Heaven Hill Series - Complete Series

by Laramie Briscoe

  “This is her.” The don’t-be-a-dick tone of Travis’ voice told Liam that maybe he had laid it on a little too thick, but they were all on edge. Someone was threatening the club and members of their family.

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” he asked, sitting at his kitchen table.

  She did so, breathing a sigh of relief when Travis sat down beside her. She was half afraid that Liam would say he couldn’t be a part of what was starting to feel very much like an interrogation.

  “I’m not trying to scare you, honestly I’m not,” Liam started, as he reached over and pulled a cigarette out of a pack that sat on the table. “You want one?” he offered it to her.

  After her experience moments before, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to touch a cigarette again in her life. “No, thank you.”

  “I’m not going to bullshit you,” he told her after he had fired one up and took a long inhale from it.

  “I’m glad.” And she was. She was sick of bullshit in her life; she was working on clearing out the bullshit.

  “Whoever this Clinton guy is wants you back in a bad way. He’s willing to use Travis’ cousin and my sister.” He let that sink in for a few moments; let her really understand the gravity of the situation. It wasn’t like he was picking on her because he had no one else to talk to. She held the key as to what this man wanted, and she refused to talk about it. “I want to know what you know—every single detail. You got that?”

  “There’s no need to talk to her like she’s a fucking idiot.” Travis took exception to the tone that Liam used.

  Liam’s eyes cut over to his communications officer, his face hard, his tone harder. “I can do this either with or without you, my man. I was polite in letting you sit in on this.”

  The thinly veiled threat did nothing to make Travis feel better. In fact, it increased his anxiety. She didn’t deserve this shit, not after everything she’d already been through, but it wouldn’t help to talk back or down to Liam either. He would throw him out faster than he could open his mouth and then talk to her however he wanted to. “I know.” The thank you wasn’t implied and it went unsaid.

  She took a deep breath and looked inside herself for some fountain of energy she didn’t know that she had. She had never planned to tell anyone anything about Clinton Herrington. Once she had escaped, she figured she would live her whole life looking over her shoulder, but she never figured she’d have to relive the things that he had done, what he had put her through. As she began to speak, her mind drifted back to the scene that she spoke about.

  “I don’t want to marry him!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. Her father, her own flesh and blood, had all but sold her to this man. There had even been a contract written up and signed between the two of them. Slave trading had been outlawed for hundreds of years, but it was apparently alive and well in Kentucky. She wondered what in the world her father had gotten her into.

  He sighed, slapping the end of his belt in his hand. “Christine.” The way he said her name spoke of boredom and impatience. “You know that it hasn’t been cheap for us to raise you. God blessed us when Edward left the way he did.”

  “His name is Jagger.” She tilted her chin up in defiance.

  “His Godly name is Edward, and you will call him that.”

  There was silence between the two of them as a battle of wills ensued. Finally, she had to break eye contact, she couldn’t stand it anymore. How could a parent do this to their own child? How could he wish one dead and then sell the other one off?

  “What will I do?” she asked, her voice small and scared.

  “You will service him, just like a wife is supposed to. You’ve read the Good Book, just as I have.”

  His version and her version were definitely not the same, but it had always been that way. Elias Stone had always seen things the way he wanted to see them; he’d always been a master manipulator, especially when it came to the Good Book.

  “I just don’t think that’s what it says, Dad.” She dared not look back into his eyes. He might smite her. He had done it before, numerous times. That was one of the reasons Jagger had left as soon as he turned eighteen.

  “Are you talking back to me?” he yelled.

  She felt moisture on her face. He had spit on her. “No, sir,” she said softly. It was the only thing she could do.

  “Then you will go upstairs, pack a bag, and then come meet your husband.”

  “What did you do?” Liam asked, as he let her have a breather.

  “I did what he told me to do. I was so tired, tired of walking around on eggshells, tired of being knocked down, tired of being talked down to. I thought that maybe, for once, I had gotten a better end of the deal than he knew. I mean, I had snuck romance novels from the library.” She sniffed as unexpected tears came to her eyes. “For once I decided to be optimistic. It was the absolute worst mistake of my life.”

  The man who had come to get her hadn’t spoken one word to her since he’d picked her and her bag up from her family home. It was very disconcerting. She wasn’t sure what to do with this. The man was much older than she had been lead to believe, and now she was nervous.

  “Go inside and have a seat at the kitchen table,” he told her. The first words he’d spoken to her. They were coarse and demanding, telling her that he wanted no argument from her. It was the same kind of tone her father used with her, and she absolutely hated it.

  After she had a seat, a woman came over to her and pulled her up by the hand. The woman wasn’t much older than she was. “I need your clothes,” she told Christine. “And you need to take your hair down.”

  For the next two hours, she was poked and prodded. Her clothes were long gone, as was her modesty. She had been waxed—everywhere—and her hair had even been dyed. It was now a garish white color. And she was given contacts that made her eyes even bluer. Looking at herself in the only mirror she was given, she realized that she looked like a young girl, almost like a doll. She’d been made into something that she wasn’t. “Why did you do this?” she asked the woman who had brought her back to the room and performed all the rituals on her.

  “Because it’s what Clinton likes.”

  That first night, she was introduced to a lot of what Clinton liked, even more throughout the next few weeks. He married her seven days after she came to live with him. Two months after that was when the other girls started disappearing.

  “What happened to them?” Liam asked her, running a hand over his face. This went a lot deeper than any of them knew. It went deeper than he’d wanted to get involved in.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged, her face blank. “I like to think that they got away, but I’m almost certain one of two things happened to all of them.”

  “What’s that?” Travis asked as he reached over and grabbed her hand, trying to soothe her.

  “There were other men who came around. I think what we were was a ring, not necessarily pornography, we were all of age.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Liam spit out. “Pornography is pornography, no matter how old you are. But what I think you were part of was more like slave trade.”

  She had thought that many times while she had been “learning her lesson” from Clinton, but she had been afraid to say it. If she said it, it meant it was true, and if there was one thing she had learned, it was if you said words, you gave them power. It could be good power or bad power, but either way, it gave them something over other people.

  “You said one thing happened or another, what was the other?” Travis asked, although he had a pretty good idea. People who did things like this didn’t want there to be witnesses.

  That same look came over her face again.

  “Have you seen Tracy?” she asked one of the other girls as she folded the laundry for the house.

  “Not in the past few days. She was supposed to go with Clinton to Cumberland Falls. He came back last night, but I haven’t seen her.”

  Christine’s blood ran cold. Tracy was
her friend, and at night, the two of them had taken to whispering about what they would do when they were finally out of this house. They knew they couldn’t be made to stay here forever. One day, someone would come and find them. They both held on strong to that belief. It was the only thing that helped them make it through. This time, Christine had a very bad feeling. As she opened her mouth to say something, Clinton came into the room and handed them a towel with blood on it.

  “That’s going to need to be disposed of. The cat got run over,” he mentioned, as an afterthought.

  When he left, they looked at the towel, neither one of them wanting to touch it. Neither one of them believed that the cat had gotten run over, especially when the aforementioned cat came in the room after Clinton had left. Finally, with tears streaming down her face, Christine took the towel and threw it in with the other whites, pouring bleach over the top of it. It was then that she knew she had to leave; she had to figure out a way to get out. She knew that if she didn’t, she would die.

  “Jesus Christ,” Travis breathed.

  “One by one, the girls disappeared, and another cat got run over, until I was the only one left,” she whispered.

  “So you can pin this on him,” Liam finished for her. “You have just enough to pin a handful of murders on this man. Not to mention, I think we can all agree that he was doing some sort of slave trading.”

  “I have a ton of questions,” Travis said. “How did he keep this quiet? How does no one else know about him?”

  “Do I have to answer anymore right now?”

  The two men had a good look at her. She was pale and her eyes were drawn tight. “No,” Travis answered for the two of them. “You’re good for now. Let me take you back to the clubhouse, and then Liam and I can meet with the rest of them and figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “What about Jagger?” she asked.

  At some point, and that point was going to be soon, they were going to have to deal with him. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow,” he told her. “Right now, I think all of us need to sleep on this. You’ve given us a lot to think about.”

  She’d also given herself a lot to think about. She wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted anymore, but she was very happy that she wouldn’t have to go through this by herself. Even a little bit of support was better than no support at all.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Travis sat in his cave later that night, checking on Heaven Hill’s interests. As he scanned the cameras, he saw a car pull up to Roni’s apartment building. It wasn’t unusual for someone to park in her other parking spot, but this car looked familiar. Doing what he did best, he tapped into the Wi-Fi of the apartment building’s security cameras and zoomed in.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he chuckled.

  Rooster was making his way up the sidewalk, and miracle of all miracles, he wasn’t dressed in his sheriff’s uniform. Dare he say that Rooster looked like he was about to go out on a date? He shook his head as Roni let his cousin in and quickly shut the door.

  He clicked out of that feed and took a look at everything else. It all looked closed up for the night, and he was exhausted. The last few weeks had taken a lot out of him, and all he wanted to do was close his eyes for a week and catch up on all the sleep that he missed. It wasn’t unusual for him to go on little sleep, but it was starting to take a toll. Shutting down everything but the essentials, he set the alarms and took one final sweep of his cave. He usually checked his feelings before he shut the door. Did he feel like he could go to his dorm room for a few hours? Was he at ease? Usually if he wasn’t, something was going to happen. Tonight he was thankful that he was at ease.

  When Travis made his way back to his dorm room, he felt odd. He’d had women in his dorm before, but never any that felt like this. He actually cared what she thought, wanted to make her happy in his own way. Should he knock on the door? Was it okay for him to just to walk in? Had Christy decided to move to an unoccupied room? They did have some of those. He hadn’t shown them to her, but someone else could have. Glancing at the black watch he wore on his right wrist, he saw that it was later than he had meant for it to be. Opening the door slowly, he tried to be quiet as he walked into the room.

  “Travis, is that you?” she asked, sitting up in the bed.

  Her voice was soft, but it wasn’t sleepy, the way he had assumed it would. Maybe she had been sitting up waiting on him? Maybe thinking the same things that he had been thinking. Fuck, she was in his bed. What the hell was he going to do now? “Yeah, it’s me.” he answered.

  There was an awkward silence between the two of them. He wasn’t prepared for this. Didn’t mean at all that he didn’t want it, but he wasn’t sure he was prepared. There were a million things about her that he didn’t know, some things he was downright scared to find out. It was all so up in the air.

  When he didn’t say anything, she cleared her throat and pulled the sheet up closer to her neck. It gave her a sense of security, as if he wouldn’t be able to see the way she felt if she held that blanket up. Being here, amongst his things, had pulled some feelings to the surface that she hadn’t known were possible. “I didn’t know if you wanted me to be here…” She let the sentence fall off, embarrassment making her stop talking.

  “No, you’re fine. If you don’t want me here, I can go stay in one of the other rooms that no one is in right now,” he told her, putting his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He had never been this nervous around a woman, not even when he had been a young kid. He rocked back on his heels and waited for her to let him know how she wanted to play this. Hardly ever would he defer to someone else to tell him who could sleep in his room, but she had already been through so much. It was like Tyler had told him; he had to direct her in an easy way. He wanted her to stay, and if it was her decision, all the more better for it.

  “I don’t want to kick you out of your own room and bed. If you’ll let me know which rooms are empty, I’ll go take one.” The moment the words came out of her mouth, she wanted to shove them back in. What had happened to the fearless woman from the night before? The one who had known exactly what Travis could see and had given him a free show? Why was she being a fraidy cat now?

  He could see her from the light that she had left on in the bathroom. She was modestly covered in a pair of sleep pants and a T-shirt. Her hair was disheveled, and a thought crossed his mind that he wished he had been the one to do the disheveling. Even though her voice hadn’t been laced with sleep, he could tell by the look in her eye that she was getting to the sleepy stage of the night. Probably made him a bastard, but he had watched her often enough on a computer screen to know what she looked like. He wanted desperately to know what she looked like lying beside him. “You don’t have to leave,” he told her, his voice low, as not to scare her.

  Christine hadn’t expected him to say that. It wasn’t that she didn’t think he didn’t desire her, she knew that he did, but this was his room. The one thing that was his in this whole world besides the motorcycle he rode on and the patch on his back. “You want me to stay?”

  That was the bitch of it, wasn’t it? He did want her to stay, but he didn’t want to force her to make a decision that she wasn’t ready for. “I want you to do whatever you want to do. I’m not that guy that tells you what you have to do. I’ve never been that kind of guy. I will tell you this, though. I’m gonna go take a shower. When I come out, you can either be here or not. There will be no hard feelings on my part if you aren’t here.”

  That seemed fair enough to the both of them. It took the pressure off just enough that she could breathe.

  He could feel her eyes on him as he went about the room, gathering the stuff he would need. From where he stood, he could almost hear the thoughts rushing through her head, and he worried if he hurried this, what if she wasn’t ready and what if he did irreparable damage to their tenuous, at best, relationship? “No hard feelings,” he told her again as he went into the bathroom and shut the door.

&nbs
p; The click that indicated the door was shut sounded like a cannon going off in the silence of the room. She paced a circle around the bed and a couch that sat in the corner as she thought about what he had offered her. It was the best of both worlds, and there was no pressure behind any of it, she knew that without a doubt, but the implications were still there. The feelings were there, even if they were there only on her part. That’s what she had always been led to believe—men desired, but they didn’t feel anything else for women. They wanted property, and she wasn’t stupid, she knew what motorcycle clubs were; she had seen a property patch on a woman before. There was a part of her that wasn’t sure if she would be happy wearing that, not after what all she had already been through.

  Then there was the elephant in the room. Jagger. He was going to flip his shit when he found out how long this had been going on and he’d had no clue. She was sure of that, but a part of her wanted him to get angry. A part of her wanted him to know exactly how rough it had been for her with him gone. That was the selfish part of her personality, the part that she hadn’t let surface in a very long time. “It’s not his fault,” she whispered to herself. And it wasn’t, but knowing that did nothing to help her sleep at night.

  There had been so many nights she had prayed that he would come find her, be the big brother that she remembered him being. She had dreams that he would come to the front door and knock it down, trying to get to her. When she had been little, he had promised her that nothing would ever happen to her, that he would protect her at all costs. In this he had failed miserably, and she did wonder if he had ever thought of her again. Had he wondered where she was? Had he thought about what their father had done to her?

  Pushing all those feelings aside was hard, but Christine knew that what Travis asked of her had nothing to do with Jagger. It had to do with what she wanted the two of them to be. Did she want them to sleep in the same bed? Did she want to be able to count on him to help her and her help him in return? That was something that had been sorely lacking in their relationship previous to this. Travis had done all the helping, and she had allowed it to happen, never offering, never anticipating what he might need from her. But that was where she got confused. The men in her life before him would need sex…did Travis need sex? Did he want it with her? He desired her, yes, but she didn’t know what he felt inside. Biting her thumbnail, she exhaled deeply and realized that she had run out of time. She could no longer hear the shower running inside the bathroom, and the doorknob was turning.