by Zoey Parker
He had to have been walking for a solid half hour before he put his head back up again. There was a police car sitting on the side of the street, just idling at the curb. He tried his best to draw attention to himself without actually doing anything, but nothing happened. The police officer inside made eye contact and then looked back at whatever he had in the car that was so much more interesting. So that meant that he didn’t have a warrant out on him. Or maybe that the officer inside just didn’t recognize him. Sure, he was walking around in public, but this wasn’t the type of public place where anyone would know him. It was just a random fancy neighborhood outside the area he normally operated in. No one knew him here. But a warrant would extend beyond throughout city, so that meant he didn’t have a warrant out for his arrest yet. And that meant…
That meant that Victoria didn’t go to the police. She was probably still in the villa.
But the fact that he and his club were both untouched at the moment also meant that the Skulls hadn’t gone looking for him again yet. But they had to know their guy was missing, the one he’d shot. And they’d want revenge even more badly then than they already had for the drug bust business. And there were two ways they could do that: through him, or through Victoria. No one had come bothering him, so they must be looking for her.
And then it hit him: they were looking for her. If they hadn’t already found her. He opened his phone again. Maybe she had decided to go to the Bloody Saints and they just didn’t want to tell him about it, for some reason. That had to be it. Still, though, he knew that something was terribly wrong. And it had to do with Victoria. He couldn’t call Sullivan. He didn’t really have anyone beyond Sullivan that he would go to with a bunch of things, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t boys he trusted.
Their names flashed through his head.
Finally, he decided to call up Benny. He’d known Benny for a while, and Benny was usually who he spent the most time getting drunk with anyway. That meant that Benny would probably be at a bar, even though it was only – judging from the sun – about 2 in the afternoon. But it was also a weekday, and they were his boys, so it was to be expected. And if Benny was at a bar, he would be around other people, so there’d probably be more information to be had.
He called.
Benny picked up on the second ring. Darren used this number to call him a lot, so there was no surprise on the other end as to who was calling. “Hey.”
Darren tried to keep panic out of his voice as he spoke. “Hey, Benny.” He turned away from the street without thinking about it, even though there was no one around who could overhear the conversation. If there was anyone there, they’d have looked at him funnily, given how secretive he was acting.
“Darren,” Benny paused, his voice sounding like he was waiting for some bad news. He slurred a little at the end, though, and Darren could tell he was drunk. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much,” he lied quickly. “Have you heard anything?”
In the background of the phone call, Darren could hear the sounds of people partying behind them. There were the classic sounds – people stumbling over things, the loud rise and fall of yelling, and the occasional non-Benny slur that creeped over the line.
Benny took a second to answer, and Darren could tell that even in his lack of sobriety, Benny was trying to get some privacy. Not that Benny would need to; Darren knew everyone in that bar. But he wasn't really worried about who Benny was around right now. He was just worried about Victoria.
“No,” Benny finally said, after some time. He amended it in less. “Actually, wait. There’s a package for you.”
Darren felt his heart drop down to his stomach. There was no room for it in his chest anymore, no matter the romantic feelings that had been going through his mind some hours earlier. This had to be something to do with Victoria. That was all it could be. And he wanted to ask, but his throat was dry and the words were dead within it.
Benny coughed. “Do you want me to open it?”
No, he didn’t. He said yes.
There was a moment of silence on the line. Total silence. Darren couldn’t hear anything, and it seemed like even the background noises in the distance had faded out.
He asked, “What’s in it?”
“Uh...” There was something in Benny’s voice and Darren’s heart shuddered.
“Tell me what it is.”
“It’s...it’s a lock of brown hair.”
They had Victoria. They had her, and she was probably going to die. He should be used to this; people hurt him and the people around him all the time, but it was so different now. He felt like he was going to fall down and never get up. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He had to go, to get her, to save her. There was no time and no room for lying down.
He had to save her, and only he could.
Because he had gotten her into this mess.
Because he couldn’t leave her alone. No, he just had to drag her along with him to the safe house. Someone else could have watched over her for a while, probably, making sure she was safe. Or she could have gone to the police. Instead, he had taken her with him because he wanted to be around her.
Because he wanted her.
Because he...loved her. He is in love with Victoria Parker, and now he might never get the chance to tell her.
“Darren? Hey?”
He heard Benny on the other side of the line, but he wasn’t focused on responding. He was still in danger, but that didn’t matter. Victoria mattered more to him than he ever could, and now he was at risk of losing her. He had to go. Benny heard the click on the other line, and made some kind of swear.
But Darren didn’t hear it. He’d already hung up.
The walk to the bar was less of a walk and more of a full-blown sprint. He’d abandoned his car a while ago, and he wasn’t about to go back and get it. The rest of the journey had to be done on foot: all long, over-stretched steps to get to the bar as he ran there. Luckily, it wasn’t raining, but it felt like it should be.
He got there quickly. It didn’t feel like he’d made it there soon enough.
There were tons of cars in the parking lot, more than there should have been. Usually, anyway. But it was made up for by the fact that there were more bikes set there – all aligned in neat little rows. So the Bloody Saints was in there, and they were having a good time as usual. He gritted his teeth, resenting it. There was no time for this.
Without thinking much of it, he walked in. His sprint had diminished to a fast walk, but he slowed it further still until he was just sauntering his normal walk into the bar. As soon as he entered, though, he realized that there wasn’t the usual chaos that could usually be found at this bar. No. While, sure, there were the normal people getting drunk and a little rowdier than usual, there was something wrong. Something off.
His eyes immediately went to the furthest back corner of the room. Benny wasn’t hanging out at the bar like he typically would, in the center of everything. Instead, he was watching the room and hanging out with a couple of other dudes he and Darren both knew. This was a bad sign. He high-tailed it over there.
As soon as he did, Benny raised his eyes to meet him and lifted a frosty glass in his general direction. The motion was less happy than methodical, though, and –
He tried not to think about it.
As soon as he got over to them, Darren just about broke down explaining.
“Victoria,” he said. Her name was the first word out of his mouth. It didn’t seem like that came as any surprise to the other men – to Benny, at least – but that didn’t mean they knew who she was. Not really.
“Brown hair?”
He nodded. “She used to work here.”
Looks of recognition painted their faces. So they didn’t know her name. That didn’t matter. At least they knew who he was talking about, anyway.
“I need to go find her,” Darren said. He almost went ahead and said “we,” but he didn’t want to drag them into this. Still, though,
he needed someone's help. Several someones’ help. If she was being held hostage – and she was – he couldn’t just go in solo, guns blazing.
That was then that he saw it – the looks of recognition morphing into looks of confusion. They knew who she was, they just didn’t know why he would want to do something like this. Why should they? They didn’t know her, not like he did.
This wasn’t going to be easy.
“Are you listening?”
They weren’t, not really.
They blinked at him in confusion again, and then the still silence of the bar – at least, in that corner of it, because that’s what it felt like to him – dissipated. They erupted in sound, a few of the guys at the table standing up and coming over to Darren where he was still standing. Benny even put his beer down when he went to go get up, and then Darren couldn’t hear anything because all of the words they were saying were running together in a mess he couldn’t discern.
They were listening. They just didn’t understand. He wasn't crazy; he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. After all he had been through – by himself and with them, the few men before him – this couldn’t be what got him written off as insane.
But it seemed like it was.
“Darren. Darren, look,” Benny started. “You can’t deal with this.”
Darren felt his heart – he didn’t even know he had one, but here it was making one of its many appearances when it came to Victoria – sink low in his chest. This wasn’t what he had been expecting, but it should’ve been. He looked to the others and grimaced, seeing the assent and agreement in their eyes as they thought the same thing Benny did.
“Yes, I can.” He felt something bubbling up inside him. He wanted to argue – not even to argue; he needed to hit something. He needed to break things and make his problems go away as they drowned in his anger, but that wouldn’t fix this. It wouldn’t make Victoria safe.
Benny sighed, and he looked over at Darren one more time. “Fine,” he said. His voice was so low that Darren could hardly hear it.
But then he repeated himself. “We’ll help you find her.”
Darren couldn’t believe his ears, but he didn’t ask again for fear that Benny might change his mind. It looked like the others agreed to it, too. What he wanted – for what felt like the first time in his life – was actually working out.
Until Benny coughed, demanding Darren’s attention again, and said, “But you stay here.”
“That’s not happening.”
Benny didn’t even bother looking to the other boys. Sighing, he started talking.
Chapter Eighteen
Victoria
Victoria wasn’t sure exactly where she was. The last memory she had was of trying to run away from two guys and being grabbed, and then pushed into a car. She hadn’t been able to guess where they were going based on how the car was turning – she had no way to do it. She hadn’t been paying attention, like she should’ve been. And her head hurt, so badly.
She cursed. She was so disappointed in herself, but she was disappointed in Darren, too. He’d left her, and now she was going to die. Of course, he’d been trying to help her; that was why he’d left. But she was only here now because he hadn’t been there, and, as much as she hated that she would’ve relied on him to stay safe, at least she would be alive.
Like she was now. But she was barely living, so that didn’t count. It wasn’t like they’d hurt her – much. She stretched her wrists as much as she could, but they were bound, and all that did was drag the skin there across her restraints. She was zip-tied, and she was bound at the ankles, too. The position she was sitting in was uncomfortable.
She looked up to the ceiling. It was gray to the point that it looked colorless, and she didn’t even want to start counting all of the tiles across it. There were so many, and they ran into each other so they were almost overlapping.
She pushed her head down again, not wanting to look at it. It hurt. The back of her neck dully ached now, too, and she didn’t want to move. But she had to. Her eyes turned to the wall directly in front of her. The wall looked like it had a door in it. The outlines of the door were hard to see, and it looked like it almost blended into the brick-tile of the wall. Her breath caught in her throat.
She heard it.
There was the sound of people coming from outside the door. Men, specifically, but then she thought she heard it: a woman’s voice. She couldn’t make out any of what they were saying, but that didn’t change the fact that it was there. That she was hearing it. She felt sick. But even though she wanted to puke, she couldn’t allow herself to get ill from this.
That is, until she heard the door start to crack open.
Breathing in shallowly and as rapidly as she could without passing out, Victoria tried to stay calm. The woman who was with the men seemed to have left, and two cruel faces peered in through the doorway at her. One sneered; the other just frowned and punched the other one on the arm, and then that guy left.
She had to get out of here. The guy who was guarding her was just standing outside the door. The door closed and then she was left in the room again. At least it wasn’t dark.
This could be so much worse. She didn’t need to keep trying to convince herself of that. Images of “worse” kept running through her mind, terrifying her. She was in danger. If she stayed here, she was going to die, and she wasn’t sure exactly whose fault that was, but she had an idea.
Her hands stretched against the zip-ties again. She had to get out of here, no matter what she was going to do to accomplish that. She just needed to get the guy watching the door to turn his back away from her, and then she could run for it.
But first, she had to untie herself. She needed to calm down, to breathe, to think about how she was going to do this. She couldn’t find a way to save herself when she was struggling to understand how or why this was even happening to her.
And then, as she started trying to squirm against her binding without attracting the attention of the guy at the door or of anyone else who might show up, she remembered. She wasn’t a damsel in distress. When she was younger, she'd taken a few self-defense lessons. Just because she hadn’t worked towards doing anything with her life in a long time, and just because she’d never had to save herself before, didn’t mean that she couldn’t do this.
The zip ties that were holding her there didn’t feel like they were as tight as she first thought. If she could just slip her hands free from them, then she could untie her feet and she could escape. The problem was that there were people waiting out there for her, and if they caught her trying to break free from this she would be dead.
The obvious solution was to wait for the guy outside the door to move away. As soon as that happened, she could make her escape. But first, she had to find a way to get out of these ties without anyone noticing. And then after that, she was going to have to find a way to make the person, or the people, if those others were still waiting around and she just couldn’t see them from where she sat, disappear.
She could ask to go to the bathroom, and then run for it as soon as he opened the door. That might solve the problem of waiting for him to go away; if she just waited for him to disappear, that could take ages. And she wasn’t too afraid to remember the self-defense lessons she’d taken when she was a teenager.
But could she take him in a fight?
She tried to move without making it obvious to anyone who might be looking in. She was in the farthest corner of the room, away from the door, and both her hands and her feet were bound. From where she was positioned, she could see anyone who was out there, unless there was a corner or something for someone to lurk around. She didn’t know what the hallways looked like. She brought a hand to her forehead again, feeling the pain there. She couldn’t identify the pain, though. Was it a sharp ache? A dull headache?
The knots that were tying her hands together were more important to get rid of now. No matter what she did, it was clear that if she did nothing, she would certai
nly die. She looked out past that door again. The shadow of that guy was still there, but it didn’t look like there was anyone else out there with him. He couldn’t stay there forever, and he was already moving. Holding her breath, Victoria sat there and watched the bulk of his back walk away. He turned – so there was a corner – and disappeared around the hall.
Victoria didn’t know which way he was going to go, and she didn’t know when he would be back. She needed to work fast. If she wasn’t done with this by the time he came back, he might find out and he might kill her; if she finished and made a run for it as soon as he was gone, he might kill her; if she didn’t even try to take this chance, she might never get the opportunity to escape again. She had to do it now, or die trying.