Crash

by Elana Johnson

  “I don’t know,” he finally admitted.

  “We’re getting you out of here,” Julie said. “And this club is headed for a crash.”

  Lawrence studied her, wanting to believe her. “How are you going to do that?” She wouldn’t have a plan. Julie hardly ever did. “Do you even know who and what you’re dealing with?”

  “I know,” she said, but Lawrence didn’t think she did. He’d tried to explain factorization to her once, and she hadn’t gotten that either. And motorcycle clubs were far more varied, nuanced, and complex.

  Mustang knocked on the door and stuck his head inside. “Five minutes. I have to get back.”

  “I can find my own way,” Julie said.

  Mustang just smiled and ducked back out of the room. Lawrence knew he’d locked the door, which meant Mustang had a key. That wasn’t exactly revelatory for Lawrence, but it didn’t settle his stomach either.

  “Five minutes,” Julie whispered. “Tell me what you’re doing here, so Lucas and I can make a plan to get you out.”

  Lawrence fell back against the short counter with the tiny sink where he kept his toiletries. “I can’t tell you.”

  “You have to,” she said, desperate now. “It’s the only way we can get you out.”

  “If I tell you, you’ll be in danger. It’s why I agreed to drop off the radar and live here.”

  “Yeah, well, I left a hundred-pound dog at Mom and Dad’s,” she hissed at him. “You don’t get to just drop off the radar.”

  Lawrence glared at her, but he really couldn’t tell her. He’d tried to type something out for her, but he had no idea if she’d gotten the message or not.

  “Look,” Julie said. “You owe me for the rest of your life for taking in Riley. Not only that, but Lucas told me you used to bully him in high school.” She folded her arms and glared harder.

  Regret and embarrassment seeped through Lawrence. He wasn’t proud of the person he’d been, and he’d known exactly who Lucas Miner was the moment he’d seen him standing in Julie’s house. He was honestly surprised the guy would do anything for him.

  It’s not for you, Lawrence told himself. And he knew he was right. He wasn’t all that pleased that Lucas was doing things for Julie, though.

  “You’re not denying it.” She slapped his chest. “You idiot. How could you?”

  Lawrence threw up his arms to defend himself, and Julie backed away, her chest heaving. More tears splashed her cheeks. “Just tell me what you’re doing here. You started to in that note in my phone. Something about something legal?”

  Lawrence looked toward the door, and Julie did too. He took her elbow and guided her over to the window seat. “Listen, I’m not going to just tell you. It’s dangerous.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  “What do you need when you cross a border?” Lawrence asked.

  Julie searched his face, her eyes widening. “But you’re—”

  “I’m not saying anything,” he said louder, and as if on cue, Mustang opened the door. “You should just go, Julie.”

  “Time to go,” Mustang said.

  Julie held his gaze for a couple more heartbeats, and then she stomped away from him. “You’re impossible,” she said over her shoulder.

  “So are you,” he called to her retreating back. Better for Mustang to think they didn’t get along—which, in a lot of ways, they didn’t. The way she’d shoved a phone at him and told him to call Mom when he’d shown up on her front step testified of that.

  But though she drove him crazy sometimes, they were still family, and Lawrence loved her. He didn’t want her to be in any danger, and he hated that he’d made her life harder by dropping off Riley and never calling.

  Julie was gone, but Mustang loitered in the doorway.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Lawrence said, and he would not snivel the way he had a couple of weeks ago outside of Julie’s house. “Ask her. I didn’t say anything.”

  “I will,” Mustang said. Then he stepped out of the room and let the door slam closed behind him.

  Lawrence retreated to the window seat again, but this time, instead of daydreaming about what his life would be like on the other side of the glass, he could only remember the way he’d treated Lucas Miner in high school. And those thoughts and memories haunted him, because they were real. He hadn’t fantasized them, and he couldn’t fix them.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Julie thought she could find her way back to the center of the hospital, where the Breathers had set up shop. There were definitely more people out and about now, and Julie didn’t want any of their eyes on her.

  “Where’s Lucas?” she asked.

  “I’ll take you to him.”

  Her stomach growled, and Julie did glance down the hall toward the main room. “How does one get food here?”

  Mustang paused. “I’ll send someone with something in a little bit.”

  “We can’t stay,” Julie said as he started walking again. “You’re going to let us go, right?”

  “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

  “Tonight?” She hurried to catch up to him. “When tonight?”

  “At church.”

  “But Lucas and I can’t go to church.”

  “Don’t worry, Julie,” Mustang said smoothly. “I’ll keep you updated.” He arrived at a door, fitted a key into the lock, and twisted. He pushed the handle down but didn’t go into the room. Darkness spilled out, or perhaps light spilled in, and Julie didn’t want to enter the room.

  “Lucas is in there,” Mustang said. He nodded to his right. “Bathroom right down the hall. Let me know if you’re cold.”

  A soft snore came from within the room, and Julie found herself not wanting to enter it. Lucas probably hadn’t slept much last night, and Julie could admit she hadn’t either. She also hadn’t left things with Lucas on the best of terms, and as she stepped into the room, the light from the hallway showed only one bed.

  Perfect.

  Her breath whooshed out of her body, but Mustang’s footsteps were already walking away. She caught the door with her foot before it could bang closed. No sense in waking Lucas if she didn’t have to.

  With the door eased closed, Julie found herself in complete darkness. She could hear Lucas breathing, and a rush of compassion moved through her for him. She knew how cruel Lawrence could be—first-hand, she knew. But she hadn’t known he bullied others in high school. What kind of person did that?

  Julie had always gravitated to the softer guys—like Lucas. The ones who took the abuse from the popular guys, who apparently was her own brother.

  Moving quietly and slowly, because she had no idea what was in the room, she crossed toward the far wall, where she’d seen the bed. She moved to the foot of it and found Lucas against the wall. So she walked back to the side and crawled into the empty spot on the edge of the bed.

  Something hard pressed into her stomach, and she remembered she had her second phone with her. She quickly pulled it out and blinked at the brightness of the screen as she woke it. She didn’t have a charger, and she needed to preserve the battery life. She quickly put it on power-saving mode, which would allow her to make calls and send texts, but she couldn’t use any of her apps, check email, or use Wi-Fi.

  Which was fine. Just fine.

  She quickly sent a text to Melinda that said she couldn’t call right now, but that she was okay and that she hoped to be home the following day.

  Tell me what you’re doing.

  Julie thought of Lawrence, and how he wouldn’t even tell her precisely what he was doing here. She couldn’t tell Melinda either. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if trouble or danger came to Melinda because of her.

  I can’t tell you everything, she tapped out. Don’t call or text me. I’m in Williamsburg, and if you don’t hear from me in the morning, call the cops.

  She didn’t want to frighten Melinda, but she needed someone who knew what was going on. Still, she hesitated. Perhaps the cops we
ren’t the right choice.

  She erased that last part and put call Maverick Malone at Ruby’s motorcycle shop instead of telling Melinda to call the cops. The Sentinels would come to the rescue, and with that thought in her mind, Julie tucked her phone back in her waistband and closed her eyes. She didn’t expect to fall asleep quickly, but with Lucas’s comforting, even breathing just behind her, she did.

  “Julie,” someone said. She thought it was Lucas, but she couldn’t quite pull herself from the deep water where she floated, blissfully unaware of any problems. Everything was right at the moment. The temperature. The mattress beneath her. All of it.

  When a hand slid along her waist, she jolted toward the surface of consciousness, sucking in a breath as she did it.

  “Whoa, it’s just me.” Definitely Lucas, and while Julie had kissed him and let him hold her, she wasn’t accustomed to lying next to him in bed and having him touch her. He sat on the edge of the bed now, near her knees, and the position was much less intimate than if he’d been lying down.

  “What time is it?” she asked, sitting up.

  “I have no idea. I’m not the one with a phone.” As if on cue, her device buzzed against her stomach. “You should silence that, Jules,” he added. “It actually woke me up.”

  She yanked the phone from her waistband and saw that a couple of hours had passed. Her stomach clenched painfully, also aware of the passage of so much time. “They have to feed us,” she said, pressing the button on the side of the phone to set the notifications to silent. “I texted Melinda, but I didn’t have Maverick’s number.” She held the phone out to him, the lamplight in the room casting soft light onto his face.

  He really was handsome in a rugged sort of way. His heart seemed to come through in his expression, and while annoyance rang through her, she didn’t want to be angry with Lucas.

  “I can text him?”

  “Don’t you think you should?”

  Lucas took the phone. “Yeah, I should.” He slid his gaze to the device and got busy. He didn’t speak for a couple of minutes, until he paused in his messages. He didn’t look at her when he said, “I’m sorry, Jules. This isn’t what I wanted for us.”

  “I know,” she said, because what else was there to say?

  “I should’ve told you everything.”

  “You didn’t have to make it about Lawrence,” she said quietly. “As you obviously don’t have any love for him.”

  Lucas cocked his eyebrows and tilted his head to look at her. “Would you?”

  She sighed. “Probably not.” She needed to use the bathroom, and she’d kill for a hot cloth to wash her face. She’d cried recently, and that made her skin somewhat crusty and stretched too tight. “So, what do we do now?”

  “Mustang brought food,” he said. “I say we eat and then demand to be let go.”

  “Do you really think they’ll let us leave?” Julie accepted the sandwich with the scent of peanut butter attached to it. No jam, but the bread was fresh, and she counted that as something to be grateful for.

  “If they don’t….” Lucas shook his head and bit into his own sandwich.

  “We have no recourse,” she said. “There’s no way to finish an if sentence. They can do whatever they want.”

  Lucas didn’t agree verbally, but he didn’t disagree either. Which meant she was right. “Did you talk to Lawrence?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s creating fake documents for people to cross the border.”

  “Documents?”

  “Passports, new IDs, that kind of thing.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Not in those words.”

  “For people leaving the country or coming in?”

  “He didn’t say.” Frustration filled Julie again, and she could barely swallow her next bite. “He wouldn’t tell me anything. I begged him for a hint, and the document creation is what I deduced.”

  “Is that what tax lawyers do?”

  “No,” Julie said. “But he’d definitely know how to file all the paperwork for things. He’s smart; he figures out what he needs to know how to do.”

  “That would require a computer. He hasn’t tried to contact anyone?”

  “I didn’t see a computer in his room.” Julie looked at Lucas. “They must watch him while he uses it.”

  “If they let us go back to Forbidden Lake, they’ll watch us too,” he said, almost under his breath. “All the time, Julie. Everyone you talk to will be in danger.”

  Helplessness filled her. “How do we live like that?” She lowered her sandwich to her lap, her appetite gone. “I need my job. They can’t follow me into patient rooms.”

  “We need a quick resolution to this.”

  “A quick resolution.” She scoffed, the idea ridiculous. Nothing he said could actually be done. “How do we do that?”

  “The only reason the Breathers have stayed here is because the police don’t know where they are or what they’re doing.”

  Julie gaped at him. “You think involving the cops is the solution?” She laughed them, almost a maniacal sound. “And I don’t believe for a single second that they don’t know they’re here. There are dozens of rooms here. A whole parking garage for motorcycles.”

  “How many did you see?” he asked.

  “Where?”

  “In the parking garage. How many motorcycles did you see?”

  Julie blinked as she searched her memory. “None,” she said simply. Their eyes met, and a flicker of hope started burning in Julie’s chest. “What does that mean?”

  “I think there aren’t as many Breathers as we think,” he said. “I know Jordan met with a dozen or so outside a restaurant a couple of months ago. We’ve only seen four come into town on our surveillance tapes.” He put the last bite of his sandwich in his mouth.

  Julie didn’t know what to say. A club of only twelve people had taken her brother from her? Sequestered him on the fifth floor in a run-down hospital in a town where more people left than came?

  It didn’t make sense.

  “You’re saying there’s only twelve of them?”

  “I’m saying we don’t know how many there are. I’m saying we might have more of a chance than we know.”

  “How are we going to get them out of Forbidden Lake, get them to release Lawrence, and get them to let us go?” She shook her head. “They have their system, and it’s working for them. This is an old hospital, and it’s in the middle of the city. I looked out the window in Lawrence’s room. They’re not going to let that go without a fight.”

  “Thus, the cops. Think about it, Jules.” He leaned toward her earnestly. “If there’s not that many of them, they might opt to move on rather than dig in and fight.”

  “You really think so?”

  “It’s always easier to move on,” Lucas said quietly, as if he knew from experience. Julie knew in that moment that he was real, vulnerable, and from a completely different world than she was.

  She’d lived in Forbidden Lake for her entire life. She’d only moved on from high school to a phlebotomy class at the local technical school. She’d put herself through the nursing program at the community college by working at a blood bank, and she’d gotten on as a nurse at the hospital in Forbidden Lake on her first round of interviews.

  The job was a lot more competitive to get now, and Julie had been fortunate in many ways in her life. She’d never had to “move on” from something; she simply moved from one thing to the next in a natural progression of good things.

  She reached out and cradled Lucas’s cheek in the palm of her hand. “I want to know everything about you,” she said.

  He let his eyes drift closed as he said, “It’s not all good, Julie.”

  “That’s what life is,” she said. “Good, bad, and ugly.”

  “I’d love to know what you consider bad.” His voice carried a hint of darkness now.

  “Tell me something, and I’ll see,” she said, something nervous in her stomach telling her t
hat anything he said would probably be considered bad on her scale.

  Chapter Twenty

  Lucas knew he had a lot to tell Julie. Things he hadn’t told anyone, because the significant people in his life already knew about his life on the streets.

  He wanted to trust Julie. He wanted her to know everything about him. “Before I joined the Sentinels, I was living on the streets,” he said. “With Jordan.” He cleared his throat. “It was winter, and we were probably days away from death. Strung out, always looking for the next high, or the next temporary job to get enough money to get the next high.”

  Julie’s hand slid away from his face, but Lucas had opened the box. And there was more to say.

  “Maverick told us we didn’t have to live like that. We could at least come to his club that night, see if there was a different way for us.” Lucas shrugged, but his whole life had changed that night. “Ruby’s was warm. Well, it wasn’t Ruby’s yet, but Mav’s always had a motorcycle shop. It was warm, and bright. There was real food, and this feeling…this feeling of…family.”

  That was what his motorcycle brothers were. Family.

  “And me, being the stubborn one out of me and Jordan, I didn’t want to join. At least not at first. If Jordan hadn’t, I definitely wouldn’t have. I was ready to walk away and find another fix. See, Mav didn’t allow drugs in the club, and coming off of them was not easy.”

  And Maverick had been there every day. Every hour, those first few days. Lucas owed him so much, including his life.

  Suddenly being in this rival clubhouse wasn’t as much as a sacrifice as Lucas had originally thought.

  “But you did it,” Julie said.

  “Not without help,” Lucas said.

  “Everyone needs help sometimes,” Julie said.

  Lucas knew that better than anyone. “Yeah.” He exhaled, thinking about Lawrence. “Even people we think don’t deserve it.” He was certain he didn’t deserve Maverick’s attention and care when he’d first been found. He’d been young, and careless, and defiant. The fact that Maverick hadn’t kicked him out of the Sentinels during those first couple of years was a miracle in and of itself.