by Raine, Meli
“You know the two-person rule,” he says severely to her. “Chase can’t be alone with her.”
“That’s fucking bullshit,” Chase says, grabbing my arm. He pinches, hard, and makes sure Frenchie’s watching. I don’t cry out.
I’m too busy eating up my mom with my eyes.
“Not my rule. Your dad’s rule. Don’t like it? Take it up with him,” Frenchie shouts over his shoulder as he leaves. My arm starts shaking. My whole body tremors.
Chase looks at my mom. “You know what you need to do to get her ready for El Brujo?”
“El Brujo?” Mom looks like Chase just shot her through the heart with a poisoned arrow.
Chase has no idea who “Jackie” really is. I can tell he’s still playing the part.
“Why are you here?” I blurt out to mom, launching myself at her, my arms around her neck and hanging on her like she’s a life preserver. I don’t care anymore. I don’t know how to lie right now. I need to touch her.
As our skin connects, I tense. She’s real. My mother is really here, alive and whole.
“What the fuck?” Chase hisses as my mom’s arms wrap around me and hold me so tight I can’t breathe. She’s crushing my bones and pushing on my bruises and the pain is exquisite. It’s perfect.
It’s home.
“Allie!” she murmurs. “I never thought I’d see you again. Oh, my Allie, my sweet Allie!” she cries, tears falling on my bare shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Chase says in an urgent voice, looking at the door.
Mom pulls back, stricken, and gives Chase a hard look. “She’s going to El Brujo? For what?”
“For good,” he says.
“Chase!” I say softly. “This is my mom!”
The look on his face is indescribable. “Did you get hit in the head, Allie? Jackie’s not your mom. She’s Loogie’s old lady!” He starts to pry us apart. Mom slaps his hands, hard.
He gives her a look that says, Don’t test me, lady.
“Who’s Loogie?” I ask, my face buried in mom’s neck. I don’t care about Loogie. I get to touch my mom. She’s alive and here and I’m not being tortured yet and omigod. My mom is here.
“Loogie’s the head of the Mephists,” Mom mumbles in my ear.
“I do not understand what is going on here,” Chase says testily. “I’m trying to get this chick ready to had over to El Brujo,” he adds gruffly to Mom.
“You don’t have to keep pretending,” I tell him. “This is my mom. She’ll do anything to save me.”
“How do you know that?” he says, hissing in my ear as he pulls me a few feet away. My heart cracks a little when my hands lose contact with my mom. “She’s been pretending to be dead for two years. You don’t know anything about her, Allie.”
“She’s right,” Mom says. “I’ll do anything. I don’t want her going through what I’ve gone through.”
“You were handed off to El Brujo?” I squeak, doubly horrified.
“No,” she says with a frown, her eyes a mix of love and confusion and horror. “El Brujo only takes virgins. Jeff gave me to Loogie.”
“Gave? Gave? Mom, I don’t—”
Chase shoves me, hard, into a chair, my ass bones slamming so hard against the seat my teeth rattle. “Make her look dolled up,” he says in a loud voice to Mom, who is wiping the tears from her eyes.
“What are you—”
Chase slaps me across the face, my teeth clapping against each other like I’m applauding. A giant starburst appears in the corner of my eye and my ear scrapes against the back of the wooden chair.
Frenchie walks in and sees what Chase just did. My ears are ringing and Frenchie’s grinning at Chase, giving him a thumbs up.
“She mouth off again?”
I lick the corner of my mouth. It’s split. Most of the flesh of my lips has cuts on it, so it’s nothing new, but the brutality of that smack is imprinted in me.
Mom remains a completely disinterested party, like Chase just hit a dog. Remember? I’m just a dog to everyone here. We’re playing a part. In normal life, my mom would whap Chase upside the head for slapping me and would make him leave.
In real life Mom’s dead, though.
This weird game makes no sense, but we’re stuck playing it. I need to win. Winning means something new now. It means getting me and Mom out alive.
“Fucking Loogie. Says his SUV ain’t working suddenly. We’ll have to take her to El Brujo on a bike.” He looks at Jackie. “Your old man sucks at keeping his cars in good shape.”
Jeff gave Mom to Loogie. To the president of the Mephists, the rival gang to Atlas. That starts to sink in as Chase, me and Mom all keep pretending we didn’t just have that moment.
I’d like to pretend Chase didn’t just slap me.
“We need to give her jeans and boots for the ride,” he tells Jackie.
“Okay,” she says weakly.
“Twenty minutes,” Frenchie snaps, leaving the room.
We descend into chaos, talking over each other.
“...I’m so sorry I slapped you, baby. I didn’t want to but Frenchie was coming and...”
“...and Jeff sold me but said he’d kill you if I didn’t...”
“...I’ve seen you with Loogie for the past year and didn’t know...”
“...Jeff sold us both? I’m so glad he’s dead, that...”
Mom’s eyes are shining with fear and excitement. “Marissa? How’s my sweet Marissa? Is she still in Los Angeles? Did she become a fashion designer? Sometimes we drive to LA and I look on the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.”
A sliver of a memory at the Santa Monica Pier cuts through me. The woman on the bike. Could it be?
“Why didn’t you ever look for her? Try to talk to her?” I ask Mom.
She winces. “At first, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere.”
“Huh?”
Chase gets a hard, angry look on his face. What’s going on?
“I was a trade, remember?” Mom’s bitter laugh cuts through my spine like a hot knife. “I didn’t have any rights. And by the time I did, I was so worried. I knew that any contact I had with you girls could put you in jeopardy.”
“Yeah. Right. Because we all know how safe I am,” I crack. “If you had reappeared, we might have been, oh, sold off to a drug lord.”
“Allie!” Mom’s voice is sharp. Reproachful.
“Sorry,” I say, tears filling my eyes.
“What I meant,” she says, angry now. Not at me, though. I can see she’s just angry. “What I meant was that Jeff thought he’d paid his debt. I was told never, ever to show my face near either of you or....”
Her voice trails off.
“Or he’d hurt us,” I say flatly.
She keeps her head down and just nods.
Jeff. That son of a bitch.
“Look. We gotta get this plan in place to get Allie out of here before El Brujo takes her and fucks her up,” Chase interrupts. He’s right.
Mom’s eyes fill with alarm. “She’s one of his girls? For sure?” From the look on her face it’s clear she knows the answer already.
“Yep.”
“Oh, God. No. No way,” Mom declares, squaring her shoulders. “I won’t let that happen.”
“We won’t let that happen,” Chase agrees. “I got a plan, but we all need to work together. You ready?”
We nod, clasping hands. I have a million questions but can’t ask them right now. If I get out of here, I can ask them later.
I just hope I get the chance.
“Here’s the deal. When a blonde guy who looks like me, but older, shows up, just do whatever he says, Allie. And Jackie, you help however you can.”
“That’s it?” I whisper. I start to shiver. Not from cold. From overwhelm and fear. All my plans are ruined now. Before, if Chase couldn’t save me, I knew what to do. Kill myself.
Now I have something to live for.
A horrible thought comes to me and I turn to my mom. “Are you here b
y force?”
An uncomfortable look passes over her face and she squeezes my hand. “It’s a really long story.”
“It’s a simple question,” Chase says, a protective anger in his voice. He’s ready to defend her, just because I love her. I realize I’m breathing again. On my own. I don’t have to concentrate on it and remember.
“Yes—at first,” she adds hastily. “But not now. No. I’m here by choice now.”
I feel like the world just stopped. My heart hurts.
“You left by choice?”
“No, no, no, honey,” she says. “I left by force. But I’ve stayed by choice. Sort of. I can’t come back. Not while Jeff is alive. He won’t let me.”
“Loogie won’t let you?” Chase asks in a menacing voice.
“No. Jeff won’t.” She frowns.
“He’s not. Alive, that is,” I say.
The look of surprise and unfettered joy on her face makes me feel like the most important person in the world. “Jeff is dead?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Oh, thank God.” Tears fill her eyes. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she says, hugging me, swaying me from side to side.
“You can come home now!” I say.
She pulls back from the hug, her eyes troubled. “It’s not that simple, honey. But I can see you and Marissa again now. We can be together and I can be part of your lives again.”
“I can’t believe you’re alive. We had a funeral for you. They found your body!” I tell her, tearing up.
“Jeff must have rigged that,” she explains, then starts to tell me more.
My turn to be shocked. “It’s all a set up?”
Chase looks nervously outside the room. “I hate to break up this reunion, but you have to make it look like you’re getting Allie ready for El Brujo. If Frenchie comes back and see nothing’s happened to her, we’re dead.”
“You mean I am,” I say.
“No—me too. I’m kinda on probation,” he admits.
“What do you mean?” I ask warily.
He sighs. “Remember how I told you my dad would kill me if I tried to leave Atlas?”
“Yeah.”
Chase sighs heavily, then looks at me with eyes that beg for forgiveness.
And then he says: “My dad told me I had to prove my loyalty to the club by bringing you in for El Brujo.”
Chapter Seven
Instinct makes me reach out and slap him across the face, so hard his head turns and red floods his cheek. I take the same hand I hit him with and clap it over my mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he says gruffly, shaking his head in surprise. “I deserve that.”
“You brought me here? Knowing what they plan for me? Knowing I was being handed off to be raped by a man who thinks raping a virgin will cure his AIDS?”
“I’m not that sadistic, Allie! Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell kind of monster do you think I am?” he growls.
“I take it you two know each other well,” Mom says dryly.
“I’m her boyfriend,” he says.
“Ex-boyfriend,” I hiss back.
The handprint from my slap is an ugly, raw color, but the pain in his eyes is way worse than the brutal reminder of my hit. “Ex?”
“You disappeared from L.A.! You kidnapped me and brought me here! What do you think, Chase? That’s some sort of a mating ritual?”
Mom’s fingers dig into my arm, possessive. Protective. “What are you planning to do with my daughter, Chase?” she asks in a voice that says the answer better be a good one.
Chase looks at her, nostrils flaring, then glares at me.
Finally, he says:
“Rescue her and love the hell out of her for the rest of her life.”
“You have a funny way of accomplishing that!” I reply.
“It was kidnap you and bring you here or let them drag you off without me. Can you imagine what Frenchie might have done if he’d had you alone?” Chase whispers, his voice quiet but his words like thunder.
That makes me stop, regret filling me. Mom’s watching us, head pinging back and forth, like someone viewing a tennis game.
“What’s your plan?” Mom asks. “You helped bring her here so you could watch over her.” She eyes my cuts and bruises. “It looks like she got pretty roughed up anyway.”
He runs a shaking hand through his hair and gives us desperate looks. “I had to let them do...some things. To make it seem like I didn’t care. That meant they wouldn’t torture her as a weapon against me.”
“They?”
He looks very uncomfortable suddenly, then looks at my mom. “The Mephists. They’re the ones handing her over to El Brujo.”
“Loogie is part of this? No way, Chase. No way. You know this for a fact?” Mom’s completely shocked. I can’t stop looking at her. She’s like an angel. Maybe she is. Am I dreaming all this? I reach out to touch her. What if this is all something I am inventing?
Chase gives Mom a very long look, then says quickly, “No. I don’t know. But you’re all here on the same day Allie’s supposed to be handed off to El Brujo. What am I supposed to think?”
I squeeze her arm and Mom looks at me.
“Just checking to make sure you’re real,” I explain.
Her face crumples. “Oh, Allie,” she says in a compassionate voice, giving me a quick hug. “We have so much to talk about, honey, but we have to get you out of here alive. Can you stay strong for me?”
“And me,” Chase adds.
I nod and wipe my eyes. My wrists are bright red, raw streaks of flesh covering the bones. The sting of tears breaks me out of whatever weird spell I just went into. I take a deep breath.
It’s time to act.
I can feel later.
“I can’t believe Loogie’s part of this, Chase. No way. He must not know the truth,” Mom stresses.
Chase stares Mom down. She looks older now, with deeper wrinkles in her face. She’s thinner than she was two years ago. Wiry is the word. She was always a tough woman. You had to be to marry a guy like Jeff. But there’s a steel rod inside her right now. She isn’t afraid of anything.
“You his old lady? By choice?”
She nods.
“What?” I gasp.
“It’s a really long story, Allie,” she snaps in a voice that says I shouldn’t ask questions. “And you,” she says to Chase. “You sure Loogie knows? He’s fine with running meth. Not with running slave girls.” Her lips tighten as she says the last two words, eyes flickering to me.
Slave girls. I feel like the words punched me in the gut. That’s all I am right now. A slave girl. Trapped on the Atlas compound, being readied to be handed off to El Brujo.
By my not-so-dead mother.
“I’m supposed to be his slave?”
Chase makes a weird grunting sound. His face remains blank as he looks out the window and says, “No. You’re supposed to cure him, if what Frenchie says is right. Then you get sold into sex slavery.”
“Jesus,” I whisper, suddenly cold. Mom grabs my waist and holds me up.
“But that’s not happening,” they both hiss at once.
A few weeks ago I was bored out of my mind at the bar, polishing glasses and getting ready for the night crowd. I hated my dull life. Jeff controlled most of my time. I had one friend—David—and a sister I loved and wanted to see in Los Angeles. I mourned my dead mother. I had no future.
Now, I have a mother who is alive and the old lady of a motorcycle gang president. I fell in love with the son of the rival gang’s president. My drug-dealing stepfather is dead. I’m a suspect in his murder. And I’m about to be used for my virginity by a drug lord to cure his AIDS, then sold into sexual slavery.
I’ll take boring any day over this.
But I want to keep my mom.
“Allie! Get with it!” Chase snaps. He gives me a gentle nudge and grabs a hairbrush, thrusting it in Mom’s hand. “You need to comb her hair and get her ready, Jackie.”
“Her
name is Helen,” I say through gritted teeth.
Chase’s head jerks back. He frowns. “Oh. Yeah. Helen.”
“Jackie. Helen. Mom. Bitch. Whatever. Call me anything as long as you get Allie out of here safe,” Mom pleads.
Chase reaches for me. I flinch. There isn’t an inch of skin on my body that isn’t scratched, scraped, torn open or bruised. But that’s not why I react like that.
“I’m sorry,” he says in a ragged voice. “Truly, madly, deeply sorry. I couldn’t keep you out of this mess, so I followed you into it. I left L.A. because Frenchie sent me a text that said if I didn’t deliver you, he would. I came back to try to find some other way.”
His eyes flash with anger. “And I failed.”
The touch of his hands on my shoulders feels like I’m transported to a better time. His palms are hard and hot. He’s practically vibrating with tension.
“You won’t fail.”
“I already did.”
“You only fail if you don’t love me.”
He looks at me for what feels like forever, then says, “I can’t kiss you. Just know that I want to.”
And he runs out of the room, boots clacking on the tile like a metronome.
Chapter Eight
“Honey, honey, it’ll be okay,” Mom says in a soothing voice as she combs my hair. The comb yanks my head back. Her hands are shaking. “Sorry,” she adds.
“It’s fine. You need to make me pretty for El Brujo,” I say, hysteria bubbling up. I look at myself in the tiny mirror on the vanity. I’m sitting in a metal chair with what looks like a needlepoint cushion for the seat. The chair is iron, bent into curls. So is the desk. It’s ornate and beautiful, like something from two hundred years ago. There are perfume bottles and makeup all over the top.
“Hush,” Mom insists. “We’ll get you out of this. I’m doing what your boyfriend says right now, but if he can’t help, I’ll go to Loogie.”
“Loogie,” I say. His name feels weird in my mouth. “Is he...are you...”
A long sigh escapes from her. The corners of her mouth turn down. She looks like Marissa. “Loogie’s my old man.”
“You fell in love with him?” My heart can’t stop squeezing in my chest every ten seconds or so. It’s like it has to remind me I should be terrified. That El Brujo is coming. That Frenchie and Chase have to deliver me to be destroyed.