Guns & Burning Rubber: The Iron Brotherhood series

by Westlake, Samantha

  The basement door, however, was locked. Kara turned around to face Savage, who had stuck closely behind her. “Do you have the key, President?” she asked him, making sure that there was a purr in her voice.

  The man reached beneath his shirt’s neck, pulling out a key on the end of a thin chain. Without a word, he bent forward and unlocked the door - but then he paused, waiting for Kara to go down the stairs first.

  Kara was not a fan of this plan. All of her instincts as an FBI agent screamed out at her, telling her not to go into an unknown location first, with a potentially hostile man, possibly even a murderer, following behind her and out of sight. This was a recipe for disaster.

  But at the same time, she couldn’t raise an objection now. She was so close, she knew! All she had to do was find the guns, and she would have her case. She’d be done, the case over and all but wrapped up aside from the last couple details of the arrests!

  So, even as her mind barely contained its panic, Kara stepped through the doorway, heading down the rough, unfinished wooden steps leading down into the basement of the house. After a few steps, she heard the door close behind her, and the creaking of a heavier weight on the steps behind her. Savage wasn’t going to let her come down here on her own.

  The stairs curved around at the halfway point, the landing, and the rest of the basement came into view as Kara came around this angle. The light switch at the top of the stairs had also turned on all the lights down here, and she could see the rest of the area, spread out before her.

  That area, however, was largely filled with big, wooden crates, stacked all across the concrete floor.

  Inside her chest, Kara could feel her heart beat picking up, hammering away heavily like a rock and roll drummer. Were these crates full of stolen, illegal guns, a million dollars of contraband that had been smuggled into the country?

  At the bottom of the stairs, she looked around at the crates, but Savage was a half step behind her, and he grabbed her hand before she could go any further into the space. “Ta da,” he grunted to her, as his fingers wandered over to her ass, once again pulling up her mini skirt.

  “Hey, wait!” Kara protested. “I don’t see any guns here, just boxes!”

  The man stared at her for a second, as if his brain was struggling to work, with all his blood preoccupied in other areas of his body. “They’re inside,” he told her, flatly. “And I’m not taking them out.”

  “Oh, come on,” Kara wheedled, leaning forward to rub her barely enclosed cleavage across his chest. “I just want to see them. It would make me so wet…”

  For a second, she thought that the man would cave. He’d come this far, why not just do this last step? He had to be almost mad with desire for her.

  But after a long second, he shook his head in denial. “I’ve shown you enough,” he said, his resolve solidifying as he spoke. “And now, I think it’s time for me to get something in return!”

  The man reached up, hooking one finger into Kara’s top - and then hauled down, pulling with undeniable strength.

  For a moment, Kara was hauled down as the fabric resisted - and then it split, right down the middle, tearing open.

  Behind her, the man’s other hand made a quick motion, and her bra popped open, falling down her arms now that her shirt was ripped almost in half down the front. Kara tried to shrug her shoulders to catch it, but it was already down, exposing her tits to the big biker in front of her.

  “Wait!” Her voice sounded a little more panicky than she would have liked, but inside her mind, Kara could feel that concern rising. She was down here on her own, without backup, in an enclosed area that she didn’t know. This was not a good situation to be in. “I’m not sure I want to go ahead with-”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you want,” Savage cut in.

  This was swiftly going downhill. Kara shifted her stance, shrugging off the man’s hands around her and taking a half step. She could strike out and hit him, or bring her leg up between his legs in a swift kick.

  But the man didn’t give her the chance.

  Even as she shifted her weight back, getting ready to strike out, his hand swung around, slamming into the side of her head.

  She felt herself falling, but somehow her muscles didn’t seem to want to respond, to move to catch her balance. She felt as though she was falling in slow motion, through air that had somehow become curiously thick.

  “Not bad for a pig,” Savage said as she fell, although the words seemed to pass through Kara’s head without actually making sense.

  Agent Kara Sybil’s vision went black as she hit the floor.

  CHAPTER 9

  Even before she opened her eyes, the first thing that FBI Agent Kara Sybil felt was a splitting, piercing pain, ringing through her entire skull.

  The pain was almost strong enough to knock her back into the depths of blackness, but the FBI agent grimly held on, flexing every bit of her mental strength as she struggled not to slip back into unconsciousness.

  After a minute, she managed to regain some measure of control. At least, while struggling not to pass out once again, Kara had enough presence of mind to keep her eyes shut, instead using her other senses to get a feeling of where she might be, what might have happened since she was knocked unconscious for the first time.

  She remembered Savage lashing out at her, smacking her on the side of the head before she could manage to launch a fist or foot at him. The man hadn’t showed any surprise or hesitation, or else he wouldn’t have gotten the drop on Kara.

  And hadn’t he said something, after he hit her? Something about knowing who she was. Kara couldn’t remember the exact words, but the meaning behind them was clear.

  Savage knew that she was with the law, was an undercover infiltrator.

  And that meant that the whole thing had been planned - he had intercepted her on the porch, led her upstairs, and then, when she instead insisted on seeing the basement, decided that he could incapacitate her just as easily down there.

  He had never planned on letting her leave the house.

  The realization was crushing, but there wasn’t much that Kara could do about it now. She knew that she had to focus on her current situation, had to find a way to get herself to safety before thinking back on how things had gone wrong.

  Still without opening her eyes, Kara let her mind wander out to explore the sensations and reports coming in from the rest of her body. She was upright, sitting, and her hands were being held up above her head. There was something hard and sharp around her wrists, something that clinked a little as she very slightly shifted position.

  Handcuffs.

  What’s more, the handcuffs were looped around something, holding her wrists up. Already, Kara could feel her shoulders complaining from the position. At least she was sitting on the cold concrete floor, so her entire body’s weight wasn’t on her shoulder sockets, but they still didn’t like this setup.

  There was a cool breeze blowing against her chest, and belatedly, Kara remembered how Savage had ripped off her shirt and stripped her practically naked from the waist up. Clearly, no one had bothered to cover her up since then, and she could feel the cool air brushing against her breasts.

  Kara cracked her eyes open a fraction, trying to see past the redness coming from the pain radiating out from the side of her head. She was still down in the basement, she saw; she could see the edges of a couple nearby crates, sitting on top of the stained concrete floor of the basement.

  Kara tried not to think about what had caused those faded stains.

  Her ears caught the sound of other voices, and she hurriedly let her eyes droop back shut again. She listened intently, trying to focus on the voices instead of thinking about holding still. She knew from training and experience that over-thinking the act of playing “dead” would ruin the illusion.

  “So what are you going to do with her?”

  That was a female voice - and Kara recognized it! She had heard it before, and she remembered where.
It also answered the question of who had betrayed her. She could hear the sneer in the tone, clear as day.

  Alicia had double-crossed her. The bitch.

  “Dunno. Plenty of places where she can disappear.” That was Savage, still sounding monotone, almost bored. He might be a villainous asshole, but he definitely had control.

  There was a slight scraping sound of boots on the floor in front of Kara, and she had to struggle not to flinch as a hand reached out, feeling up her chest and giving one of her breasts a rough squeeze. Okay, maybe he didn’t have full control, Kara amended her previous thought - perhaps he was just a sick freak who liked his women unconscious.

  In fact, that particular thought raised another disquieting question. Had the man…?

  A short mental exploration of the feedback coming from the muscles of the rest of her body revealed that, although she definitely hadn’t been gently handled when she was strung up with these handcuffs, Savage hadn’t yet done anything worse to her. Despite his clear attraction to her, and her lack of suitable clothing, he hadn’t chosen to violate her.

  Of course, he could always do it at any point, now, whenever he felt the urge.

  That thought didn’t do much to comfort Kara.

  “Hey. Wake up.” Savage’s voice came from right in front of her, and the man’s hand slapped at her cheek. He must be kneeling right in front of her still.

  Savage turned slightly, his boots scraping on the floor. “Alicia, go and get some water.”

  “Get it yourself, ass,” the woman returned, sounding disinterested in the whole thing.

  Savage grumbled wordlessly in warning, but Kara let her eyes flutter open, as if she was only now just returning back to consciousness. “Hello?” she muttered, making sure her voice sounded groggy and disoriented. It wasn’t too far off from the truth.

  As her eyes opened, Kara quickly scanned around the environment, trying to assess her situation. As she’d predicted, she was still in the basement of the Hellraisers’ house, surrounded by large, bulky wooden crates. A few of them had leaked some of the sawdust and straw from inside their wooden slats out onto the concrete floor. She must have been moved deeper into the basement, she realized, as the stairs leading back up to the main level were no longer visible.

  Just as she had guessed, Savage was squatting down in front of her, looking at her with a mixture of lust, disgust, and annoyance on his face. A few steps away, Alicia was doing her best to appear as if she wasn’t paying attention, leaning against one of the basement’s stone walls and smoking a thin cigarette.

  After the quick scan of her surroundings, Kara focused on Savage’s face. “What are you doing?” she asked, pretending that she didn’t know the man was onto her. Maybe, if he didn’t trust Alicia…

  Without changing a single muscle on his face, Savage reached out and slapped her again - hard. It wasn’t enough to knock her out, but Kara had to bite down on a cry of pain, as her whole head rang from the blow.

  “Who do you work for?” the man asked. He reached back behind him, pulling something out from a pocket. Kara half expected it to be a knife, but instead he emerged with a black rectangle - a smartphone. And as he clicked the display on, Kara recognized the phone as her own.

  She had to say something. “Okay, okay, you caught me!” she said, rolling her eyes as if this confession was no big deal. “Look, I’m sleeping with a member of the Iron Brotherhood, and they told me that it would be great if I could check out one of your parties…”

  She let her voice trail off, carefully putting up a look of scared realization, as if she was only now understanding that perhaps things weren’t totally cool. “I didn’t mean any trouble,” she finished, trying to appear wide-eyed and innocent.

  Savage just stared at her. This time, it was Alicia who intervened, quickly crossing the few feet of space between her casual leaning position and the handcuffed captive. Alicia’s pointed, high-heeled boot connected hard with Kara’s stomach, knocking the air from her lungs in a whoosh.

  “Tell us the truth, you bitch!” the woman screeched down at her, as Kara tried frantically to regain control of her breathing, gasping for air. “We know that you’re with the police, or the government, or someone! You’re trying to investigate us!”

  Even as she sucked in air and tried to control the red-hot splinter of pain radiating out of her stomach, Kara couldn’t help making a mental note of Alicia’s choice of words in the back of her mind. ‘Us,’ the woman had said. She hadn’t picked up the impression before that Alicia was directly involved with the Hellraisers, as opposed to simply on the periphery of their social circles, but this language seemed to suggest it.

  “Maybe she is with the Brotherhood,” Savage suggested, glancing up at Alicia’s angry standing figure as Kara tried to recover from the kick. “I’ve heard that they aren’t happy about our expansion.”

  “So what, they’d send in one of their fuck toys to dig around?” Alicia retorted, throwing another kick in Kara’s direction.

  Kara saw this one coming out of the corner of her eye, and was able to turn and move with the kick, reducing the power of the blow. Alicia barely noticed, now spinning to confront Savage. Clearly, the woman had some power here - she acted like she was in charge of the whole gang!

  “Listen, you ass, I don’t care what you do to her, as long as I know where she ends up,” she hissed at the big man. “And that place better be a hole in the ground, somewhere that no one will find her! How long it takes for you to get her there, or what sort of games you play with her in the meantime, that doesn’t matter. Just get it done!”

  But perhaps Alicia had pushed the big president of the Hellraisers just a little too hard. The man moved forward and, in a single swift motion, grabbed Alicia by the throat, under the chin, and lifted her up until her boots were dangling just an inch off the floor.

  “Watch it, girl,” he snarled at her. “No one talks to me like that - not even my own blood.”

  His own blood? Alicia was related to Savage? That did help connect another piece of the puzzle - namely, why Alicia had been so willing to sell out Kara at a moment’s notice - but it didn’t matter much now.

  In Savage’s powerful grip, the woman struggled a little, but finally she dropped her eyes, backing off - for now. But as the man dropped her back down to the ground, Kara caught a brief flash of an angry, raging, howling beast contained behind her eyes. Alicia reminded the FBI agent of a half-rabid dog, holding back for the moment but just itching to break its leash and cause chaos.

  “Who else knows that she’s here?” Savage asked, after a tense second of quiet glares between the man and woman who seemed to be in charge of the Hellraisers.

  Alicia shrugged. “No one, probably. Maybe Cross, her former boy toy, but I can certainly take his mind off of worrying about where his little handler is.” Her lips quirked briefly upward. “Hell, maybe I’ll invite him here, call it ‘burying the hatchet,’ making peace between your two gangs.”

  “I don’t want peace with them,” Savage protested. “I’d be as happy if they were dead.”

  The woman waggled a finger at him. “But wouldn’t it be so much easier to ambush them if they weren’t suspecting it?”

  Savage frowned slightly at this, although whether the frown was due to the dishonest and backstabbing nature of the plan, or simply him not thinking of it first, Kara couldn’t say.

  “Listen, don’t worry about it,” Alicia soothed her relative, reaching out and patting Savage on the chest. “I’ll go take care of Cross. And I’ll leave you here, to have some fun with our little police snitch, before she vanishes for good.”

  With that, Alicia turned and sauntered off towards the stairs - but not before looking back over her shoulder and shooting one last grin at Kara. The smile was teasing, mocking, taunting the FBI agent for how easily she had let herself get captured.

  But it was the eyes above that smile that made Kara shiver. Savage was a brute, amoral and used to getting his own way, but
he still seemed to have at least a hint of conscience, and still considered the strategic impacts of his choices. There was no way that he could run a gun smuggling operation of this size without some sort of control on his impulses and emotions.

  Alicia, on the other hand, was a blazing wildfire. In her eyes, even in that split second, Kara could see that she didn’t care what consequences followed from her actions. She was out to get her way, to have fun - no matter the cost.

  And then, a minute later, the woman was gone. Kara was left alone in the basement with Savage, the big president of the Hellraisers, the head of the gun smuggling operation.

  And he was advancing towards her...

  CHAPTER 10

  Savage, the big, hulking biker president of the Hellraisers, wore a grin on his face as he stepped forward. He looked as if he was already several minutes in, imagining all the terrible things that he was going to do to the woman, handcuffed and helpless before him.

  Down on the ground, staring up at him, FBI Special Agent Kara Sybil felt small tendrils of panic climbing up her spine.

  Focus, she tried to tell herself. Take stock of the situation. Measure the negatives and positives, and look for avenues of action. Remember your training.

  Positive: she wasn’t dead yet. She was conscious, alive, and unharmed, at least for the moment.

  Negative: she was currently handcuffed to a pipe, trapped in a basement.

  Negative: no one else knew where she was - which meant that there was no cavalry on the way.

  Negative: the man in front of her, now advancing towards her with an evil glint in his eye, had been given orders to kill her.

  Positive: it seemed that Savage had some other activities in mind before he actually took her life.

  Negative: Kara was absolutely certain that she was not going to enjoy these activities, even if they were holding off her death for a little longer.

  Counting up the results of this analysis, Kara concluded that there were definitely more negatives than positives. Not a great situation, all things considering.