Scorched (Furies MC Book 3) Read online

  Scorched

  Furies MC

  Book Three

  by Harley McRide

  Published by JK Publishing, Inc.

  © Copyright February 2017 Harley McRide

  Rights & Permissions © February 2017 JK Publishing, Inc.

  Cover, art, and logo © Copyright February 2017 by KO Ink Books, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN #978-1-370-43183-0

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  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales are entirely coincidental.

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  Dedication

  This series is dedicated to my fans, for each book a reader will choose the main character’s name, and road name. I truly believe there is something special in all of you, whether it is teaching, nursing, stay-at-home parent, we all have the imagination worthy of becoming a story.

  Max ‘Torch’ Merlin was chosen by Tammy Carney and her family. Tammy is not only a fan, she is a friend! Her husband served our country, and for that, I thank him and Tammy for the sacrifices they made.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Books by Harley McRide

  Capo Ricco Excerpt

  About Author

  Prologue

  Being shot wasn’t a picnic, but it was also not the end of the world, Torch thought as he walked down the corridor to his President’s office. He saw Ridge and his woman, Casey, laughing and talking to a few of the others in the club, all the while Casey was petting her monkey. Torch shook his head, how the fuck they got permission to have that damned thing in the country was beyond him, but miracles happened every day, and considering what Casey had gone through, he was happy she had something to hold onto, even if it was a strangely tiny monkey. These last few days had been fucking long trying to figure out where the fuck the asshole who was releasing information had been moved to. This had drained all of them and all their resources. No one had heard a damn thing, but they knew this asshole was just biding his time.

  He opened the door to his President’s office and saw he was on the phone. When he held up his hand and motioned Torch to sit, he almost turned and left; he really wasn’t in the mood right now to deal with anything. Torch sat in the office while Fling was talking on the phone, so he leaned back and closed his eyes, trying to block out the conversation he didn’t want to listen to. His arm still hurt like a bitch. The bullet had gone through, and even though he wasn’t supposed to be riding for a few weeks, Torch was ready to get on the bike and take off. They had a week, and he just needed to take off by himself. Seeing Boomer and Ridge both find their old ladies was awesome, but it made him think too much about the one he had left behind.

  Left behind was an odd choice of words. Torch didn’t leave her behind, she had left him behind, but it was easier for him if he thought of it the other way. Mostly because there was no explanation of her absence, and Torch had left as soon as he was reassigned. So if Anya had come back, she wouldn’t find him waiting. Thankfully, that transfer was the best decision he ever made. Why? Because that was when he found the Furies, and they had proven to him the real definition of family, all of them. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for this group of men, nothing.

  If he thought about Anya, he would get pissed off, and pissed off wasn’t what anyone wanted right now. For the last few months, he had kept a lid on the anger that had threatened to rise to the surface. Seeing his brothers find their women, for some reason struck a sour cord for him, and he hated feeling that shit.

  Anya had promised to wait for him, and then she had disappeared. He had looked everywhere for her, but it was like she had vanished into thin air. Her friends, her co-workers, everyone he asked said she had been there one day and gone the next. No one knew where she had gone, she hadn’t left a note, and all her stuff had been left in their home. Torch had been frantic, but no matter who he had hired to find her, they’d come up empty-handed on her whereabouts. So he was left with the knowledge she had left him for a reason, and she wasn’t coming back.

  Casey, Georgie, Sunshine, they were all good women who had their men’s backs. Not Anya, she had disappeared without a thought of what it would do to him.

  So he had thrown himself into his job, left on mission after mission, always volunteering to stay and let the men with families go home. On his last deployment with his former team, things had gone to shit. There was nothing he could have done, but still half of his unit had died in an ambush. They had sent the rest home, saying they needed counseling. It was bullshit; they had wanted to hide them from the media who learned of the huge loss.

  For a few months, he did exactly what they said, went to the people they told him to, and tried to get everything out of his head. It hadn’t worked, and Max couldn’t stay in the house with so many reminders. They weren’t married, but Max had loved her. And it burned that she’d left when he needed her the most.

  Torch
transferred to Fling’s unit, there he finished out the last of his tour with men who helped him let the anger go, focus it on something else, namely the Furies. During missions, Fling and the others, Boomer, Loki, Ox, they all showed him acceptance.

  Torch had gotten out; he had taken off with a pat on the back and a Bronze Star. The road led him here, and he had finally found solace in being a part of a unit again. But there was still that thought in the back of his head that would make itself known when he saw a fiery redhead walking down the street. Was it her?

  Fling hung up the phone, and he said, “Sorry, brother, I know you had plans, but I have a bit of a situation here.”

  “Okay?” Torch said slowly, and then Fling leaned forward and took out a file and put it on the desk in front of him.

  “Do you know her?” he asked and Torch opened the file and looked down. He frowned and picked up the picture, and stared at the woman. It was her, but it wasn’t. The woman in the picture had black hair, and it was a lot longer than hers had been. Shit, Anya? It couldn’t be.

  “Fuck,” Torch whispered and then Fling sighed.

  “We had a request specifically for you but, brother, if you say no, we all do,” Fling said and then continued, “You know that hacker the government was looking for, the one in Nepal? Well, he’s no longer in Nepal, it got too hot, now his whereabouts are unknown again, but he is back in business and has reared his ugly head yet again.”

  Torch nodded, not taking his eyes off the photo, and Fling continued, “Well, she apparently was put into protective custody five years ago. She had reported to the First Shirt on an Air Force Base that she had seen one of the men on the base stealing weapons from the armory. Apparently, he had been selling them to a terrorist group; she was able to identify the man who robbed them as well as the people he sold them to.”

  Torch looked up at him and frowned, “What base?”

  Fling sighed and then said, “Lackland Air Force Base.”

  “Her sheet showed she lived with me, so you know the story, I came back from a mission, and she was gone. So you are telling me she left because she saw something?” Torch said, and Fling nodded.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is she? Why the fuck was I not notified? I should have been, I sponsored her on the base, she was mine dammit,” Torch snapped.

  “I know, brother, and we will get the answers you need, I promise we will. Right now, though, they don’t know where she is, but they need to find her. Which is where we come in. The General himself asked us for help, not sure why, but I will ask more questions. Just know, the government needs you to find her and fast, and there is a reason. The hacker is going to release her name and her whereabouts soon. She was notified of the possibility when he stole all the information, and she took off. They’ve been trying to find her, but she apparently has crossed the border into Canada.”

  Torch stood and said, “Send the rest to my phone, I’m leaving right now.”

  “Wait!” Fling said, and Torch stopped and turned around.

  “What?”

  “Fuck,” Fling said and ran a hand down his head. “There is more.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Loki is going with you, there is more than just Anya,” Fling said, and he frowned.

  “She married?”

  “No,” Fling said. “Fuck, kills me to say this, man, but she has a little girl.”

  Max ‘Torch’ Merlin stared at his President and then nodded and turned. “Tell Loki if he isn’t ready in a half an hour, he can catch me later.”

  “Be careful, honey,” she whispered into his ear and kissed him thoroughly. “When you get home, we will have that talk, okay?”

  Max leaned back and smiled. “Yeah, make sure you go out and buy yourself a dress and shit. When I get back, we are going out to celebrate.”

  “Oh really, we are going to have something to celebrate?” she teased.

  Max looked at her seriously and whispered, “We are going to have a lot to celebrate about. Now, gimme a kiss and get your ass back inside, it’s going to start raining any minute, and I don’t want you sick when I get home.” He then kissed her and watched her move back to the front of their home. Shit, he had finally gotten what he always wanted. Turning he walked down the sidewalk to where his truck was parked.

  With one last glance, he turned and saw her standing in the doorway, looking beautiful and gorgeous. If he had known things would go to shit so soon after he stared at her the last time, Max would never have left. He would have figured out some way to stay with her.

  Fuck, he thought and shook his head and looked back at his President. “And find out why the fuck I wasn’t notified. She lived with me, dammit; they should have told me what the fuck was going on.”

  Fling nodded and picked up the phone. Someone had a lot to answer for, and for their brother, they were going to find out who.

  Chapter One

  Torch strode through the Vancouver Airport where they flew into. Loki followed him, frowning since they had taken off. Torch had been quiet, even when Loki tried to talk to him about the mission they were on. He had only been told they were looking for a woman and a child, not enough for him to work with right now. He had lied, but he needed time to process everything. Loki was the kind of brother who would ask a million questions, and Torch knew he couldn’t answer half of them. So he chose to be quiet and process what he learned. Loki would have his answers soon enough.

  However, during the flight Torch had made some decisions, one of them being he was going to find Anya, and keep her and her kid safe. She left him without a word, and to him, that meant their relationship wasn’t as strong as he assumed. It was fine; he moved on. He stretched his arm and felt the twinge of where the bullet had gone through. Fuck, he wasn’t going to let it slow him down. This may not be a second chance, especially since she had a daughter, which meant she had someone in her life that mattered to her. Anya wasn’t a slut, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself of that for the last few hours. No, she had found someone, which meant more to her than Max did, simple as that. While it pissed him off, he wasn’t going to take it personally. She was a person from his past, but he got over it, like way over it. Torch realized now, that whatever he felt for Anya died when she walked out the door.

  Torch felt his phone vibrate and he pulled it from his pocket. Back on the ground maybe they would have more info now, he thought. As he looked at the texts Fling had sent him during their flight, Torch growled. There it was, finally they had a name. The fucking government had finally officially identified the asshole. Of course, they had waited long enough, which put them all way behind the power curve, always protecting their own asses until it got too bad and then the Furies helped clean up.

  Torch pulled up the document they just sent him, and he saw Loki doing the same as they walked. Victor Burns, aka ‘The Ghost Hacker,’ which really was a fucking awful name the press gave the asshole since they didn’t actually know his name, they only knew his idiot computer name, ‘Ghost.’ Now the name stuck and gave the asshole credibility since the media was calling him a genius hacker. If only they knew. His eyes narrowed as he looked at the background of the prick, not so impressive when you saw it all laid out in black and white. While the man was good with computers, he had failed at a lot of other things, including being bounced out of the military.

  The man was a fucking asshole. He wasn’t doing this for a noble cause, he was doing it for fucking money, that was it, money. The man had everything at his fingertips working for a diplomat; he just exploited it. Shit, he kept reading and saw the information they had gathered. He was a wannabe, he wanted to be in the military but washed out, wanted to be in politics, and failed, hell, the man had bounced around enough until he finally just stole classified documents and was blackmailing the government. No one knew why, no one cared either; they just wanted him shut down. But the man was hiding behind embassies. Torch really hoped the asshole would truly get what he deserved. Fling was going
to send someone to talk to the asshole who Anya saw that day, oh how he wished it could be him. Torch wanted to stare into the eyes of the fucker who had been responsible for this.

  He couldn’t think of anything else right now, even when Loki yelled at him when he almost walked right through customs without showing his passport. Torch stopped and then waited, albeit impatiently. Why the hell the government had passed that law, Torch will never know. Really? Did it stop people from coming to the US illegally, not so much, but for the people who actually followed the law, it was a pain in the fucking ass. What if someone just wanted to pop over the border to get some Canadian Cuisine? Okay, that even sounded stupid when he thought it, but still it was annoying.

  “Dude, I get there is shit on your mind, but damn, do you want to get arrested before you find her?” Loki said.

  Max ‘Torch’ Merlin, yeah that was his real name, just stared ahead, thoughts crowding his mind. He just couldn’t believe that after five years he was finally was going to get the answers he wanted. Answers he needed really. From the day he came home and found her gone, he had been confused, pissed, and possibly a little sad, although he would never admit it. They had been doing so good; the two were like a match made in heaven. Anya said it a lot, which was why he was so confused when she split. Hearing she had left because of something that happened on the base, the one he worked at, well, that pissed him right the fuck off.

  “Come on,” Loki whispered, and Torch looked up. It was his turn, and apparently, the worker had been calling him for a while. Way to draw attention to yourself, he thought and stepped up to the window and handed the man his passport. They were fake, but they were also the best money could buy, so he knew they would pass.