by Stasia Black
“Good,” Drea heard from behind her. “I’m glad you found them.
Drea spun and glared at Garrett. Why the fuck hadn’t he told her about this room right away?
As if anticipating her question, he just stood up straighter. “I had to make sure the clubhouse was secure. I had to know you were safe first.”
“Start on the other side of the room,” she snapped at him. “But careful. Anything happens to any of them, don’t forget I’ve still got my switchblade on me.”
Just a short pause before, “Yes, ma’am.”
And on they went, freeing woman after woman. As they got deeper into the basement, the cages were stacked two high. Some of the women couldn’t stand, their muscles were so cramped.
In the end they pulled thirty-three women out of the cages, in addition to the twelve upstairs.
It would have been thirty-five but two were dead from malnutrition.
“They feed us once a day but those two just lost the will,” said Gisela. She’d started organizing the other women as each one was freed. Garrett and Billy had gone upstairs and brought down clothing, blankets, and food. Gisela had immediately begun passing them out, getting the stronger women to help her with the weakest.
Another girl nodded. “Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t do anything but lay in their cages waiting to die.”
Drea tried not to let it in as she helped the last girl out of her cage. It was one of the stacked cages. Right underneath one of the dead girls.
She was shaking so bad as Drea helped her to her feet.
Gisela hurried over. “It’s okay, Maya. You’re free now. No one’s ever going to hurt you again.”
Drea winced at the assurance. She’d made statements like that. So confident she could protect the women she’d tried to shelter at Nomansland. So sure of herself.
“So what now?” Gisela turned to Drea, bright brown eyes expectant. She was wearing a Black Skulls T-shirt that dwarfed her tiny body, coming down almost to her knees. She had to be just as hungry as everyone else, but she hadn’t even touched the food Garrett had brought down in a duffel bag.
“Well,” Drea said. “First, let’s get upstairs and out of this stinking basement.”
Gisela nodded and clapped her hands. “Okay girls. Up the stairs. Let’s leave this shithole behind once and for all.”
More cheering. It was like they’d been waiting for permission but as soon as it was given, they mobbed the staircase leading up to the first floor.
Gisela had to hurry over and organize them so they didn’t hurt each other in their hurry to get upstairs.
Drea looked to Garrett. “You fortified the clubhouse like I said?”
He nodded. “Locked her up tight. Found three more hiding out. The rest fled.”
Drea nodded. Though calling this place a ‘clubhouse’ was somewhat laughable. The clubhouse she’d grown up in had been a retired army barracks. Far from what you’d call a particularly inviting space. But this place must have been an office or apartment building back before The Fall.
While they’d replaced the exterior doors with steel ones and boarded up what were once clearly glass storefronts, it was only moderately defensible. Maybe if they had more time, but they didn’t.
Because soon there would be a lot of pissed off bikers coming back when they found out the call that had gotten them out of the clubhouse was a fake.
Drea looked at her watch. They had ten minutes. Fifteen at the most.
“What now?” Gisela asked once Drea made it to the top with Maya and they’d reunited with the other girls who’d been raiding the kitchens.
“First, you eat.” Drea grabbed a bagel from the bag Billy brought up. Both Gisela and Maya backed away from him as he passed. Little wonder after all they’d been through at the hands of men.
Drea’s eyes flicked to Garrett. The girls seemed no more skittish of him than they did Billy. Did that mean he hadn’t had any direct interaction with them?
He still worked for the club that trafficked them, though. For the last eight years. He knew what they did. And still, he’d stayed.
He glanced her way like he could feel her eyes on him and she looked away quickly, back to Gisela.
Then she looked at the women as a whole. Some were huddled together, holding on to one another. A few were off on their own, arms clasped around themselves, rocking back and forth. More still were on the floor, maybe their legs weren’t strong enough to stand.
Drea swallowed hard but then forced herself to stand up straight.
“You need to get moving. Half the club will be back any minute.”
Her words were met with cries of shock and fear.
“Where will we go?” asked one girl. “We have nowhere. We’ll just be picked up again by someone else. Enslaved again.”
“Besides,” Gisela said, kicking one of the men who lay bloody on the floor where Drea had shot him in the head. “We’re tired of running. We want to fight. Like you.”
A few others echoed her. The others just looked scared as shit.
Drea put a hand to her forehead.
Shit.
This hadn’t been part of the plan.
She looked at the half-starved girls again. Some of them were still shoving food in their mouths so quickly it was sure to make them sick. Others were struggling into clothes many sizes too big.
Drea had never seen a more rag-tag army. She looked down at her watch.
Seven minutes.
No time to stand around with their thumbs up their asses.
“Anyone know how to shoot a gun?”
Eight girls out of the forty-five held up their hands. Gisela took a step forward. “I was the best of all my friends at first person shooter games when I was a kid.”
“Jesus,” Billy swore behind Drea.
“Shut up,” Drea said, turning to address the women. “Okay, anyone who wants to fight can. Garret, Billy, you stockpiled the weapons off the bodies?”
“Did you one better,” Garrett smiled. “I took a little trip by the armory.” He went over to a second duffel bag and opened it up. It was stuffed to the gills with guns. Machine guns. Shot guns. Pistols.
Drea grinned. “I knew there was a reason I kept you around.” She meant it as an offhand comment but Garrett’s face went serious.
“I swear to you Drea, I’ll do whatever it takes to make it up to you.”
But Drea just shook her head. “It’s not me you have to make it up to.”
Garrett swallowed and looked around at the room of women, nodding.
He held out the bag of guns and Drea ushered the women forward. “Let’s go, let’s go. There’s no time to be shy. Come on, I have a plan.”
Chapter Eight
GARRET
Garrett had been in love with Drea Valentine as long as there’d been air in his lungs, it felt like. He remembered the first time he saw her. It felt like his first memory.
That blonde hair of hers, it was glinting in the sunshine when she first stepped outta her daddy’s truck.
She looked tiny standing there next to Domino. Barely come to his hip, seemed like. So thin Garrett was sure her bones must be hollow like a bird’s and she’d just fly right off. Right there off the pavement and up into the big old clouds. Like an angel. That’s what he thought she was. An angel come down from heaven.
Except Garrett didn’t know why a little angel’d be visiting Domino like that. Domino Valentine was a scary motherfucker, even back then.
If Garrett had memories before Drea, it was nightmares of that skull face of her daddy’s. It’d be coming for him at night, floating down the hall. It’d open it’s mouth and swallow him whole and he’d scream and his mama would come in his room and hush him so he didn’t wake his own daddy.
Cause Handlebar was a mean, scary motherfucker, too.
Turned out Mama had about had enough of living with bruises and broken bones, and it wasn’t too long before she took off. She left a note for Garrett. It said: Mama loves you.
Garrett slept with the note under his pillow for a year.
Then Handlebar found it and gave him a hiding so bad he walked funny for a month.
Garrett wasn’t dumb. Least not as dumb as everybody thought he was. He figured he clamped onto Drea like he did cause everything else in his life was shit.
But then there was her.
Beautiful. Innocent. Good.
And sad.
She looked so sad sometimes.
He’d see her alone in the courtyard of the clubhouse, playing in the dirt with a stick, and her sweet little pink cheeks would have tear tracks running through the dust the Texas wind always seemed to kick up.
They were the only two kids who lived at the clubhouse full time, so he’d sit down beside her and grab a stick, too.
He didn’t say anything. He learned real quick she’d run away if he tried talking. So he didn’t say a word, just dug around in the dirt.
At first she was still real skittish like, moving away from him to the other side of the courtyard’s dirt patch. But she didn’t run back inside.
So Garrett considered that progress.
And as that first month went on and he kept on going out each afternoon after school every day, she stopped moving so far away. Every day, closer and closer.
Until finally, one magical day when those blue, blue eyes of hers flipped up his direction.
His breath caught in his tiny little chest.
Was she finally gonna talk to him?
“You’re doing it wrong.”
Then she went back to digging at the ground like she hadn’t just shattered his universe and torn his chest wide open and planted herself inside forever.
She’d spoken to him.
To him.
And she’d looked at him.
And she was sitting right beside him. And not moving.
He was gonna marry that girl.
He decided then and there.
He stared at the Drea of today. No little angel anymore. Now she was a warrior goddess. Watching her earlier… goddamn.
She gave a gun to every woman who wanted to fight and then led them into the triple wide garage downstairs and had them all hide behind bikes, cars, drop cloths, everything and anything.
She was fucking crazy, and beautiful, and crazy fucking beautiful.
He hid crouched down behind a big ass shovelhead Harley, as close as he could get to her. She was wound tight as she waited for all the bikers to pull back into the garage.
Garrett had been doing his job a long time. Too fucking long. He’d been in turf wars with the cartels before The Fall ever happened and goddamn, after, it was all-out war for half a decade. But he’d never seen anyone as cool going into battle as Drea fucking Valentine.
He could barely see her chest moving she was breathing so calmly as she glanced between the fender and the fork, only pressing the remote to send the garage door shutting behind the bikes after everyone was in.
It was the signal, and her warriors responded even though she’d only had minutes to sketch out the plan.
Including Garrett.
He stood up with his Thompson M2053 sub-machine gun and let ‘er fuckin’ rip.
Fifteen pissed off women plus fifteen sub-machine guns? In addition to Garrett? Yeah. It was over in minutes. Drea’s army had all lined up on one side of the garage so there wouldn’t be any friendly fire and even the women who’d never shot more than a video game gun when they were kids caught on pretty quick.
And Garrett didn’t miss the mix of tears, smiles, and satisfaction on the women’s faces. It might be a gory form of closure but Drea had known it was just what they’d needed. To give the bastards who’d hurt and tortured and traded them like they were cattle exactly what they deserved.
Garrett looked out on the bodies of the men who’d called him brother and felt… nothing. Fuck that wasn’t true. He felt damn relieved, that’s what he felt.
Like he’d been underwater in a sinking car and there was just that inch of air left at the top and he could keep gasping at it, making it for one more minute, a few more seconds, sure the end was coming for him.
But right around the corner, there was the reaper. Just waiting for him. Just waiting to take him to hell.
So he just kept trying to suck in air and praying to God even though he knew he had no right to.
Because Garrett knew what the club’s main income was. Always had. Handlebar saw to that. He tried to get Garrett to lose his virginity to a girl from ‘the docks’ that dear old Dad tied to a bed for his sixteenth birthday present.
It was right before everything happened with Drea’s dad and just after Garrett’s shoulder had finally healed from surgery.
Having your father beat you with a baseball bat so brutally that your shoulder shatters to the point of needing a shoulderblade replacement? Yeah, really makes you think twice before telling your dad to go fuck himself or to outright reject any presents.
No, Garrett didn’t fuck her.
Garrett banged the bed into the wall for five minutes while apologizing profusely to the girl but knew it didn’t really matter because she’d be going back to ‘the docks,’ wherever the hell that was. Handlebar had only told him enough to haunt his nightmares without being able to actually do anything about it.
Not that he did do anything about it when he finally learned the ins and outs of the whole operation.
Not for a while anyway.
The world had gone tits-up by that point. His whole plan to go to the FBI and take down his dad and the whole MC with all the information he’d been gathering ever since Drea left went down the fucking drain.
What FBI? What police?
The Skulls only got more brutal in the aftermath—but still, one nightmarish trip into Southern Alliance Territory on Skulls business was enough to convince Garrett that as bad as the Skulls were, at least here it was the devil he knew. And the Skulls weren’t selling people as slaves to be fucking eaten. Maybe that was a low bar but for fuck’s sake!
And from inside, it was a system Garrett had a hope in hell of subverting now and again. Still, he knew if any of the girls went missing right after he was made full club member, it would look suspicious. Handlebar always thought he was too soft, even after he became the club’s enforcer and spent day in day out using his fists to break people’s bodies.
No, Garrett waited a full seven months before he made his first move and saved the first girl. Finding a safe place for her to go was tricky too. But he did it, and he did it quiet.
Garrett made it look like she was lost in a car accident on the final leg of her ‘delivery’ to the client. During the next few years there were several such accidents.
He was most proud of the boat full of twelve girls that was ‘lost at sea’ in the Gulf of Mexico on a trip from Galveston to New Orleans. He took a speedboat out in the middle of the night, offed the captain, got the girls, and sank the bigger boat. Garrett had contacted the family of two of the girls and they agreed to take the rest of the girls in and find safe places for them.
Suicide got suspicious after that and tore the whole fucking club apart looking for the traitor. But Garrett was good at playing big, dumb, and compliant. It was how Handlebar had treated him his whole life, so everybody bought it.
Even bossman himself, and Suicide was usually much more shrewd when it came to reading people. But sometimes if something’s so close under your nose, it’ll always stay a blind spot. That was Garrett. One big old six-foot five, two-hundred-and-ninety-pound blind spot.
But all in all, he only saved nineteen girls.
Nineteen.
Out of hundreds. Maybe even thousands. It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.
But it was how he’d justified his continued existence in this world. It was why he didn’t just let himself drown. Or put a gun in his mouth and pull the goddamned trigger.
More likely though, deep down, he was terrified it was the justification of a coward. A better man would
have found a way to save more.
Or a better woman.
Garrett stared at Drea as she bent over a desk, examining a map.
Fuck but she’d turned out so much more amazing than Garrett ever could have imagined, and he’d thought about her and imagined a lot.
“What?” Drea asked, flashing those blue eyes as she glanced his way, “Why are you staring at me like that?”
Garrett grinned. “Just remembering the day you told me I was digging in the dirt wrong.”
Drea huffed. “Well you were. The whole point was to smooth it all out so you could draw pictures. Then smooth it all out again. You were just jabbing at it.”
She demonstrated jabbing, making oof, oof sounds.
Garrett shook his head. Like usual when it came to him, she got it all wrong. The whole point was to spend time with her.
“Okay,” she said, standing upright after circling a point on the map. “So go to this house here just off the highway. Your first. 483 Sycamore Lane. We left him in the upstairs bedroom. Now he’s in rough shape, so be careful when you move him, okay? And take a gallon of water so you can make sure he’s hydrated.”
Goddamn but she had the most beautiful lips on God’s green earth.
“Garrett.”
The top one was like a little bow. And so pink even though he knew she’d rather stab her own eye out than ever wear lipstick.
“Garrett.”
“What?” He blinked. “Sorry. Got it. Water. Third house on the left. Upstairs.”
She put her hand on his and the touch of her skin sent electrical current straight to both his heart and his dick.
Fuck. It’d probably piss her off if she noticed his stiffy when she was all concerned about this friend of hers.
This male friend of hers.
“So who’s this guy, anyway? Boyfriend or something?”
“No! Jesus.” Then she looked back down at the map and muttered under her breath, “Why does everyone keep asking that?”
The way she looked away so quickly and the color in her cheeks said different, though. Not that it’s any goddamn business of yours, he told himself. He wasn’t a little kid anymore. Life had taught him enough lessons to know he wasn’t the sort of guy that got the girl.