by Hazel Parker
Because he’d asked her to go into the city and spend the day, she now found herself in a coffee shop that had been her favorite spot when she was growing up but now she rarely, if ever, found the time to visit. She didn’t plan on spending any of the money that Vance had given her, even though he’d insisted and she was sure that he could afford it, so instead of going into the strip mall next door, she’d just come in here to order a vanilla latte (with extra whipped cream, since she was told to treat herself, after all) and sat down at a table by the window. She’d planned on reading a book on her phone, but she found herself too distracted to focus on the words, her thoughts constantly drifting back to her motel and to Vance and, lastly, to Adam. Part of her really wished that she’d just forced him to take her with him, but she knew that if he were telling her that she didn’t want to be anywhere near that action, that he was probably right. Above anything else, she trusted him.
She stared at her phone for a while even though she knew that it was far too early for him to have done anything yet, hoping against hope that he’d call her to let her know that everything was okay. Though she didn’t want to go on a shopping spree with Vance’s money and didn’t quite have her own liquid income to just spend frivolously, she was getting bored in the coffee shop quickly since she couldn’t focus on her book. Walking around might help, she decided, pushing her chair away from the table and heading out of the shop toward the mall. Her plan was to buy something small so she didn’t look like she was loitering and then to just hang until Vance called, much the same way that she and her high school friends had used to spend time around here.
She walked around a jewelry store for a while, since it was the closest to the coffee shop and none of the stores in the strip were really any more interesting than any of the others. Intentionally avoiding making eye contact with any of the employees so she wouldn't have to tell them that she was just looking around to pass the time, she browsed through the store, looking inside each of the blindingly bright displays that contained diamonds bigger than anything she or Adam could ever be able to afford. However, she'd always sort of thought that these enormous rocks were a little gaudy, honestly. Not that she didn't think that diamonds were pretty, but she could never work her job with a ring the size of a gumball on her finger, and she didn't want to have a ring that she'd have to take off several times a day. She'd never been one to wear a lot of jewelry, anyway. Even the locket that her dad had given her as a kid, which she still had and cherished now that he was gone, she never wore for fear of losing it. Perhaps she was just too nervous about things getting broken or lost to want to wear a lot of jewelry.
"Can I help you find something, ma'am?" a voice asked her. Nina had to fight against a cringe, upset that she hadn't been able to sneak under the radar and leave without being noticed by an employee because these commission workers never liked to take no for an answer.
"I'm just looking, thanks," she replied automatically, but when she turned around to look the employee in the eye, her face blanched when she realized that it wasn't, in fact, someone who worked here.
"What are you up to, Nina?" Adam asked, trying for casually curious but unable to keep the edge of suspicion out of his tone.
"Adam," she greeted as cheerfully as she could, reaching over to kiss him on the cheek in hopes that it would make her seem less nervous. "I got bored, so I decided to come to the mall. I'm just kind of bumming around the stores, not buying anything."
He nodded, but it clearly wasn't adding up in his mind. "What about the Oasis?"
Nina shrugged. "I never take time off, so I feel that I should probably start," she said, a shred of truth in the lie. It wasn't her real motivation, but she'd been thinking more and more lately about what it might be like to take a day off, to be able to go out and do whatever she wanted. Every time Vance left for wherever it was that he went twice a month, she felt the same envy wash over her.
“So you’re just… taking the day off? By yourself?”
She crossed her arms, not quite defensively but with enough seriousness to convey that she didn’t want him to push the issue. “I’m allowed to do that, aren’t I?” she asked.
“Well, yeah, of course,” Adam said. “I just… you know, I worry about you, sometimes.”
“Why worry?”
He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “It just feels like ever since the robbery, you’ve been acting kind of squirrely. Like you haven’t been telling me things like you normally would. I just… you don’t still think about that, do you? When you’re alone? Or when you’re sleeping?”
That made sense. Though Adam hadn’t personally ever been involved in anything traumatizing on the job yet, he’d seen a lot of post-traumatic stress in his fellow officers. Sometimes it was as simple as jumping every time a car backfired or losing sleep until they got some therapy, but he’d also seen it ruin lives, when it had gone untreated. In fact, the chief of police, whom Adam had admired a lot, hadn’t even been immune, and had ended up drinking himself into a depression so deep that he hadn’t been able to pull himself out of it and had ended up needing to leave and live on disability. Though he tried to act like it didn’t affect him too much, Nina knew that it had really freaked Adam out to watch one of his heroes be struck down like that, and she felt a little guilty for worrying him.
“It’s nothing like that, I promise,” she tried to defend, but it didn’t quell the worry in his eyes. Running her hand over her face in exasperation, she knew that she was going to have to come clean, at least about some of what had been going on at the motel. Vance might be pissed, but her first loyalty was to Adam, anyway, right?
“I have to be honest with you,” she said. “There’s some things that have been going on that I haven’t really mentioned.”
“Like what?”
She took a steadying breath. “Some local bikers got… the wrong idea, I think, about one of the guests that I hosted a few weeks ago. They’ve been making some threats.” Adam’s eyes went wide.
“What the hell do you mean, ‘threats?’” he demanded. “Has someone threatened to hurt you, Nina? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“No one said they were going to hurt me,” she reassured. “It’s fine. I’m handling it.”
“Is that why you’re actually away from the motel today?” he asked. “Because you don’t feel safe there?”
“It’s not that I don’t feel safe,” she corrected him. “There have been a few motorcycles circling the place today, but it’s being taken care of.”
“Yeah? By who?”
She bit her lower lip. She’d intentionally left Vance out of her description of what had been happening, though she didn’t quite know why she hadn’t been able to just throw him under the bus. It would make things a hell of a lot easier for her just to villainize him and kick him out of the motel, and that’s exactly why she didn’t want Adam to find out that he was involved: if he knew that telling Vance to leave would potentially solve her problems, she’d have to find an explanation as to why she hadn’t done that already and didn’t plan to.
“Well, you know Vance is a biker,” she asked. Adam’s face turned beet red, but he didn’t do anything but nod. “He apparently knows some of them. He told me that he’d talk to them for me.”
“So, what, he’s in some kind of gang?”
“Of course not,” Nina argued. “He just knows how these people are, and he wanted to help.” Adam seemed to buy that much, but he cursed under his breath when he heard the explanation.
“He’s gonna get himself killed,” he said. “Come on, Nina. We can come back for your car. We’re going to the motel to put an end to this whole thing, once and for all.”
Nina floundered uselessly for a moment, unable to do anything but follow after Adam while he led her back to the patrol car.
“I don’t think we need to do that,” she reassured. “He’s got everything under control.”
“Of course he’d tell you that,” Adam argued onc
e they were outside and Nina could see where the patrol vehicle had been parked and began counting the steps she had to talk Adam out of this, “but these kinds of people are dangerous. Not everyone who rides a motorcycle is as nice as your dad, Nina.”
She frowned. “I know that,” she said. “I’m not arguing that they are. I just—what if he’s got a plan and we’re messing it up?”
Adam shook his head. “Any plan that involves trying to reason with people like this is going to fail. Vance is a nice guy, and I’m sure he’s just trying to help, but we’ve got to get down there before he does something dangerous or stupid and someone gets hurt.”
Nina couldn’t argue without revealing more than she felt that she should about Vance’s life, so she had no choice but to hop in the back seat of the patrol car as Adam climbed into the passenger seat.
“Hey, Silas,” she greeted when he shot her a questioning look.
“We need to go by the Oasis,” Adam explained, “and step on it. We might be on a strict timeline, here.” Silas nodded without asking further questions, putting the car in drive and pressing the button for the sirens and lights to allow them to slip through traffic with ease and speed. Nina took her phone out of her pocket and quickly tapped out a text to Vance, warning him that they were on their way and that he should forgo any plans that he had and do nothing so that Adam and his partner wouldn’t stumble upon him doing something that he shouldn’t, but she knew that the chances of Vance reading the text if he were focused on something else were slim to none. She hoped against hope that he’d check his phone before they arrived, but with each minute that passed without receiving a response, the anxious feeling in her gut intensified. Vance could have already been hurt or worse. Or he could be right in the middle of having some kind of threatening chat, one where the cops showing up could land him in hot water and put him in danger.
The longer she sat silently in the back of the car, the guiltier she felt about even asking him for help in the first place. Really, she should have just gone to Adam—why hadn’t she just gone to Adam? It was his job to protect her, not Vance’s, even if some of the danger was brought to her motel by Vance. She had no choice but to acknowledge that she didn’t think of herself and Adam as a team, but as two individuals who sometimes did favors for one another. The person she really trusted to protect her, to help her solve problems, to listen to her and talk her through bad times—that was Vance. And if something happened to him today, she’d never forgive herself.
Chapter 19: Vance
Vance knew that he wouldn’t have to wait long to be able to talk to the Devil’s Disciples, if that were truly who were circling the motel, and he couldn’t imagine that anyone else would have any reason to draw attention to themselves around here. He wondered who, specifically, would be circling, but he would put money on the assumption that Amelia would be at the front of the pack. There was no way that she would just sit on the sidelines and let the others handle Vance. In fact, he was pretty sure that if it were anyone else from the Rebel Kings staying in the motel and running the bar that this wouldn’t be happening at all. The most likely motive was jealousy and Melly’s lingering hostility toward him, and the turf war was just an excuse.
The worst part of this was that Flip had warned him, even at the time, that he shouldn’t be dating someone within the club. He’d told him over and over that it would only lead to trouble, but he hadn’t listened. They’d both insisted that they’d be the exception that proves the rule, that they were really in love and going to be together forever. However, she’d been 19 at the time and hadn’t had any idea what she really wanted in life. He hadn’t been much older than her, but his problem was that he’d known exactly what he wanted—to be a high-ranking member of the Rebel Kings—and nothing else, at the time, had mattered. He hadn’t cared what he’d had to do to earn the respect and trust of the guys, and he hadn’t been willing to listen to any criticism she’d had about his lifestyle or priorities. Now that he was more mature, he realized that the timing just hadn’t been right, not for either of them. Too bad it was too late. Not that he wanted her back, but if he’d waited until he was really ready to be in a relationship, at least he could have avoided breaking her heart and earning her wrath.
He sat on his bike in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette and waiting. He didn’t want to take his eyes off the road, since he knew that he’d only have a second to get the attention of whoever was riding by and if they didn’t decide to stop in, he’d need to be able to tell the Kings who they needed to pay a visit to. For roughly half an hour, he waited there, letting his mind drift away from the confrontation he was about to have and from work so that he could think about something happier. He found himself thinking about Nina, hoping that she was having a good time with the money he’d given her even if she’d told him that she was refusing to use it. She deserved to have someone spoil her sometimes—God knows that she wasn’t going to do it herself.
The sound of a revving engine in the distance snapped him out of his thoughts. For a moment, he simply listened, trying to figure out just by the sound of it whether it was one person on a bike or several, whether it was a casual motorcyclist or a group of Disciples. All he could tell was that whoever was approaching was riding fast, the sound intensifying quicker than he expected. As he watched the horizon, he eventually saw three people on bikes, all wearing helmets and too far away to tell whether or not they were part of a club or just a group of buddies riding the highway together. He waited. It would be clear as soon as they saw him in the parking lot whether or not Melly was riding, even if they didn't end up stopping into the lot—she wouldn't be able to take her eyes off him.
Sure enough, as soon as they were close enough to be able to see the motel, the person in the front did a double-take at the parking lot before signaling for the group to turn and pull in, which they slowed down to do. All three bikes were bright red and shiny, more expensive, designer-types of models not anything that the Kings had. Vance and the guys took a lot of pride in their bikes, but more in the fixing and renovating process than in the actual price tag. Though it had been a while since he'd found anything that he really wanted to do to his own bike, there had been a period of time when working on his chopper had been all he ever did outside of sleeping and eating. Usually, they found a plateau, after which the renovations started to taper off, but it took a long time to finally be happy with the final product. The Devil's Disciples weren't so much like that. They were more about dropping a bunch of cash on something and then riding it until it died, then moving on to the next bike. There was nothing particularly wrong with that, but Vance still felt a sense of ego about his own way of doing things.
The three motorcycles stopped in the parking lot, boxing Vance's bike in on all three sides as if he were planning to escape, which he hadn't been, anyway. Vance wasn't the type to run from confrontation, and he didn't start fights that he didn't plan on finishing. Predictably, the first person to tear off their helmet was Melly.
"Murphy," she greeted curtly. "You remember the guys." Indeed, Vance recognized the two people with her—an older man named Tyson and a man named Jack, who had tattoos covering almost every inch of his face.
"Nice to see y'all again," Vance greeted so sarcastically that he didn't think that it really counted as a lie.
“Thought you’d be at the bar right now,” Melly admitted, and Vance shrugged.
“Yeah, well, I’m here.” He crossed his arms. “What are you doing here?”
Jack made defiant, almost hostile eye contact. “Can’t we just be passing through?”
“Maybe once in a day, yeah,” Vance agreed, “but I hear this isn’t your first time riding by today.”
Melly’s smile was condescending and mean. “So, that little motel owner is your girlfriend, huh?” she accused, and Vance rolled his eyes.
“That’s not your business, Melly,” he said, and she turned a harsh glare on him.
“It’s Amelia,” she corrected
sharply. “You don’t get to call me Melly anymore.”
He put up his hands in mock surrender and shook his head. “Alright, fine,” he said, “Amelia. I’ll call you whatever the fuck you want, but you’ve gotta tell me what you’re doing stalking Miss Sullivan.” Perhaps if he referred to her more like he would just a landlady, Amelia would change her mind about their relationship. He didn’t think that it’d really work, but it had a better shot at convincing her than flat out denying it. She believed the exact opposite of almost everything he said, and at this point, she’d decided that they were dating and there was probably nothing he could say to convince her otherwise.
“We haven’t bothered her none,” Tyson insisted. “All we done is ride the highway, not hurtin’ anybody.”
Vance didn’t say a word, just gave Amelia a scrutinizing look that showed her that he didn’t believe that for a second. She shrugged.
“He’s right,” she said. “We haven’t done anything to her.”
“I know you two have talked,” he revealed. “After you showed up at the bar. Don’t try to deny it; you threatened her.”
She laughed humorlessly. “Oh, was she threatened by that?” she asked. “That’s a shame.” Amelia had a scary habit of looking genuinely entertained when other people were nervous or upset, which hadn’t bothered Vance when they were dating because nothing really ever phased him, but now that he saw it from a different perspective, was an ugly trait.
“Cut the crap, Mel—Amelia. She’s got nothing to do with me or anybody else in the Rebel Kings. She just owns this motel that I happen to be staying in. She’s a nice girl. You know that doesn’t do shit for me.”