted through my being as I kept staring at the picture, the world fading around me as a high-pitched ringing started in my head. Cade’s voice wrenched me all the way back to reality. “Fuck. We gotta go. Court! Let’s fucking go.”

I blinked, then ran with Cade to our pickup, hopping in the passenger seat as he put it in drive. We sped off the site and down the highway, but we weren’t going home. We couldn’t.

I punched the dashboard until Cade shouted at me. “I get that you’re freaking out right now, I do,” he growled. “But this mission is fucked and we need to keep our cool going forward because not only will we not get the money, we could possibly die trying. So rein in your goddamn temper and calm the fuck down. She’ll be okay. She’s the toughest fucking person. She can hold her own. You know that. Now think about Jesse and why we’re doing this and calm the fuck down.”

Fuck.

I whipped my head back into the headrest, slamming it a few times, trying to rattle this terror right out of my system. Logically, I knew he was right, but Whitney getting dragged away by some stranger? No, by a fucking rat. Everything in my system was screaming at me to go get her, to kill the man who took her, and make sure she was safe.

“We go to Frank’s and figure things out from there. We need to think about what this means for the whole operation. Now we’ve been compromised, and Thorne will be waiting for us to make the next move. Taking Whitney is either bait or retribution or both. Either way, he knows about us. If he’s got Whitney, he knows.”

None of this was what I wanted to hear. The only thing I wanted to do was take the car and chase after Whitney.

“I knew there was something off about him. The way he was asking those questions.” Cade pulled out his phone, hit a few buttons, and held it to his ear. “Frank. We got a problem. No, it’s Kyle. Yes, your new fucking hire Kyle.” There was a pause while he listened to something Frank was saying, then, “No, he fucking kidnapped Court’s girl. Yes, Court has a fucking girl—that’s not the goddamn point, we think he’s working for Thorne!”

Cade’s conversation with Frank sounded a thousand miles away, my mind moving in so many directions at once that I couldn’t keep up with the chaos.

But there was one line of thought that kept flying through on repeat.

I was going to kill that rat, and then I’d kill Thorne three times over.

I’d burn down every fucking monster who put his hands on her and thought they could get away with it.

“Blow it up.”

Everyone stared at Brooks, who had just suggested a way to lure Thorne away from his estate.

We were at Frank’s compound, tucked away in his meeting room. Every second that passed was another second Whitney was in danger, and it took everything in me to sit here instead of stealing one of Frank’s cars to go after her.

The first thing Brooks did was pull up everything he could on Kyle Troutman.

That fucking piece of shit was working with the Barons, a gang a few towns over and the Sainted’s rivals. He’d been giving them information on a lot of shit, except it really wasn’t much that would do any damage to Frank because Kyle hadn’t been allowed to any meetings or anything. There was always a six month trial period for any new or potential recruits.

Thorne worked with the Barons quite often. They were one of his main allies, always stashing their products at his stores. They had no morals and ran drugs and a huge prostitution ring that brought in customers all over the state. It was why they were so chummy with Thorne. Birds of a feather.

But their relationship had grown a bit strained after Frank intercepted one of their handoffs. Thorne lost a lot of product he was keeping for another organization at the time, and because Frank had been targeting the Barons, Thorne blamed them for his huge loss. Slowly, though, they’d been working on rebuilding their alliance, strengthening it again, mostly with the Barons sucking up to Thorne.

And here Kyle was, thinking he’d be the biggest sycophant by taking Whitney and bringing her right to Thorne. He’d overheard Frank’s phone call to me the day of the news broadcast, so he knew Whitney was with me. Brooks found communications between Kyle and a friend of his from two days prior discussing Whitney and the enormous payout that Kyle was going to get from Thorne. But Kyle hadn’t told anyone else at the Barons, he was acting completely alone. We weren’t sure if Thorne even knew since we hadn’t been able to find anything about him having any knowledge of it. But how could he not know?

Kyle was an opportunistic low life, and I was going to fucking kill him.

Brooks had been on the feeds for Thorne’s Glen Falls estate to check that he was there. He was, and so was Tom. So it was still possible Thorne just thought we’d robbed his stores and that was it. He couldn’t know anything about our plans to get into his bunker or the safe down there. But he was an egotistical fuck who didn’t like his toys being stolen from him, and taking Whitney out from under our noses was his idea of retribution, maybe.

But it got much, much worse, because he’d brought some unknown woman back there earlier this evening. It wasn’t Whitney. It was someone we’d never seen before. The fact that he’d brought someone else to his bunker was bad. It meant we had to speed things up. We had to do everything now before he had a chance to harm her.