by Eve R. Hart
Before I could blink, a chain was tossed around my neck and a lock clicked into place. Then I was flipped over and the click of the zip tie told me that my hands were going to be stuck behind me from now on. After a beat down that consisted mostly of kicks to my guts and ribs, I was left alone on the cold floor.
I took a moment to regain my breath and clear my vision. The urge to vomit was overwhelming but I swallowed it down. My eyes followed the chain and saw that it was bolted to the wall. I guessed I had enough slack to make it to the middle of the room and that was all. This was better. Sort of. I could move, though my hands were still bound. It sucked that they were behind me but maybe I could make that work to my advantage.
I gave myself a few more minutes before I attempted to move. Every single part of my body screamed at me as I crawled over to the wall and flopped down with my back right over the hook bolted into the wall. My eyes glued to the door as I fumbled around with my fingers. Once I made contact I gave it a wiggle. It was in there good. I gripped the ring and tried with all my might to get it to turn. I needed some sort of leverage and my fucking hands free.
I knew I had to keep my movements slow. It was too quiet and if I moved too quickly the chains would rattle and possibly give me away. These guys weren’t dumb. I suspected they already thought I’d be working to find a way to get out.
I gripped and turned and struggled until the bones in my fingers felt bruised. It was no use, that thing was screwed in tight.
Exhausted, my body sagged and I all but slumped to the side. I tried to prop myself up awkwardly on my elbow but the pain from the stab wound on my arm shot fire through my veins.
I coughed and was surprised when I didn’t get a mouthful of blood. As I took a slow, deep breath in, my lungs burned and my ribs ached, but I could tell they weren’t broken. Not yet, anyway. I suspected that it was just a matter of time before one of their kicks or punches made that a reality.
Then lights cut without warning. I strained to hear if there was any sort of commotion.
Nothing.
The silence began to ring in my ears telling me that this was planned. There was no rescue attached to the darkness. The unheard sounds of panicked chaos and gunshots only told me not to get my hopes up.
My brothers didn’t know where I was. The fact that I would have been the one that they turned to in a situation like this was crippling because I wasn’t there to help them find me. Without my talents, they were like the blind leading the blind. And the lack of information I’d left behind wasn’t going to help either.
This was such a mess. I really didn’t think that anything could have gone wrong. Not only had I been so wrong about that, but I had been stupid to think that I’d be safe. It wasn’t like me to approach any situation like that. It wasn’t like the club either. Maybe we had too many hands in too many different cookie jars right now, and it was reckless of me to add another one.
But I couldn’t leave these guys to keep running their business. I had to save the girls. It was just me and my club that had the information about this. I hadn’t reached out to anyone else. But it wasn’t like I’d had the time to do so. And I doubted Lucy had either. No, she would have told me if she had. There was no way I could have turned a blind eye. Still, I wondered if I had done more damage. They were all dead now. I hadn’t saved them. I hadn’t even had a chance to. And I didn’t even want to think about what had happened earlier. I could have saved her. Couldn’t I have? Something told me that her end would have come no matter what. But the brutality of how she went out, that was on me.
Fuck! Even as I sat there, I couldn’t shake the images from my mind. I had never been truly disturbed or haunted by anything thus far in life. I guess, in a way, it was maybe time. As I thought back to all the fucked up things I’d done and had been a part of, I realized why they hadn’t bothered me like this did. Every single fucker that paid by my hands or was taken out because of something I’d found, fucking deserved it. She—number fifteen, she didn’t deserve a damn thing. I had nothing but a number to call her. It seemed so impersonal. And all I could think about was if I would even recognize her if I saw her on a missing persons report?
Then my mind wondered if that maybe it wasn’t better for them. Yeah, shitty, dark hole to go down. But if I wasn’t there to save them the life they had after they left those cages would have been unimaginably bad. Condemned to a life of being used and raped and God knew what else. Beaten. Tortured. Treated like an object rather than a human. It didn’t justify suffocating and being burned alive, but at least they had peace now. I had to believe that because if I didn’t then I would break.
I couldn’t save them.
And I was starting to doubt that at this point I’d be able to save myself.
I tried to focus on the things that would help to keep me going.
My brothers.
My club.
I had to free myself to save them. We’d been found out and I had a good idea that once they were done with me they’d be on their way to hit up at least one of the compounds. It still bugged me how they knew. But there was no time to obsess over answers I wouldn’t get.
And I knew there were more girls out there to save. Ones they had trapped somewhere else. Future ones that would be snatched when they would least expect it. This had only slowed them down but I knew it wouldn’t stop them. Life would go on in the criminal world and I had no doubt that even as they took time out to deal with me, that they had scouts out there grabbing up new merchandise, as they saw it.
Just as my eyes drifted closed, the lights flicked back on again. My eyes snapped open, my gaze landing directly on the door as if I knew someone was going to come walking in. Then the room went dark again.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. They were watching me somehow. In the darkness, I searched for a camera that I had missed when I looked the first time. The brightness had messed up my vision and I waited for my eyes to adjust to the black again. It was no use. I couldn’t see shit.
Testing out my theory, I waited a few minutes and then slowly closed my eyes again. I let my body relax and sag naturally. Sure enough, the lights cut on again and as soon as I opened my eyes, they cut back off.
Yes, I had no doubt now that they were watching me. This was child’s play. I knew what they were doing. Hell, I’d done it to people before. Tactics to disorient and wear a person out. Wear them down. Get them so sleep deprived and confused that their brain will spill things just to make it stop.
Now that I knew they were watching, I made it my goal to find out how. I had to arm myself with every little thing and know every single detail about my surroundings. I could use this tactic to my advantage. I was prepared for it to take a long fucking time to do, considering that I only had seconds of light every time. I had to plan this out just right. I picked a corner of the room and kept my eyes pinned onto the top near the ceiling, making sure not to move my eyeballs as I lowered my lids. The thing was not to move my eyes once I opened them but to use my peripheral as best as possible. To take in as much as I could in one fucking blink.
It took several tries. It was probably over an hour because I had to make it believable. I couldn’t let them catch on to what I was doing. Finally, I spotted it, or at least I was pretty sure that was it. There wasn’t a camera in any of the most obvious places. But there was a patch of peeling wallpaper that looked as if it had been pulled away to conceal something. And the small hole that had been cut out for the lens to see through was strategically hidden in the flower pattern. This wasn’t some random abandoned building. I mean, maybe it was at one point, but these guys had clearly spent time setting it up as a torture room. Maybe there were more rooms set up just like this one. I suddenly doubted that I’d been the first person brought here.
Now that I had the information that I needed, I didn’t care to play their game any longer. I rolled over, giving them a nice shot of my ass.
There, take that, fuckers.
Tucki
ng my face into the corner where the wall met the floor, I closed my eyes. It was the best I could do to shield myself from the light. I got lost deep inside my head and ignored their lame attempts at torture. I was sure it would only get worse.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hunter
They called me The Hunter.
Hunt for short.
A little bit ironic that my last name happened to be Huntsmen, even though not many people knew that.
I could tell you how I got started in this line of work, but I think that was a story best saved for another time.
I worked for just about anyone and everyone. I was my own boss and my only employee. I was not a huge fan of people and did my best to avoid them. Unless I was tracking and hunting them, that was.
And before you ask, yes, I had limits on the jobs I would take and the people I worked for. I always did my research and I knew what I was getting myself into before I took a meeting. And if it didn’t feel right, then I’d turn it down right away. There were a few people I worked for with little questions before I took the job. These people were…a little unsavory, but good people despite the choice to make their own laws.
I’d been contemplating taking a vacation—something I did every now and then but would never follow through with the idea—when my phone pinged with a message. Dialing my voicemail, I put the phone on speaker. Since I was at home and had just swept for bugs the day before, I knew it was safe to do.
The voice that had always been cool and calm now held a tinge of anxiety. I was needed. This wasn’t just a job, this was personal. The kind of personal that was out of fear and panic. A loved one. A brother. Someone had gone missing. I didn’t ever get those from these types of men, so that alone had me getting to my feet even before the message ended.
Seven and a half minutes later, I was sliding into my car. Two hours and thirty-eight minutes, I was rolling through the tall ass gate that secured the compound. And nine minutes after that, I was seated in a rickety chair in front of the President of the Steel Paragons Motorcycle Club.
Cal sat behind his old, cheap desk, while Loch, Diesel, Tank, and Axe crowded around the small room.
I listened to Cal speak, remaining silent until he was done. I just needed a starting point, if they didn’t have that for me, I could find it on my own. But I knew time was of the essence and if I even had just a whiff of a trail to follow it would cut down on time significantly. With jobs like this, that was a big deal, when all it could be was a matter of minutes between life and death.
The story started and I listened to the quick run-through. I was right, it was a brother that had gone missing. Bocca. The Flirt. Hacker. The gatekeeper to all the club members’ secrets. I made it my mission to know the people I worked with and I had a damn good memory.
So, it made sense that they’d called me in for this. Without their resident computer nerd, they were a bunch of blind men stumbling around a pitch black room. Must have sucked to have a wake-up call this way. To become so comfortable in relying on one person for certain things. If you asked me, Bocca could have been considered the backbone of this club, because clearly, without him they were fucking clueless.
Good thing they knew me.
He’d been tipped off to a human trafficking auction. Loch explained that Bocca was only supposed to go in and blend into the background and collect information. That sort of thing. My guess was, he got made. No telling what happened to him after that. I could sure as hell tell you that it wasn’t good.
At best, they took him out back and shot him in the head. Yes, it was a shitty thing to say. But I knew these guys well, having had my fair share of rescues from underground trafficking. I knew what these men were not only capable of, but enjoyed doing. The worst of the worst, some might say. And while I would agree with that wholeheartedly, I had seen worse in my days.
The story wrapped up with the only knowledge that he’d gone into the city. No names as to who the hell was running this thing. No directions as to where it was being held. Fucking jack shit for me to start from. The list of people that they knew would be attending probably wouldn’t help me out for shit. It would end up taking more time to track the place I was looking for using the names on that list. I was better off heading into the city and seeing where the wind took me. And by that, I meant walking down the shady side of town with my ears open. Because one thing I’d learned over the years, was that people couldn’t keep secrets for crap. So if someone knew, there would be word going around.
Before I could say anything, the door busted wide open with a force that had even a guy like me twitching. My head whipped around, my body rigid and ready to pounce. I only slightly relaxed when I saw a tall bombshell standing just on the other side of the threshold. Her eyes were strangely cold. No, not cold. There was something there, guarded and calculating. Her movements were slow and her stance projected the kind of relaxed toughness that told me not to let my guard down.
“Angel,” Tank said with a heavy sigh.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his arms flop to his sides as his head bowed with a sad kind of shake to it. Like he had resigned himself to the invasion. Like he didn’t expect anything differently even though it was clearly something that was simply not done.
Nadya. Contract killer—former, from the word circulating around my people. Not that I really had people, but I guess you could call them that, you know, the underground, go around the law types. I knew her well enough to be unsure of what to think about her, if that made any sense.
She waited there like she knew her intrusion was unwelcome, but she wasn’t going to let that completely stop her. After a long, tense, silent minute, she finally took a step inside. I could have only guessed that Cal had given her some sort of silent sign that she could enter. Her eyes slowly cut down to take me in for a fraction of a second as she walked to the desk. An odd flash of something that was too quick for me to analyze passed in her gaze.
She didn’t speak as she dropped, quite literally, a tablet down on the desk in front of Cal and hit play. The news clip played, filling the room with sound. The smoldering building in the background caught my attention before the sound of the woman speaking even hit my ears.
One of the best ways to cover up evidence, burn everything to the ground. Take it a step further and leave your victims naked and toothless.
The death toll was at twenty-five so far and it was clear that they weren’t nearly done going through the rubble.
They said it was an underground party filled with a bunch of runaway kids. Yeah, total bullshit to cover up what had really happened. There was someone in power behind that too, I had no fucking doubt. I bet if I dug into it further, I’d find that most those bodies belonged to children reported as missing. Kids snatched when they, and their parents, least expected it. Vanished in broad daylight when they thought they were the safest. I’d put money that most of them were girls.
I couldn’t in good conscious have said that this was good, but at least now I had a starting point.
“I called Silas,” Nadya said speaking for the first time.
There was an odd lilt to her voice, one that was almost hidden. Her words came out slow and one might have said, void of any emotion. But I knew that wasn’t it. No, this was the way she held herself together. Against the pain. Against the hard things she’d had seen and worse, done.
Silas. Nadya’s sire, in a sense. The man that found her and made her into what she was today. He, at one time, was considered the best contract killer that didn’t go by a false name or generic title. Or maybe Silas wasn’t even his real name. Who the fuck knew. But that was what he was known as in my world. Silas. The Killer. The dragon slayer that only took jobs that ended evil. He, like me, had rules. Lines he wouldn’t cross. In a way, it was noble, perhaps. But he was still a killer. A man that took lives without even blinking his eyes.
I wasn’t judging. I had my fair share of blood-soaked hands. I was painted in gray and red down to the core. So
, I understood. His head wasn’t the one that laid on my pillow at night, so what did I care?
But what I did care about, was that this was going to impact me and how I worked. I worked alone. That was me. But I had a damn feeling that was about to change no matter my say in it. I chose to bite my tongue, knowing this was serious, and the help shouldn’t be unwelcome.
“How long?” I asked not tilting my head to look up at her but still able to catch her movements out of the corner of my eye.
“An hour,” she responded not looking at me either.
“Tell him to meet me there,” I said, pointing to the now darkened screen on the tablet.
Then I gave a nod to Cal and headed for the door.
I had work to do.
There was no more time to waste.
CHAPTER NINE
Bocca
The door opened and hit the wall behind it with a loud bang. I snapped alert but didn’t roll over. By the way my eyes felt dry and scratchy, I had a feeling I hadn’t been out long. Though I couldn’t see whoever it was, I could tell that they were standing there waiting for my attention. With a roll of my eyes—yes, I knew they couldn’t see it—I flopped over and sat up as best as I could.
“What is so important that you had to fuck up my sleep?” I said with a blank look on my face.
My body was stiff. My shoulder was screaming at me for sleeping on it like I had. Not that I had much choice with my arms bound behind my back and all. I ignored all the pain in my back as I took in the man standing on the other side of the room. This wasn’t the head guy. This one was shorter and thicker, but not in a built sort of way. More like in that I-love-donuts-and-I-can’t-eat-just-one way. I took in the tray of food he was holding. I wasn’t an idiot, I knew that this was just another game.
“Oh, goodie, you brought me breakfast,” I said trying to sound sarcastically thrilled about it. I had a feeling it was closer to lunchtime anyway. “Why don’t you put it right over there just out of my reach, will ya?” I called out the play before he even did it.