Carry You Home (Carry Your Heart #2) (13 page)

"Dom," I called over my shoulder as I stalked down the hallway. "If it was
your
house and
your
old lady, you'd feel a little differently, don't you think?"

I nodded to myself when I heard Dom's sigh of surrender and then there was some shuffling behind me as Dom and Casey followed me out of the clubhouse without so much as a protest from anyone else watching this scene play out. I didn't stop until I was standing in front of my bike again to turn to Dom and Casey to bark out some orders. This was my business and if either of them didn't like it, they could get on their bikes and head back inside.

Hell if I cared right now. That wasn't going to change shit because I was going with or without them.

"Get Ortega on the phone," I instructed pointedly and clenched my fists in anticipation. "Let's see if he knows where his old lap dog has been lately."

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My eyes just about glazed over as I rose my fist to knock on the door. Once Ortega was brought up to speed about what his former associate was up to, he rattled off all the places Padilla was known to frequent without hesitation. As luck would have it, we'd found him at the first place we tried—his house. Padilla was either incredibly stupid or incredibly confident I wouldn't retaliate. Either way, he was going to be feeling every single inch of what he'd destroyed in my house and every second of fear he'd inflicted on Isabelle.

Padilla probably thought all our shit was settled and over now.

Asshole had another thing coming.

I pounded fiercely on the front door, shrugging off the way Dom and Casey shifted anxiously behind me. They didn't want to be here right now and I didn't really give a shit. The club didn't have anything to do with this—this had everything to do with all the times me and Padilla had stared each other down, each time I had worked overtime to report back to Ortega all the ways Padilla was screwing up, each time Padilla came up empty and each time I reveled in every wrong move he made...it had all come down to this.

A few moments later, the door swung open to reveal Padilla, dressed in a dirty wife-beater and a half-empty beer in one hand. The smug expression drained from his face and then he scrambled to shut the door in my face. I slammed my foot right into the middle of it, knocking Padilla back into his living room, and charged straight ahead.

"Hey, man, listen," Padilla held up his hands in clear desperation. "Nobody got hurt. No big deal, man. We're square now."

I stepped inside the living room, with Dom and Casey hot on my heels, and cocked an eyebrow at him. "You think we're square? Man, you're even stupider than I thought."

I moved forward until I was toe to toe with the man I was going to take great pleasure in beating to a bloody pulp and my lips curled back into a snarl. "Your first mistake, asshole, was fucking with my old lady and my house. And the second, dumbshit, was sticking around long enough so I would know it was you. You think I'm just gonna stand here and let you shit all over what's mine?"

"You cost me a shit-ton of money," Padilla interjected hastily. "I was gonna make over 100 Gs from that deal and you blew it."

"100 Gs, huh?" I nodded to him and my shoulders shook with laughter. "Bullshit. Everyone knows you're not smart enough to pull somethin' like that off."

Rage flared up in Padilla's eyes and just as he was gearing up to swing, Casey appeared at his side and twisted his arm back before he could move an inch.

"Watch yourself, asshole," Casey leaned into Padilla menacingly. "You should know better than to go after a woman. You deserve everything you're about to get handed."

"I didn't hurt her!" Padilla hollered back in his face. "I didn't even touch her!"

As if on cue, a short, scantily-clad Mexican woman, the same one I recognized from the patch-over party, appeared in the hallway. "Diego, what's goin'—"

She stopped short as soon as she took in the three Horsemen cuts standing in her living room.

"Get back in the bedroom, Luz!" Padilla yelled at her. "Turn around and walk away!"

Luz's face contorted, but she stood her ground, refusing to leave her man behind. I supposed I could understand that kind of loyalty and chose to ignore her instead.

"So," I started again, leaning down to get in his face. "Let's try this again. What were you gonna do if my pregnant old lady hadn't nailed you with pepper spray, huh? You know, the one you called a fucking bitch?"

Padilla's eyes flooded with sheer panic and he didn't need to tell me what we both already knew: if just a few seconds had happened differently, Padilla wouldn't have hesitated to tear her to pieces too. My lips curled into a menacing snarl and right about now, I was surprised I was even seeing clear objects in the room I was so blinded by this overwhelming rage.

"I didn't know she was pregnant! I swear I didn't!" Padilla pleaded hoarsely, but it fell on deaf ears.

"You know," I started darkly and ignored his cries. "You were right before. About us gettin' square. We should be square. Then this shit between us can be finished once and for all."

I pulled my own Glock out of the holster underneath my cut and aimed it directly at Luz's head. I wasn't normally prone to such spiteful violence, but now that the wrath-fueled floodgates were open, there was no stopping the rush that followed.

"How do you like it, huh?" I snarled back at Padilla, still holding my Glock trained on his woman. "How do you like someone comin' up into your space and scarin' the shit out of your woman? Doesn't feel so good, does it?"

"Caleb..." Dom's voice called out to me to bring me back from the brink. I didn't miss the warning in his tone, but right about now, that was the least of my concerns.

"I got it, Dom. Just keeping this shithead in his place," I shot back tightly, keeping my focus trained on the man shaking with anger in front of me.

"Now," I turned back to Padilla. "We're almost there. Just about square."

I tucked my Glock back in its holster and then swung my fist until it connected right in Padilla's jaw. With my fury now completely unleashed, I kept swinging and kicking, oblivious to the shouting around me, until my knuckles were torn and bruised and covered in Padilla's blood and until Casey finally dragged me away.
 

My chest heaved violently as I watched Padilla crawl around the bloodied floor and spit a tooth out two feet away from my shoes.

I crouched down and grinned at the mangled mess I'd made.

"Now we're square."

Isabelle

I ran a hand over my tired eyes and gratefully took the bottle of water the prospect slid over to me. Lexie was bouncing Chloe anxiously on her hip next to me as Skyler eyed us both warily. Becca was still nowhere to be found, but that was honestly the least of my worries right now. I'd tried calling her a little after Caleb left the clubhouse and once I'd finally started to feel normal again, but had only gotten her voicemail.

Just the fact that I'd left my best friend a message to say my house had been broken into and now, it'd been almost two hours and still, nothing...there was something seriously wrong with that. I just didn't have the energy or the presence of mind at the moment to dwell on it for too long.

My number one priority right now was Caleb. Or rather, where he was, what he was doing, and what kind of state he going to come back in. I knew him well enough to know that Diego Padilla was going to be looking a hell of a lot worse than him, but still, the barely-bridled violence and rage burning in his eyes before he'd left with Dom and Casey was scary as shit. And for a moment, I'd panicked that I was going to lose him, that he wouldn't come back to me in one piece, and sitting here waiting was just cruel and unusual punishment.

Thankfully, it wasn't much longer until the tell-tale roar of motorcycles echoed through the quiet clubhouse. I jumped at the sound and Lexie cast a sympathetic glance my way.

I didn't have to wait long because Caleb strode into the clubhouse with Dom and Casey right on his heels. The triumphant smirk on Caleb's face wasn't hard to miss and just as I'd started to relax, my eyes settled on his bloodied and torn knuckles. While I'd known exactly what he'd done and why, I still hadn't been prepared to see the physical evidence.

I didn't want to think about what he'd done with those fists. What he'd done with the Glock I knew he had in that holster underneath his cut.

Caleb's dark eyes roamed the clubhouse hungrily and when his eyes found me, his lips twisted into a smile, silently telling me that everything had been taken care of, that nothing was going to happen to me again. Just as he stalked toward me, Marcus stepped in his path.
 

"Everything handled, Caleb?" Marcus asked gruffly, clamping his teeth around his cigarette as he spoke.

Caleb nodded quickly, his eyes darting between his club president and me. "No problems."

Dom huffed roughly next to him and Caleb rose his eyebrows at his best friend. I watched them carefully, trying to decipher the meaning behind their silent communication, even if part of me wasn't so sure I really wanted to know.

Marcus cocked an eyebrow at Caleb, his black eyes shifted quickly between them. "I respect your decision to handle this outside the club, Caleb. This was personal between you and Padilla and I get that. You brought back-up with you and you handled your shit, so you got no problems on my end as long as there's no blowback."

"There won't be any blowback," Caleb pushed out through tightly clenched teeth. "He got the message."

"Alright," Marcus dipped his head down in approval.

Caleb didn't waste any time and I bit down on my bottom lip to keep my emotions in check as he closed the short distance between us. My arms were around his neck before I could even fully register that he was standing right in front of me and then his lips pressed into mine hungrily. For a moment, I forgot we were standing out in the open, right at the bar where everyone could see us, and I quickly broke away so I could inspect the damage to his hands.

"Caleb..." I whispered softly as I brushed my fingertip on a piece of torn skin.

"You wanna go clean me up?" he asked in that husky voice he knew drove me up the wall.

I laughed and playfully smacked him in the chest. "Any excuse to get me alone, right?"

"You know it, babe."

"Okay, but after that," I told him pointedly. "I want you to take me back to the house."

His face twisted with anguish and immediately shook his head. "Iz—"

"It's our house, our things. I just want to see it."

Caleb ran a hand over his face, despite the pain he had to be feeling in his hands, and grimaced harshly. "I don't know, Iz. Maybe we should wait. We have to stay at the clubhouse until everything's cleaned up anyway, you know. I haven't even seen it yet and I don't want you to—"

"Caleb," I cut in. "I just want to grab some clothes."

He frowned down at me and I could see the wheels in his head turning, weighing the pros and cons of what I wanted to. It was interesting...all the things I'd learned about being in a relationship with the hard-edged, tough-as-nails biker that he was. He might like to show that tough exterior when other people were around, but when it was just him and me, the tenderness softened out those rough edges. Sometimes, it was like he was two different people—the outlaw biker and the sweet, attentive guy I'd fallen head over heels for all wrapped up in one pretty package.

"Well," he started slowly like he was mentally chewing on the words to see how they tasted. "I suppose we could swing by the house
if
you promise me you'll see our doc as soon as she can fit us in."

Of course he'd give me an ultimatum. Damn him and his super-intuitive, alpha-male tendencies.

I was
fine.

"Iz," Caleb started again, this time his voice was cautious. He was well aware treating me like some kind of invalid who couldn't take of herself was not the way to get me to agree to just about anything. "You can't deny you had a pretty good scare today. Add the panic attack into the mix and I think it's better to be safe than sorry."

I guessed he had a point.

"Fine," I grumbled and jabbed a finger at him. "But only because I love our child. This has nothing to do with you being right."

His shoulders shook with laughter as he swung an arm around me to tuck me into his side. That guy was lucky he was so cute when he laughed.

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"You sure you wanna do this, Iz?" Caleb murmured in my ear as he led me up the walkway to the front door, the same walkway I'd sprinted down just two hours before as my life flashed before my eyes. "I can just go in and throw some shit in a bag for you. You don't have to go inside."

I knew what he was doing and understood why he was doing it. He was protecting me. Just like he always did and even though that just made my heart swell at the thought, he couldn't protect me from everything. This was our house. These were our belongings. And thank God for homeowner's insurance.

"No," I shook my head, resolved to see this through to the end. "I need to go in. It'll just drive me crazy if I don't see it."