by Drew Elyse
Engage
Disciples’ Daughters #3
Drew Elyse
Copyright © 2016 by Drew Elyse
Cover Design by By Hang Le
www.byhangle.com
Editing by Word Nerd Editing
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduces or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owner.
All rights reserved.
For Michael
Because nine years later,
we haven’t gotten sick of each other.
And, really, it’s about time
you got a dedication.
The sound wasn’t what woke me. I had no idea why I’d stirred in the middle of the night. Usually, I was a sound sleeper.
No, the sound came after I’d already started to wake. I lost the seconds I had trying to place it. It came from the hallway, a mix of solid knocking and rattling.
A picture frame, the answer came to me.
It was only that knowledge that had me moving. There was no reason for any of the frames I had hanging in the hall to make that sound. Not unless…
The door to my room flew open. There were men there, three of them. I didn’t waste time staring. Instead, I scrambled to the side of the bed. I just had to get to the nightstand. There was a gun in the drawer—the gun Dad had taught me to shoot and insisted I have.
I got the drawer open, but never reached my only saving grace. One of the men was on me, grabbing me around the chest and hauling me backward. I fought. I kicked and hit at him, my training lost and raw instinct to fight or die kicking in. Another man came close, and I screamed with all I had.
I tried to fight him back, both legs kicking out, but his partner turned me. I felt the sharp prick at my arm. It didn’t take long. Even as I continued to scream, to try to break away, darkness took over the edges of my vision, closing in until there was nothing left.
When I woke, I was facing a wall covered in its own layer of dirt, broken up only by a rust-colored track of water from a leak above.
Where was I?
I tried to remember, tried to fight the fog to grasp onto anything that would tell me how I ended up in such a place.
I was home, in my room. I’d gone to bed…
The picture frame.
Like a dam breaking, it came back. The men, fighting them off, losing consciousness.
My head swam, my vision hazy. I had to figure out where I was, how to get out of here. I moved, feeling an ache like I had never known through every muscle. Then, a stinging pain in my arm. I looked there, seeing the IV. I followed the cord from my arm to a bag hanging on the wall above my head.
It was only then I noticed I wasn’t alone.
I shot to sitting, jerking back to the wall. But what I saw wasn’t a threat. What I saw was three women, all of them frail, malnourished, and dirty. To my left were iron bars. We were in a cell, me and those women. Soon, I would look like they did.
“Where are we?” I found the voice to ask. My throat was dry. So much so, it hurt to speak. That was when I noted how my skin felt like I hadn’t showered in days.
Had it been days?
“We don’t know,” one—she looked to be the oldest—answered. Her voice sounded as rough as mine. When was the last time they’d been given water?
“How…how did we—”
She shook her head sadly. Beneath the grime, I realized she was, in fact, the oldest—maybe five years older than me, no more. Her dark hair was long, matted, her skin pale, her eyes flat.
“Sometimes, they take us, sometimes…” she trailed off, looking to her side. I followed her gaze to the woman next to her. She was blonde like me, and looked to be about my age from what I could see of her face as she peered over her knees. “Sometimes, we are sold to them.”
Oh God.
My eyes moved past the blonde, terrified someone had given her over to this fate. What I saw hit me harder than anything I had experienced since I’d woken up.
The last woman was no woman at all. She was just a girl. She had light brown hair that needed washing weeks ago. Her cheeks were sunken in. She had been down here a while.
“How old are you?” I couldn’t help but ask.
She didn’t talk, just hid her face behind her hands, the woman who had spoken to me already answered for her.
“Fifteen.”
Fifteen. She was still a child. What were they doing with a child?
What were they doing with any of us?
It was hours before the man came down the hall, appearing in front of our cell. I’d long since dealt with the IV. I didn’t have the finesse to pull the needle free without it tugging and scratching beneath the surface, but the discomfort was worth it when I watched a small flood of whatever they were injecting me with escape. Tricia, the woman who had been talking to me since I woke, told me it was a sedative mix. If I left the IV alone, I’d go back under. I’d already been there for three days. How long I’d arrived after they’d taken me was anyone’s guess. The last thing I wanted was to lose any more time in this place.
Tricia also told me the names of the others. Katia, the blonde, and Sarah, the young girl.
“I’ve been here about two months, I think,” she explained. “Sometimes it can get hard to track how long it’s been. They come once a day with food and water. That’s the only real way to tell time down here.” There was something in her expression when she mentioned the provisions they were given, something disgustingly similar to longing.
“But why are we here?” I asked, not even sure if I expected her to have an answer.
She didn’t respond, but I could see in her face that she did know.
I met her eyes and repeated, “Why are we here?”
Her gaze turned sympathetic, as if she weren’t down here as well, as if she hadn’t been here far longer than I had. She felt bad for me because whatever she was going to share was going to make this whole nightmare worse.
“They intend to sell us.”
Sell us. I wouldn’t even let my mind wander to what that might mean. I forced myself to seal off thoughts of who would want to buy us. I had to keep myself together. Letting my mind go there was not the way to do it.
After that, there wasn’t much to say.
Then, the man came to the cell. He was brutish, large, and outright intimidating. He didn’t say a thing as he approached the metal bars holding us captive. He simply inspected the nearly empty IV bag, seeing I’d freed myself from the line attached to it.
I had no idea if what I was about to do was stupid—whether it would get me punished, hurt, or worse. I just knew where I was was about as bad as it could get. I had to try something.
“There’s a motorcycle club, in Hoffman, Oregon. They’ll buy me. They’ll pay whatever you ask,” I practically shouted at him.
He stared at me, not responding.
“The Savage Disciples. They’ll buy me.”
He walked away without a word.
“What the fuck am I looking at?”
On some level,
the answer was pretty fucking obvious. I was looking at a woman. Tall, blonde, nice body. What I really wanted to know was what she was doing here, seeing as she wasn’t straddling the lap of one of my brothers or grabbing him a beer. She was passed out on the damn couch—and not the lightweight who passed out at a party either. Her arms and legs were bound with duct tape, a strip of which was also adhered to her mouth.
Behind her were two motherfuckers in suits who had no business at all being in the Savage Disciples’ clubhouse, let alone when most of the brothers were out on a run and wouldn’t be back until morning.
And, lest I forget, that meant not for another seven hours or so seeing as it was three in the goddamned morning.
Ace, who was still recovering from a couple gunshot wounds and hadn’t gone with the rest of the brothers, spoke up. “These two fuckers said she told them we would buy her.”
Buy her?
“The fuck you say?”
One of the suits decided to take that one. “She recently came into the ownership of our employer,” he explained. The words came out stilted, like he was remembering a script. Probably because whoever his “employer” was—and I had a pretty solid guess—wanted his lackeys to sound moderately intelligent, if not sophisticated. Seemed he wasn’t quite getting the product he was after.
The goon went on with his thesaurus routine. “She was quite adamant the Savage Disciples would be willing to pay for her release. Our boss is not a frugal man, but he does like to turn a profit. He is also disinterested in trouble with motorcycle gangs. Selling her to you dispenses the need to find another buyer and pay for the man-hours involved in such an endeavor.”
Jesus Christ, but I was getting twitchy. I focused on cracking my knuckles to keep from burying them in one of the fuckers’ faces.
Motorcycle gang. Fuck, I hated that phrase. We weren’t a damn gang, running around in the streets shooting each other and dealing dope on corners. But that was beside the point.
Whoever the chick was, she’d thrown our name out when she’d been taken. I had no doubt that was what happened. The Disciples weren’t in the trade—even back in the days when the club’s shit wasn’t clean, we didn’t deal in pussy—but trafficking wasn’t completely unfamiliar to us. You live outside the law, you see shit. Peril of the life.
This woman—chances were she was an innocent victim in this case. Taken off the street, sold by her parents, who knew. What it meant was she was in the hands of some seriously not good people who had plans for her—plans she was certainly not going to like.
I looked her over again, trying to force any sort of recognition, but there was still nothing. She was cute, no doubt any guy here would be glad to have a go at her, but that didn’t explain why we’d buy her. If she had a connection to the club, it wasn’t one I knew about.
Even as I conceded she was a stranger to me, I kept my face passive. There was no reason for the hired muscle in front of me to know one way or another whether she was familiar.
I shot Ace a look, but his answering stare and the minute shake of his head told me he wasn’t having any more luck with identifying her than I was.
We were stuck in a shit situation, but the club was under my charge while our brothers were away. It was on me to make a decision.
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand.”
Fuck. This could blow up in my face, but it didn’t seem I had much choice. If I said no, they’d find another buyer—and from the look of the girl, they wouldn’t have a hard time with that. Most likely, she’d end up in some pimp’s stable, selling her ass for his profit. And that was probably one of the better possible outcomes. I couldn’t risk that. She named us, which could mean she was important to one of the brothers.
“Twenty-five,” I shot back.
The other goon chose to chime in then. “You’s already gettin’ a damn deal.”
Seems he was instructed not to talk by the big man because he had even less of a way with words than his buddy.
“Your boss wants to avoid the hassle of selling her. I want to avoid the hassle of going after the asshole for taking a woman who belongs to the Disciples. Twenty-five.”
The one who’d pulled rank since they walked in studied me. I met his stare straight on, not hiding the fact that I knew I had the upper hand. If he failed to make the sale or brought the wrath of the Disciples to his boss’s door, he was fucked. He had no moves.
“Twenty-five,” he submitted.
With a nod, I turned to Ace. “They don’t fucking move until I get back,” I instructed. A jerk of his chin met my demand.
Without a word, I left the room. Stone, the pres, had left me the key to his office. It was a good fucking thing too, seeing as the safe was in there. I felt like shit about taking twenty-five large from the club’s funds without the okay from my brothers, but it had to be done.
If it came down to it, if buying her was a total fuck up on my part, I’d forfeit my cut of the money from this run. The payout would be big enough that the club wouldn’t be hurting anytime soon. Safe escort of the kind of firepower our benefactor was moving didn’t come cheap, particularly when escorting that kind of shit meant it could be Disciples who landed their asses in a cell.
I carried the fat stack of bills back out to the main room and handed them off, mentally cursing every-fucking-thing about this situation. The goon with half a brain took the cash and counted it out—twice—before nodding.
“Everything appears to be in order.” Jackass.
“You’ve got your money. Now, you got one minute to get the fuck out of our house before your boss can make his way down here himself to pick up directions to your fucking bodies,” I explained.
The two of them decided to waste a whole twenty seconds of that minute staring me down. A dare. After ten, I grabbed my piece from the back of my jeans and held it down against my thigh. They spent the next ten sizing me up. If they knew jack shit about anything, they’d know I’d have them both down before either could get to the guns clipped on their belts.
Whether they read that or not, they moved just about the time the countdown hit thirty. Neither said a word—which was a good call with the way my trigger finger was twitching—as they left. I moved my attention back to the girl who had just cost the club twenty-five grand.
“Go strip one of the rooms. One with a bathroom. Nothing left that could be a weapon. You know the drill,” I instructed Ace. “And call Slick in. Need to flip the lock around on the door. You know how he gets when we touch his work.”
“On it,” he answered.
I called after him as he walked away. When he turned, I added, “Take the room across from mine. Want to be able to hear if she wakes and gets up to anything.” With a nod, he got to it.
I crouched down in front of the girl so I could get a better look at her face. Damn, she was a beauty. Real fucking cute. If goons one and two were working for who I thought, then she had no business being in their hands. Those boys weren’t known for being gentle—or waiting for a “yes”.
She might be a trap. Could be she was meant to report back on anything she could get her eyes or ears on. Until we knew for sure, she’d be guarded. Still, I couldn’t help but hope she was clean. Fucked as it was to think it in that moment, I wanted a taste of this one.
Although, that would depend entirely on whether or not she could handle me tasting. Lots of women couldn’t. I hoped she wasn’t one of them.
When Ace had the room ready, I moved Sleeping Beauty to the bed, brought in a chair, and sat across the room for a while, mulling over the decision to untie her. No way in fuck she could overpower me, drugged or not. She wasn’t tiny for a woman, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t know a man twice her size who could get the drop on me. Still, I wasn’t exactly yearning for the job of having to restrain her if she went rogue when she woke.
Fuck. That wasn’t entirely true. I was all for restraining her. That shit might have even been part of the hesitation I was having over
cutting her loose. There was nothing quite like a bound woman.
It was that thought that had me grabbing the switchblade and releasing her. I was a lot of things—most of them bad—but I wasn’t so fucking lecherous I’d make a move on an unconscious woman. It didn’t matter whether she meant something to one of my brothers or not, that was a line I’d never cross. It was a line I’d gladly castrate a motherfucker for crossing.
Cutting through the rope took no time at all. Whoever had done the job didn’t know a thing about binding someone. Had she been awake, she’d have been able to slip free easily enough. One rotation of her wrists was all it would have taken. Amateurs.
Once she was loose, I settled my ass back in my chair and waited. She didn’t even stir—not a movement. She was out cold the entire forty-five minutes it took for Slick to arrive, and she slept right through us talking. She didn’t even wake when he got to work on the lock. Whatever they’d given her, it was doing its job.
“Nothing?” I asked Slick again as he grabbed his repacked bag of supplies a while later. The door was outfitted with a new lock we’d control from the hall. Not so much as a knob on the inside for her.
“Don’t recognize her, man,” Slick replied.
“Fuck,” I muttered. That made three of us. Not a good sign.
“You made the right call, brother,” he assured me.
I seriously fucking hoped so.
I followed him out of the room, taking the chair with me. I had no idea if a girl her size could break the thing, but I wasn’t taking chances. Slick handed over the key and we locked her in before he took off.
As I went back to my own room for another couple hours of no sleep, I shot a text off to Doc. He needed to come in and check the girl over. No telling what issues the drugs they’d given her might have caused. Old man probably wouldn’t get it until morning, but that would have to do.
I managed to nod off at some point. I’d seen the sky lighten and the sun rise through the window, but I was out when the commotion started. Pounding, and a female screaming.