The MC all looked at one another. Then Mac spoke. “We do this,” he said, “you’re with us. No more lone wolf shit. No more keeping things from us. Family.”
I nodded again. Quickly, because I could feel a fucking lump in my throat.
Mac stepped out of the cell and pulled me into a hug. “I missed you, brother,” he told me.
Back at the clubhouse, we picked up our bikes and then got the hell out of town. We didn’t know how long it would be until Harris woke up, or the next shift arrived and raised the alarm. We headed up along the mountain road until we could look down on the town, then pulled over to discuss our next move. As soon as we cut the engines, the night was almost silent. The stars were out and there was so little wind the lake below was like a second sky.
Everyone looked at me. “I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “He took her off in an SUV. They could be anywhere. For all I know, he’s taken her out of the state. Out of the country.” I thought about Annabelle drugged unconscious and loaded onto a jet and I nearly threw up.
Mac put his hand on my shoulder. “Easy, brother. We’ll get the bastard.”
Hunter had climbed off his bike and was staring off into the distance. He knew the land the way Annabelle knew machines. And he had years of experience tracking down psychos as a bounty hunter. “He does this a lot, right?” he asked. “I mean...he buys a lot of girls.”
I felt sick to my stomach. Mac squeezed my shoulder. “Yeah. Everyone says he’s a big timer.” I frowned, trying to remember. “He sells them to some European guy.”
“So he’s a middleman,” said Hunter, still not looking at me. He was going into full-blown detective mode, now, off in his own little world. “Probably goes all over Northern Cali, buying from people like the Blood Spiders. He’d need somewhere to keep the girls until he shipped them to Europe. And not all that far away. When you called him to set up the deal, how long did he need to get here?”
“An hour or two,” I said. The more I thought about Volos’s sick business, the angrier I got. He must have done this to tens of women, maybe hundreds. And he has Annabelle.
“He’d want it to be remote,” said Hunter, still thinking aloud. “Not in a town. It’d only take someone to hear one scream—”
“Hunter,” said Mac in a warning tone.
Hunter glanced at Mac and then me. I realized I was glaring at him as if ready to throw him off the mountain.
“Sorry,” muttered Hunter.
“It’s okay,” I said in a strangled voice. “Do your thing.” I didn’t care how angry it made me, if it worked.
“Somewhere remote,” said Hunter. “A big place, out in the country. What else do we know? Did you get anything out of her step-dad?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Anything,” Hunter pressed. “Even if it seems like it’s useless.”
I sighed. “Nothing! He overhead Volos’s goons talking but they were just bitching about the women they’d bought. Said the standing stock was a pain in the ass.” My face twisted. “That’s how they talk about women. Stock. Fucking inventory.”
“You sure that’s what he said?” asked Viking. “Standing stock?”
We all turned to him. “Yeah,” I said.
He shook his head. “Standing stock isn’t anything to do with inventory. It’s a machine. It’s what they have on ranches, to trap cows in while the vet’s working on them. I worked at a place like that, for a while.”
I’d jumped to completely the wrong conclusion. All this time, I’d had a clue and not even known it.
“A ranch would make sense,” said Hunter. “Out in the country, lots of privacy.”
Mac dug out his phone and we made a list of every ranch within a two hour drive. “We’ll split up,” said Mac. “Take a few each.” And he started dividing them up. A few minutes later, I was on my way to my first one. Hold on, Annabelle. She had to be in one of them.
53
Annabelle
For the first hour, I was beyond thought. The fear took over and I sat against the bars of my stall, eyes closed, arms hugging my knees. The place was too clinical, too hard, too white. You couldn’t even look at it without despair taking over.
But the blackness behind my closed eyelids wasn’t any better. Everything comforting I found there was gone. And it was all my fault. Mom’s trailer? Destroyed. Ox, the gentle giant? In hospital, maybe with brain damage. The MC? In jail.
And then there was the biggest loss of all. Carrick was dead.
No one was coming to save me. I was right back to the nightmare I’d been in when I made that fateful phone call...except I’d gotten Carrick killed and ruined countless lives. It was too much. The panic rose up inside, overflowing. I opened my eyes but that was even worse. The slaughterhouse rose around me, huge and merciless. This was a place designed to process animals and now I was one—
A man dressed in coveralls came to my stall. He couldn’t have been much older than me, with sandy-blond hair. “Take off your clothes,” he told me. “Fold them at the back of your stall.”
I gaped at him. Then I saw the stick hanging on his belt, like a slender aluminum baton with two shining metal contacts at the end. An electric cattle prod.
I took off my clothes, hiding my body as best I could, and folded them at the back of my stall. He showed no interest in me sexually, even when I was naked. “And the necklace,” he said.
I looked down at the gold shamrock: my last connection to Carrick. My hand closed around it protectively.
The guard stepped forward, his hand on his cattle prod.
I slowly pulled the necklace over my head and dropped it on my pile of clothes.
The guard turned and walked away.
“Wait!” I called after him. “I need to use the bathroom!”
He didn’t even break his stride. “Use the bucket.”
I turned and saw the metal bucket in the shadows. My stomach turned and, suddenly, I was crying. Weirdly, it was the total lack of privacy that tipped me over the edge, more than the nudity. I closed my eyes and clutched the bars. Why? Why not just take us to the bathroom? There must be a bathroom for employees. Why make us undress but leave our clothes with us? I was losing it, panic breathing between my sobs. I didn’t understand anything and every question increased my fear, made me feel even more like weak, warm, animal flesh in the middle of this huge machine—
And then, at the very height of my terror, I saw it.
This was a machine. It had been a machine when they built it, one designed to turn cattle into meat. Now it turned women into prisoners...docile, obedient prisoners, too scared to fight back, like the woman who’d refused to even look at me.
I opened my eyes. I was staring at my pile of clothes and the gold necklace that lay on top of them. I grabbed it and closed my fist around it.
This place was a machine designed to break us.
I wasn’t going to let it.
If it was a machine, I could understand it. I could learn its secrets and find its weaknesses. And I could figure out how to beat it.
I squeezed my fist tight around the necklace. And over the next four hours I watched.
They wanted to depersonalize us. They could have let us keep our clothes on but stripping us naked, when the men were clothed, made us feel weak. Inferior. As did the bucket toilets and the stalls. We were no better than animals, stripped of our pasts. Except I had a secret: the necklace, gathered up and clutched in my fist. It reminded me who I was.
The slaughterhouse had a second, more terrifying impact. All around us were reminders of the fate cattle had once had here: the bolt guns used to kill them, the hooks and overhead track that lifted and transported their bodies, the hose-down floor that had once run with blood. We used to kill animals here. You’re an animal. Don’t misbehave. The slaughterhouse, I was sure, had been a deliberate choice by Volos. It worked in ways an abandoned factory or office building never could. But whenever the fear threatened to paralyze me, I squeezed t
he necklace tight, feeling the shamrock pressing into my palm. They’d taken him from me. No way was I going to let them win.
There was no night and no day. The lights never went off: we just huddled down on the floor of our stalls and tried to sleep whenever we could. Every four hours, they’d open the stalls and have us exercise by walking several circuits of the massive floor, our bare feet slapping the cold rubber mats. The barriers directed us, just as they had the cattle. The men, with their cattle prods, made sure we kept moving.
Food was a gray-green slop, served in a bowl with no spoon. It tasted disgusting but I forced myself to eat slowly and try to figure out what I could taste. Oats, definitely. Vegetables...maybe kale and broccoli? It had a milky smell that might have been protein powder. It was probably incredibly healthy: they wanted us to look good when they sold us. Anyone who didn’t finish their bowl was threatened with the cattle prod.
The men guarding us were a mixture of ages and had the look of ex-cons. For the first few hours, I expected them to grab us: we were naked, after all, and there was no one here to protect us. But none of them tried anything. Watching them closely, I realized they were afraid, too: afraid of Volos. And I realized that was another reason for all the efforts to depersonalize us: making us into slop-eating, mindless animals helped remove temptation for the guards.
There were eight women there currently, including me. But from whispering to a few of the others, I learned there’d been as many as twenty, sometimes. One woman had been there for two months. Only the newcomers would talk to me and then only a few words, checking for a guard the whole time. The ones who’d been here more than a few days wouldn’t talk at all. They’d been broken. I learned the most from Cassie, a slender blonde who was in the stall next to mine. She’d arrived just one day before I had.
Most women seemed to stay at the slaughterhouse for a few days. Then they’d be sold to a buyer, either a specific client or a trafficker in another country. Some women had heard things about Europe: there was some guy there who Volos shipped a lot of women to.
I couldn’t believe the scale of it. A new woman arrived every few days. Well over a hundred women a year. How did the FBI not know about this? But then I remembered the story Volos had agreed with my step-dad. She moved to New York with some guy. My bags, packed and then buried. The other women would be the same. No one was looking for us.
I clamped down on my rising panic. I couldn’t beat the system on that level. If I thought about how powerful Volos was, how untouchable he was with all that FBI knowledge and influence, I’d go crazy. I had to focus on the things around me, the stuff I could touch.
I examined the padlock and chain that secured my stall. It was something they’d added when they repurposed the place—the latch had been enough to stop a cow. The chain was heavy duty but the padlock was just a simple, store-bought thing like you’d use to lock your tool shed. That was my way out. A lock was just a machine. A lock could be picked.
What I needed was some wire. When we next exercised, my eyes searched every surface for a lost paperclip or a piece of electrical wire but there was nothing: everywhere was kept ruthlessly clean and free of clutter. By now, I figured it was late morning although I was rapidly losing track.
I slept a little. I ate. I exercised. I dug my nails into my palms to keep from crying.
It was when I was next trying to sleep that I thought of it. I had my head on the little pile of clothes I’d made and I sleepily pushed one item off it because it was digging into my cheek. I lay there with the thing in my hand for several minutes, idly fingering it, before I opened my eyes.
My bra. My bra had underwiring.
I sat up and started trying to extract the wire. What would have taken seconds with a pair of pliers took a full half hour. But eventually, I had a short length of springy, bendable wire I could slot into the padlock’s keyhole.
I’d never picked a lock. What I really needed was a good book, with diagrams. But as I probed and twisted, I started to build up a picture of what was going on in the mechanism, the shining parts separating in my mind. If I’d been in jail, I could have worked on it all night but here there was no night: every ten minutes or so, a guard would walk past and I’d have to pretend to be asleep and then start all over again. The frustration was unbelievable. But one thing I had on my side was time.
An hour after I started, the lock finally clicked open. I stared at it for a moment, tracing the shining hasp with my finger. Should I just go now? The temptation to just pull the door open and run was unbelievable.
But I had no plan: they’d recapture me instantly. And I knew the guard would be back any minute. I’d have to relock it and trust I could do it again later, now I had the technique. I took a deep, shuddering breath and squeezed the padlock closed, imprisoning myself again. A few moments later, I heard the guard’s footsteps approaching and quickly lay down.
This time, though, he didn’t pass by. He stopped in front my stall and threw a bag through the bars. “Get dressed,” he said. “Fix up your face. I’ll be back for you soon.”
I was forcing myself not to stare at the padlock in horror. I should have gotten out! “What’s going on?” I asked in a strained voice.
“You’re off to Europe,” said the guard as he walked away. “You’ve been bought.”
54
Carrick
The sun was going down and I was ready to kill someone.
We’d been searching all night and all day. We’d checked every ranch in the area but there wasn’t any sign of anything suspicious. Mac had even called in the chapters in the neighboring counties and had them out searching, but no one could find her. Meanwhile, someone had found Sheriff Harris and discovered our escape. An APB had gone out for all of us. There were fewer cops out here in the sticks but we knew it was only a matter of time until we were spotted.
We’d all met up at the final site on the list, a former ranch that was now nothing more than crumbling wood and knee-high grass. We’d hidden the bikes in the old stable block so they were out of sight from any passing patrol cars. But now, standing around in the gloom, no one had any ideas. “Fuck!” I yelled, and kicked at the rotting stable wall. My boot went straight through, fragments of sodden wood flying into the air.
“Could be I was wrong,” Viking offered. He ran his hand over a cage-like device of rusting metal—the standing stock that had brought us here.
I felt the exhaustion sweep over me. The previous morning, waking up happy with Annabelle in the cabin in the woods, felt like a lifetime ago. “You weren’t wrong,” I said stubbornly. I didn’t want him to be wrong. If he was wrong, Annabelle was lost forever.
“We tried everywhere,” said Hunter. He put a comforting hand on my shoulder but I shook him off. I didn’t want comfort. I didn’t want to hear what they were trying to tell me.
They wanted her back just as much as I did and they wanted revenge on Volos for what he’d done to the club. But it was over.
She’s gone, a little voice inside me said. She’s lost. You had her and you lost her forever because you made the wrong choices. I thought of how scared she must be, right now, and the rage roared through me, making every muscle tense and ache. If I got my hands on Volos, he wasn’t going to jail.
I saw now that we’d been locked in battle from the first moment I’d walked into that bar. Two men, warring over the same woman. Except I wanted Annabelle as a gorgeous, bright, smart woman; he wanted her as a thing, as inventory to sell. A product—
I blinked and jumped to my feet. I grabbed Viking by the front of his cut. “Standing stocks,” I said. “Do they use them anywhere else? What about where they cut up the cows? A slaughterhouse?”
Viking thought about it. “Probably. They’ve still got to control them, examine them. Yeah, I guess.”
Everyone got their phones out and started searching for slaughterhouses. Mine had been wrecked in the lake so all I could do was muscle in and look over shoulders. “There!” I stabbed at o
ne on Hunter’s screen. “Right out in the middle of nowhere. And it’s the right distance from Haywood Falls.”
The mood changed. We had a target again. “Saddle up,” said Mac savagely. “Let’s ride.”
55
Annabelle
I stared at myself in the hand mirror. I was dressed again and I’d put on lipstick, some mascara and a little eye shadow. I’d brushed my hair, too, and dabbed on the perfume that had been in the bag. The whole process made me fell ill: the last thing I wanted to do as to make myself more appealing to these bastards. But they had to think I was following their orders. I needed them to let their guard down.
Just as I finished, I hear footsteps approaching. Not just the guard, this time. Several men. And something about the confident footfalls of the man in front made my chest close up in fear.
Volos turned the corner and walked right up to my stall. Four men were with him, all in suits. I recognized two from the auction and two from when we’d met him by the lake. “We’re taking a trip,” he told me. “Ever wanted to see Europe?”
My stomach knotted. Once I was out of the country, there’d be no hope.
“Give me your hand,” he said, his tone almost friendly.
I hesitantly put one hand through the bars, wanting to keep him happy as long as possible.
He grabbed my wrist and yanked. I was jerked forward and my forehead slammed against the bars, bringing tears to my eyes. The men laughed. I was still reeling when I saw the needle.
No. No!
But he still had hold of my wrist. And before I could stop him, he was pushing the needle into my upper arm and squeezing the plunger. A clear liquid shot into me, burning and throbbing.
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