Chapter 211

Chapter 211
~Torin~

The compound felt wrong without her in it. Too quiet in places that should have carried her voice, too empty in ways that crawled under my skin every time I crossed another room and didn’t find her there.

Her coffee mug still sat beside the sink upstairs. Her jacket still hung over the back of the chair near my room. Little pieces of her everywhere, enough to make the absence feel worse instead of better.

The clubhouse looked normal. That was the problem. Nothing should have looked normal while she was gone.

Rain hammered outside while men moved constantly through the clubhouse, phones ringing, engines starting, voices staying low and sharp as information passed from one brother to the next faster than I could process it. Burdock had half the city being watched already while Rook worked through everything he could pull on Brian from three different laptops spread across the table.

And me? I was barely holding the leash on what sat inside my chest right now.

“Vehicle came back registered to a dead company,” Rook muttered as he dropped another folder onto the table beside me, one hand dragging tiredly over the back of his neck. “Fake plates too.”

Of course they were. Brian planned this.

That part settled heavier every second. Not random obsession. Prepared obsession. The realization made my stomach turn colder than rage alone ever could.

I leaned over the table, palms braced against the wood while surveillance stills scattered beneath my hands. Grainy traffic cam shots. Partial street captures. One blurry image of the sedan turning down an industrial road near the river before disappearing completely.

Brian knew procedure. Knew response times. Knew how investigations worked.

FBI. That thought alone made violence press harder behind my ribs because the bastard used training meant to protect people in order to take her.

“She probably woke up by now,” Reif muttered quietly from near the doorway.

I looked up slowly. The kid looked exhausted, bruising still dark along one side of his jaw while guilt sat all over him like a second skin. None of this was his fault, but he’d still carry it anyway. Men like Reif always did.

“Probably,” I answered roughly as I straightened away from the table.

The thought hit immediately afterward. Marlowe waking up alone, confused, scared. And realizing Brian was the one standing there.

My jaw clenched so hard pain shot straight into my temple.

“She’ll fight him,” Reif added, shifting his weight uneasily against the wall.

Yeah. That worried me too. Because Brian didn’t strike me as the kind of man who handled rejection well. Or resistance. Men obsessed with control usually didn’t.

Rook’s phone buzzed sharply against the table before he grabbed it fast, eyes scanning the screen while his expression changed almost instantly afterward.

“What,” I snapped, my attention locking onto him immediately.

“Credit card hit,” he replied quickly as he turned the phone toward me. “Storage facility rental three months ago under one of Brian’s aliases.”

Aliases. Plural. This wasn’t impulsive. Brian had been building toward this for months. Maybe longer.

“Where?” I demanded as I stepped around the table.

“South industrial district near the river,” Rook answered while pulling another screen up beside it. “Private units. Security fence. Limited cameras.”

I was already moving.

The chair slammed backward behind me while every man in the room straightened instantly because they felt it too now. The change, the certainty.

“We don’t know she’s there yet,” Burdock warned as I headed toward the door, his voice sharp enough to cut through the room.

“Don’t care,” I shot back without slowing.

“Torin,” he warned.

I stopped just long enough to look back at him.

Burdock’s expression hardened slightly while thunder rattled low outside behind us. “If Brian’s FBI,” he muttered carefully, “then he’ll have exits planned.”

“Then I’ll block them,” I replied coldly.

“He’ll panic if he feels cornered,” Rook added while grabbing his cut off the chair nearby. “And panicked men do stupid shit.”

No, obsessed men did worse than stupid shit. They justified it afterward. That was the dangerous part.

I grabbed my gun from the table roughly before shoving it into the back of my jeans, every movement inside me feeling too violent, like my body already knew blood was coming.

“He touches her again,” I muttered coldly as I looked toward Rook, “I’m putting him in the ground.”

Nobody argued, not one of them, because every man standing in that room knew exactly what Brian stole the second he put his hands on Marlowe.

Not leverage and not power. Peace…mine.

Rain hit hard the second I stepped outside, the water soaking through my shirt almost instantly while motorcycles roared alive around the compound one after another. Ravens moved fast now, weapons loading openly, engines vibrating through the storm like something alive beneath the night.

I swung onto my bike hard enough the frame shifted beneath me while one thought looped violently through my head. Brian watched her, studied her. Planned around her routines. And somehow through all of it, I never saw the obsession sitting right in front of us.

My stomach twisted viciously because Marlowe trusted him. She lived with him. Ate dinner with him. Slept down the hallway from him while he built this nightmare piece by piece inside his head.

The betrayal of that alone would gut her once this ended. If this ended.

No. Absolutely fucking not. It was ending tonight.

I rolled the throttle hard, tires spitting water across the pavement while the compound gates started opening ahead of us.

“Torin,” Rook’s voice crackled through the comm.

“Yeah,” I answered roughly.

“We pull up smart,” he muttered. “Quiet first.”

A dark laugh left me as I tore through the gates into the storm. “There’s nothing quiet left in me right now.”