Chapter 1

CHASE

"She's been gone for fucking weeks. She missed his goddamn funeral. Don't tell me she's okay." A dull thud fills the room as I swipe a ton of stuff off the table, and it clatters to the carpet. I know I'm cracking. I can't help it. I lost my girl and my brother that night. My soul is drenched in hopelessness and the darkness that I thought my girl chased off has now settled into every inch of my bones again. I have this uneasiness in my heart that something is wrong, something is happening with her, and not knowing where she is and what she's doing is not helping.

I sit on the couch with my head in my hands, trying to calm down before I look up at Jax. "She told me she would never forgive me if he died. It was the last thing she said before he…" Regrets fill my throat. I can't finish the sentence.

"I know." Jax takes a seat next to me, placing his hand on my shoulder. "But she's been texting Harper and her mom's had a phone call from her. So, we know she's safe. We just don't know where she is, that's all."

"That's all," I scoff.

"Chase, I know, alright. I want to find her too, she's family, but she needs space to deal. A lot went down that night and she needs time to process."

Asher walks into the room, blunt in hand, clearly stoned, as he gives us a lazy smile. "What's going on?"

"The usual," Jax states before walking over and typing away on his computer. Jax's hacker skills are second to none and his system is insane. There are twelve interconnecting screens, three different system loops running backups upon backups, and one solo system searching the dark web for anything we need without it connecting to anything else. It even runs on its own Wi-Fi, so if anyone tried to backdoor us that way, they couldn't get into our main system but even with all that, we can't find her.

Asher throws himself down on the couch next to me, and I curl my lip up at him in a sneer. The last five weeks, he's just spiraled downward. Harper won't speak to him, knowing we had something to do with Nate. She's right, of course, and so is Brooke. It is our fault, and there's nothing we can do to fix it. Nate got shot because of me. My way of dealing with it is to try and find her. He told me to look after her, and I'm failing already.

I need her to be safe, and not knowing where she is, it's driving me crazy. Jax is hunting down every lead he can find, putting out feelers and her picture to his online hacker friends. and Asher… Well, if he's not banging some slut while he's high and drunk off his ass, he's down at the club fighting, as you can tell by the black eye he's currently sporting from last night. He seems to be taking a lot of hits lately, ones he could easily dodge. Unlike me, that hits a haze, and I don't come out of it till all I see is blood. Devin's told me one more time and I'm out. No more fighting. He thinks I'm going to kill someone; he's not wrong.

"You need to sort yourself out." I give up trying with him now. I don't have the energy to deal with him and don't even give him a second glance as I join Jax, taking a seat beside him. "Can't you, I dunno, track her cards or something?"

"You know I can't. She emptied her account that night and hasn't been back into it since. She's clearly only using cash and doesn't want to be found. Her phone has not been on other than to text Harper, and by the time we find out she has, she's switched it off again. I can track a phone even if it's not switched on, but I think she's removing the sim card."

"Well, what about yours? We know she swiped it." I glare, I'm grasping at straws here, anything to get her in my arms again.

"No, it's my phone, and you know the security I have on it. The security on it is a system that I built, aka untraceable. I didn't think I would ever need to get in my phone remotely."

"Well, what else can we do?"

"We can't. We just have to trust she's safe and that she'll come home. I know you're worried, we all are but there's nothing I can do. I'm sorry." He gives me a look that's so damn apologetic, but it doesn't matter. I can't bring myself to even acknowledge it, and he sighs in return.

"What I don't get is why she took your phone; did she pick it up by mistake?" I've been racking my brains for weeks trying to figure it out.

"Oh fuck!"

I look over at Asher as he disrupts me from my thoughts. "What? You run out of weed? Maybe Vodka? Or maybe you've just realized what a fucking idiot you've been the last few weeks."

"Fuck off, Chase. Listen. Remember we went away when we were at the beach, we left for a couple of days. Jax found that guy."

"Luke?" Jax calls over his shoulder. "So what?"

"So, he fucking gave us names and addresses of more of those involved before I shot the bastard. You wrote them in your notes app on your phone. You said you would back it up to your system here when we got home. Don't you get it? She took your phone, and it had all the addresses. What if she's tracking them down? What if that's where she is?"

My heart begins to beat hard, threatening to burst from my chest in panic. If she found any one of them, she'd be in trouble. She isn't remotely prepared for any of them. "No, no, she's not—she's not stupid enough to go after them herself." I don't know if I'm trying to convince myself or the guys.

Asher gets up. "Maybe not before, but you didn't see her when she left the hospital, Chase. That girl…that wasn't our B. She was pissed, and I mean in a huge way. She wasn't thinking straight. She looked like a woman straight out of hell. She was covered in blood, she just lost Nate and she blamed us. I was expecting her to cry, breakdown—but she just looked so coldly at us, like we were nothing to her anymore. Brooke may not have been stupid enough to go after them, but that girl, the girl that left that hospital…that girl would have burned the earth down to get what she wanted."

I look over at Jax, and he agrees with Asher. God, it hurts to know that my girl left like that, and I pray I get her back, but if that's the case, we're fucked. I get my phone out and find Harper in my contact list, frantically calling her. She answers, and I cut her off quickly.

"When was the last time you spoke to Brooke?"

"Nice to speak to you too, Chase. How have I been? Well fan-fucking-tastic."

"Harper, I don't have time for your fucking sarcasm right now. Brooke's in trouble. Please."

"Trouble? As in the trouble like at the beach?" I hold the bridge of my nose between my two fingers.

"Harper, please, I need to know this. When did you last speak to her?"

She sighs, "Two weeks ago. She told me she was going to call me the Saturday after, but she didn't. I just figured she needed more time."

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Two weeks, and she hasn't been in contact with anyone. "Did she say where she was?"

"I'm not supposed to tell you, Chase!"

"Jesus fucking Christ, Harper, do you want Brooke to end up like Nate? No! Just fucking tell me!" I scream at her in anger.

The boys fall silent beside me, though I see Asher's jaw tick at how I'm talking to Harper. Uneasiness seeps into the room, thinking of my girl like that, alone, bleeding, dying. I can't give a fuck about their feelings right now.

"She was in Highcastle. She said she was visiting a friend."

I look over at Jax and mouth "Highcastle" to him.

He swivels back onto his computer, typing furiously as I hang up the phone to Harper, not even giving her a second thought.

"Well?" I demand. Jax is good, he will find her, I know it. I peer over his shoulder along with Asher.

"C'mon man, we can't let what happened to Ellie happen to her," Asher chokes out.

"None of the names on our list have a place in Highcastle. It must be one of the new addresses we were given."

"Okay, so we drive there and knock on every fucking door till we find her. Asher can flash her photo over town, Jax, you can check the hotels, and I'll…"

"Wait." Jax leans back in his chair. "Ho-ly hell." I push his chair out of the way, leaning forward to examine the article he just pulled up. There was a double murder in Highcastle last week. Bodies burned beyond recognition. I scan it, looking for clues as to why he thinks this is relevant, then I see it. A description of a girl who left with one of them. It was her.

My girl, my light, there's no way she could do that, could she? Even after what happened with Nate, could she really kill two people in cold blood? No, no, she couldn't, she didn't. I look at Jax and I can tell he's thinking the same thing as me.

"Told you she wasn't the same girl," Asher says dryly.

"You got that right."

I look behind me from where that voice comes from. It can't be, but it is. She's here, in front of me. I walk toward her and pull her in my arms. My head dives into the crook of her neck, taking a deep breath of her, letting her scent wash over me. She's safe, she's here, and she's in my arms. It's gonna be okay now because my girl's home. The relief is short-lasting, though, as I notice she's not hugging me back. If anything, she's slack against me, her arms hanging by her side as she clears her throat, and I let her go.

She looks at me and there's nothing there, no warmth in her eyes for me. She doesn't look at me the way I remember. Asher is right—my girl is gone. In front of me is a stranger. She's cold, distant, just an empty shell of my princess.

Jax gets up from his chair and immediately grabs her, pulling her into a hug. I watch her wrap her arms around him and curl into his body before turning to Asher. They stand there looking awkwardly at each other.

"You're back?" he asks quietly.

She nods. "For now."

"And you're…okay?"

She looks at him sadly, "I'll never be okay again."

She walks over to the screens, running her fingers across the desk lightly.

"Where have you been? Highcastle?" I ask.

She turns, smiling coldly at me, "Smart boy." Her tone of voice is condescending, to say the least.

"Did you do that?" Jax nods toward the screen, and she laughs in response.

"Yes. Wasn't as hard as I thought, but then practice makes perfect." She takes Jax's phone out of her pocket, tossing it to him. He looks down at it, tapping away, and then his eyes meet hers in shock.

"There's four names crossed off," he says.

"Yep. I got four of them but can't find the other two. Those addresses don't exist, and neither do those names."

He nods. "I figured. I think they're aliases, which means they're likely to be higher up the food chain. There's a lot you don't know, Brooke."

"Maybe I know more than you think, Jax. You think I didn't get information from them first?"

I walk over, grabbing her, unable to hear her talk so easily about this stuff, shaking her, almost shouting at her. "Stop, just fucking stop! Princess… What the hell? You did that. You're telling me you killed four people in the last few weeks?"

She looks at me square in the eyes and pushes me away and the only words that fall from her lips are "Don't call me princess. You lost the right to call me anything when Nate died." She turns back to Jax without a second thought to me. "I know it's bigger than you think. The last guy, James, he told me he's in acquisition. I get the feeling he finds the girls for them."

Jax nods. "I think that too. It's going to take some time, though, but when we find them, we will end them."

"That's not enough," she says coldly. "It's not. They should suffer. They should know what it's like to have everything stripped away from them first. They need to know what it's like to lose everything before they die. Like Ellie and Nate." She looks at me, her gaze intense and full of hatred.

"Like you." A silence descends over the group as I call her out.

"This isn't about me," she says quietly, looking away.

"Like hell, it's not Brooke. You walked away from me." I clear my throat awkwardly, "I mean from all of us that night."

She can't even bring herself to look at me again, instead keeping her eyes on Jax.

"Okay, Brooke. I'm with you. They deserve everything they get for what they did, for what they plan to do, and I have your back," Asher says, walking over to her, but before he has a chance to wrap his arms around her, she steps back. I can see on his face that he's hurt, but he lied to her too and she won't forget or forgive that easily that he had a part in what happened that night. Everyone has to pay for it, in her eyes. She's only being okay with Jax because she needs his help. He nods silently to himself, stepping back as she glares at him.

"I don't need you to have my back. You're either on board or you're not, if you're not fine. I'll do it on my own."

"It was my sister who died, Brooke, or did you forget that? I started this and I'm going to finish it. This is my burden to bear, not yours. You can get on board with me, and if not, then back off," he growls.

She looks up at him, tipping her head back to meet his eyes, not bothered by his reaction. Whereas I want to throttle him for talking to her like that.

"Don't tell me it's your burden. You, all of you, made it mine when you fucked up and got my best friend killed." Her voice cracks like she's scared to say his name.

She grabs her bag and begins to walk out of the room. Asher speaks quietly as if he doesn't want her to hear him.

"We're losing her, you know."

"No, you're not. You've already lost me."

She walks out, not looking back again. I walk over to the window and look down, watching her get into Nate's truck, slam the door, and blast music out the stereo to drown out her thoughts like she used to. She's lost herself. My princess who used to be my light in the darkness, has gone. There's nothing left of her now. Now she's someone else, something else, and all I'm surrounded by are dark shadows that have no problem dragging me to hell for what I did to my brother.