Chapter 208

Chapter 208
I couldn’t go fast enough. Didn’t matter how fast I pushed. Didn’t matter how hard the engine hit. It wasn’t fast enough. Nothing was.

The bike tore through the street, engine screaming under me, the vibration riding straight up my arms, but it didn’t cut through it. Didn’t touch it. That moment, her hand on the door, still sat there. Locked. Burned in.

“Anything?” Rook’s voice cut through the comm.

“No,” I answered.

It was all too clean, too quiet. The road too empty.They didn’t leave anything. Didn’t give me anything.

That wasn’t luck. That was planning.

I cut down another street, hard, leaning into it, scanning everything, every parked car, every shadow that stretched too long, every corner that could hide movement if you didn’t look close enough. Nothing.

My jaw tightened, hard enough to feel it.

“She’s not here,” Rook said.

“I know,” I remarked. But didn’t slow, didn’t stop, because stopping meant accepting it, and I wasn’t there yet. Would never be.

My mind ran it again. Reif gets hit. We get pulled in. She walks away, alone, exposed. Timing, not coincidence.

My grip tightened on the throttle, the engine kicking harder under it like it felt it too.

“That wasn’t about Reif,” I said.

Silence. Then, “Say it,” Rook said.

I didn’t want to, didn’t need to, but it was already there. Already settled in deeper than anything else.

“This wasn’t about the club.” The words came out flat. Cold. Certain. “It was about her.”

Everything went quieter in me after that, because once that hit home, everything changed.

Every piece of it realigned into something cleaner. Something worse.

I slowed just enough to cut toward the curb, killing the engine, the sudden silence hitting harder without it, the world snapping back in around me.

My hand came off the throttle, fingers flexing once before I pushed off the bike, boots hitting pavement hard.

Something near the curb caught my attention; small. Out of place.

I stepped toward it, and crouching my hand closed around it before my brain caught up.

Keys. Her keys.

My grip tightened instantly. Cold metal biting into my palm. Still faintly warm.

“She dropped her keys,” I muttered.

“What?” Rook asked, sounding as if wasn’t sure he’d heard me right.

“Keys,”  repeated. “She dropped her keys.”

My jaw tightened again, slower this time.

I looked back at the street.

Empty, like nothing had happened, almost as if she hadn’t just been taken from it.

Like she didn’t exist here anymore.

“Fuckers,” I muttered.

My grip tightened harder on the keys, the edge of them digging into my skin, grounding, anchoring, holding something in place that wanted to break loose.

“They took exactly who they came for.”

The words didn’t echo, didn’t hang. They sank, deep, permanent.

My hand closed tighter around her keys, metal pressing into bone now, something sharp cutting into my palm that I didn’t feel beyond the pressure.

My head lifted slowly, eyes tracking the empty stretch of road one last time, committing it, locking it, filing it away with everything else.

“They think they have time,” I said quietly.

Rook didn’t answer, he didn’t need to, because he heard it.

What sat under my words.

“They think they can hold her,” I went on, my voice dropping lower, flattening out into something that didn’t leave room for doubt.

My fingers loosened just enough to look at the keys in my hand, my thumb dragging once over the worn edge.

“They can’t,” I continued.

The words were simple. Final. Certain. Because they didn’t take something fragile. They didn’t take someone who would just break and stay broken. They took her, and that was going to be the last mistake they ever made.

I climbed back on my bike, feeling the engine vibrating under me, steady, waiting, like it knew what came next before I said it out loud.

My hand closed once more around her keys before I slid them into my pocket.

Wasn’t leaving them behind. I wasn’t losing the last thing she touched out here. Wasn’t happening.

“Lock it down,” I said into the comm, my voice low, controlled, already moving ahead of everything else. “Every camera within five blocks. Traffic, storefronts, alleyways. I want every second from the moment from the second she rounded the corner.”

Rook didn’t argue, didn’t question, just a simple, “On it.”

This wasn’t guesswork anymore. This was reconstruction. Piece by piece. Frame by frame. Until I had a face. A route. A mistake, and there had been one made, there always was. No one ran something that clean without leaving something behind.

Something small. Something they didn’t think mattered.

My jaw tightened slightly as I rolled the throttle once, the engine answering sharp.

“They think distance buys them time,” I muttered. It doesn’t, all it does, is give me more room to tear through everything between here and them.

I turned back toward the bike, already moving, already done standing still, the engine roaring back to life under me like it had been waiting for it. Because this part was over. The waiting. The guessing. The space where this could have been anything else…was gone.

What came next wasn’t a search, it was a hunt, and I didn’t lose those.