“Don’t let her leave!” Taz swings the gun toward her.

“Christ.” Griz snaps and moves Ember behind him. “T, have you lost your goddamn mind? Lower the fuckin’ gun!”

I move in front of Griz and Ember. Do my best to block them both from Taz’s line of sight. “Put it away, T. That’s a fucking order.”

But before Taz can even consider it, Smoke knocks into him and grapples for the gun. Taz always with a finger heavy on the trigger, fires. Smoke finally knocks the gun from his grip and sends it skittering on the floor toward me.

I pick it up and tuck it into the back of my jeans as I stride toward them. As I move in next to Smoke, he let’s go of Taz and throws him toward me.

I in turn throw Taz up against the wall. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shake him once, twice, and then letting go, I shove him back again. I stare at him like I don’t know him at all. “You need to get your head fuckin’ right.”

“Dammit, you stupid fucker! You shot me!” Griz growls. My gaze swings to him as he lifts his arm to show us where the bullet grazed his forearm. I immediately search behind him for Ember to make sure she’s not hit, but find the rest of the room empty.

“Fuck!” I race to the door. Entering the hall, I’m met with a wall of HOCs. I cut through them as fast as I can. As I do, I spy blood on the wall. Fresh blood. The same height as Griz’s arm wound.

Ember’s blood.

“Shit! Move!” I yell as I push my way to the stairwell with my heartbeat pounding in my ears.

Edge grabs me. “What the fuck’s goin’ on?”

“I don’t have time to explain. Find Griz,” I shout as I take the stairs two at a time, and push bodies out of my way.

God, what the fuck have I done?

I hit the first floor and see a sea of women, but not one of them her, so I race out the front door and into the parking lot.

It’s dark as fuck, and jogging forward I scan each person, bend to look under cars. When I still don’t catch sight of her, I head toward the gate.

“Did she come through here?” I spit out at Rigor.

He jumps, startled. “Who?”

I nearly say Doll, but then I realize he won’t know who I’m talking about. “Pumpkin.”

He slowly shakes his head. “No man. I haven’t seen her.”

I spend ten more minutes searching the lot again. Pulling out my phone, I call the cell I gave her. I call it three times, and each time it goes directly to voicemail. Either she turned it off or the battery’s dead.

When I get back inside, I question the girls in the main room. Lita tells me she saw her duck into the kitchen. Searching every inch of it, I find drops of her blood by the backdoor on the floor, which tells me she’s hit worse than Griz. But how badly, I don’t know and it turns my fucking stomach.

The idea that she could be seriously injured makes me even more frantic to find her.

I lose her trail in the dirt and in the dark behind the clubhouse. But spot it again a while later where she climbed the fence.

When my brothers finally figure out what’s going on and come to help, I ask Rigor to head to Bethany’s and to call me immediately if she shows up. To my surprise, Dozer volunteers to go.

“I’ll call you if Bethany hears from her,” he says as we exchange a look that says multiple things. I can trust him. The hatchet’s buried. He hopes I find her.

The only one that doesn’t help is Taz. Edge found out what he did, and knocked him the fuck out. Had Grinder haul him to his room, to sleep off the crazy.

The rest of us, at least those not too drunk to drive, comb the streets on our bikes. Somewhere between five and six in the morning, everyone else heads back, with a promise to help me search in the morning. But I keep looking.

Throughout the night and again at dawn, I check in with Dozer only to find out Ember never showed, and Bethany hasn’t heard from her.

I don’t give up. How can I, when she’s out there somewhere injured and bleeding? Fucking barefoot. She doesn’t have a dime on her, and the last time she had anything to eat was hours and hours ago.

This isn’t about getting her back so she can explain herself to the club anymore. This is about finding her before I lose her for good.

I don’t blame her for running. Not when I did what I promised I wouldn’t do. Hurt her. Threatened to keep her here against her will just like the last monster she ran from. Then Taz goes and aims a goddamn gun at her. Threatens her survival.

How can I blame her for running when she’s only doing what she does best?

Because if my girl’s anything, she’s a survivor.

Random events only make sense in the mists of chaos.

EMBER

I’d thought it more than once, but it was never truer than it is now.

I wish I’d never come here. I wish I’d never taken the help Lily offered. I wish I’d never seen his face. I wish I’d run when he’d given me the chance to.

Because then I wouldn’t have to live with this torment, the knowledge and memory of what a taste of a life with him could have been like, and how he had the ability to melt me with a kiss, burn me with a touch, and bring my body to life with his.

Then I wouldn’t have to experience this kind of pain. Not only the blinding pain shooting up my body from the wound on my side, but the ache of my heart curling in on itself. Withering and fading.

Was it all an act? When those words fell from his lips, it felt like he’d reached into my chest and squeezed my heart, stopped it from beating.

After everything I’d told him, showed him, and after everything that we shared, he thought I could be a whore and a snitch for another club. That I was acting when I let down my guard and gave myself to him. When I told him about the hell I went through with Warner, about Will and having to drop out of school, and how my mother left Sunny and me.

God . . .

I grieved with him when he showed me the wreckage of his past. I comforted him when he told me about his dreams of a family and being a father. I’d cried for the precious baby he lost.

Did he even stop to consider that I never once asked him anything about the club besides how long he’d been a member and why he joined? Or how the more I was with him, the less I was at the clubhouse. Which meant I wasn’t there overhearing every tidbit the members conversed about when they thought no one was listening. Why would I want to be anywhere but at the clubhouse if getting information on them was my goal?

It wasn’t until Smoke explained why he’d come into his room, that I saw Mav’s doubts waning. But the damage was done. My faith lost. He didn’t trust me, and that hurt more than anything else.

Because I trusted him.

I’d given him a second chance when he didn’t deserve one. I had faith he’d change when I didn’t have any reason to. I believed he could be a better man even though he’d only shown me his worst.

So I have only myself to blame.

I mean, I’d learned this lesson already, hadn’t I? That a man with two faces isn’t one I can trust. That putting myself in their path invariably ends with my blood being split, and running for my life.

Well if I hadn’t then, I definitely have learned it now as I wince and whimper with each movement. Failing miserably to keep my blood inside my body where it belongs, and brace with every step for the consistent prickly sting that shoots through my foot, courtesy of the cut I received from a broken beer bottle in the field behind the clubhouse.

Luckily, I was able to scale the club’s fence unscathed. Otherwise, I’m not sure I could push myself to go on.

For the moment, I’m safely alone on the street. Although my pulse has yet to find its natural rhythm. Partly because I’ve attempted to flag down two cars, and neither would stop, and a mere ten seconds ago a motorcycle roared to life. The throaty growl sent my heart galloping again.