Page 74 of Devil's Queen
I take a deep breath, trying to calm the storm raging within me. She’s right. We can’t let our emotions dictate our actions. We need to strategize and think clearly. But it’s hard not to feel the fire of desperation licking at my heels, urging me to act impulsively.
Rex places a hand on my shoulder, his touch grounding me. “Marissa is right, Rem. We can’t rush into this blindly. We need a plan. Our family’s lives depend on it. This is what Wolff wants you to do. He’s been ahead of you every step of the way. He wants you to panic so you slip up.”
She’s right. I know she is, but every second my family is with that sadistic fucking bastard is too much. Beaux and Birdie have to be terrified right now. The thought of fear in my son and Birdie is almost too much to bear. If Mama was still alive, she’d be doing her best to keep them calm, but they don’t need her. They have us by the proverbial balls with the kids. All the chips are on their side of the table, and we don’t have one to play with as long as they have them.
“He wants to break us,” Marissa adds, her voice filled with steel. “He wants to see us suffer, and he’ll use whatever means necessary to achieve it.”
“So, we sit here and wait while our family is at his mercy?”
Rex places his hand on my lower back, his phone still in his other hand.
“We’re not going to sit here and wait, Rem,” he says, his voice calm and steady. “We need to be smart about this. Smart brings them all home.”
Harlow’s phone rings. She quickly picks it up and puts it on speaker. My stepbrother’s voice comes from the other side of the line.
“I’ve got eyes on them. Black four-door sedan. Plate number is…” He rattles off the plate number so quickly I barely catch half of it.
“They must have had that car stashed nearby. Do any of you remember a black sedan?”
Marissa speaks first. “There was one parked over at the neighbors a few blocks down. It’s been there a couple of days. Figured it belong to them. I never saw anyone near it nor did it move.”
They’d planned this down to the tiniest detail. Wolff had known where I lived. He knew that we’d hole up here for safety. He saw all of this coming before we even knew what we were going to do.
Rex’s hand stiffens on my back. “It’s stopped moving.”
“Yeah, I’m seeing that too. Let me overlay a map. One second.” The keys of his keyboard tap in the background of his side of the call. “Shit,” he swears.
“Yeah, I’m seeing it too.”
“What? What are you seeing?” I peer over at Rex’s phone. A map is on the screen with a dot with Birdie’s face in the middle of it on the map.
“They’re at the fucking Zulu Kings’ clubhouse.”
“Why would they go there? It’s too obvious. This can’t be right?” I argue.
“I can confirm it’s right,” my stepbrother’s voice mutters from Harlow’s phone. “Two guys just forced them inside.”
“That’s good, right? Your club is there.” Hope fills me for the first time since we came back to the house. “They’ll protect them.”
Rex shakes his head. “He made sure he cleared the place. I didn’t see this until now. I got this over an hour ago.” He shows me a message with his number attached as the sender and several other contacts listed in the message string.
The club is compromised. Move to the secondary location.
“You didn’t send this.”
“I know. Wolff must still have access to our alert system. His access should have been pulled the second he was voted out. Someone dropped the ball.”
“Call it off. Get them back here.”
“I can’t,” Rex declares. “There’s a protocol in place. As soon as that message was sent, every guy in that club pulled their SIM cards and ditched their phones. We go off-grid.”
“Where’s the secondary location? Can one of us go there and tell them?”
“An hour north of the city.”
If they’d sent this an hour ago, the Zulu Kings are already gone. They’d be no use to us now. We are on our own.
“Hey, hold on a second. Raze just walked in,” Beau declares. I can hear him telling Raze the situation. There’s a muffled jostling of the phone before his low, deep voice speaks.