Chapter Eight

Abbie

Ifucked it all up. I'd pushed too much, but I guess it also never really mattered.

Cameron had known about my plan all along. It didn't matter that I'd changed my mind about him and his family. It didn't matter that I no longer had plans to tear his club down and his family apart.

He'd already known.

I didn't even really have a right to be upset that he'd played me. Because I'd started out doing the same to him, and I'd never come clean. He was protecting his family, and I was just being a greedy bitch intent on climbing the ladder within the precinct.

I wouldn't have trusted me either.

Now, two days later, I was lonely. I missed Cameron. I missed his snarkiness, the way he played with my hair when we cuddled on my couch in a post-sex haze, the way he smiled, his sexual innuendos… I missed everything about him, including his short temper and his evasiveness. Having part of him had been better than having none of him. And it just made me hurt even more to know I'd made him hate me.

It was no one's fault but my own, too.

I looked up from my computer screen when Carmen Rigby, the deputy sheriff, suddenly loomed over my desk. I'd never liked her much; something about her just rubbed me wrong, but she was nice enough. And she was also my superior, so I had to respect her.

"We just had a call come in from a concerned citizen about a white van parked in front of her house," she told me. "You think you and Trent can go take a look at it?"

Weird that it hadn't come over my radio like all of our other calls usually did. Still, I forced a smile I didn't feel to my lips and stood from my desk, nodding my head. "Yeah, sure," I told her. "We'll go check it out."

"Thanks, Abbie. You're always such a team player. I appreciate your willingness to do your job without fuss." She lowered her voice to a whisper, like she was telling me some secret she didn't want anyone else to know. "You're so much easier to work with than most of the other people here."

Somehow, my fake smile remained firmly in place even as a slimy, disgusting feeling slid through my veins. She walked off, and I finally let my smile slip away before I grabbed my coffee. Trent sighed and wheeled back from his desk. "And here I thought we might have a day to focus on paperwork," he muttered as he followed me out of the door.

I snorted. "You're partnered with a rookie cop, remember?"

He chuckled. "Yeah." He playfully eyed me in a distasteful way. "You're always making me get the short end of the stick."

I rolled my eyes. "Get fucked, Trent."

He barked out a laugh and slid into the driver's seat of the cruiser just as information on the suspicious vehicle came through our radios.

Sure enough,the location we were sent to had a white van parked outside. There was a house on the other side of the street, but it didn't look like anyone was home—for all I knew, they called the vehicle in while they were leaving.

The van didn't have any plates, and the only windows I could see were the windshield, the driver's side door window, and the passenger side window. The whole thing made my stomach hurt just looking at it, and my instincts told me to get the fuck away. But I was a cop; I couldn't run from danger. I was the one who was supposed to put a stop to the danger.

"Something doesn't feel right," I warned Trent.

He grunted. "Yeah, I know." He then pushed open his door, his weapon already in his hand, and I followed suit. He took one side of the vehicle, and I took the other, nausea swirling in my gut as adrenaline pumped through my veins. Branches cut at my skin as I rounded the truck, heading toward the back.

"Abb—" Trent's words were cut off, and he grunted before something hard slammed into the van on the other side. I rushed toward him, reaching for my radio for backup, but I was too slow.

Someone tackled me from behind. My gun slid across the dirt into the leaves, and my chin bounced off the ground, blood immediately pooling in my mouth. Pain exploded through my jaw. I tried pushing back, but whoever was on me was strong, and they held me down with ease as someone else bound my arms behind my back tight enough to cut off the circulation in my wrists.

"Trent?!" I yelled, blood dripping down my chin. I couldn't get another word out before a gag was shoved in my mouth and tied behind my head. I kicked out, trying to roll over, but fuck—whoever these people were worked together like a well-oiled machine. My legs were grabbed, and someone sat on them while another set of hands bound my legs together.

"Night, night, biker bitch," someone growled from behind me before something hard slammed into the back of my head and everything went dark.