Tempted by the Devil: Highway Titans MC

by Cora Black

  “It was really fucking stupid,” Ben said. “Really, really fucking stupid.”

  “Hey, everything turned out okay,” she reasoned, gesturing to the front of the bar as if it was evidence. “See, no more broken windows. You got the drugs. Why are you so upset?”

  “Because!” Ben said, raising his voice a little higher than before. “Because you walked right in the middle of a goddamned biker brawl and you could have gotten seriously hurt. You think those fuckers care that you have a vagina? No! They’ll gladly fuck you up if you get in the way. You were lucky as shit.”

  For a second, Charlotte felt her anger rise to his level, and she opened her mouth, ready to yell back at him before realization hit her right in the head. Oh. Oh, that’s what this is about, she thought. “You didn’t want me to get hurt,” she said. It was a statement rather than a question.

  “Well, yeah, duh!” Ben responded. “It wouldn’t exactly make my day any easier if you got fucked up by a couple of huge bikers, Charlotte.”

  She both loved and hated hearing her name come out of his mouth. It felt a little bit like she was in elementary school again, being scolded by a pissed-off teacher. But at the same time, there was this closeness to it, like he’d known her for longer than a week. She felt closer to him than all her other clients, and it wasn’t just because of the fucking.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” she repeated, this time much more sincerely. “I didn’t mean to worry you. But, look, I’m not just some girl your uncle picked up off the street here, okay? I know a little bit about how people work, how your kind of people work. Not a lot, but some. And I used what I knew today to get the best results. That’s basically my job description. I’m sorry if I scared you, but it worked, right? It worked.”

  There was a long pause where Ben didn’t say anything, his foot kicking up a little dirt on the ground like a little boy does when he’s nervous. “You handled it okay,” Ben finally said begrudgingly.

  “Okay?” Charlotte parroted incredulously. “I fucking dominated in there.”

  A small smile spread across Ben’s lips, and Charlotte felt like cheering. “You did pretty good,” he conceded. It wasn’t exactly glowing praise, but Charlotte would take it, knowing it meant a lot coming from him.

  “Thank you,” she said, her voice coming out lower and softer than intended.

  Ben reached in and pushed a strand of hair away from Charlotte’s face. “Come on. We got places to be.”

  “Should I ride with Noah?” she asked quietly, fearing the sting of rejection.

  Ben shook his head and offered Charlotte his hand. “No. You’re riding with me.”

  ***

  It went like that for weeks. Ben would take Charlotte into more and more hostile territory, and Charlotte would have to sit through the verbal squabbles and the physical fights. Sometimes she’d hold back to the corners, sometimes she’d step in and try to break it up, all depending on her mood. After she meddled in club affairs Ben would always say to her, “You’re gettin’ a little big for your britches there, missy,” but he couldn’t ever seem to keep the teasing tone out of his voice no matter how hard he tried. Every time he took her on a particularly serious mission, she found a way to make it lighter, to make him even have fun at it. He was starting to run out of ideas to scare her off.

  But then one day, about three weeks in, it hit him. The women. Charlotte would have a problem with it, maybe a big enough problem that she would finally see the club for what it was. She’d finally see Ben for who he was, and she’d be so disgusted he’d never see her again. His chest hurt a little at the idea, but it was what he wanted, right? Charlotte out of his life. That was the goal, even if he had to keep reminding himself.

  “We’re going to the ladies’ club today,” he announced to the boys once he stepped outside that afternoon, Charlotte following in his footsteps.

  Ben could see Theo’s confused face even out of the corner of his eye. “Really? What for? Aren’t they all there already?”

  “We’re doing a check-up,” Ben said back, hardening his voice so that the boys would get the message to shut up already. He didn’t want to warn Charlotte at all of what she was about to see. She needed to be shocked. She needed to be scared.

  At the same time, Ben felt a sick tightening in the bottom of his stomach, like a snake had coiled up around his intestines. What was Charlotte going to say? What was she going to do? Will she even be able to look at me after? He shook the thoughts out of his head as Charlotte slipped on the bike behind him and he revved the engine into action.

  They pulled up to the place about a half an hour later, rolling into the parking lot of the broken-down shack on the edge of the desert road. There was nothing around for miles. That was intentional. To the outside world, it looked like an abandoned building.

  “What are we—?” Charlotte whispered behind him as Ben shut the engine off and climbed off the bike.

  “You’ll see,” he said shortly, offering her his hand so she could swing off the bike with ease. He figured he’d do one nice thing for her before destroying everything. Ben could feel her heart pounding through the skin of her wrist. She was nervous. He wanted to squeeze her hand reassuringly, do something to get her to calm down a little, but what was the point? She had a right to be nervous. She had no idea what she was about to witness.

  Ben knocked on the rickety front door of the shack, tapping in a pattern he had to memorize years ago. Three knocks, two knocks, four knocks, then one. “Code?” the guard inside demanded in a gruff voice on the other side of the door.

  “Cucumber sandwich,” Ben said in a flat tone.

  Charlotte giggled behind him, probably at the ridiculousness of the phrase. He thought, with a shot of pain to his chest, that it might be the last time he would ever hear that noise from her.

  The door swung open, and the stuffy smell of the inside immediately hit Ben’s nostrils. It didn’t stink, exactly, but it was apparent that the door was only ever opened for a few seconds at a time, and there were no windows here.

  Ben gathered up his courage, as much of it as he could muster, and stepped inside. He nodded in salutation to the guard, the big guy holding the huge gun, and kept walking, opening up the door just inside the entrance. Charlotte was still right behind him. He felt her hand come up to touch his shoulder, fingers digging into his skin. He felt the nervousness coming off of her. He wished he could comfort her, but it would only get worse from here.

  As soon as they stepped through the inner door, Ben saw three girls get up from their beds, turning their backs to him to ruffle up the blankets into some semblance of order. The other girls were still under the blankets, lifting their heads as they heard the boys filter into the room.

  Ben heard Charlotte quickly inhale, then deeply exhale in realization.

  There were twenty, maybe twenty-five girls squished into the room, each of them assigned a single cot, with a communal bathroom in the far corner and a single set of dressers in the center of the room.

  One by one, the remaining girls sat up in their beds, rubbing their eyes and blinking to adjust to the light from outside. “They sleep during the day, you know,” Ben murmured. “Because they’re working at night.” Ben knew he wouldn’t have to specify the type of work.

  “For you?” Charlotte asked in a soft voice.

  “For the club,” Ben answered.

  “For you,” Charlotte said. This time her voice was far from soft. “It’s the same thing. You’re a part of the club. One of the leaders of the club. So they work for you.” She was silent a moment. Ben turned to look at her, seeing her staring down at the girls who just looked across the room to stare back at her. “Do they get paid?” Charlotte finally asked after the long pause.

  “Yeah, they get paid,” Ben said. “But not much.”

  “Did they… Are they here willingly?” Charlotte asked. She wasn’t looking at him, still.

  Ben nodded before he realized she couldn’t see him. She probably didn�
�t even want to see him right now. He wouldn’t blame her for running out. “Yeah. They can leave whenever they want.”

  “Do they know that? Do they even speak English?”

  Ben felt weirdly defensive, even though the club had no excuse for this. He still felt like explaining himself. “They have a translator. And they came over knowing what they would have to do.”

  “So they have to do it?” Charlotte shot back, finally turning to look at him. He had never seen her look so angry. Somehow, even when he pictured this confrontation in his head, he never thought what she would look like, the disappointment and the fury and the sadness all wrapped up in her eyes.

  “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that, but… They’re not here legally. There are only so many ways to make money.”

  Charlotte nodded and turned back to the girls. “So they’re fucked. You say they have a choice, but what other option do they have, really? Starve on the side of the road?”

  Ben felt himself nodding, like his brain and his body were completely detached from each other. “You’re right. You’re right. They don’t have a choice. Not really.”

  “Right. So they basically get up and go to get raped every night, because what other choice do they have?”

  Ben didn’t say anything. One of the girls, a short brunette with bruises on her arms, was staring up at him with fear in her wide dark eyes. Charlotte was right. They didn’t have a choice.

  Charlotte cleared her throat and spoke out so that the whole room could hear her. “Who here speaks English?”

  One of the girls on the far side of the room raised her hand slowly, like she was afraid of what the consequences would be.

  “You deserve better,” Charlotte said before turning and walking out of the room.

  Ben quickly pulled Theo aside and told him to talk to the guard and to the girl who responded to Charlotte, see what they had to say about the state of affairs for the girls, before following Charlotte outside.

  “Take me back to the club,” Charlotte ordered him as soon as he exited the building.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, a little surprised that Charlotte didn’t insist on being dropped off at her apartment, or place of work, or anywhere unrelated to the Highway Titans.

  They rode back to the club in silence. When they rolled to a stop, Charlotte got off the bike, marched through the bar, and climbed the steps up to Ben’s apartment. Ben didn’t know what else to do except follow her.

  “So do they fuck the Titans or other guys or both?” she asked as soon as he shut the door of the apartment behind them. Charlotte was pacing around the couch, her hands tangled together and pressing against her mouth.

  “Both,” Ben said, feeling the hot sensation of shame crawl up his neck.

  “And the Titans— Do you guys just come and go and fuck whoever you want, whenever you want? Is that why they looked so scared when we walked in today?”

  “The guys have to call ahead of time. The guard keeps records of everything so it’s not… They get paid for everything they do.”

  “But not much, right?” Charlotte asked.

  Ben just nodded.

  “Say it. Admit it,” she ordered, the volume of her voice climbing.

  “Not much, no,” Ben said.

  Charlotte stopped her pacing. “Whose idea was this? The girls? Have they just always been here since the inception of the club, or what?”

  Ben shook his head. “No. Just a few years. It was Old Man Trevor’s idea. He’s one of the senior members here. Been here forever.”

  “And Wally let him do it?” Charlotte asked.

  “They voted on it, and it passed. That’s how the big missions work these days.”

  “Oh, so it was a democratic decision,” Charlotte said sarcastically.

  Not for the first time since he met Charlotte, he felt judged. But he knew he deserved it this time. He wouldn’t have brought her to the den in the first place if he hadn’t known it would end like this. He knew that she would react this way. This was what he wanted, right?

  For over a full minute, they stood in silence.

  “We gotta do something to fix this shit,” Charlotte said. “We gotta get them into a better place, a cleaner place, and we got to lay down some precautions to make sure they don’t get hurt. I don’t care how. But we’ve gotta do it.”

  “We?” Ben asked, but Charlotte didn’t seem to hear him. She just started pacing again, this time circling the whole living room area.

  “We can’t just send them back home, obviously. They left for a reason. There’s the whole big American Dream thing, you know. They came here for a better life. And we’ve got to give it to them. We gotta teach them English, we gotta give them access to occupational training, you know, stuff to help them transition out of the work if they want to. We’ve got to give them a way to defend themselves if the tricks get violent, or else make sure the guard is always present. That reminds me— We’ve got to check with the girls to make sure the guard is behaving himself. He can’t be trusted to protect them if he’s hurting them when nobody’s there.”

  “He’s not. He’s a good guy. I know him personally,” Ben said, following Charlotte’s path with his eyes.

  “We’re checking, Ben,” she said in a forceful tone, picking up the pace as she crossed the room back and forth, over and over again.

  Ben felt himself smile a little, ducking his head so she wouldn’t see, even though she looked like she was barely paying attention to him. But it felt nice, seeing her in action like this. This had to be the way she was when she was in counselor mode, he realized. This was Charlotte the Officer, Charlotte the Leader, at work. And he liked it. He actually liked it. It no longer felt like he was being condemned by her mighty authority. Instead it felt like he was being handed a way out, like he had been stranded in the middle of the ocean spitting out water and she was offering him a lifeline.

  “We gotta organize resources. We gotta allocate some of the boys to help the women and we probably should bring in some of the working girls at the other clubs, like Laila and her friends, to help out, if they’re available. I can look into resources to help them learn the language. That’ll be the first hurdle,” Charlotte continued, although she finally stopped in her tracks and turned to look at him with determination in her eyes.

  “I, um, kind of thought you’d want to call the cops on us,” Ben said. Honestly, it didn’t sound like a terrible idea to him. In a just universe, it would probably happen next. But Charlotte scoffed like the idea was preposterous. “Why don’t you?” Ben asked.

  Charlotte shrugged. “They’d get deported,” she said simply. “I’m assuming you didn’t kidnap them, right?”

  Ben shook his head furiously. “No, no, they came over. They wanted to get out and come here,” he rushed to say. At least, he was pretty sure that was true for most of them.

  Charlotte nodded. “Right. So we’re not deporting them. We’re helping them. That’s what we’re doing. And you’re gonna help me do it.”

  Ben felt the corners of his mouth itch, like he wanted to smile again, but he fought it off this time. “Okay. Okay, I’ll figure it out.”

  “I mean it, Ben,” Charlotte said, walking toward him until she stood directly in front of him. “I’m not gonna let you get out of this.”

  “I know, I know,” he rushed to say, stepping forward a little. Only about a foot separated them now.

  Charlotte nodded again, probably to herself. “I think you showed me that today because you wanted my help. You didn’t know how to do it yourself, but you don’t have to. I’m here.”

  Ben felt his heart start pounding in his chest. “Do you— Do you still…?” Ben trailed off, and he ducked his head again, not wanting to look Charlotte directly in the eyes.

  “Do I still like you?” she suggested.

  Ben nodded, barely moving his head enough to qualify as an affirmative answer, but she must have interpreted it correctly because she kept talking. “Look, I’m not going to lie to
you. It was pretty fucking gross, what I saw today. I’m not happy about it. But…”

  Ben looked up to see her staring right at him. God, she was so fucking beautiful, her hair framing her face and her glasses bringing out the green in her eyes. He wanted to kiss her so badly. Don’t do it. Control yourself. Be a man.

  “But it’s something we can change. I get it, okay, it’s a part of the biker culture. But I don’t think that it has to be. We can treat the women better, at the very least, make sure they’re comfortable and safe. We owe it to them, Ben.”

  “We?” Ben asked again. She hadn’t acknowledged it last time, and he needed to hear it out loud.

  “Yeah, we,” Charlotte repeated. “I’m not going anywhere. I know you thought it’d be easy to shake me off, but I’m a goddamned fighter, Ben, and you can’t make me leave. I promise that.”