Except...you scare people long enough, you forget how to do anything else. You come home too many nights and wash the blood off you in the shower, after a while it feels like it’s still there.
Mac didn’t say anything but I knew he could see it. The job was starting to get to me: I barely slept, I hardly talked. He knew I’d die for the club, knew I gave it everything I had...but he wanted me to take from it a little, too. He wanted me to lean on him and the other guys.
I stiffened, the anger blooming inside me. That’s what none of them understood, not even Mac. This weight was mine to bear and mine alone. This job was my penance. I didn’t deserve to lean on the rest of them. Not after what I’d done.
I shook off Mac’s hand and walked on. I’d get blind drunk. That was all the fucking therapy I needed.
I was heading for the bar when I heard the clubhouse phone ring. The rule is, whoever’s nearest answers and technically that was me. But the only people who ever called were jealous girlfriends, enemies with threats or cops with questions. Fuck it, I was thirsty.
I marched straight past and told the prospect tending bar to give me a beer.
“Phone, Irish!” yelled Ox from across the room.
They call me Irish on account of—oh, you get it. Ox...there’s not much of a story there. Guy’s big as an ox, introduced himself as Ox when he first joined and, since he won’t tell anyone his real first name, we don’t have much of a choice. He’s a gentle giant...unless he gets riled.
You don’t want to see Ox get riled.“They can leave a message,” I muttered. Then I wrapped my hand around the slick glass and knocked back the beer in three long gulps. Oh, Christ that tasted good: cold amber heaven, meltwater hitting a river bed that’s been dried up for months. I slammed the glass down and told the prospect to give me another.
I was sipping my second beer, making this one last, when I saw Ox finally get up out of his seat and walk over to the answerphone. I knew he’d check it: he’s not the sort of guy who can leave something undone, even if it’s someone else’s job. That’s why he makes such a good treasurer.
I found a seat on one of the couches and had just settled in when Ox’s huge boot kicked the cushions right between my legs. “It was for you,” he told me accusingly. “Some woman.”
I groaned. One of the girls from a previous party? “I’ll listen to it in the morning.”
“Listen to it now, brother.” He jerked his thumb towards the phone. “She sounded like she was in trouble.”
I sighed and stalked over there, taking my beer with me, then replayed the message.
“C—Carrick?”
My beer glass hit the floor. My spine snapped straight, every muscle coming to attention. The reaction was soul-deep and instant: I knew that voice and it wasn’t one I ever wanted to hear scared. It cut through all the layers of gruff hostility I’d built up to protect myself, right through to my core.
“I don’t know if you’ll get this. It’s Annabelle.”
I fell. Straight down a thousand feet, plummeting into the past. I was lying on my back looking up at a star-filled sky and that same voice asked me, “Are you bad?” I automatically put my hand on the scars on my side, feeling the long-healed knife wounds burn and throb as they had that night.
Twelve years. I’d been seventeen, young even for a prospect. I was a different person, back then: innocent and...good. She must think I was still that guy. She’d barely recognize me, now. I barely recognized myself.
But she was a sweet kid. A kid who’d never done anyone harm her entire life. And she was—
“...in trouble. I’m at a place outside Teston, a bar. There are bikers: Blood Spiders.”
My heart clenched tight as a fist. I’d heard rumors about that place.
“They’re going to...S—Sell me—”
My hand crushed the phone so hard I felt the plastic creak. No they’re fucking not.
I dropped the phone and ran for my bike.
4
Annabelle
When I saw the room, my legs gave way. The blond biker raised his hand threateningly and I tried to stand because I didn’t want to get hit again, but my legs were like Jell-O.
Hay had said there would be thirty coming but there were closer to eighty men. They filled the whole room aside from the small stage. At least ten Blood Spiders were there to keep the crowd in line but that didn’t keep them quiet. The noise was deafening: cheering and baying and stamping, all of it directed at me.
They were calling me every obscene name under the sun, already dissecting my body, my face, my red hair. It was almost a relief that they were all yelling at once because some of it was drowned out and—
“Good tits!”
—I could—
“She a natural redhead?”
—just hear—
“She take it up the—”
—fragments. I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to block it out, and felt myself dragged up onto the stage. Hay must have raised his hand for silence because the crowd went quiet.
“You know why you’re here,” he told them. “You know the consequences if you go running your mouth off. Let’s get down to business.” He pulled out a stopwatch. “Each of you gets sixty seconds to look her over. Ask what you want, but no touching until you buy her.”
Buy her. Jesus, this is real. I opened my eyes.
The first guy who came up on stage had intricately-shaved stubble and a gold chain around his neck: a pimp? A gang leader? He moved so close that I could feel his body heat. I tried to back up, only to find the blond biker’s hand on my back.
The guy began to walk around me. I could feel his eyes on my hips, my ass, my legs. He moved my long red hair out of the way to inspect my neck—apparently, that was allowed—and I felt the warmth of his breath on the sensitive skin there. Then he came around to the front and gazed for a long time at my breasts. I felt like an insect under a microscope. I wanted to run away and hide, wanted to scream at him to stop looking! But the blond biker was right there behind me, ready to discipline me. All I could do was stand there submissively and watch the bulge in the guy’s pants swell as he imagined what he was going to do to me when he owned me.
“Time,” said Hay, clicking the stopwatch.
I was shaking. I wanted to throw up. And that was only one man.
The next man wore a suit and pushed his glasses up his nose as he threw questions at me. Was I a virgin? No. Did I have any diseases? No. Had I ever had a baby? No.
The third man I was sure I recognized. He was in his fifties, with sandy-blond hair, and the too-tight shirt collar was familiar. My stomach twisted. One of my teachers, from high school? God, please no.
He grinned at me. He wouldn’t stop grinning, whether he was looking down my dress or looking down the length of my back to my ass. That’s when I remembered where I’d seen him: at a town meeting, fielding questions from reporters with a laugh and a wink.
He was Teston’s chief of police. My heart sank: now there was no hope at all.
It went on and on. Some tried to touch me: the bikers yelled at them or threw them off the stage. When a man grabbed my breasts for the fifth time, the blond biker broke his fingers as an example to the others, and after that it mostly stopped.
There were loud ones and quiet ones. The loud ones weren’t so different to the over-aggressive guys who yell at women in bars, the guys who sometimes won’t take no for an answer.
The quiet ones were terrifying. I could feel the wrongness radiating off them. They’d lick their lips and look at me with a mixture of lust and absolute hate, as if I was responsible for every woman who’d ever belittled them. These were the guys you read about in newspapers, who keep a woman locked up in their cellar for years.
There was a third type. Just two guys out of the eighty or so, one in his twenties and one in his fifties. They looked embarrassed to be there and, when it neared their turn, they looked up at me with expressions that were almost shy.
It’s f
unny how your perspective changes, when you’re really, really scared. As each of those two guys examined me, I found myself smiling at them. When the second one accidentally touched me as he craned around me to look at my ass, he apologized and I said quickly, “It’s okay.”
Then I caught myself. What?! No it’s not! What am I doing?
And that’s when I realized I wanted to be bought by one of them. I was actually being nice to them, just because they were better than the alternative. I wanted to throw up. After just a half hour on stage, I was so scared that I was practically selling myself.
At that moment, two men in suits with identical, close-cropped hair walked in and climbed up onto the stage, ignoring the waiting line. “Volos is outside,” said one of them.
The crowd went deathly silent. I saw my step-dad take a long, shuddering breath. Even Hay went pale and stepped back out of the way. Whoever this Volos guy was, everyone was petrified of him.
The men in suits grabbed my arms and walked me off the stage and down the hallway to the rear door. Both had the build of football players and bulges under their jackets I was pretty sure were guns. Who the hell was this guy, that he had professional bodyguards?
A biker held the rear door open for us, almost bowing his head in respect as we passed. A big, black car was waiting for us in the darkness, its shining paint reflecting the bar’s neon sign. The rear windows were privacy glass, so I couldn’t see who was inside, but something about it scared the shit out of me. I knew, on an instinctual level, that if I went inside that car, my life would be changed forever.
“No,” I said in a strangled voice.
The men ignored me and kept walking.
“No!” I said again, digging my heels into the ground.
They lifted me into the air and carried me the rest of the way. Then the car door was opening and….
The man was normal from the neck down. Average body, smart suit, polished shoes. He could have been any businessman from anywhere in America.
But his face….
They say even babies recognize faces, that humans are hardwired to see eyes and mouths: that’s why we see faces in clouds. But when it came to Volos’s face, that same internal wiring made my brain lock up. His face was...wrong.
He wasn’t scarred. His face had been twisted and distorted, as if the flesh had melted and then hardened again. I couldn’t stand to look at him but I couldn’t look away.
The men pushed me onto the rear seat next to him and slammed the door. In the sudden silence, I could hear my own panting. I wanted to throw open the door and run but I was frozen with fear.
Volos leaned towards me and I saw that he was wearing a mask. That didn’t ease my fear…in some ways, it made it worse. What sort of man chooses a mask like that to conceal his identity?
All I could see of his real face were two tiny points of reflection where his eyes looked through slits. But they were enough to tell me that he was looking at me, his gaze running from the top of my head all the way down to my feet and then slowly back again. The parts of me he’d looked at immediately felt tainted. This wasn’t just lust. He wanted me the way a spoiled child wants a toy.
He leaned closer and I shrank back against the car door. The hideous mask filled my vision, almost brushing my face. I went rigid, barely daring to breathe. I couldn’t see his mouth but somehow I knew he was smiling. He liked that I was scared.
Then he lowered himself back into his seat and knocked twice on the window. Instantly, the door swung open.
“Fifty thousand,” said Volos. His voice was a shock: so...normal. He could have been the guy who served you your latte or your boss at work.
The two men in suits nodded, grabbed my arms and hauled me out of the car. That’s when it sunk in that Volos was going to buy me. I had no idea what women sold for, but surely I couldn’t be worth fifty thousand dollars. I didn’t feel like I was anything special. That meant that Volos would outbid everyone else...and then he’d own me.
“Don’t worry,” said Volos as I stared at him in terror. “I’m going to take very good care of you.” And then the men were dragging me back into the bar.
Inside, the hush had changed to bad-tempered grumbling. They all knew that they’d likely be outbid, now that Volos had shown up. My insides went cold. How often does Volos do this? How many women has he bought?!
“We’ll start the bidding at two thousand,” Hay told the crowd.
As soon as the bids began to flow, it became real in my mind. I really was going to be sold. All I could hope was that I’d be bought by someone kind, maybe one of the two men I’d smiled at.
But as the bidding rose past ten thousand, the first of the two shook his head. When we hit twenty thousand, the other ruefully sighed and dropped out, too.
When they hit twenty-five thousand, the bidding slowed down. Hay glanced at my step-dad as if annoyed: I guessed that he was in for a percentage of my final sale price. “Come on, you fuckers,” he yelled at the crowd. “Let’s get it going!” But the bids began to peter out.
Hay snarled and grabbed the top of my dress, wrapping his thick fingers around the delicate beading at the neckline. Then, with one tug of his arm, he wrenched it down. I screamed as the stitching started to rip and a few buttons popped off—No! I tried to break free, desperate, but the blond biker grabbed my arms from behind. It wasn’t just the thought of being exposed: the dress was one of the only things I still had from my mom.
Another wrench and both shoulder straps gave way. The dress fell to my feet and the crowd came alive, whooping and roaring, as I stood there in just my bra and panties.
The bids started to flood in. Thirty thousand, thirty-five, forty. Now I knew why my step-dad had done this: he’d be able to pay off all his debts and have money to spare.
At forty-five thousand, it was down to the man with glasses—the one who’d asked all the questions—and the two men in suits bidding on behalf of Volos. Please! I begged. Anyone but Volos!
Then the bidding reached fifty thousand. And the man in glasses shook his head.
“Sold to Volos for fifty thousand dollars!” declared Hay. And I knew my life was over.
Carrick didn’t come. A ridiculous thought. Completely unfair. I’d called him only an hour before, on a number twelve years out of date. It wasn’t his fault. But that logic didn’t stop it feeling like a cold, iron spike was being hammered into my heart. The thought of him had kept me going through my darkest times for the last decade. Now I’d grabbed at my one, forlorn hope and found it was just an illusion, nothing but a childhood encounter I’d blown out of all proportion.
I had no hero.
The men milled around, grumbling at missing out. Volos’s men passed an envelope no thicker than my hand to Hay, who extracted some bills and passed the remainder to my step-dad. Is that it? Just a handful of paper. A pathetic thing to exchange for a human life.
One of Volos’s men grabbed my step-dad by the arm. “Volos wants to make sure you understand,” he said. “He’s not just buying her. He’s buying you and your story. What’s your story?”
My step-dad glanced at me just once, then looked away in guilt. “She went to New York, with some guy she met on the internet.”
And suddenly I understood why I was worth fifty thousand dollars. I was a woman who no one would ever look for.
The two men grabbed my arms and started walking me towards the hallway and Volos’s waiting car.
That’s when the bar’s door was kicked in with a crash that sounded like the end of the world. A man with a shotgun stepped into the light and I caught my breath as I saw his face.
“Nobody fucking move,” said Carrick.
5
Carrick
I saw her immediately: she was impossible to miss. But my eyes kept searching the room: I think I was still looking for a kid, because that’s how I remembered her.
It took a few seconds before my gaze swung back to the woman in her underwear. I took in the long, silky red hair
, the pale skin, those big, liquid eyes the color of moss.
It can’t be. This was a woman, twenty or so. Annabelle was just a—
My brain knew the math was right but I just couldn’t process it. I’d had over a decade of remembering her as a kid.
Then I saw the gleam of gold around her neck, the shamrock twisting and bouncing as she pulled against the men holding her. It’s her. And God, she was gorgeous. She’d grown into a long-legged, full-breasted beauty, all luscious curves and smooth white skin.
And those bastards were going to sell her. The rage boiled up inside me and flooded down like lava to fill my limbs, every muscle hard and straining with the need to kill, to smash, to destroy.
I let out a roar that made the windows shake and stepped into the room. Everyone stepped back and the whole place went silent as a tomb.
When I speak, people listen. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” I told them. I jerked the shotgun towards the two men holding Annabelle. “Tweedledum and Tweedlefuckingdee are going to let her go. She’s going to walk over to me. And then we’re going to leave.”
I saw a few people blink at my accent. I sound more Irish when I’m angry.
I was very fucking angry.
A big Blood Spider with a beard shook his head at me from the stage. “This is none of your business.” There was a hint of fear in his voice. He’d seen my cut and heard my accent. Everyone had heard the stories about the Hell’s Princes’ Irishman.
I saw the President’s patch on his cut and pointed the shotgun at him, instead. “I beg to differ,” I snarled. Bastard. He had his MC selling women? I’d heard things about the Blood Spiders but I hadn’t believed it until now. “Tell your boys to back down.”
Out of the corners of my eyes, I could glimpse the other bikers shuffling, trying to surround me. I couldn’t fight all of them. I needed their pres to get them off my back. I took two big steps and leapt up onto the stage. “Tell them to back down!” I roared, and shoved Caorthannach right in the president’s face.
Outlaw's Promise Page 3