CHAPTER TWO

JAX’S POV

I knew the bed was empty before I opened my eyes.

Her warmth was gone and her scent was fading fast, which meant that she hadn't just slipped out. She had been gone for a really long time and I didn't know. I was sleeping, exhausted after what she did to me the night before.

I opened my ears, already regretting my actions and hating myself for making that kind of mistake. What would I tell Dante now if he called.

My phone rang.

"Boss." Remi, the best rider on my team said. "King Dante is requesting an update on the girl."

I stared at the indent on the pillow beside me. "Tell him I'll call back."

"He said…"

"Tell him I'll call back." I snapped and cut the line. I sat on the edge of the bed and held my head in my two hands as I thought about losing everything I had done in the last two years. I had only one job and I fumbled it with one night of pleasure.

I called him back. “I need twenty of our best men outside the motel on campus road.”

“We are already there sir.”

“Good.” I said and cut the call.

Twenty riders arranged themselves in formation, when I walked outside the motel. Their engines were already idling, and they were all dressed in leather. I swung onto my bike.

"We need to find the girl from last night." I said in a flat voice. "Check every bar within a mile of campus, every road she uses and every corner. I need access to every camera, contact, and informant. The first man to see her called me directly. Do you understand?" I said and looked across their faces once.

“Yes sir.” They all replied at once.

“Good. Now move."

They flooded the city like smoke while I rode the perimeter myself because I trusted my own eyes more than anyone else. I checked the bar first, the side streets and the campus gates. Then I sat outside her apartment building and stayed there for a long time. Long enough to watch three strangers walk in and out but she didn't show up anywhere.

By the time the sun was high up in the sky, I had nothing.

I called Dante before he could call me again and he picked up on the first ring. "Tell me you have her."

"I'm working on it."

He gave me silence, and I dreaded it.

"Working on it?" he repeated in a quiet and measured voice that was always worse than shouting. "Jax, I gave you one responsibility. Just one. And you let her go while you're standing somewhere telling me you are working on it? How do you intend to find her?"

A hand flew over my hair subconsciously. "She was gone before sunrise but I have men on every route she uses."

"That is not the point." His voice dropped once again. "The point is that she should never have left your sight. Do you understand what will happen if Kingshade gets to her first?"

"Yes."

"Good. Then I don't need to explain what is at stake. Make sure you find her today." He said and ended the call.

I sat with my hand on the handlebars while the engine cooled under me as I thought about everything that happened the night before. How she crashed into me and looked up at me with zero fear.

I have been watching her since before then. I saw her drinking four shots of tequila and hit the dance floor, swinging her body in that short leather skirt and skimpy shirt with high boots. She didn't even know where she kept her jackets.

I wanted her then, immediately. Hell, I have always wanted her since the first time I set my eyes on her but she's the enemy's daughter and my orders were to watch her.

Then she walked up to me with much boldness while others flinched around me without even knowing why. And she smiled instead.

I pulled back into the road to stop myself from recalling what transpired in the motel room.

***

I sent her many messages, and she wasn't reading any of them.

By noon, they were all still unread and that bordered me more than I would like to admit. I typed another one, looked at it and deleted it before putting the phone face down on the table.

Karl appeared from somewhere and sat across from me without an invitation, and he was the only person who could do that and still keep both hands. He poured two coffees nobody asked for and pushed one toward me.

"Still nothing?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"Hm." He wrapped both hands around his mug. "Do you want to know what I think?"

"No." I replied, “because whatever you're thinking is not it.”

But he continued anyway. "I think that you liked her."

I looked at him cold and he threw both hands up.

"I'm just saying. You've been watching her for two years. Two years of clean surveillance and you haven't broken protocol even once. Then one night in a bar and she's gone before sunrise. Now you're sitting here looking like someone stole something very dear to you."

"She's a missing asset."

"Right."

"And she is more dangerous lost than found. That is the only reason I'm looking."

"Absolutely." He nodded slowly. "That's completely the only reason."

I stood up and went to the window. The street below was ordinary and quiet which was nothing like what’s going on inside my head.

I was deeply worried. Thinking about what she really was and who she actually was underneath all of it.

She was the girl born in the gap between two kingdoms that had hated each other for thirty years and the match that could light a war so big that both sides won't be able to put out. She was the one person every player in this war wanted to own and not a single one had the right to.

I spent the night with her like none of that mattered, and now I might be paying for it.

My phone buzzed and I grabbed it faster than I meant to, expecting to see her call, but it wasn't.

It was Dante.

I picked it up. "I haven't found her yet."

"I found her," Dante said and I went still.

“What… what do you mean?”

"She called me from the hospital." He said quietly, and I thought he sounded sound. "Her mother is gone and she has nowhere else to go."

The words settled over me like a hard rock dropped from a tall height.

Her mother was gone.

I thought about her laugh. The one she had on the dance floor before she ever turned and saw me. It was loud and completely unguarded, like she had just one night to be free from a life that didn't give her many.

I wondered if she had any idea that at that moment her whole world was already ending.

"Jax." Dante's voice pulled me back. "Prepare the estate. I'm bringing her home tonight."

"Understood."

"And son." He paused. "Whatever happened between last night and this morning ends now. She is coming in as your family and she is nothing else to you. Are we clear?"

I looked at the empty street below the window.

"Clear," I said and he ended the call.

I stood there for a long moment before I picked up my helmet and walked out.

I drove back to the estate to prepare a room for the girl I spent one night with and now, I was expected to call her sister.

The whole ride back I thought about the things I hadn't told anyone else.

I found the file. The one Dante didn't know I would ever find. I saw the DNA result that was buried in the restricted archives six weeks ago, stamped, signed and impossible to misread.

Dante believed he was bringing his daughter home tonight but he wasn't.

And the man whose blood actually ran in her veins had already made three attempts on the estate this year alone.

She wasn't walking into safety. She was walking straight into the reason her mother kept running in the first place.