“Look, man,” I called out to him, my voice ragged but soft. I didn’t know what I’d do if some rival club took Dom from me; didn’t even want to think about it too closely. Yeah, that kind of thing could change a man forever. It could make him a worse human being, and it was hard to control, hard to stop. Maybe no one had ever reached out to him. Maybe they’d let him build a wall, and he’d driven himself insane behind it. I really couldn’t judge him. Hell, I could relate to him. We were fucked up individuals, and I’d hit people before, too. I’d tied people to chairs before. I’d dunked heads in water before. I was no better than Agent Harrison in this moment. “I’m sorry about your dad. Think about this, though. When you were seven…I wasn’t even born yet. When your dad died, I was still just a thought in my mama’s head. I know about anger, all right? I know about revenge. But this isn’t the way. This is…random, and cruel, and your dad, he wouldn’t have wanted that for you—”
I found myself submerged, burbling and screaming, before I could finish my sentence. When he jerked me back up by the hair at the nape of my neck, he howled into my face, “Don’t even talk about my dad, you Hell's Ransom fuck! You don’t know anything! Don’t you talk to me like some kind of fucking therapist, you—you loser! You murderer! ‘Cause you can wax philosophical all you want, but we both know this is not exactly random, is it? It’s not exactly cruel, is it? You killed Jared Wayne, and—”
“I did not—”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Harrison yodeled into my face like a teenage girl throwing a royal tantrum. His complexion was as bright and waxy as the skin on a tomato.
“But—”
Back into the bucket I went.
This time, he kept me under the water. It wasn’t some show of his dominance. I shook and bucked and shuddered, and then, at last, I breathed. I breathed the acrid water, the pressure in my lungs clenching like a vice, and the dark, earth-green water churned with shimmers of light and black spots.
He dragged me into the air and I vomited water reflexively onto the floor. The world around me swung and swooped, pivoting and whirling like a whimsical carnival ride. I was going to pass out, if I didn’t die first.
“Harrison,” I croaked. I had to try one more time. “Connor. I—am not—a murderer. You…are not…a murderer.”
“Hmm.” Harrison’s fist held my head up by its dripping hair. I didn’t have the strength to support my own weight anymore. Part of me fluttered and whimpered and suggested that giving up might be the gentler escape from this predicament. “You’re right about one thing.” Harrison dropped my head, and it hung over my lap uselessly. Black static encroached in my peripheral vision. “I’m not a murderer. I’m an executioner.”
Chapter Fifty
Isabelle
When Juan and I pulled up at El Toro Rojo, I swung my leg from around his hog and bolted toward the men’s room. To any outsider, it would appear as if I just really had to go, but it was because I knew. I knew with the same crawling certainty a homeowner might feel upon noticing a broken window along their front porch. I knew with the same crawling certainty of a housewife noticing her husband has started keeping his cell phone ringer on silent. Answers would be in there…and they wouldn’t exactly be good to hear.
I shoved through the swinging door and froze, nauseated and relieved at the same time.
On the one hand, Linda Carson was sprawled on that grimy floor, unconscious. It couldn’t have been a good sign.
On the other hand, we were one step closer to Harrison, and one step closer to Ash.
Just as the bathroom door was clapping shut behind me, it popped open again. Juan, Drake, and three other Hell's Ransom brothers crowded behind me as I stooped and scooped Carson’s lulling torso into my arms. I patted her cheek gently and she stirred. Encouraged by this, I pulled my palm further back and slapped her fully.
Carson moaned and rolled away from me, tumbling back onto the cold, cruddy tile.
“What…the…hell,” Carson cried out, seemingly to herself.
“Carson!” I snapped, hoping to keep her attention on what was important. “Did Ashton Carter turn himself in to you or your partner?”
“What happened?” she asked, eyes still rolling in her head. I bit back the urge to slap her again.
“That’s not important right now,” I answered. “Answer my question.”
Carson coughed. “I need help,” she sobbed. “The room…won’t stop spinning. I need a hospital…”
I grimaced. Perhaps, in some ways, love hardens us. For all the little birds I had stitched back together, I really couldn’t spare a damn that Linda Carson wanted to see a doctor. “Did Carter, or did he not, turn himself in tonight?” I demanded.
Carson let out a weak mewl; I didn’t feel a stab of guilt at the sound. “He did,” she confessed. “We had him… He was…in the car.” Her eyes rolled toward me and there they held. “You’re…” The fog cleared from her pupils and her expression gained some semblance of responsiveness again. “You’re the Turner girl. The one we’ve been looking for. You’re…Carter’s…hostage.”
Her misconceptions caused my spine to straighten, my eyes to go flat. If Carson didn’t know that I had held a gun to her partner’s head, that I had helped Ash tie her partner up and leave him on this very floor, then he had never told her. He must have had a reason to keep the interaction a secret… But what could it have been? Why wouldn’t a man want all the help he could get, bringing a fugitive back under the law?
“Y-yes,” I admitted.
“You weren’t…kidnapped…were you?”
I opened my mouth to respond, not even sure what I was going to say, when Juan stepped forward and gagged Carson with a wadded handkerchief from his pocket. She cried out in alarm, eyes flashing with accusation, but neither Juan, Drake, nor the other Hell's Ransom members hesitated in hauling her to her feet and binding her wrists with some handcuffs I hadn’t even known we were carrying.
Juan didn’t even look at her. He looked, instead, at me. “So,” he said, perfunctory, breezy, as if we were discussing our separate shares of a small bill. “64 Toro Drive, I believe it was, Jade said the other trace pinged?”
“Right,” I replied. My eyes drifted to Carson, sweating and kind of dirty from this gross floor, gripped between Juan and Drake. She wasn’t even fighting. Her eyes had become dull and glassy with nausea; as someone who had imbibed a substance or two in her time, I knew that look. Carson had been drugged. But—by whom? By Ash…?
I winced, made guilty with the thought, and reached out to touch her clammy cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We’ll make it up to you, all right? Ash and I both…” I hesitated then, thinking that I didn’t know if there would be an “Ash and I” tomorrow. I didn’t even know if there was an Ash now.
“We’ll make it up to you.” My voice, though, had changed. Its inflection was dry. My mind was elsewhere.
We had to get to 64 Toro Drive.
Chapter Fifty-One
Ashton
My hands and feet must have been bound during my unconsciousness, when he had pricked me with that concoction… Maybe the same thing he’d slipped into Carson’s drink. I tried to be discreet as I writhed, but it was no use for several reasons.
First, it seemed as if the sick bastard had already done his prep work; he had tied my wrists and ankles with actual rope, which would be impossible to fray on the smooth sides of a metal chair. Secondly, my muscles ached with the residual build-up of chemicals: whatever chemicals he’d shot into me, and the chemicals that would naturally overload a body being slowly drowned to death. Finally, he was watching me too closely to move too much. Harrison stared at me with such mania and anticipation, he could almost have been confused with an admirer, an obsessive stalker.
“Dad hated Hell's Ransom,” he was going on, pale eyes glimmering in the meager fluorescent light of the abattoir. I was hardly listening, but it seemed that Harrison was making a speech that had been burdening his chest for
a long time now. “Your complete disregard for society.” That wasn’t true; we had established our own society, interconnected, albeit isolated. “The way you pride in hurting innocent people.” Eh, that was subjective. Hell's Ransom members weren’t all the same; most of us liked to consider ourselves righteous, in a shadowy way, like avenging angels. Like that guy whose fingers I had cut off for my initiation rite. He’d been a bad guy, a drug dealer, a thief, a weak shit who beat on his girl… “And I want you to know, Carter—I want you to know before you die—that this isn’t the end for me. Oh, no, no, no. This isn’t the end of my mission. I’d like to get a federal case brought against the entire club, if I can. Maybe the, uh, corpse of Dominic Carter’s little brother will…convince him to take action against me.”
Harrison leered into me, enamored with his own brilliant plot. Gazing into his face, I saw my own reflection in a twisted, queer mirror. How close had I come to being this man? What had the difference been? He’d led his life straight, and become a demon, subsisting on dreams of blood. The tide could have turned to the same tune for me, but it hadn’t. I didn’t want to kill anyone. I just wanted a simple life, the love of a good woman, and freedom.
“When I’m done with you, Carter,” Harrison went on, swaggering away from me, never taking his glowing eyes off of me, “the Hell's Ransom will be so engulfed in revenge, they’ll set themselves on fire. They’ll burn themselves down. There will be nothing left. This—this? Is just the flame to ignite the wick on a stick of dyn—”
The sound of shattering glass roused us both from the tense eye contact, and then a crash as several shadows descended onto the defunct machinery of the old slaughterhouse. It moaned, and plumes of rust and dry blood exploded into the air. My heart squeezed and seized in my chest, daring to hope, praying that it was reinforcements.
Harrison twisted toward the source of the disturbance and went staggering back almost simultaneously with the crack of gunfire. He collapsed, but rolled onto his knees and crawled out of sight. Shit. Of course. The son of a bitch was in a bulletproof vest.
A shadow emerged from behind a row of wide, metallic vats, and I thought that I might have been hallucinating. Was it Isabelle? She was a woman, whoever she was, and a shapely, jaunty shadow at that. The way she moved certainly appealed to me in the exact way that Isabelle had. A stream of long, thick hair swung behind her shoulders, and she moved with the combination of grace and force one would find in an athlete, yet still I hesitated to believe that it could really be her—that it would truly almost be over, I was so tired—
As she moved beneath the fluorescent light and I saw her in full relief, her honeyed complexion, the body whose nooks and crannies had become familiar to me, home to me…she descended to her knees in front of the chair, working at my bonds, and the light overhead exploded into a shower of glass. There was no time, I realized, for a happy reunion. We had to get the hell out of here. Harrison’s plot had been fumbled, and he was pissed. He’d be happy to kill Isabelle and blame me, and Hell's Ransom, for that too. He’d use it all in his case against us.
“Izz,” I breathed.
Her eyes flashed up to mine in the darkness; I could only see her in the meager glow of moonlight through the broken windows. She looked like an angel.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I went on. I’d never forgive myself if something happened to her. Between the two of us, I’d rather die a thousand times before her.
“Too late for that now,” she murmured, going back to work at my wrists. “What the hell is going on here? Is there anyone else we need to worry about?”
We? Who else is with her?… Hell's Ransom? The club didn’t exactly pick up girls and take them on adventures too often. Women were more often considered a sexual necessity than a resource in battle.
“It’s just Harrison,” I said. One of my hands came free, then the other. I would’ve rubbed at my wrists, but the truth was that I couldn’t feel them. My body was still pretty numb and shaky from whatever he’d dosed me with. “Kind of a lone wolf mission thing.”
“That explains Carson,” Izz replied. One of my legs came loose, and then the other. I exhaled a long sigh and enfolded her in my arms, surging and brimming with joy. Even though we weren’t across the border yet, for just that second, I felt like everything was over.
I heard the clamor of chains and a door whine and slam, then a vaguely familiar voice intruded on our little bubble of time and space: “Looks like he went out the back.”
I looked up from Isabelle’s neck and frowned at the shadow looming over us. “Juan?” I guessed, uncertain. “From fucking Moab?”
“Juan from Fucking Moab,” he replied, chuckling to himself. “Glad to see you’re all right, kid.”
“Dude…no…I’m not all right,” I promised him. Isabelle busied herself sliding under my arm and pulling me to my feet, but I was too dead for her to manage. Juan grabbed the other arm and only then could I stand, though the room spun as I did. “Harrison wants to kill me, but it’s not just that. He doesn’t just want to kill me. He wants to kill all of us, homey. He wants to end Hell's Ransom for life. You need to get back to Utah as fast as you can, and don’t look back. Don’t worry about me. You’ve done enough.”
A big Mexican biker brother—even bigger than Juan—came galloping up to where I lulled between my girl and Juan, his gun at the ready. “Harrison took off,” he panted. “We need to get the hell out of here. Something tells me that he’s not done yet; the crazies never are. If he can’t do this job himself, he’ll try to get someone else to do it for him. I hit him a couple of times, but he was wearing a Kevlar.” The guy looked over at me and nodded. “Jeez, hermano, you look like shit. I’m Drake, by the way.” His eyes shifted to Juan. “So? Fuck out of here?” he suggested again. I found Drake instantly likable.
“Yeah,” I breathed, answering for Juan. “You guys go ahead. Take Izz with you. I’m tired of doing this to you people. This is my mess—”
“You know we don’t work that way,” Drake said.
“Yeah, let’s just leave him here, in this gross, old slaughterhouse,” Isabelle suggested. Her voice was hard and harsh. “With no car, and a federal agent that wants to kill him, and no friends, and no money, and no ID, and no gun. That all sounds brilliant. Am I missing anything?” she asked.
I winced. When she said it like that, my sacrificial heroism sounded kind of ridiculous. Like they’d wasted their gas by even coming here in the first place.
Izz sighed. “Don’t listen to him,” she said to Drake. “He’s delirious. Let’s go. We’ll figure things out on the road.”
Drake winked at her. “We always do,” he agreed.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Isabelle
The Hell's Ransom boys rode with us, off into the night, with Ash on Drake’s cycle and me on Juan’s. He was a little too unsteady to be trusted to ride alone, they said, but one of the boys—I never caught his real name, everybody just called him Nacho—he was a new “prospect,” they said, and young, almost as small as me—was dropped off to pick up Ash’s cycle and bring it with us. We were less than an hour and a half from the border, so the drive, even in the dead of night, wasn’t too much of an inconvenience. We were headed to the final internal checkpoint: El Paso, Texas. A 50-minute venture.
“Don’t you worry about Nacho,” Juan told me. “You’re too good, Izz. He’s a prospect. He needs to prove himself to us, not the other way around, by doing things like this. Petty shit at 3 am just because we said so. Your boy went through it, too. We all went through it. Don’t go easy on him.”
“You sound like my mom,” I piped, only realizing after I’d said it that I was talking about Hope. I almost never called her “mom,” and never before without thinking about it first. “She was never a fan of how the women’s liberation kind of…de-classified sex.”
We arrived in El Paso at four in the morning and pulled off the road at a cozy little lodge called The Shady Oasie. The night clerk wore an expressio
n of doom as we swaggered into her establishment, deep under the sway of exhaustion. We probably looked like we’d been dosed to the gills with premium heroin, and her eyes proclaimed as such. She was a small, older woman. I think she would’ve leapt up from her armchair and locked the reception area in the boys’ faces if it weren’t for me. Seeing me there (her eyes lingered long on mine, as if to try to establish some kind of silent pact that she would be safe—so weird and stupid), she stood from her chair and went dutifully to the front desk, where the ledger and register awaited to reluctantly assign us rooms and gladly take our money.
Juan and his Utah companion, Woody, got one room together (two beds). Drake and Nacho, the men of the New Mexico chapter, snagged another of the same design. With my arm still locked securely around Ash’s hip, I ordered a second room for us, one bed. The lady’s eyes drifted with cold deduction to Ash; I didn’t appreciate the way she scrutinized him, as if someone on an earlier shift had left a bag of trash for her to haul to the dumpster.
“Hey, lady,” I snapped, shoving a handful of dollars across the table. “While we’re young?”
Ash glanced at me from the corner of his eye with a slight smile, and Judge Grandma gave us an electronic key. Swanky.
Up in the room, I gently stripped Ash of his clothing, pausing only for a moment to admire his beautiful physique. I winced with him as his shirt came up over his head, though I didn’t see any bruises. “Are you…this might sound stupid, but…are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Ash promised. “I got hit in the stomach a few times.” The pain which clouded his eyes let me know that he was minimizing the brutality of the beating. “And, you know, drowned.” He smiled painfully. “But I’m better, now that you’re here. I thought—when you didn’t come back—I thought that you’d decided to leave. It would’ve been the smart thing to do.”
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