She released the woman’s arms and turned to Ronnie. “Take her inside, and tell my mom that Andre’s hurt. Tell her to send the boys.”
Ronnie gaped at her, horrified. “Why me?”
“Because I’m going to find Andre.”
She didn’t wait for him to protest. Instinct kicked in, adrenaline flooded her, and gone was the college grad, back was the biker girl in full force. She took off at a jog, her sandals slapping the pavement. Two hangarounds were lugging fresh cases of beer toward the clubhouse and she put thumb and forefinger in her mouth and whistled. Both snapped around to look at her. “I need you to come with me,” she said. “A member’s hurt.”
They glanced at each other.
“Come on!” she snapped. “If you wanna patch this club someday, learn to take orders from the boss’s daughter!”
She heard their footfalls behind her as she took off, navigating the wedge heels of her shoes like a pro, the river-scented air funneling down into her lungs.
If Andre was stabbed, then that meant there was someone on the property who shouldn’t have been. And while it was always a possibility that someone had slipped in the main gate and mingled amongst the revelers, Ava had a feeling it was the back gate that had been accessed. The back gate: a place where a high, horny Andre might have taken his groupie for a moment’s peace.
Ava ran along the bike shop, across its back parking lot full of parts and half-bikes, and headed for the gate that penetrated the nine-foot, barbed-wire-topped fence at the back of the Dartmoor property. The river loomed shapeless, a wide alley of shadow, a terrifying void in the night. The security lamps painted half-moons of shine across the black water. The gate, Ava saw as she neared it, was ajar, its Master lock hanging disengaged from the chain.
Only then did she slow down and evaluate the utter stupidity of her plan. She was in sandals and a frilly skirt, without so much as a ballpoint pen to defend herself, with two hangarounds she didn’t know from Adam as backup. She should have gone to the clubhouse herself, sought out her father or brother, any of the guys, and allowed them to handle this dangerous situation.
But she was Maggie’s daughter, and she pushed through the open gate without slowing, heading down the short grass slope to the shore…and the dark figure sprawled with his face in the water.
“Andre,” she called, then realized it was useless.
Andre – and she recognized him by the neon blue shirt she’d seen him wearing beneath his cut earlier – was unconscious, at the mercy of the lapping water. The grass gave way to gravelly sand…and then Andre’s boots, his jeans, his torso shifting with the tiny waves that nibbled at the shore.
“Andre.” Ava waded in; the water was cold against her ankles, her calves. She felt the suede footbeds of her sandals grow slick. She stepped through squishy muck and kept going, until the water almost reached her knees, and she grabbed at the back of Andre’s cut. “Andre. Andre!”
She glanced up at the hangarounds, the two of them staring slack-jawed from the shore.
“Pull him on shore,” she ordered. “Hurry! Before he drowns.”
They rushed to comply, slogging through the water, taking Andre under the arms and dragging him face-up onto dry loud.
His face was waxen; the skin was pale, fleshy, and corpse-like already, the lips blue, the eyes closed and mouth gaping. A black blossom of blood stained his belly where he’d been stabbed.
Ava felt for a pulse and felt only a flutter in his throat. “Shit, Andre,” she muttered.
One of the hangarounds handed her his flannel overshirt and she pressed it to the wound. The bleeding had slowed, which wasn’t a good thing, in her mind. It meant he’d already lost so much, there was no strength left to feed the flow.
Then the shouting reached her ears, and her head lifted.
Barreling toward them were at least two chapters’ worth of bikers. She realized the tableau she made: hovering in her skirt and ruined sandals over a stabbed Dog, vulnerable, unarmed, at risk.
Her dad reached her first, and Ghost hauled her up without ceremony, shoving her toward Aidan. Her brother caught her around the waist and began to tow her away as the Dogs converged on their fallen member, shouting orders to one another, asking Andre if he could hear them, swearing.
“Come on,” Aidan said in her ear. “You don’t need to be down here.”
As she was hustled away, Ava’s gaze roved wildly over the crowd, and landed on Mercy. His expression was dark and tight, his eyes black as they touched hers and then moved away. She felt the rage in him, even from this distance. That rage that lived under the surface and plagued him like a curse. It was the fury that had earned him such notoriety in the club. The anger that had saved her life more than once.
She’d never loved him because of the rage, but it was a part of him she’d never pretended didn’t exist. Her first childhood impression of him had been that of a Doberman: dangerous, intractable, loyal to a fault to those he loved. It had been a correct impression.
Sometimes, she thought she’d understood him better when she was still just a girl. Sex had changed – had ruined – everything.
“Ava,” her brother said, and she realized she’d ground to a halt.
She fell into step beneath Aidan’s arm, and let herself be taken back to the clubhouse.
The revolving red lights of the ambulance cast a hellish pallor across the faces of all those gathered in the parking lot, reflecting in mad circles across the corrugated sides of the Dartmoor buildings.
