by Raven Dark
“Disappeared?”
“Yes. When I came to Vegas, I expected to find her at that agency, but she’d quit. I haven’t been able to find her since.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to absorb all of this. It’s too incredible to be true. But there are also a lot of things that make sense about Emma that didn’t before.
If she was born into the order and not allowed to learn about the outside world, it explained how she didn’t know what I was when she saw me. It explained how she didn’t know who she was tangling with when she stole those tips, even though everyone in Vegas knows we own The Devil’s Den.
It takes all my willpower to maintain my skepticism, to remind myself that she could be lying her fuckable ass off.
My thoughts latch onto this story about her friend. Whoever she is, she could prove useful. If nothing else, she could verify Emma’s story. A story that I have feeling is not going to be easy to prove.
“What is this friend’s name?”
Emma opens her mouth and then closes it. There’s a long pause, and I can see the battle she’s fighting written all over her face before her gaze drops again. Is she afraid I’ll find her friend? That I’ll hurt her?
Her shoulders drop, as though she’s realized that holding the name back will only make things worse for her. She mutters the name, but too quietly for me to make it out.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Sarah. It’s Sarah.”
“Sarah what?”
“Carpenter.”
I don’t need to see Rat to know he’s already searching her name.
So many things about Emma are starting to make sense, and yet there is still one question she has to answer.
How the hell is a former cult member connected to that gun-toting moneybags jackwad?
I clasp my hands behind my back. “And Adamson?”
She rolls her eyes again. “I told you, I don’t know who that is.”
Damn. I’d hoped that if she’d broken enough to spill her guts about this order, she’d have told me about him. Either he’s a bigger secret than the Colony, and nothing’s going to open her up about him, or she really doesn’t have a clue who the fuck he is.
Which raises a whole other set of questions. Namely, if she doesn’t know him, what the fuck is he doing with her photo and her name?
Shutting down the need to believe her, I stalk over to her. She tenses. I grab the back of her neck, yanking her close.
“If you are lying to me,” I growl slowly. “If one word you’ve said to me today is a lie, I will come back in here and put a bullet in your skull and send your head back to Seth in a box. You get me?”
Once more time, her face turns white as a sheet. She swallows.
“I’m not lying,” she rasps shakily. “I’m not.”
I release her roughly and tap her cheek with my hand.
Then I stalk to the door and open it.
“Spider, untie me! Please!”
“No.”
“You lowlife piece of… I’m telling you the tr—!”
I leave the room and slam the door.
23
The Order
“Rat.”
“Yeah, I know, I’m on it.”
I’m barely in the door to the Control Room, his name is hardly out of my mouth, and he’s already pulled up information on everything Emma had said. What he could find of it, anyway.
Darting between three keyboards, eyes shifting from monitor to monitor, his fingers tap keys and the screens flash with pages from dozens of government, social media, and business sites.
“Tell me about this fucking cult.” I stand behind Rat, in front of his biggest monitor on the center of his back wall. Dragon is beside me, scowling at the camera feed that looks in on Emma. The prez hasn’t said a word, and he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t believe a word she’s said.
Emma’s screaming, shouting at me to release her.
“Spider, come back here! Get these chains off of me, let me out of here!
Her shouts reverberate through the Control Room until Rat mutes the feed.
Most women would be cursing up a storm, slinging insults at me, but Emma didn’t let out a single curse. If she’s lying about the cult, she isn’t lying about her religious background. Only someone raised in a strict, prudish religious family would be able to keep from using every swearword in the book right now.
Forcing myself not to look at the feed into her cell, I keep my eyes fixed on the big main screen, where Rat’s got twitter up. When I give the order about His Holy Peace, he flips to a different window pane. A page pops up for a website that looks like it’s for the religious sect.
“Don’t get your hopes up, Spidy,” Rat says. “I can’t tell you much, but--”
“But it exists, right?”
I hate that part of me is hoping to hell her story is true. That I need it to be true. I can’t care about her. Can’t feel for her. And I don’t want to trust her.
“Ohh, yeah.” He glances back at me, his eyes wide and wild with wonderment. “It’s real, and man, let me tell you, this cult’s got some creepy shit going on.”
“How so?” I peer at the web page, which has the order’s logo, two yellow lines forming a cross in front of a sunburst, all on a blue backdrop, with the words, His Holy Peace in big bold white letters. “Wait. If the place is as secretive as she says, how do they have a website?”
“They don’t.” Rat presses a few keys, enlarging the image of the website. “This is a web page from a blogger who claims to know a lot about the cult. She says on her blog that her sister was taken into the order a few years ago. She vanished. The woman’s been trying to get her out. Everyone she goes to, the cops, the FBI—they’re all chalking the girl’s vanishing act up to another teen runaway.”
He turns to me, leaning on the desk in front of the monitor that has the blog displayed on it.
“So, here’s what I mean by creepy. This blogger claims that this order is up to all the usual shit that cults get into. Under-age, forced marriages, child abuse, forcible confinement. And the punishments the members get for breaking the rules? Whipping. Caning. Stockades. Real old school medieval shit. She said her sister’s been forced to marry an order member, and she’s only thirteen.”
I widen my eyes. “These people are sick.”
“Right?”
“It is sick if the blogger isn’t a two-bit hustler looking to get rich off a movie deal,” Dragon says.
The thought had crossed my mind, but I don’t voice it. “It falls in line with what Emma said. But she could also have found all of that out online.”
“Exactly,” Rat agrees.
I run my hand down my face. “Okay. Is there any way to verify what she said? That she was part of the cult?”
“Well, see, that’s the rub.” Rat puts his hands together under his chin. “This is the beauty of her story. These people don’t exactly advertise their existence. They don’t have a list of their members in a nice, neat little online database that we can check. They don’t leave a paper trail. There is no way to prove that our resident thief was a member. But there’s no way to disprove it either.”
“Fuck. Of course there isn’t.”
“Wait, though. There is one piece of information I did find that verifies at least part of her story. One of the few things I did find online about His Holy Peace is a tax audit that does eventually trail back to David Gild. There is a bookkeeper who closes Gild’s books on the last day of every month. His name appeared on one of their audits. It’s conceivable that she hitched a ride with him on one of his visits and got out of there without him knowing, but, again…” He shrugs. “She could have found that out somehow and rolled it into her story.”
“Rat, come on.” Dragon goes to a small bar along the wall stocked with liquor and coffee and pours himself a whiskey. “Are you two chuckleheads telling me you actually buy this shit? This Gild guy managed to make hundreds of people believe the world is some s
ort of dystopian society, that hiding away in this Colony is all that’s keeping them alive?” He downs the glass. “If the truth never got out and no one ever came forward, how does this blogger know any of the shit she’s spouting is true?”
“Prez, there are cults like this all over the world,” Rat says. “I’m sure we’ve all heard the stories about girls who escaped. You know, those girls who end up forced to marry some old rich guy in the cult and pump out his babies until they manage to get out and make national headlines.”
“Yeah, but none of them report being told the stories that woman has.” He points to the monitor that looks in on Emma. The audio is muted, but she’s still screaming, probably at me. “None of those cults successfully, and for years, brainwashed their entire congregation into believing something that sounds like it’s straight out of a Twilight Zone episode.”
Listening to Dragon and Rat argue, I run my fingers over my beard, thinking hard.
I’ve never been a fan of science fiction, but there is one Sci Fi movie I remember watching as a kid. It’s called The Island.
In the movie, people are kept inside a compound and told that the world above is uninhabitable. They’re forbidden to leave, told that if they venture outside the compound, they’ll die. Only later do two of them discover that the whole thing is a lie. The world above is all fine and dandy. Turns out, the poor souls in the compound are being kept hidden from the world because they’re clones that have been created to be used for spare parts for rich assholes who want to live longer. It’s probably the only Sci Fi movie a non-geek like me could sit through, and as a kid, it scared the fuck out of me. Thinking about the lies Emma and the rest of the Colony members were apparently fed reminds me of the clones in that flick.
Sure, The Island is just a movie. But hundreds of people being told a pack of lies to keep them controlled and contained for some sick jackwad’s evil purposes? Totally plausible. All anyone has to do is look at the Holocaust. And with enough connections and know-how, with enough fear instilled into the congregants, even the invention of the internet doesn’t negate the possibility that a cult could have that kind of control over its followers. When people are desperate enough, they’ll believe anything.
“Did you check into this Sarah Carpenter she mentioned?” I ask Rat.
“I did. She’s a ghost, just like your Wildcat. I looked into the nanny agency you gave me. If she worked there, she must have been using an alias. The only way we’d find her is through her.” He points to Emma.
And it’s a good bet Emma won’t easily give up the name Sarah was using or any other information on her. A talk with Sarah might be the only way to prove Emma is telling the truth. She’ll give it up if she thinks a sit down with Sarah is the only way to make me believe her, but for now, Sarah is not important. There is another much bigger problem to deal with.
“And what about Adamson?” Dragon asks, beating me to it. “If this fucker has information on me, or my club, I want his ass.”
Rat heaves a sigh. “Yeah, okay, so, him, I was able to dig up some stuff on, but nothing that looks shady enough to fit with what we saw at that mansion, and nothing that appears to connect to Emma.”
“What did you find?” I take a seat in one of two chairs that sit in front of the monitors.
“Abel Adamson owns a slew of B&Bs, small hotels, and a few rooming houses in Nevada. I crosschecked the businesses he owns with the numbers we found at his house. They match.”
“And I’m guessing one of the places he owns is Rosie’s Room and Board.”
Rat points to me and nods. “All of the places he owns, including Rosie’s, look clean, even with some considerable digging. He crosses all his I’s and dots all his T’s.”
When I raise my brows at him for his getting the saying backwards, he smirks.
“There were only two complaints I found. For the first one, a woman was attacked at one of the rooming houses. Someone saw her being dragged into a room by another resident, but no charges were filed, and the woman never came forward. For the other, at Rosie’s, a neighbor complained about a lot of noise coming from the place. Other than that, Adamson is as clean as a whistle.”
I squint up at the screen where Rat’s brought up a list of Adamson’s businesses. This asshole is really starting to piss me off.
“All right, let’s go over what we know.” I push to my feet, pacing, and hold up one finger. “This guy is some low-key small business owner… He’s clean, and yet he had armed men swarming his house.”
“And he buys guns from one MC, and he has a computer full of the names of members from another one,” Dragon adds. “He pitted those two MCs against each other.”
I can hear the anger in his voice. I lift another finger with a nod.
“And he doesn’t seem to have any connection to Emma, but he obviously knows her,” Rat adds.
I raise a third finger.
“And then there’s Emma,” I put in, raising a fourth. “Assuming she’s telling the truth, we have a woman who’s supposedly on the run from a cult and a forced marriage to one of its members, who’s only connection to the outside world is a fellow member who also got out, and then vanished. But then Emma somehow ends up on a fat cat criminal like Adamson’s radar?” I drop my hand. “I don’t get it. What are we missing?”
Dragon downs a second glass of whiskey. He sets the shot glass down upside down on the bar and ignores Rat’s scowl. “I dunno, but figure it out, Spider.” He nods to me. “Whatever this fucker’s beef is with my club, I want him taken down.”
I stare at the list of businesses belonging to this Adamson asshole as if the missing pieces of the puzzle will appear there if I stare at it long enough. Then I shift my gaze to the monitor that looks into Emma’s cell. Naked body displayed in full view, she’s twisting furiously, gorgeous head tossed back, screaming silent screams.
Not only did Adamson have my name on his blacklist too, but he’s got some unknown connection to my Wildcat. An unwelcome vision of him staring at that image while he jacks off flickers in my head and my fist clenches.
I want him just as bad as Dragon does.
“Don’t worry, Prez,” I tell him, without taking my eyes off Emma. “I’ll deal with him. When I find him, he’ll wish he’d never fucked with the Outlaws.”
I stare at the monitor that looks into Emma’s cell so hard that my eyes should be burning a hole through the screen.
If she’s lying to me… My thoughts descend into a world darkness, imagining bringing such pain and misery on her that it frightens even me. If she’s lying, it’s a betrayal there is no punishment fit for.
And whatever happens, however Adamson ended up with her picture, he’ll wish he never knew the name Emma Wineman.
24
Entropy
Following Spider’s departure, minutes drag by, turning into what must be nearly another hour. Which means I must have been strung up here in this room for nearly three.
My arms feel like they’re going to fall off every time I move. My legs feel like they’ll fold on me the minute the chain on my wrists comes off. My throat is parched, and my stomach is growling as if I haven’t eaten in days. The chains dig into my wrists, and my hands are going numb.
And on top of everything else, my bladder is ready to burst.
The only bright side is that the cuts Spider left behind with that blasted knife of his aren’t stinging anymore. The bleeding must have stopped.
Again, I try not to think about who might be watching me through that camera besides him. Is he getting a kick out of watching me wherever he is?
Hatred for him scalds my insides. Hatred I’ve never felt for anyone before. Not even for him. Not even when I first met him.
It guts me to think that, only days ago, we’d lain together in his bed, holding each other. Spent long hours taking each other slowly until I felt like we knew every inch of each other’s bodies. He’d been so different then. Now I want to gouge his eyes out. The thought makes me s
ad.
I’d screamed and hollered at first. Until I’d realized it wasn’t doing any good. No amount of begging or pleading or yelling is going to change anything. I’m not getting out of here until he chooses to let me out.
When keys jingle in the door, I jerk my head up, hope springing to life.
The hope is quickly followed by the cold chill of fear.
Before he’d left, Spider had told me that if anything I’d said was a lie, he’d shoot me and send my head to Seth in a box. He’s made it clear that he’d do what he had to for the club. I’ve wronged his MC, and I’ve betrayed him. Broken his rules. Nothing I told him was a lie, but if he thinks otherwise, he’ll make good on his threat.
What if he doesn’t find anything? What if he can’t verify what I told him one way or the other? Will he consider that grounds for killing me?
Panic wells up, followed by a pang of worry for Sarah. If I die, who will find her?
The door creaks open.
Spider steps in and my panic mounts until I’m twisting in those chains. He shuts the door. When he turns to me, he’s holding a tray with a bowl of soup, a roll, and a bottle of water.
I swallow, watching the beads of condensation run slowly down the sides of the bottle. I can smell the soup from here—chicken. My mouth waters, my stomach rumbling in angry protest.
But instead of unchaining me and bringing the food to me, Spider locks the door, goes over to the bed, and sets the tray down on the floor. He says nothing. He doesn’t even look at me.
I close my eyes, letting my head fall back, desperation twisting my gut into a tight knot. “Did you find anything that proves what I said? Do you believe me?”