Torched

by Shay Mara

  How the fuck did she do this? Every goddamn time they argued, she turned shit around effortlessly. “Don’t try to spin it. Why can’t you fucking understand that we wanna protect—”

  “We? So everybody knows. That’s fucking great.”

  “Only the people in this room.”

  “Oh,” she nodded. “Right, that makes it totally okay for you to completely invade my fucking privacy.”

  “Christ,” he huffed. “Like I was saying—”

  “You want to protect me. Yeah, I heard you,” she mouthed off. “And you just assumed that I need protection based on an eight year old police report.”

  “What the fuck else am I supposed to go off of?” he demanded. “How about all the moving, fake identities, weapons, and security setup? You think I’m a moron? I know Henslow’s trying to kill you, if he hasn’t already tried.”

  “I don’t think you’re a moron, I think you’re misguided,” she sneered. “I explained all that. Again, my business—”

  “Quit your bullshit, we’re not leaving here ‘til you fill in the goddamn blanks,” he huffed.

  “Fine, here’s all you need to know… I don’t need your protection, the meeting today had nothing to do with you or the club, and you have no right to go looking into shit that happened before we met. Shit I made clear wasn’t something I wanted to think or talk about. It’s not your place, just like it’s not my place to interfere in your—”

  “Jesus Christ, you and your dodging. The guy slit his own brother’s throat and tried to do the same to you. Are you more worried about protecting your fucking ego than yourself?”

  She jumped off the stool and held out her hand. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Give me my keys.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Torch roared, fisted his own fucking hair out of sheer frustration. “Can you just be honest for once in your life? How is it you can confess to a dozen fucking felonies, but not what happened to you? You know you can trust me. You can trust all of us. Every fucking Serpent would go to war for you after everything you’ve done.”

  “That’s the fucking problem! I know you would. But need to stay out of it, Torch. For your sake.”

  For his sake? “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means there’s a reason I keep reminding you this ends at business and sex. I won’t let you get hurt.”

  Let him get hurt? Christ, one fucking mystery after another. But at least he was chiseling away at the facade, he just had to keep pushing. She turned back around to the bar and reached for her bag.

  “Why would I get hurt?” he asked.

  Ignoring him, she tried to get around. He grabbed her. For the first time that day, he saw something other than anger in her eyes. Pain. They were turning red, like she was holding back a flood of tears. His own anger seemed to fade into the background, all he wanted to do now was take it away from her. “Babe, why would would any of this hurt me?”

  “Because nothing good can come from me being in your life—”

  “I beg to fucking differ, you’ve been nothing but good. Fucking hell, woman. You’re beautiful, kind, smart, and you can handle yourself around a bunch of goddamn buffoons.”

  “That’s all surface shit. I’m not a good person, Torch. Don’t put me on a fucking pedestal.”

  “Why? Tell me why—in a room full of outlaws—you think you’re somehow a bad person?”

  “Drop it,” she warned, squirming to get away from him. He simply held on tighter.

  “No. Tell me why Henslow’s after you. You didn’t talk to the Feds.” By now her entire body was shaking and he realized that restraining her was probably fucking traumatizing if she had Mitch on the brain. He loosened his hold.

  She pushed on his chest to propel herself back. “It’s not about talking—”

  “Then what? Tell me what he wants! Or so fucking help me, I’ll have every goddamn chapter of this club—”

  “Payback! … He wants payback.”

  Blowing out a lung full of air and leaning back against the bar again, she ran her fingers through her hair and looked up at him point blank. “Mitch didn’t kill his brother… I did.”

  : 22 :

  “What?”

  There it was, the current pulling him under, even his ears felt like they were filled with water.

  Her revelation froze him in place. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, all he could do was stare. They all murmured and stared as she closed her eyes and bowed her head. By the time she raised it again, there was a look of defeat on her face. Not sadness, not anger, just… defeat.

  “Torch,” she said softly, “I don’t do well when I feel trapped. I’ll tell you everything but I need my keys.”

  Oh, she was going to tell him everything, there was no escaping that now. But if having her damn keys in her pocket made it less of a fucking battle to get it out of her, so be it. He held them out. When she reached for them, he wrapped his hand around hers. “You wanna talk in the room? Just you and me?”

  She took a deep breath and shook her head. “No, that’s okay. I think I’d rather just do it once, everybody’ll find out anyway. Let’s sit though.”

  She walked over to a couch, motioned for him to sit down, and planted herself on the coffee table in front of him. The rest of the guys followed and all got comfortable.

  “I guess I’ll just start at the beginning since this goes that far back,” she sighed. “My name was once Chloe Belman. I was an only child, a happy child mostly, until the morning of my sixth birthday when I found my mother dead of a heroin overdose in the bathroom. The needle was still in her arm. I was a daddy’s girl before that, but he lost his way when she died. They were high school sweethearts and I think he just didn’t know how to cope without her. He turned to booze for comfort, but that cost him his job, so gambling to pay the bills came next. It turned into more than a side-hustle pretty fast. At first, he was home for a few hours every night, but gradually it turned into every other night, then maybe once a week. I think over time it got hard for him to even look at me because the older I got, the more I looked like my mom. He kept the electricity on and made sure there were frozen dinners and canned food for me, but that was about it. I’d have to sneak change out of his pockets after he passed out to buy clothes at a thrift store.”

  “Swell fucking guy,” Torch muttered. He could relate.

  She shrugged and gave him a pained smile. “Better than taking his problems out on me, I guess. Anyway, I always loved learning, so I still went to school, but I couldn’t really let myself make any friends because I didn’t want one of their parents calling social services. I think part of me just felt bad for my father and I didn’t want him to end up in jail on top of everything else he was dealing with. So, instead of sleepovers and sports, I spent most of my time at the library reading everything I could get my hands on. It was an escape.”

  “That’s why you’re such a smart bitch,” Grimm mused.

  Liv smirked. “I think you’re giving me too much credit.”

  Torch reached across and placed a hand on her thigh, eager to keep her moving along before she changed her fucking mind. “Quit cutting yourself down. What happened next?”

  “Well, this went on for years, until I was fifteen and a freshman in high school. At that point, it started going even more downhill. My dad was up to his ass in debt and constantly dodging loan sharks. Pretty much the only thing he hadn’t pawned off was my bed and the couch. One night, he decided to try one more hand and go all in. Except he didn’t have any money and he’d already lost what he borrowed against the house. So… he bet me.”

  “What do you mean, he bet you?”

  “Just what I said, I went in the pot. Not surprisingly, he lost, like he always did. But this time, he was playing against Mitch. He dropped me off the next day and never came back.”

  “What?” Buddha asked, dumbfounded like the rest of them.

  Torch dropped his head and clasped his fingers together be
hind it. “Then what?” he seethed. She was talking fifteen, not twenty when he found her. That was an entire five fucking years later. Obviously, she’d lied about every goddamn detail in the report. The question was why.

  “Mitch and Vince lived together. At the time I didn’t know what they did, but they were low-level dealers. It wasn’t bad for the first few months. They pulled me out of school but mostly just had me cooking and cleaning. But then I hit a growth spurt and they both started looking at me in a different light.”

  “They didn’t,” Zed murmured.

  She nodded. “Mitch was the worse of the two, he’s just aggressive and violent by nature. But Vince got his kicks in too. I put up a fight the first few times, but all that got me were beatings on top of it. So eventually I just gave in and took what they gave.”

  Torch—now feeling like a complete fucking dick for making her relive this—got up from the couch, sat down beside her, and stroked her cheek. “Baby, why didn’t you run?”

  She looked away and brushed his hand off her face. “I tried. Twice. You have to understand that these two moved up really fast. By the time they started using me as a fuck toy, they had associates all over the state. Both times they caught up to me within an hour. After the second attempt, they decided to keep me shackled and locked up in the basement. The only time they let me out was to take care of the house when they were both home to stand guard. Trust me, I constantly thought about what I could use as a weapon to get away, but I also knew I had nowhere to run. I didn’t have an ID or money, so I had no way of getting out of Pennsylvania short of walking. And I still didn’t wanna end up in foster care. I was an isolated teenager and they kept me in line by telling me horror stories about kids in the system who ended up starved and forced to sleep outside. I guess I just figured that I was lucky to have a roof over my head and food in my belly. Thought if I stuck it out until I was eighteen, I’d be able to get away easier.”

  “Why the fuck is this asshole still breathing?” Squid hissed.

  Liv ignored his question and kept talking. “One night, when I was seventeen, I accidentally walked in on a deal. It wasn’t intentional, they’d left the basement door unlocked and it was time to go make dinner. I didn’t see it as a big deal, I’d already caught on to how they made their money, but Mitch and Vince felt the need to teach me a lesson in keeping my mouth shut. They drove me out to a forest in the middle of the night. I thought they were about to kill me, but they pulled a body out of the trunk.”

  “Oh, come on,” Mace huffed.

  She nodded. “They told me to dig a grave and bury him.”

  Torch couldn’t tell what the fuck he was feeling anymore, aside from the feeling of his chest caving in from the weight of trying not to go postal.

  “Something weird happened that night,” she explained, “I did what I was told—not wanting to end up like that guy—and somehow managed to impress them. For the first time, I didn’t get hit when I ran my mouth. And Mitch wasn’t as vicious as usual when we got back to the house. That was when I realized I had to play it from a different angle if I wanted to survive. I started volunteering to be their errand bitch. Pretty soon I was doing a lot more for them. I made drops, picked locks, played decoy, and drove getaway rides. Anything they asked really. Even the violence rubbed off on me toward the end, I got pretty good at getting information out of people by any means necessary. It bought me a bit of freedom and enough respect to where the abuse died down a little. They still got rough to keep me in line, but it wasn’t a daily thing anymore. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought that plan all the way through, because by getting more involved in their business, I got in too deep to try running again. By the time my eighteenth birthday rolled around, I knew too much, too many people knew my face, the brothers had expanded into neighboring states, and Mitch even had cops on payroll. Anything half-assed would’ve spelled death for me. So, for the next couple of years, I kept up the charade and waited for an opportunity.”

  Torch’s blood boiled at the thought of her being forced into a life of crime and violence. He could relate to that too, and understood why she’d done it, but women just weren’t meant to live those kinds of lives. It was all coming together—her distrust of the law, familiarity around criminals, and insistence on being able to handle her own business—but there was still one event unaccounted for.

  “What happened at the warehouse, baby?” he implored.

  She twisted her neck to stretch it out and cracked her knuckles. “That night, I went to the warehouse with Vince. They’d just had a shipment leave the day before, so it was empty. I had no idea why we were stopping by. We went inside and he left me alone to take a call. I was pacing around when I heard a scraping sound coming from upstairs. It was one of those buildings were the second floor wraps around and looks down on the first. I followed it to one of the rooms. There were ten girls in there, tied to cots and gagged. I freed one of them and she explained that they’d been picked up a few days before. They didn’t know what was happening, but they’d overheard two men talking about some kind of auction.”

  “Human trafficking. Fantastic,” Torch mumbled.

  Liv nodded and looked down. “I just… I lost it. I could deal with the drugs and guns and fuck else, but there was no way I could be part of something like that. I knew what it was like to be a slave. Right then and there, I decided I’d rather die than let another girl go through what I had. I knew I probably wouldn’t make it out alive, so I cut them all loose and pointed them to a fire escape. I told them to run and keep their mouths shut.”

  Torch exhaled and scrubbed his beard. “Why didn’t you go with them?”

  “Because I figured Vince would come looking for me at any minute. He was carrying, I wasn’t. I thought they’d have a better chance if I distracted him so they could get a running start, rather than having him catch all of us and start firing. One person’s life to save ten. It was the right call. When I heard him coming up the stairs, I decided to meet him halfway and go out swinging. I took off running and slammed into him right as he got to the last step. We both went flying down, but he took the brunt of the fall. I still don’t know how that didn’t at least knock him out, but before I knew it, he was swinging at me. I think he hurt his back though, he couldn’t move his legs. I managed to squirm away and grab his gun. That was when I saw his knife on the floor. When he started talking shit, I just… I snapped. I couldn’t see past the fucking rage. A bullet would’ve been easier, but I wanted to make him suffer. I attacked. I pinned him down so he couldn’t fight back, pushed his head to the side so I wouldn’t end up covered in blood, and cut his throat open.”

  A blood-thirsty Mace hollered and clapped. “Fuck yeah!” Everybody else followed and joined in on the applause.

  Liv looked around in surprise, then back at Torch. “Really?” she asked, barely audible over the ruckus.

  “They like a happy ending,” he replied with a shrug. “Alright fuckers, calm down. Storytime’s not over yet.” They could talk about her strong stomach and homicidal tendencies later. She still hadn’t accounted for Mitch’s part in all this.

  She smiled, shook her head, and kept going. “I don’t remember much after that, honestly. Vince was still gasping for air when Mitch surprised me from behind and threw me to the ground. I guess that was when he got his first look at what I’d done, otherwise I figure he would’ve shot me first. We struggled, he managed to wrestle the knife away, and at some point he went for my neck but missed and stabbed me in the shoulder instead. Next thing I know, I’m staring down a barrel and the cops are rushing in. I passed out and woke up a couple hours later at the hospital.”

  Christ. The woman had taken on two crazy motherfuckers and lived to tell about it. A new sense of respect was emerging. “The report said there was a 911 call about a shooting—”

  “I think one of the girls did that to help me, I don’t know who else would have. I wish I knew who it was though, they saved my life.” She looked like she was ab
out to get lost in thought, but snapped out of it and kept going. “When I woke up there was a DEA agent waiting to question me. They’d been watching Mitch and Vince for a few weeks. I gave her the name Chloe James buy time and cover my ass. I was long past the point of being able to claim coercion in any of my crimes and I didn’t want to go away for being an accomplice. So I took the victim angle, feigned memory loss, and came up with an ambiguous story. I knew the cops would find my DNA in the house and some of the neighbors knew my first name, so that had to be explained.”

  He was starting to see a pattern in the way her brain worked. Every angle, every decision, every possible outcome, she thought shit through before she made any moves. He suddenly felt like he was in a nature documentary again, this time looking at some rare, endangered animal. A bitch who didn’t fall apart and turn into a goddamn emotional mess under pressure? He sure as shit didn’t see many of those in the wild.

  “How the hell did you get out of the hospital? Didn’t they have you under guard?” he asked.

  “There was a cop posted at my door. I just used my mouth on that one and convinced him to let me take a walk around the floor. I called Lexi from a room on the floor below. I stole clothes from the patient who was sleeping in there, which was kind of a low point actually. After that, I walked right out the front entrance and waited for her and Neil to pick me up at a diner. She helped me dye my hair while Neil put a call in to Snoop. They gave me a car, some cash, and clothes. Neil followed me to a motel a couple hours away. I slept the next day and then drove straight to the Barrel. You know the rest.”

  He shook his head. “No, back up. Why didn’t Neil and Lexi help you out before?”

  “They didn’t know. Neil owns a strip club that Mitch would drag me to. Lex was a dancer there. She and I got to be friends, but I didn’t tell her anything. I mean, she was the only friend I had. I didn’t want anybody getting hurt. Mitch had a lot of pull.”