Savage Saints Mc : Claimed By Four Monsters

Chapter 10

Zephyr

I was in the kitchen making eggs when I heard the gate. I didn't need to look out the window to know something had shifted. Kael's footsteps changed when something significant was happening. Usually he moved through the clubhouse at a steady pace, unhurried, like a man who had already accounted for every variable. But those footsteps going across the yard were different. Faster. Tighter.

I turned the stove off and went to the window, The black SUV was already parked. She was already out of it. My stomach dropped in the particular way it only dropped for a small number of things. Bad news. Incoming violence. And Nadia Vael.

I hadn't seen her in two years. She looked exactly the same, which somehow made it worse. Some people carried time on their faces and you could track what it had cost them. Nadia looked like time had simply decided not to bother her. Tall, composed, dressed like she was walking into a boardroom rather than a biker clubhouse at seven in the morning. She touched Kael's face before he could say a word and he went still the way he only went still for one or two things in the world.

I put my eggs in the bin and went to find Riot. He wasn't in his room. I checked the main hall, the back corridor, and the garage. Then I looked up.

Roof.

Of course. And if Riot was on the roof, Isolde was on the roof. And if Isolde was on the roof, she had just watched what I watched from the yard below, except she didn't know what it meant. I took the east staircase two steps at a time.

The roof door opened onto the morning and I saw them both immediately. Riot on the left edge, arms on his knees. Isolde beside him, closer than I expected, looking down at the yard with an expression I had seen on people who were trying very hard to look like they felt nothing.

She was not succeeding. I crossed the roof and sat on her other side, close enough to talk quietly.

"Former business associate," I said, before she could ask anything. "Emphasis on the former."

She looked at me sideways. "What kind of business?"

"The complicated kind." I kept my voice easy. Light. The voice I used when I needed to give someone information without giving them the full weight of it all at once. "She's an intelligence broker. She finds things out and sells what she finds. Kael used her work a few times, years back."

"And the rest of it?" Isolde said.

I looked at her. She looked back at me and her eyes were very clear and very direct and I had this uncomfortable sensation I sometimes got with her, like she could hear the parts of sentences I didn't say out loud.

"There's no rest of it," I said.

She held my gaze for exactly two seconds longer than comfortable. Then she looked back down at the yard.

I was lying slightly and I knew that she knew.

The truth was that Nadia arrived in our lives during the worst six months the club had ever survived. Two years ago, before Isolde, before any of this. We had been caught between a supplier war and a police investigation that had three of our outer members facing serious charges. Kael was managing seventeen problems at once and something in the machinery was grinding in a way I had never heard before.

Nadia appeared through a contact of Soren's. She had information we needed, delivered it cleanly, asked for fair payment, and then stayed. Not officially. She just kept being around, kept being useful, kept handing Kael things that turned problems into manageable situations. For about four months she was the most valuable person in the building.

Then she left. No conversation, no explanation. One morning her room was empty and Kael said nothing about it and none of us asked because the look on his face the first day made the question feel dangerous.

I had my suspicions about why she came and why she left. I had never voiced them because suspicions without evidence were just stories I was telling myself. But I watched Kael go still under her hand in the yard below and I felt those suspicions sit up straighter.

"She's not here for a social visit," Riot said from Isolde's other side. He hadn't moved but he'd been listening.

"No," I agreed.

"Does she know about Isolde?" he asked.

"She knows about everything. That's what she does."

Isolde said nothing. She was watching Kael and Nadia below. Kael had stepped back from her hand, which I noted with a small amount of relief, and they were talking now, standing a measured distance apart, Nadia with her arms loosely crossed and Kael with his hands in his pockets.

Twenty minutes later Kael appeared at the roof door. He looked at the three of us sitting on the ledge like birds on a wire and something moved across his face that might have been exasperation.

"Inside," he said. "All of you."

The main hall felt smaller with Nadia in it.

She stood near the far wall and watched us file in with the calm attention of someone cataloguing. Her eyes moved across Riot, barely paused on me, and landed on Isolde and stayed there for a moment longer.

"You must be the one everyone is looking for," she said. Not unkindly. Just factual.

"And you must be the one who showed up uninvited," Isolde said.

Nadia's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Close enough. "I like her," she said to Kael.

"You like anything you haven't figured out yet," Kael said flatly. "What do you have?"

Nadia reached into the bag over her shoulder and pulled out a folded document. She set it on the table and smoothed it open with one hand. A floor plan. I moved closer. It was detailed, precise, the kind that came from either architectural records or someone who had been inside.

"The girl is at a Voss secondary property," Nadia said. "Not the main estate. A converted warehouse facility about forty minutes outside the city. They moved her there three days ago." She tapped a section of the floor plan. "She's being held here, second level, east wing. Four guards on rotation, two on the exterior. The shift change happens at midnight and again at six."

The room went very quiet. Isolde stepped forward and looked at the floor plan and I watched her face move through about seven different things in four seconds. Relief that Petra's location was known. The tightly controlled urgency of someone who wanted to move right now. And underneath all of it something harder, something that had been sitting in her face since she came down from the roof, some new weight she was carrying that hadn't been there yesterday.

"What do you want for this?" Kael asked.

Nadia straightened. "Something I'll tell you when the time is right."

"That's not how I work."

"It's how I work." She picked up the floor plan and held it out toward Kael. "And you need this more than I need your comfort level."

Kael took it. The muscle in his jaw moved once.

"Nadia," Riot said from the side of the room. His voice was flat and carried a specific warning in it. "If this is another situation where you walk out without explanation after everything goes wrong, say so now."

She looked at him. "Hello, Riot. You look terrible."

"Answer the question."

She opened her mouth to respond.

Then she looked up. Past Kael, past all of us, toward the high window above the main hall that faced the yard.

She was looking at the roof. At the exact spot where Isolde had been sitting twenty minutes ago.

She smiled. Slow and certain, like a woman confirming something she had already known before she walked through the gate.

Like she had been expecting Isolde all along..